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Rummaging through my accumulated papers, I just came across the English translation of a speech I delivered in Czechoslovakia on July 4, 1982, when I was American ambassador in Prague. At that time Czechoslovakia was ruled by a Communist regime imposed by the Soviet Union.As I perused it, I realized to my dismay that today I could not honestly make many of the statements in this message.Here are some of the key paragraphs and my reflections on them today:"I am pleased to send greetings to the people of Czechoslovakia on this 206th anniversary of my country's independence. It is a day when we Americans celebrate the foundation of our nation as an independent, democratic republic, and a day on which we dedicate ourselves anew to implementing the ideals of our founding fathers. For us, the bedrock of these ideals is the proposition that states and governments are created by the people to serve the people and that citizens must control the government rather than being controlled by it. Furthermore, we believe that there are areas of human life such as expression of opinion, the practice and teaching of religious beliefs, and the right of citizens to leave our country and return as they wish, which no government has the right to restrict."Can we really say that our citizens "control the government" today? Twice in this century we have installed presidents who received millions of fewer votes than their opponents. The Supreme Court has nullified rights supported by a decisive majority of our citizens. Votes for the U.S. Senate count far less in a populous state than in a state with fewer citizens. Corporations and individuals are virtually unlimited in the amount they can spend to promote or vilify candidates and to lobby Congress for favorable tax and regulatory treatment. The Supreme Court has, in effect, ruled that corporations are citizens too! That sounds to me more like an oligarchy than a democracy."We are a nation formed of people from all corners of the world, and we have been nurtured by all the world's cultures. What unites us is the ideal of creating a free and prosperous society. Through our history we have faced many challenges but we have been able to surmount them through a process of open discussion, accommodation of competing interests, and ultimately by preserving the absolute right of our citizens to select their leaders and determine the policies which affect their lives."Since when have we seen an open discussion and accommodation of competing interests in the work of the U.S. Congress? How is it that, for the first time in U.S. history, we had no Speaker of the House of Representatives for days this year?"Our society is not a perfect one and we know very well that we have sometimes failed to live up to our ideals. For we understand the truth which Goethe expressed so eloquently when he wrote, "Es irrt der Mensch, so long er strebt"(Man errs as long as he strives.) Therefore, while we hold fast to our ideals as goals and guides of action, we are convinced that no individual and no group possesses a monopoly of wisdom and that our society can be successful only if all have the right freely to express opinions, make suggestions and organize groups to promote their views."Unless you are a Member of Congress who speaks out in defense of the fundamental rights of Palestinians to live in freedom in their ancestral lands, or students at Columbia University who wish to do the same."As we Americans celebrate our nation's birthday and rededicate ourselves to its ideals, we do so without the presumption that our political and economic system– however well it has served us–is something to be imposed upon others. Indeed, just as we preserve diversity at home, we wish to preserve it in the world at large. Just as every human being is unique, so is every culture and every society, and all should have the right to control their destinies, in their own ways and without compulsion from the outside. This is one of the principal goals of our foreign policy: to work for a world in which human diversity is not only tolerated but protected, a world in which negotiation and accommodation replace force as the means of settling disputes."Unless you live in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria, or Palestine…or, for that matter, in Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela."We are still a long way from that world we seek, but we must not despair, for we believe that people throughout the world yearn basically for the same things Americans do: peace, freedom, security, and the opportunity to influence their own lives. And while we do not seek to impose our political system on others, we cannot conceal our profound admiration for those brave people in other countries who are seeking only what Americans take as their birthright."Unless they live in Gaza or the Palestinian West Bank."While this is a day of national rejoicing, there is no issue on our minds more important than the question of preserving world peace. We are thankful that we are living at peace with the world and that not a single American soldier is engaged in fighting anywhere in the world. Still, we are concerned with the high levels of armaments and the tendency of some countries to use them instead of settling disputes peacefully. We share the concern of all thinking people with the destructive potential of nuclear weapons in particular."At that time the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the U.S. was demanding their withdrawal. Subsequently they did withdraw in accord with an agreement the U.S. negotiated. But then, after 9/11, the U.S. invaded and stayed for 20 years without being able to create a democratic society. A subsequent invasion of Iraq, on spurious grounds, removed the Iraqi government and gave impetus to ISIS. Then, the U.S., without a declaration of war, invaded Syria and tried unsuccessfully to overthrow its government (which we recognized) and also to combat ISIS, which had been created as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.American soldiers are now stationed in more than 80 countries. We spend more on arms than all other budgets for discretionary spending, and now the Biden administration is making all but formal war against Russia, a peer nuclear power."It is for this reason that President Reagan has proposed large reductions of nuclear weapons. … We have also made numerous other proposals which we believe would increase mutual confidence and reduce the danger of conflict. All aim for verifiable equality and balance on both sides. That way, the alliance systems facing each other would need not fear an attack from the other. …"Yes, and by 1991 we negotiated massive reductions in nuclear weapons, banned biological and chemical weapons and limited conventional weapons in Europe. The Cold War ended by agreement, not the victory of one side over the other. But, beginning with the second Bush administration, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from every important arms control treaty and embarked on a trillion dollar "modernization" of the American nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, although there was no Warsaw Pact after 1990, the U.S. expanded NATO and refused to negotiate an agreement that insured Russia's security."The task ahead for all the peoples of the world to establish and preserve peace is not an easy one, The issues are complex and they cannot be solved by simplistic slogans, but only by sustained effort."Nevertheless, from the late 1990s the U.S. seemed motivated by a false and simplistic doctrine that the world was destined to become like the U.S. and the U.S. was justified in using its economic and military power to transform the rest of the world to conform with its image of itself (the Neocon thesis). It was, in effect, an adaptation of the failed "Brezhnev doctrine" pursued by the USSR until abandoned by Gorbachev. As with the Brezhnev doctrine, the attempt has been an utter fiasco, but the Biden administration seems, oblivious to the dangers to the American people, determined to pursue it."Nevertheless, I speak to you today with optimism, since I know that my country enters the 207th year of its independence with the determination not only to preserve the liberties we have one at home but to devote our energies and resources to maintaining peace in the world."But, today, during the 248th year of American independence :The U.S. is sending 100 "super-bombs" for dropping on Gaza. The BLU-109 "bunker busters", each weighing 2,000 pounds, penetrate basement concrete shelters where people are hiding, the Wall Street Journal reported Dec. 1.America has sent 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells to Israel since October 7, the paper said. Details of the size and number of weapons sent have not been previously reported.Also on the list are more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or "dumb" bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000-pound warhead bombs, around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAMs, the Journal said.The news dramatically contradicts statements of Foreign Secretary Antony Blinken that avoiding civilian casualties is a prime concern for the United States.The U.S. also provided the bomb that was dropped on the Jabalia refugee camp, killing 100 people, possibly including a Hamas leader, the Journal said.Repeated calls by the countries of the world, through the United Nations, for a ceasefire have not been supported by the U.S. and its follower nations.Military spending makes up a dominant share of discretionary spending in the U.S., and military personnel make up the majority of government manpower.The weapons are being airlifted on C-17 military cargo planes directly from the U.S. to Tel Aviv.Oh lord, what has happened to us?This piece has been republished with permission from Ambassador Jack Matlock's website. Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!
Until very recently, in the debates on water in the Spanish and European context, the concept of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) evoked foreign realities, typical of Latin American countries or other regions of the global south. However, since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008, as a result of the consequent emergence of situations of poverty and precariousness, the concern to defend the recognition and implementation of this right became present. The declaration of the HRWS by the United Nations in 2010 (United Nations 2010a,2010b), coinciding with this historical juncture, has promoted processes and debates around its effective implementation at an international, European and Spanish level. The current health crisis and the consequent economic debacle caused by the COVID-19 at the beginning of 2020 have updated the urgency of the debate on the HRWS. In 2015, the plenary session of the European Parliament supported the citizens' initiative Right2Water, which sought to guarantee the right to water for all people and the transposition of the HRWS into the legislation of member states. The current reform process of the Drinking Water Directive (98/83/EC) is justified, among other reasons, by the need to adapt these regulations to the aforementioned commitment to coherence. The Right2Water initiative was transferred to Spain, mainly thanks to the encouragement of the Association of Public Water Supply and Sanitation Operators (Asociación de Operadores Públicos de Abastecimiento y Saneamiento Agua, AEOPAS), within the framework of the statewide Public Water Network (Red Agua Pública, RAP), through the Social Pact for Public Water (Pacto Social por el Agua Pública, PSAP). The effects of the crisis also coincided with privatization processes of water services that, justified by austerity policies, European institutions promoted in the countries most affected by the crisis, despite strong social opposition. In some of these countries, such as Spain, the process of privatization has been especially related to the seek of funding by municipalities in crisis, through the perverse mechanism of the 'concession fee', which allows for a rapid injection of money into the municipal treasury in exchange for a decades-long privatization of the service. This process is usually accompanied by increasing rates and greater pressure on users with payment problems. The relations between the causes and consequences of the crisis and privatization, as well as the emergence of situations of water poverty of different types, have led to the present existence of a social movement, with a solid discourse that is committed to defending the human right to water, as well as the model of public management, in our cities. At the same time, the existence of public water management companies, which formally maintain public ownership of the service but practice a mercantile management style (priority of profit and loss accounts, opacity, consideration of users as clients) has led to demands to renew public management models to guarantee compliance with the human right to water in a broad and deep sense, redefined in an antagonistic way: a recognition of access to drinking water and sanitation as a human right rigorously conceived that puts into question the neoliberal logic of managing water services. This is one of the core arguments this article addresses: the HRWS today constitutes the banner of a movement that is articulated around the concept of water as a common good and that is oriented towards the objective of building a collaborative and transparent model of public management. The ownership of water and sanitation services operators (in their different modalities, from strictly public to strictly private formulas) is related to the implementation of the HRWS, which contributes to the reactivation of debates on the need to preserve or recover ('remunicipalización') the public character of these services, and with the need to generate legal frameworks that guarantee effective local democratic policies. To this social dimension, committed to the public and democratic dimension, open to new debates on common goods management, another characteristic is added: the human rights movement in Spain has been in tune from its beginnings in discourse and organizational structure with socio-eco-integrating perspectives of natural resources, aquatic ecosystems management, which is at the foundation of the possibility of implementing the human right to water. This is a relevant and somewhat distinctive quality of the Spanish experience, which contrasts with the unfortunate, although historically explainable, disagreements and conflicts that frequently characterize the social and environmental perspectives in the movements in defense of water. In addition to the above, this article presents a new approach to the typology of water poverties. Until recently, the efforts that have been carried out in the implementation of the HRWS have been focused especially on accessibility, condemning and trying to alleviate the deficits in supply and sanitation coverage in the Global South. In contrast, its recent reception in European countries has focused especially on affordability (prohibition of cuts, guarantee of a vital minimum, social rates) and on implications for governance (transparency, accountability) and the management model (public versus private). However, throughout this research it has been found that accessibility remains a significant problem in certain European regions, especially related to the existence of marginal settlements, slums, homelessness, temporary immigrant workers in rural areas, etc. The problem of HRWS is thus situated in the broader context of access to housing and dignified living conditions, and is related to the marginalization and exclusion of groups or social sectors, due to various factors, generally combined, of economic, cultural and/or ethnic nature. Finally, another issue that this article addresses is the question of the legal regulation of the human right to water in Spain. It will seem strange to a non-expert observer of this matter that after the intense concern, organization and reflection on the subjects that have been mentioned, and which are presented in detail below, and in a country with such a long tradition of water policy and legislation as Spain, we lack a state or autonomic-wide regulatory framework for the management of urban water. And not only do we still lack this or these framework(s) but we have been discussing their need for many years (the jurisdictions and responsibilities over the urban cycle are municipal) and, if they are really needed, their nature, contents and scale of formulation. The article analyzes the keys to this process and ends by presenting the latest propositions on this subject from the HRWS social movement in which its authors are conceptually situated. From a theoretical (urban political ecology) and methodological (transdisciplinary participatory research-action) point of view, the article has been developed in the double framework in which the authors operate. On the one hand, the working group on the urban water cycle of the New Water Culture Foundation (Fundación Nueva Cultura del Agua) and, on the other, the Research Networks of Excellence of the National Research Agency on water poverty (WAPONET, CSO2017-90702-REDT), made up of researchers from seven Spanish universities (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Politécnica de Catalunya, Oberta de Catalunya, Jaume I de Castellón, Alicante, Oviedo, Granada y Sevilla). As a space for transdisciplinary action-participation on which this work has been specifically based, mention should be made of the Andalusian Social Committee on Water (Mesa Social del Agua de Andalucía), whose composition and main activities between 2017 and 2020 are reflected throughout these pages. We owe information, ideas and experiences to all the colleagues who participate in these spaces, where we carried out a real process of co-production of knowledge, throughout years of work in common. ; El derecho humano al abastecimiento y al saneamiento (DHAS) constituye hoy en España y en Europa la bandera de un movimiento que se articula en torno al concepto del agua como bien común y que se orienta al objetivo de construir un modelo de gestión pública participativa y transparente. La materialización efectiva del DHAS se relaciona discursivamente con la titularidad pública o privada de los operadores de los servicios urbanos de agua, lo que ha contribuido a la reactivación de los debates sobre la necesidad de conservar o recuperar el carácter público de estos servicios, y sobre la necesidad de generar marcos jurídicos que garanticen políticas de democracia local efectiva. A esta dimensión sociopolítica, se añade otra característica: el movimiento del DHAS en España sintoniza en discurso y articulación organizativa con las perspectivas socio-eco-integradoras de la gestión del agua como recurso natural, de los ecosistemas acuáticos. Ésta es una cualidad importante y en cierta manera distintiva de la experiencia española, que contrasta con los desencuentros y conflictos que frecuentemente caracterizan a las perspectivas social y ambiental en los movimientos de defensa del agua, y en general de los recursos naturales. Complementariamente a lo anterior, este artículo presenta un nuevo enfoque de la tipología de pobrezas hídricas. La reciente recepción del DHAS en los países europeos se ha focalizado especialmente en la asequibilidad (prohibición de cortes, garantía del mínimo vital, tarifas sociales) y en las implicaciones para la gobernanza (transparencia, rendición de cuentas) y el modelo de gestión (publico versus privado). No obstante, a lo largo de la investigación que se presenta, se ha constatado que la accesibilidad sigue siendo un problema significativo en ciertas regiones europeas, relacionado especialmente con la existencia de asentamientos marginales, chabolismo, personas sin hogar o trabajadores temporeros inmigrantes en áreas rurales. Finalmente, este artículo aborda la cuestión de la regulación legal del derecho humano al agua en España, analizando las claves de este proceso y presentando las últimas propuestas del movimiento del DHAS en el que sus autores conceptualmente se sitúan. Desde un punto de vista teórico (ecología política urbana) y metodológico (investigación-acción participativa transdisciplinar), el artículo se ha desarrollado en el doble marco en el que los autores se desenvuelven. Por una parte, el grupo de trabajo de ciclo urbano del agua de la Fundación Nueva Cultura de Agua (https://fnca.eu/oppa/ciclo-urbano-del-agua); y, por otra, la Red de Excelencia de la Agencia Estatal de Investigación sobre pobreza hídrica (WAPONET, CSO2017-90702-REDT, https://waponet.org/approach/).
En las ciudades mexicanas la transformación de los espacios públicos y la incorporación de arte están estrechamente ligadas a los períodos en donde quien dirige establece posiciones radicales que determinan aspectos de índole social hasta urbanos que impactan en la forma de hacer ciudad, uno de los ejemplos fueron las dictaduras, entendiéndolas como una forma de gobierno con una visión unilateral o unipartidista, que marcaron los pensamientos de quien ejerció su poder sobre el país marcando periodos o transiciones que de alguna manera replanteaban las ciudades. Las transiciones o cambios sufridos se pueden visualizar en el siglo XX con el régimen de Porfirio Díaz, que duró más de treinta años, en donde el país se vio impactado por la industrialización y la introducción de arte y arquitectura de tipo ecléctica, al periodo de la revolución en donde se quería despojar un régimen autoritario y buscar una identidad, hecho que encaminó la proclamación de la Constitución (1917), posteriormente en 1929 la permanencia de un partido político, que permaneció setenta años en la presidencia, el cual se desgastó en conmemorar a personajes de la política en parques y jardines, hasta la denominada alternancia signo de una aparente democracia. Todos estos periodos han caracterizado a México y sus espacios abiertos, incluidas las actividades sociales. El presente trabajo aborda el estudio del espacio público que se desarrolló durante el siglo XX impactado por las dictaduras tanto oficiales como las no oficiales definidas en tres momentos, en un primer ciclo con el gobierno porfirista, seguido de la etapa postrevolucionaria o constitucionalista y el último caracterizado por una visión unipartidista con la entrada de el PNR1 posteriormente PRI2. Tres periodos o transiciones que han definido el rumbo de los espacios públicos mexicanos heredados hasta el presente, en los que se pueden ilustrar posturas con notable influencia europea en jardines, avenidas, esculturas y mobiliario urbano. Pero así como se ejerció una influencia de otros países durante el siglo XX también se buscó arraigar una nueva historia por medio de a) la conservación del pasado prehispánico (museos), b) la restauración de monumentos arquitectónicos, c) la arqueología científica, y el uso turístico del patrimonio. Posturas neoprehispánicas mediante las cuales la burguesía nacional intentó crear una cultura que abarcaba a todas las clases de México (Shchavelzon, 1988). Las transiciones durante el siglo XX impactaron puntualmente en el uso del espacio público por todos aquellos movimientos sociales que se efectuaron en las décadas de los sesentas, setentas u ochentas en busca de respuestas e inclusive se habla de su monopolización por el grupo político dominante: El espacio público era hasta hace unas décadas el ámbito donde la noción de política se ceñía a la obtención y retención del poder, y rechazaba por ¡inútil! o ¡subversiva! la defensa y la promoción de los intereses comunitarios. En México, durante la mayor parte del siglo 20, al espacio público lo monopoliza el aparato de gobierno. (Monsiváis, 2008). Es importante mencionar que el siglo XX es un periodo en donde se produjo una gran cantidad de espacios abiertos y de monumentos u objetos escultóricos con una notable influencia partidista (Hernández, 2009). Por lo tanto a lo largo del siglo pasado el espacio público experimentó una serie de transformaciones que afectaron de una manera radical la concepción del mismo así como de su aspecto físico y la manera de utilizarlos, no se duda que el siglo XXI será un periodo de cambios que radicarán principalmente en aspectos de seguridad y cohesión social. ; In Mexican cities the changes in public spaces and the inclusion of art are closely linked to the periods of time where the authority established radical positions that determined social and urban nature aspects that impacted in the way of making a city, the case of dictatorships was a truth in Mexico because the thoughts of who exerted his power above the country were perfectly marked. The transitions or changes undergone in these spaces can be visualized in XX century at Porfirio Diaz' regime, that lasted more than thirty years where the country was impacted by the industrialization and the introduction of eclectic and nationalistic art and architecture, to the period of the revolution where it was wanted to deprive an authoritarian regime and to look for an identity, fact that lead to the proclamation of the Constitution (1917), later in 1929 the permanence of a political party which lasted seventy years in the presidency that was exhausted in commemorating political personagesy in parks and gardens, until the denominated alternation, sign of an evident democracy. All these periods have characterized Mexico and its open spaces, including the social activities. This work includes the study of public space developed during XX century which includes Porfirista period, post revolutionary or constitutionalist stage characterized by a single-party foresight with the appearance of the PNR3 thereinafter PRI4, three causes that have defined the course of Mexican public spaces that have been inherited until present time, in which positions with remarkable uropean influence in gardens, avenues, sculptures and urban furniture can be showed. But as well as an influence of other countries was exerted during XX century also it was looked for setting deeply a new history by mean of a) the conservation of the past pre-Hispanic (museums), b) the restoration of architectonic monuments, c) the scientific archaeology, and the touristic use of the heritage. Neo-Prehispanic positions with which the national bourgeoisie tried to create a culture that included to every social group in Mexico. (Shchavelzon, 1988). The transitions during XX century caused impact regarding the use of the public space by all those social movements that took place in the sixties, seventies or eighties in the searching of answers and inclusively it was spoken about their monopolization by the dominant political group: The public space was until decades ago the environment where the policy notion tightened to the procurement and retention of the power, and it rejected by useless! or subversive! the defense and the promotion of the communitarian interests. In Mexico, during the most of 20th century, th public space is monopolized by the government. (Monsivais, 2008). It is important to mention that XX century is a period where a great amount of open spaces and sculptural monuments or objects with a remarkable partisan influence were built (Hernandez, 2009). Therefore throughout the past century the public space underwent a series of changes that affected in a radical way the conception of the same as well as their physical aspect and the way to use them, there is not doubt that XXI century will be a period of changes mainly in security and social cohesion aspects. ; En las ciudades mexicanas la transformación de los espacios públicos y la incorporación de arte están estrechamente ligadas a los períodos en donde quien dirige establece posiciones radicales que determinan aspectos de índole social hasta urbanos que impactan en la forma de hacer ciudad, uno de los ejemplos fueron las dictaduras, entendiéndolas como una forma de gobierno con una visión unilateral o unipartidista, que marcaron los pensamientos de quien ejerció su poder sobre el país marcando periodos o transiciones que de alguna manera replanteaban las ciudades. Las transiciones o cambios sufridos se pueden visualizar en el siglo XX con el régimen de Porfirio Díaz, que duró más de treinta años, en donde el país se vio impactado por la industrialización y la introducción de arte y arquitectura de tipo ecléctica, al periodo de la revolución en donde se quería despojar un régimen autoritario y buscar una identidad, hecho que encaminó la proclamación de la Constitución (1917), posteriormente en 1929 la permanencia de un partido político, que permaneció setenta años en la presidencia, el cual se desgastó en conmemorar a personajes de la política en parques y jardines, hasta la denominada alternancia signo de una aparente democracia. Todos estos periodos han caracterizado a México y sus espacios abiertos, incluidas las actividades sociales. El presente trabajo aborda el estudio del espacio público que se desarrolló durante el siglo XX impactado por las dictaduras tanto oficiales como las no oficiales definidas en tres momentos, en un primer ciclo con el gobierno porfirista, seguido de la etapa postrevolucionaria o constitucionalista y el último caracterizado por una visión unipartidista con la entrada de el PNR1 posteriormente PRI2. Tres periodos o transiciones que han definido el rumbo de los espacios públicos mexicanos heredados hasta el presente, en los que se pueden ilustrar posturas con notable influencia europea en jardines, avenidas, esculturas y mobiliario urbano. Pero así como se ejerció una influencia de otros países durante el siglo XX también se buscó arraigar una nueva historia por medio de a) la conservación del pasado prehispánico (museos), b) la restauración de monumentos arquitectónicos, c) la arqueología científica, y el uso turístico del patrimonio. Posturas neoprehispánicas mediante las cuales la burguesía nacional intentó crear una cultura que abarcaba a todas las clases de México (Shchavelzon, 1988). Las transiciones durante el siglo XX impactaron puntualmente en el uso del espacio público por todos aquellos movimientos sociales que se efectuaron en las décadas de los sesentas, setentas u ochentas en busca de respuestas e inclusive se habla de su monopolización por el grupo político dominante: El espacio público era hasta hace unas décadas el ámbito donde la noción de política se ceñía a la obtención y retención del poder, y rechazaba por ¡inútil! o ¡subversiva! la defensa y la promoción de los intereses comunitarios. En México, durante la mayor parte del siglo 20, al espacio público lo monopoliza el aparato de gobierno. (Monsiváis, 2008). Es importante mencionar que el siglo XX es un periodo en donde se produjo una gran cantidad de espacios abiertos y de monumentos u objetos escultóricos con una notable influencia partidista (Hernández, 2009). Por lo tanto a lo largo del siglo pasado el espacio público experimentó una serie de transformaciones que afectaron de una manera radical la concepción del mismo así como de su aspecto físico y la manera de utilizarlos, no se duda que el siglo XXI será un periodo de cambios que radicarán principalmente en aspectos de seguridad y cohesión social.
On Tuesday night, speaking to an audience of Army cadets at West Point Academy in a much anticipated response to his general's request for additional troops, President Obama announced a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. It was a somber speech, delivered with his usual trademark of logic, rhetorical skill and assertiveness, but also with a certain emotion. At crucial moments in it, Obama looked straight into the camera, making direct eye-contact with the individual spectator, summoning his support in an effort he seems to be taking up somewhat reluctantly. He outlined a new strategy for the eight-year old war that will include immediate deployment of 30,000 new US troops to protect civilians, clear and defeat the insurgents and train Afghan forces in order to be able to begin the draw down in eighteen months. This new surge will be supplemented by additional NATO troops and Afghan national forces to meet the original 40,000 troops demanded by General McCrystal. After three months of deliberation, the President has decided to heed the advice of his generals and his Defense Secretary, and proceed with a military escalation of the conflict. In so doing, he rejected the logic of Vice President Biden who rhetorically asked earlier this year why the US spent 30 times as much in Afghanistan as it did in Pakistan, when it was well-known that Al Qaeda or what is left of it, is in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Lately he had argued against more troops (because the central government was an unreliable, weak and corrupt partner) and in favor of shifting the mission to killing or capturing main insurgency leaders, establishing more ties with local tribal leaders and giving more support to Pakistan. On Wednesday morning, however, Biden appeared in the morning news shows to defend the President's decision unequivocally.The next morning, in hearings before the Senate's Armed Forces Committee, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fleshed out the main objectives of the surge more fully: training Afghan forces, eliminating safe havens, stabilizing a region fundamental to American national security. She also emphasized the importance of the parallel "civilian surge" which the President had also mentioned in passing and whose job will be to develop the agricultural base away from opium and to further strengthen institutions at every level of Afghan society, so as "not to leave chaos behind" when troops are drawn down and responsibility is transferred to the Afghan government. Finally, she stressed the need to develop long-term relations with both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Indeed, Obama's three-pronged strategy includes not only military and civilian components for counter insurgence and institution-building, but also a strategic partnership with Pakistan, whose government can help contain the Taliban, destroy Al Qaeda and prevent it from gaining access to nuclear material. Unfortunately, during his speech the President did not spend much time explaining the importance of that relationship. Another important omission was the inclusion of other regional actors in the process of conflict resolution. But the truth is Obama was performing an extremely difficult balancing act, trying to simultaneously gain the support of disparate groups at home and abroad for a last-ditch effort to win an eight year old war in a context of war fatigue, massive debt and a weak economy. That also explains why in his speech he denied any intentions of nation-building (public opinion in the US is strongly against it mainly because of the cost and the long-term commitment it implies) and instead focused on transferring responsibility to the Afghans themselves for their own defense.In articulating both an escalation and an exit strategy at the same time, the President opened himself to criticism from both the Right and the Left. While the Right was very supportive of the surge itself, it was quite critical of his timeline for withdrawal, which they say, will only embolden insurgents to wait the troops out. The Left of his party, led by Moveon.org, responded negatively to the increase of troops, which they regard as "deepening (US) involvement in a quagmire." Meanwhile, and in spite of much commentary to the contrary, the White House insists that the President made this decision because he feels it is the right one, and that electoral considerations played no role in the process (although the withdrawal in the summer of 2011 conveniently coincides with the beginning of his presidential campaign for re-election!) Instead, pundits favorable to the President were quick to point out that a time frame was absolutely needed to provide a sense of urgency to the Afghan government itself so that it will clean up its act and take advantage of this "new window of opportunity" as Secretary Clinton put it. However, it is obvious to the same pundits that the pace and time of withdrawal will most likely be dictated by the conditions on the ground in the summer of 2011 and not by the pre-established timetable. Whether it is for political or strategic reasons, the fact is, the President has made speed, (that is, a quick deployment of new forces followed by quick withdrawal), the central tenet of his new strategy, and while providing for a civilian surge, he has underplayed the nation-building aspects of the mission for the obvious reason: that they undermine the credibility of a speedy exit strategy.Whether or not this strategy works, his decision on Afghanistan has gained Obama some time free from the crushing criticism of the opposition whom he has silenced for the moment; he has pleased Independents (66% of whom trusted the generals over Obama in planning the war strategy; 48% were in favor of more troops, as opposed to only 30% of Democrats); and he can now turn to the two other major challenges facing his administration: public discontent with the economic situation and the battle for health care reform. The latter won a major victory two weeks ago when the Senate voted to bring the bill to the floor for discussion. Still, between the Thanksgiving break last week and the end- of -the -year holidays it is very unlikely this discussion will bear fruit within this calendar year, as was the President's goal. And the more the bill gets delayed the more the public option gets diluted to the point that it will all but disappear from a final version. Since April the President's plan has lost Independent support steadily (only 25% of Independents opposed it in April, now 50% are against it, while among Democrats it has wide support, with only 22% opposing the public option).On the economic front, five times more Independents than Democrats hold Obama responsible for what has gone wrong. They blame him for salvaging the banks but not their jobs. In light of this, Obama has summoned a job creation "summit" to be held later this week in the White House. While most see it as a public relations tactic, with unemployment having surpassed 10%the public is demanding action, and job recovery is key to getting the Independent vote back. With his approval rate hovering at 50%, the President is in dire need of striking some points and delivering some victories before the end of the year. Amid a rising wave of populism that is both anti-Wall Street and anti-government, he needs to show that he can make government work. After a seamless campaign and after months of relying on his own personal charisma and his gifted oratory to coax and persuade the public, the magic seems to be wearing off: he now needs to find other ways to reach the voters. Of course, performance will be the safest one: Independent voters want competence and results: they want him to show them that he can govern. This has proven elusive for many reasons beyond his control, but lately some mistakes were made that could have been prevented. This is a young White House and in spite of their mastery of the new technologies to connect with young voters and their ability to establish their own narrative about the President, in the last few weeks Obama and his close advisers seem to have lost some of their attention to details insofar as his public image is concerned, for example the importance of certain visual and other non-verbal signals. The trip to Asia provides myriad examples of this: the "unforced error" of bowing too deep to the Emperor of Japan, which was ridiculed by the media on all sides of the political spectrum; his tense press conference in China during which both he and Hu Jintao stiffly read prepared statements, after which neither took questions; the town-hall style meeting with students in Shanghai, in which he said "the Internet should be free and all should have access to it" but which was only shown by local TV and in a very slow live feed on the internet, and later all references to it were deleted from all websites. Even a picture of Obama alone by the Great Wall of China was interpreted as a bad visual that suggested isolation, and while this may be an over-interpretation, there is a reason why commentators made that association. Obama is having a very hard time keeping his coalition of independents, moderates and liberals together. The unraveling of his coalition is constraining every policy choice he makes, as he has to measure at every step not only the costs of each decision but also the opposition he is likely to face from within his own party. He thus feels limited in his choices and picks a middle of the road solution that does not fully satisfy his purposes and makes him a target from the two extremes of the political spectrum. In many cases, as in the Afghan war,there are no good choices but this is hard to confess to a public to whom he promised change and that is expecting him to deliver.With his new Afghan decision President Obama may have swayed many hawkish independents to his side but the question is for how long. Soon Obama may find that while nation-building abroad may be difficult, nation-building at home is a task he cannot postpone any longer. Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
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Two attacks, and one defense, of classical liberal ideas appeared over the weekend. "War and Pandemic Highlight Shortcomings of the Free-Market Consensus" announces Patricia Cohen on p.1 of the New York Times news section. As if the Times had ever been part of such a "consensus." And Deirdre McCloskey reviews Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu's "Power and Progress," whose central argument is, per Deirdre, "The state, they argue, can do a better job than the market of selecting technologies and making investments to implement them." (I have not yet read the book. This is a review of the review only.) I'll give away the punchline. The case for free markets never was their perfection. The case for free markets always was centuries of experience with the failures of the only alternative, state control. Free markets are, as the saying goes, the worst system; except for all the others. In this sense the classic teaching of economics does a disservice. We start with the theorem that free competitive markets can equal -- only equal -- the allocation of an omniscient benevolent planner. But then from week 2 on we study market imperfections -- externalities, increasing returns, asymmetric information -- under which markets are imperfect, and the hypothetical planner can do better. Regulate, it follows. Except econ 101 spends zero time on our extensive experience with just how well -- how badly -- actual planners and regulators do. That messy experience underlies our prosperity, and prospects for its continuance. Starting with Ms. Cohen at the Times, The economic conventions that policymakers had relied on since the Berlin Wall fell more than 30 years ago — the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency — look to be running off the rails.During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs left health care workers without face masks and medical gloves, carmakers without semiconductors, sawmills without lumber and sneaker buyers without Nikes.That there ever was a "consensus" in favor of "the unfailing superiority of open markets, liberalized trade and maximum efficiency" seems a mighty strange memory. But if the Times wants to think now that's what they thought then, I'm happy to rewrite a little history. Face masks? The face mask snafu in the pandemic is now, in the Times' rather hilarious memory, the prime example of how a free and unfettered market fails. It was a result of "the ceaseless drive to integrate the global economy and reduce costs?" (Here, I have a second complaint -- the ceaseless drive to remove subjects from sentences. Who is doing this "ceaseless drive?" Where is the great conspiracy, the secret meeting of old white men "driving" the economy? Nowhere. That's the point of free markets.)The free market has a plan, imperfect as it might be, for masks in a pandemic. Prices rise. People who really want and need masks -- doctors, nurses, police -- pay what it takes to get them. People who don't really need them -- nursery schools -- look at the price, think about the benefit, and say, "maybe not," or take other measures. People reuse masks. Producers, seeing high prices, work day and night to produce more masks. Others, knowing that every 10 years there is a spike in prices, pay the costs of storing masks to make great profits when the time comes. The actual story of masks in the pandemic is the exact opposite. Price controls, of course. Instantly, governments started prosecuting businesses for "price gouging" who dared to raise the price of toilet paper. Governments redistribute income; markets allocate resources efficiently. As usual, the desire to redistribute tiny amounts of income to those willing to stand in line to get toilet paper won out. An entrepreneur tried to start producing masks. The FDA shut him down. (I hope I recall that story right, send comments if not.) China wanted to ship us masks. Yes, China the new villain of globalization gone mad. But their masks were certified and labeled by EU rules, not US rules, so like baby formula they couldn't be imported and sold. More deeply, even I, devoted free-marketer; even at the late night beer sessions at the CATO institute, nobody puts mask distribution in a pandemic as the first job of free markets. There is supposed to be a public health function of government; infectuous diseases are something of an externality; safety protocols in government labs doing government funded research are not a free-market function. As we look at the covid catastrophe, do we not see failures of government all over the place, not failures of some hypothetical free market? California even had mobile hospitals after H1N1. Governor Brown shut them down to save money for his high speed train. We might as well blame free markets for the lines at the DMV. The idea that trade and shared economic interests would prevent military conflicts was trampled last year under the boots of Russian soldiers in Ukraine.Does anyone think a prime function of free market economics is to stops wars, usually prosecuted by, eh, governments? The standard history of WWI is enough. We do allege that free markets, and free markets alone, make a country wealthy enough to fight and win wars, if the country has the will and desire to do so. The US and NATO military budget vs. Russia's, larger by a factor of 10 at least, seems to bear that out, along with the much greater quality of our weapons. Heaven help us militarily once the protectionists lead us to state-directed penury. inflation, thought to be safely stored away with disco album collections, returned with a vengeance.Did anyone every vaguely hint that inflation control is a function of free markets? Inflation comes from government monetary and fiscal policy. And increasing bouts of extreme weather that destroyed crops, forced migrations and halted power plants has illustrated that the market's invisible hand was not protecting the planet.Doe the Times even vaguely think of news as fact not narrative? There have been a lot of migrations. "Forced?" Many due to violence, poverty, ill government. None due to temperature. Halted power plants (more passive voice)? Yes, it was that pesky unfettered free market that shut down power plants... The favored economic road map helped produce fabulous wealth, lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and spur wondrous technological advances.Well, a peek of sunlight, an actual correct fact! But there were stunning failures as well. Globalization hastened climate change and deepened inequalities. More fact free narrative spinning. How are "inequalities" plural? Globalization brought the sharpest decline in global inequality in the history of our species. Perhaps it "hastened climate change" in that if China had stayed desperately poor they wouldn't be building a new coal fired power plant a week. US emissions went down because of... choose 1: enlightened policy 2: fracking, a shift to natural gas made only possible by the curious US property rights system absent in Europe, and pretty much over the dead body of the entire energy regulatory apparatus. ***Meanwhile over at WSJ, Deirdre is in classic form. (Again, I have not read the book, so this is Deirdre coverage.) The paragraph that caught my attention and demanded a blog post: We need [according to Acemoglu and Johnson] ... the legislation currently being pushed by left and right to try again the policies of antitrust, trade protection, minimum wage and, above all, subsidy for certain technologies. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson are especially eager to regulate digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. "Technology should be steered in a direction that best uses a workforce's skills," they write, "and education should . . . adapt to new skill requirements." How the administrators of the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce would know the new direction to steer, or the new skills required, remains a sacred mystery."Technology should be steered." There it is, the full glory of the regulatory passive voice. Steered by who? Deirdre answers the question with that gem of rhetoric, specificity. "Administrators of the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce" for example. The theme uniting the two essays: If there is one lesson of the last 20 years it is this: The catastrophic failure of our government institutions. From bungled wars, a snafu of financial regulation in 2008 just now repeated in FTX, SVB, and inflation the evident collapse of the FDA CDC and plain commonsense in the pandemic, the free market is bravely forestalling a collapse of government (and associated, i.e. universities) institutions. we need the state to use its powers "to induce the private sector to move away from excessive automation and surveillance, and toward more worker-friendly technologies." Fear of surveillance is a major theme of the book; therefore "antitrust should be considered as a complementary tool to the more fundamental aim of redirecting technology away from automation, surveillance, data collection, and digital advertising."The question what institution has the technical competence to do this seems to be begging. "Government subsidies for developing more socially beneficial technologies," the authors declare, "are one of the most powerful means of redirecting technology in a market economy." Well, interpreting the sentence literally, you have to give it to them. Government subsidies are powerful means of "redirecting technology." Usually to ratholes. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson warmly admire the U.S. Progressive Movement of the late 19th century as a model for their statism: experts taking child-citizens in hand.Their chapters then skip briskly through history...seeking to show how at each turn new innovations tended to empower certain sections of society at the expense of others. The "power" that concerns them, in other words, is private power.This is, in fact, the central question dividing free-marketers and others. Private power being subject to competition, we worry more about state power. The essence of state power is monopoly, and a monopoly of coercion, fundamentally violence. The heart of the book is that technological gains create winners and losers, and Acemoglu and Johnson want that directed by a nebulous bureaucracy. Which will somehow never be infected by, oh, Republicans, or turn in to the endless stagnation of most of the last millennium which actually did pursue policies that forbade technological improvement in order to sustain the incomes of incumbents. Deirdre, who coined the lovely phrase "trade tested betterment" takes it on. During the past two centuries, the world has become radically better off, by fully 3,000% inflation adjusted. Even over the past two decades the lives of the poor have improved. The "great enrichment" after 1800 and its resulting superabundance has brought us out of misery. Even the poor workers who did not benefit in the short run have done so enormously in the long run. In 1960, 4 billion of the 5 billion people on the planet lived on $2 a day. Now it's fallen to 1 billion out of 8, and the income average is $50 a day. The state didn't do it, and forcing short-run egalitarianism or handing power to the Office of Economic Development can kill it, as it regularly has. Messrs. Acemoglu and Johnson see great imperfections in the overwhelmingly private sources of the enrichment. With such imperfections, who needs perfection?Another way to see the problem is to remember the common sense, refined in Economics 101 and Biology 101, of entry at the smell of profit. ...The great fortunes they deprecate have the economic function of encouraging entry into the economy by other entrepreneurs who want to get rich. This competition cheapens goods and services, which then accrues to the poor as immense increases in real income.Many fortunes, for instance, were made by the invention of the downtown department store. The profit attracted suburban competitors, and at the mall the department-store model began to fail. Jeff Bezos reinvented the mail-order catalog. He is imitated, and the fortunes are dissipated in enormous benefit to consumers called workers. .... It's what happened and happens in a liberal economy.The book uses a lot of history, surveyed by McCloskey. As before, it's criticized a bit as history lite. The history Deirdre covers has the usual imperfections of the free market. I wonder if the book has any history of success of this plan, of governments successfully guiding technological transformations to protect the rights and incomes of incumbents, without in the process killing technical change. Governments habitually screw up basics like rent control. Figuring out what new technology will do is pretty much beyond the capacity of private investors and book-writing economists. The idea that bureaucracy has the capacity to figure out not just what new technology will work, but to guide its social and distributional consequences seems... far beyond the historical record of bureaucratic accomplishment. But I am straying beyond my promise to review the review, not the book, before reading the latter. ****I recognize the desire on both sides. Partisan politics needs "new" ideas and a "new" propaganda. In particular, the right is aching for something shiny and new that it can sell to voters, which it regards with the same sort of noblesse-oblige intellectual disdain as the left does. Mind the store, mend the institutions, freedom, rights, opportunity and make your own prosperity are, apparently, not sexy enough. So both sides need new initiatives, expanded governments, to excite the rabble. But we're not here to supply that demand, merely to meditate on actual cause-and-effect truth of what works. Beware the temptation. Update: In retrospect, perhaps the issue is much simpler. The bulk of economic regulation serves exactly the purpose McCloskey basically alleges of Acemoglu and Johnson: Preserve rents of incumbents against the threats of technological improvements. From medieval guilds to trade protection to taxis vs. Ubers, that is really its main function. So we have an extensive bureaucracy that is very good at it, and extensive experience of just how well it works. Which is, very well, at protecting rents and stifling growth.
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Daniel Levine on Hidden Hands, Vocation and Sustainable Critique in International Relations
Daniel Levine is part of a new generation of IR scholars that takes a more pluralist approach to addressing the hard and important questions generated by international politics. While many of those interviewed here display a fairly consistent commitment to a certain position within what is often referred to as 'the debate' in IR, Levine straddles the boundaries of a diverse range of positions and understandings. Time to ask for elaboration.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The question I'd like us to be asking more clearly than we are is, 'are we a vocation and, if so, what kind of vocation are we'? This points to a varied set of questions that we, as scholars, gesture to but spend relatively little theoretical time developing or unpacking. There's an assumption that the knowledge we produce is supposed to be put good for something, practical in light of some praiseworthy purpose. Even theorists who perceive themselves to be epistemologically value-free hope, I think, at least on an intuitive level, that some practical good will emerge from what they do. They hope that they are doing 'good work' in the sense that some Christians use this term. But, there is not really a sustained project of thinking through how those works work: how our notions of vocation might be different or even mutually exclusive, and how the differences in our notions of vocation might be bound up in non-obvious ways to our epistemological, methodological, and theoretical choices.
Moreover, except for a few very important and quite heroic (and minoritarian) efforts, we don't really have a way to think systematically about the structure of the profession: how it influences or intervenes or otherwise acts on particular ideas as they percolate through it, and how those ideas get 'taken up' into policy. Brian Schmidt has done work like that, so has Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Ole Waever, Ido Oren, Oded Löwenheim, Elizabeth Dauphinee, Naeem Inayatullah, and Piki Ish-Shalom; and it's good work, but they are doing what they are doing with limited resources, and I think without due appreciation from a big chunk of the field as to why that work is important and what it means.
When I started writing Recovering International Relations, I had wanted to recover the 'view from nowhere' that many social scientists idealize. You know, that methodological conceit where we imagine we are standing on Mars, watching the earth through a telescope, or we're Archimedes standing outside of the world, leveraging it with distance and dispassion. I had worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a long time, was living in Tel Aviv, working for a think tank, and was—am—an Israeli citizen and an American citizen. I had this somewhat shocking discovery right after the Second Intifada broke out. Most of my senior colleagues were deploying their expertise in what seemed to me to be a very tendentious way: to show why the second Intifada was Yassar Arafat's fault or the Palestinian Authority's fault—or, in a few cases, the Israelis' fault. There were some very simplistic political agendas that were driving this research. People were watching the evening news, coming into work the next morning, and then running Ehud Yaari's commentary through their respective fact-values-methods mill. Or if they were well-connected, they were talking to their friends on the 'inside', and doing the same thing.
It was hard to admit this for a long time, but I was very naïve. I found that very unsettling and quite disillusioning. That's why the view from nowhere was so appealing. I wanted to be able to talk about Israel and Palestine without taking a position on Israel and Palestine—but without eschewing the expertise I had acquired along the way, in part because I was a party to this conflict, and cared about its outcome. I was young, inexperienced, and slightly arrogant to boot—neither yet a scholar, nor an 'expert,' nor really aware of the game I was playing. So my objections were not well received, nor did I pose them especially coherently. To their credit, my senior colleagues did recognize something worthwhile in my diatribes, and they did their best to help me get into graduate school.
As the project developed, and as I started engaging with my mentors in grad school, it appeared that the view from nowhere was essentially impossible to recover. With Hegel and with the poststructuralists, we can't really think from nowhere; the idea of it is this kind of intellectual optical illusion, as though thinking simply happens, without a mind that is conditioned by being in the world. Therefore, there needs to be a process by which we give account of ourselves.
There are a variety of different ways to consider how one might do that. There's what we might call the agentic approach, in which we think through the structure of thought itself: its limitations, our dependence on a certain image of thinking notwithstanding those limits—thought's work on us, on our minds. This is closest to what I do, drawing on Adorno and Kant, and Adorno's account of how concepts work in the mind; how they pull us away from the things we mean to understand even as they give us the words to understand them. And drawing on Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Hannah Arendt, Cornel West, JoanTronto, and JudithButler to think through how one conditions oneself to accept those limitations from a space of love, humility and service. Patrick Jackson's (TheoryTalk #44) Conduct of Research in IR is quite similar to this approach; and so is Colin Wight's Agents, Structures and International Relations; though they use more philosophy of science than I do.
One could also do this more 'structurally.' One could say 'this is how the academy works and this is how the academy interconnects with the larger political community' and then try to trace out those links: I mentioned Hamati-Ataya, Oren, and Ish-Shalom, or you could think of Isaac Kamola, Helen Kinsella, or Srdjan Vucetic.
Any of those approaches—or really, some admixture of them—would be pieces of that project. I would like us to be doing more of that—alongside, not instead of, all the other things we are already doing, from historical institutionalism to formal modeling, to large-N and quantitative approaches, and normative, feminist and critical ones. I would like such self-accounting to be one of the things scholars do, that they take it as seriously as they take methods, epistemology, data, etc. Driving that claim home in our field, as it's presently constituted, is our biggest challenge.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
I'm 42, so the Cold War was a big deal. I'm American-born, and I was raised in a pretty typical suburb. John Stewart from the Daily Show is probably the most famous product of my hometown, though I didn't know him. My view of history was a liberal and progressive in the Michael Waltzer/Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens, vein, but I was definitely influenced by the global circumstances of the time, and by the 'End of History' discourse that was in the air. I thought that the US was a force of good in the world. I was a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey. I really wanted to live in Israel for personal reasons, and the moral challenge of living in Israel after the Intifada seemed to go away with the peace process. So, it seemed to me that it was a kind of golden moment: you could 'render unto Caesar what was due to Caesar', and do the same for the Lord. I could actually be a Jewish-Israeli national and also a political progressive. (That phrase is, of course, drawn from the Gospels, and that may give you some sense of how my stated religious affiliations might have differed from the conceptual and theological structures upon which they actually rested—score one for the necessity of reflexivity. But in any case, those events were important.)
I moved to Israel when I was 22 and was drafted into the military after I took citizenship there. In the IDF, I was a low-level functionary/general laborer—a 'jobnik', someone who probably produces less in utility than they consume in rations. Our job was to provide support for the combatants that patrolled a certain chunk of the West Bank near Nablus—Shechem, as we called it, after the biblical name. I was not a particularly distinguished soldier. But we were cogs in a very large military occupation, and being inside a machine like that, you can see how the gears and pieces of it meshed together, and I started taking notice of this. Sometimes I'd help keep the diary in the operations room. You saw how it all worked, or didn't work; or rather, for whom it worked and for whom it didn't. All that was very sobering and quite fascinating.
I once attended a lecture given by the African politics scholar Scott Straus, and he said the thing about being present right after genocide is that you come across these pits full of dead bodies. It's really shocking and horrific—there they are, just as plain as day. Nothing I saw in the sheer level of violence compares to that in any way—I should stress this. But that sense of it all just being out there, as plain as day, and being shocked by this—that resonated with me. Everyone who cared to look could understand how the occupation worked, or at least how chunks of it worked. So I would say in terms of events, those things were the big pieces that structured my thinking.
Here's two anecdotal examples. Since I was a grade of soldier with very limited skills, I was on guard duty a lot. We had a radio. I could hear the Prime Minister on the radio saying we are going to strike so-and-so in response to an attack on such-and-such, and then I could see helicopters pass overhead to Nablus, and then I could see smoke. Then I could see soldiers come back from going out to do whatever it was the helicopter had provided air support for. I'd see ambulances with red crescents or red Stars of David rush down the main road. It began to occur to me that there was a certain economy of violence in speech and performance. I didn't think about it in specifically theoretical terms before I went back to graduate school, but Israelis had been killed, political outrage had been generated. There was a kind of affective deficit in Israeli politics that demanded a response, and some amount of suffering had to be returned—so the government could say it was doing its job. I found this very depressing. My odd way of experiencing this—neither fully inside nor outside—is certainly not the most important or authentic, and I'm not trying to set myself up as an expert on this basis. I'm only trying to account for how it made me think at the time and how that shows up in what and how I write now.
Later, when I was in the reserves, I was in the same unit with the same guys every year. One year, we were lacing our boots and getting our equipment for our three weeks of duty in a sector of the West Bank near Hebron, I think it was. I remember one guy, one of the more hawkish guys, said 'we'll show 'em this time, we'll show them what's what'. Three weeks later, that same guy said 'Jeez, it's like we're like a thorn in their backside; no wonder they hate us so much.' (He actually used some colorful imagery that I can't share with you.) I remember thinking, 'well, ok, he'll go home and he'll tell his family and his friends; some good will come of this.' The next year, I saw the same guy saying the same thing at the start, 'we'll show those SOBs.' And then three weeks later, 'oh my God, this is so pointless, no wonder they hate us…' So after a few years of this I finally said to him, 'tagid, ma yihiyeh itcha?'—Like, dude, what's your deal? 'We've had this conversation every year! What happens to you in the 48 weeks that you're not here that you forget this?' And I think he looked at me like, 'what are you talking about?'
I thought about that afterwards: we have these moments of experience when we're out of our everyday environment and discourse, the diet of news and fear, PR and political nonsense—that's when these insights become possible. So, when this guy comes in and says 'ok, we'll get those SOBs,' he's carrying with him this discourse that he has from home, from the news and TV, from his 'parliament' with his friends where they get together and talk about politics and war and economics and whatever else—and then a few weeks of occupation duty disrupts all that, makes him see it in a different light, and he has these kinds of fugitive experiences which give him a weirdly acute critical insight. Suddenly, he's this mini-Foucault.
In a few weeks, though, he goes back to his life, there's no space or niche into which that uncomfortable, fugitive insight can really grow, so it just sort of disappears or withers on the vine, its power is dissipated. This is a very real, direct experience of violence and it's covered over by all of this jibber-jabber. So there's a moment where you start to wonder: what exactly happens there? What happens in those 48 weeks? What happens to me during those weeks? You can see how a kind of ongoing critical self-interrogation would evolve out of that. Again, none of those things are exactly what my book's about, but it gives you a sense of how you might find Adorno's kind of critical relentlessness and negativity vital and important and really useful and necessary. You can see how that might inform my thinking.
In terms of books, as an undergraduate, I had read, not very attentively, Said and Foucault, and all of the stuff at the University of Chicago we had to take in what they called the 'Scosh Sequence,' from sociologists like Elijah Anderson and William Julius Wilson to Charles Lindblom and Mancur Olsen: texts from the positive and the interpretive to the post-structural. I had courses with some very smart Israeli and Palestinian profs—Ephraim Yaar, Salim Tamari, Ariela Finkelstein. And of course Rashid Khalidi was there at that time. Once I was in the military, the Foucault and Said suddenly started popping around in my head. Suddenly, this sort of lived experience of being on guard duty made the Panopticon and the notion of discipline go from being a rather complicated, obscure concept to something concrete. 'Oh! That's what discipline is!'
When I went back to graduate school, I was given a pretty steady diet of Waltz, rational deterrence theory, Barry Posen, Stephen Walt (Theory Talk #33), and Robert Jervis (Theory Talk #12). Shai Feldman was a remarkable teacher, so were Ilai Alon in philosophy, Shlomo Shoham in sociology and Aharon Shai in History. Additionally I had colleagues at work who were PhD students at the Hebrew University working with Emanuel Adler; they gave me Wendt (Theory Talk #3), Katzenstein's (TheoryTalk # 15) Culture of National Security, Adler and Barnett, and Jutta Weldes' early article on 'Constructing National Interests' in the EJIR (PDF here). My job was to help them publish their monographs, so I got really into the guts of their arguments, which were fascinating. I am not really an agency-centered theory guy anymore and I am not really a constructivist anymore, but that stuff was fantastic. I saw that one could write from a wholly different viewpoint, perspective, and voice. This is all very mainstream in IR now, but at the time, it felt quite edgy, very novel. Part of the reason why the middle chapters of Recovering IR has these long discussions about different kinds of constructivism is that I wouldn't have had two thoughts to rub together if it was not for those books. I do disagree with them now and strongly, but they were very important to me all the same.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I'd be more comfortable answering that question as someone who was, until relatively recently, a grad student. I've not been productive long enough to say 'Well, here's how to succeed in this business and be a theorist of enduring substance or importance' with any authority. But I can say, 'here's how I'm trying to be one.' There's a famous article by Albert O. Hirschman called 'The Principle of the Hiding Hand,' (PDF here) and in it he says that frequently, the only way one can get through really large or complicated projects is to delude oneself as to how hard the project is actually going to be. He takes as an example these ambitious, massively complicated post-colonial economic projects of the Aswan High Dam variety. The only way such enormous projects ever get off the ground, he says, is if one either denies their true complexity or deludes oneself. Otherwise you despair and you never get it done. From the first day of seminar to dissertation proposal to job—thank God I had no idea what I was in for, or I might have quit.
Also, the job market being what it was, we had to be very, very passionate scholars who wrote and argued for the sheer intellectual rush and love of writing. And yet, we also had to be very practical and almost cynical about the way in which the academic market builds on the prestige of publications and the way in which prestige becomes shorthand for your commodity value. At least in the US, the decline of tenure and the emergence of a kind of new class of academics whose realm of responsibility is specifically to engage in uncomfortable kinds of political and moral critique—but without tenure, and at the mercy of a sometimes feckless dean, an overburdened department chair or fickle colleagues—that's very scary. If you're doing 'normal science', it's a different game and the challenges are different. But if your job is to do critique, in the last ten years, it's a very big deal. Very difficult. I'm very fortunate in that regard; at Alabama I've had great support from my department, my chair, and my college.
I was a Johns Hopkins PhD, and my department was fantastic in terms of giving me support, encouragement, getting out of my way while throwing interesting books at me, reading drafts that were bad and helping me make them good—or at least telling me why they were bad. We did not get particularly good professional training, because I think they did not want us to get professionalized before we found our own voice. I'm really grateful for that, truly. But then there's this period in which you have to figure out how to make your voice into a commodity. That's really tough, it's a little bit disheartening—even to discover that you must be a commodity is dismaying; didn't we go into the academy to avoid this sort of logic? But just like Marx says, commodities have a double life, and so do you. The use-value of your scholarship and its exchange-value do not interlock automatically and without friction. So you spend all this time on the use-value of it—writing a cool, smart, interesting dissertation—thinking that will translate into exchange-value, and it turns out that it sort of does, but a lot of other things translate into exchange-value too that aren't really about how good your work is necessarily. And many of your colleagues, if what you're doing is original, won't really understand what you're doing; the value or the creativity of it won't be apparent to them unless they spend a lot of time sifting through your bad drafts of it, which only a few—but God bless those—will do. So how you create exchange-value for yourself is important. So is finding people who will care about you, your project, your future—and learning when to take their advice, when to ignore it, and how to do so tactfully.
If all that's hard, you're probably doing it right. It's unfortunate that that's how it is, but at all events, that's how it was for me.
Would you elaborate on the concept of vocation and why this is so important to the view from nowhere? It is important to say that the view from nowhere is perhaps difficult. So is vocation, or a kind of Weberian approach, a way to articulate that for you?
There's a quote in a book from a Brazilian novelist named Machado de Assis. His protagonist is this fellow Bras Cubas, who's writing a posthumous memoir of his own life. He's writing from beyond the grave. From there, he can view his whole life and his entire society from outside; he's finally achieved positivism's view from nowhere. But the thing about this view—and the book means to be a sendup of the Comtean positivism that was fashionable in Brazil in those days—is that it gives him no comfort. He now knows why he lived his life the way he did; how he failed and what was—and what was not—his fault. The absurdity of it all makes sense. But it changes nothing: he has died unfulfilled, unloved, and essentially alone: a minor poet and back-bench politician who was ultimately of little use to anyone nor of much to himself. All he knows is how that happened.
In the end, if we're all playing a role in how a world comes into being and it's in some sense our job simply to accept this, and our job as scholars merely to explain it, this gives us no comfort in the face of suffering, in the face of violence and evil. To some extent as scholars, and to some extent as a discipline, we exist as a response to evil, to suffering, to foolishness, to folly; it's not a coincidence that the first professorship of IR is created in Britain in the wake of WWI, and that it's given to someone like E. H. Carr.
If we don't have a view from nowhere because we've given up anything like a moral sense that can't be reduced to fractional, material, or ideological sensibilities, and if we know that sometimes those 'views from somewhere' can provide cover for terrible kinds of evil or justify awful kinds of suffering, then the notion of vocation seems to come in at that point and say well, 'here's what I hope I'm doing', or 'here's what I wish to be doing', or 'here's what I'd like to think I'm doing', and then allowing others to weigh in and give their two cents. Vocation, in the sense of Weber's lectures, comes out of that. It's Kant for social scientists: What can I know? What should I do? For what may I hope? In other words, what the necessity and obligation of thinking is on the one hand, and on the other what its limitations are.
This is a way to save International Relations from two things: one, from relativism and perspectivism, and the other, from a descent into the technocratic or the managerial. I am trying to stand between the two. My own intellectual background was in security studies at Tel Aviv University in the 1990s: the period immediately after Maastricht, in the period of the Oslo Process, the end of Apartheid. My hope back in the days when the peace process seemed to me to be going well was that I'd be able to have a kind of technocratic job in Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs or Defense. Counting tanks, or something similar. I thought that would be a pretty good job. I would be doing my part to maintain a society that had constructed a stable, long-term deterrent by which to meaningfully address the problem of Jewish statelessness and vulnerability, but without the disenfranchisement of another people. I could sit down and count my tanks with a clear conscience, because the specter of evil was being removed from that work. The problem of the occupation was being be solved. Again, it's somewhat embarrassing to admit this now.
I would say in the US academy, there is definitely a balance in favor of the technocrats. We have enormous machines for the production and consumption of PhDs in this country. The defense establishment is an enormous player. Groups like the Institute for Defense Analysis need a lot of PhDs, the NSF funds a lot of PhDs (for now, at least), and that tips the balance of the profession in a certain way. My ability to use ideas compellingly at ISA won't change that fact all by itself, there's a base-superstructure issue in play there.
In Europe, it's a different story, for a bunch of reasons. The defense establishments of the EU member states aren't as onerous a presence. And, there are more of them; so there's a kind of diversity there and a need to think culturally about how these various institutions interlock and how people learn to talk to each other: the Martha Finnemore-to-Vincent Pouliot-to-Iver Neumann (Theory Talk #52) study of ideas and institutions and officials. Plus, you have universities like the EUI and the CEU, which are not reducible to any particular national interest or education system; creating knowledge, but for a political/state form that's still emergent. No one knows exactly what it is, what its institutions and interests will ultimately be. Because of that, it's hard to imagine the EUI producing scholars with obviously nationally-inflected research programs, like Halford Mackinder, Mahan, Ratzel from a century ago. There will still be reifications and ideologies, but there's more 'give' since the institutions are still in play. And there's fantastically interesting stuff happening in Australia, and in Singapore—think of people like Janice Bialley-Mattern, Tony Burke and Roland Bleiker.
Critique has a long and controversial history in our discipline. Could you perhaps elaborate, as a kind of background or setting, how critique can be used in IR and why you've placed it at the center of your approach to IR theory?
Critique as term of art comes into the profession through Robert Cox (Theory Talk #37) and through the folks that were writing after him in the '90s, including Neufeld, Booth, Wyn-Jones, Rengger, Linklater and Ashley—though pieces of the reflexive practice of critique are present in the field well before. For Cox, the famous line is that theory is always 'for something and for someone.' The question is, if that's true how far down does that problem go? Is it a problem of epistemology and method, or is it a problem of being as such, a problem of ontology? Is it fundamental to the nature of politics?
If the set of processes to which we refer when we speak of 'thinking' is inherently for someone and for something, and that problem harkens back to the idea that all thinking is grounded in one's interests and perspectives, i.e., that all practical or systematic attempts to understand politics are 'virtuous' in the Machiavellian sense (they serve princely interests) but not necessarily in the Christian sense (deriving from transcendent values), then we have a real problem in keeping those two things separate in our minds. Think of Linklater's book Men and Citizens in International Relations as a key node in that argument, though Linklater ultimately believes (at least in that book) that a reconciliation between the two is possible. I'm less convinced.
Now recall the vocation point we discussed before. IR as a discipline has a deep sense of moral calling which goes beyond princely interest. And the traditions on which it draws are as much transcendently normative as anything else. So encoded in our ostensibly practical-Machiavellian analyses is going to be something like a sense of Christian virtue; we'll believe we're not merely correct in our analyses, but really and truly right in some otherworldly, transcendent way. True or not, that sense of conviction will attach itself to our thinking, to the political forces and agendas that we're serving. We'll come to believe that we are citing Machiavelli in the service of something greater: whether that's 'scientific truth' or the national interest, or what have you. Nothing could be more dangerous than that. Critique, as an intervention, comes here: to dispel or chasten those beliefs. Harry Gould, Brent Steele, and especially Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53) write about prudence and a sense of finitude: these are the close cousins of this kind of critique.
If we take seriously the notion that people sometimes fight and kill in the service of really awful causes while believing they are doing right, and that scholars sometimes help them sustain those convictions rather than disabuse them of them—even if they do not intend this—then critique becomes an awfully big problem and it really threatens to undermine the profession as such. It opens up a whole new level of obligation and responsibility, and it magnifies what might otherwise be staid 'inside baseball'—Intramural scholarly or methodological debates. Part of the reason why the 'great debates' were so great—so hotly fought—had to do with this: our scholarly debates were, in fact, ideological ones.
It undermines the field in another way as well. If we take critique seriously, there's got to be a lot of moral reflection by scholars. That will make it hard to produce scholarship quickly, to be an all-purpose intellectual that can quickly produce thought-product in a policy-appropriate way, because I will want to be thinking from another space, and of course precisely what policy-makers want is that you don't think from some other space; that you present them with 'shovel ready' policy that solves problems without creating new ones.
So you now have not just a kind of theoretical or methodological interruption in the discussion of, say, absolute or relative gains. You now have to give an account of yourself. And for me, that's what critique in IR means. To unpack the definition I gave above, it's the attempt to give an account of what the duties and limits of one's thinking are in the context of politics, given the nature of politics as we understand it. Because IR comes out of the Second World War, we're bound to take the most capacious notions of what political evil and contingency can be; if we are not always in the midst of genocide and ruin, then we are at least potentially so. And so contingency and complexity and all the stuff that we're talking about must face that. I want to hold out that Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau might be right—in ways which neither they, nor I, can completely fathom. Then I have to give accounts of thinking that take a level of responsibility commensurate with that possibility.
In that vein, when I look at accounts of thinking in the context of the political, when I look at what concepts are and how they work and how they do work on the world so that it can be rendered tractable to thought, I realize that what we come up with when we're done doesn't look very much like politics anymore. We have tools which, when applied to politics, change it quite dramatically; they reify or denature it. To be critical in the face of that, you're going to be obliged to an extensive degree of self-interrogation and self-checking, which I call chastening.
That process of chastening reason, is, in effect, what remains of the enlightenment obligation to use practical reason to improve what Bacon called the human estate. What's left of that obligation is to think in terms of the betterment of other human beings as best as you can, knowing you can't do that very well, but that you may still be obliged to try.
That's really hard to do and it's an odd form of silence and non-silence. After all, if I were to look at the Shoah while it was happening, or look at what happened in Rwanda, and say 'well, I don't really have a foundational position on which to stand so I can't analyze or condemn that'—that would not be a morally acceptable position. Price and Reus-Smit (TheoryTalk #27) say this in their 1998 article and they are absolutely right. But then there's the fact that I don't quite know what to say beyond 'stop murdering people!' The world is so easy to break with words, and so hard to put back together with them—assuming anyone cares at all about anything we say. So I am obliged to respond to those kinds of events when I see them, and I am also obliged to acknowledge that I can't respond to them well, because my authority comes from the conceptual tools I have, and they aren't really very good. Essentially, what I'm doing as scholar of IR is the equivalent is using the heel of my shoe to hammer in a nail. (That's a nice line, no? I wish it was mine, but it's Hannah Arendt.) It will probably work, but it will take a while, and the nail won't go in so straight. To chasten one's thinking is to remind oneself that the heel of one's shoe is not yet a hammer; that all we're doing is muddling through—even when we do our work with absolute seriousness and strict attention to detail, context and method—as of course we should.
You discuss IR theory in terms of different reifications. In which was does that also lead you to take a stand against a Weberian understanding of IR?
I think where I depart from Weber is that he has more faith than I do that, at some point, disenchantment produces something better. There is faith or hope on their part that the iron cage that we experience as a result of disenchantment and as a result of the transformation from earlier forms of charismatic and traditional authority to contemporary rational ones won't always be oppressive, not forever. New forms and ways of being will emerge, in which those disenchanted modes actually will fulfill their promise for a kind of improvement in the human estate. If it's a long, complicated process—hence the image of slow boring into hard wood—but faith is still justified, good things can still happen.
For me, the question is how would you manage a society that is liable to go insane or to descend into moments of madness because of the side-effects or intervening effects of disenchantment and modernization, while holding fast to the notion that at some point, this is going to get better for most people? I'm a bit less certain about that than I read Patrick and Weber being. I think that even if they're right, it makes sense morally as scholars, not necessarily as citizens or individuals or people, to dwell in the loss of those who fall along the way.
I find myself thinking about the people who are gone a lot. My ex-wife teaches on slavery, and I think a lot about this terrible thing she once told me. On slave ships, when there was not enough food they would throw the people overboard because ship masters got insurance money if their property went overboard, but not if human beings succumbed on-ship. There's a scene depicting this in Spielberg's film Amistad and it haunts me. I find myself thinking about those people, dragged under with their chains. I wonder what they looked like, what they had to say. I wonder what they might have created or how their great-great grandchildren children would have played with my child. I wonder if my best friend or true love was never born because her or his ancestor died in this way. An enormous number of people perished. I can't quite believe this, even if I know it's true.
Yoram Kaniuk, the recently deceased Israeli novelist, wrote that the Israeli state was built on the ground-up bones of the Jews who couldn't get there because it was founded too late. I wonder about them too. And when I taught course modules on Cambodia, I would find myself looking at the photographs made of the people in Tuol Sleng before they were killed, the photo archives which the prison kept for itself. There is a mother, daughter, father, brother, son, and I find myself drawn into their eyes and faces. I don't want those people to disappear into zeros or statistics. I want somehow to give them some of their dignity back, and I want to dwell in the tragic nature my own feeling because it bears remembering that I cannot ever really do that. If I remember that, I will have some sense of what life's worth is, and I won't speak crassly about interventions or bombings or wars—wherever I might come down on them. I would say that it's almost a religious obligation to attend to the memory of those people. My desire to abide with them makes me very, very suspicious of hope or progress. I want this practice of a kind of mourning or grief to chasten such hope.
There's a problem with that position. Some will point out to me that this will turn into its own kind of Manichean counter-movement, a kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. Or else that dwelling in mourning has a self-congratulatory quality to it. And there are certainly problems with this position at the level of popular or mass politics. We do see a lot of ressentiment in our politics. On the left, there's a lot of angry, self-aggrandizing moral superiority. And you can think about someone like Sarah Palin in the US as a kind of populist rejection of guilt and responsibility from the right.
But as social scientists, we might have space to be the voice for that kind of grief, to take it on and disseminate the ethics that follow from it; to give that grief a voice. That kind of relentless self-chastening is what I'm all about. I think it opens you up to new agendas and possibilities. I think it's a much deeper way to be 'policy relevant' than most of my colleagues understand this term. If we are relentlessly self-critical as scholars, and if we relentlessly resist the appropriation of scholarly narratives to simplistic moral or political ends and if we, as a society, help to build an intolerance of that and a sense of the mourning that comes out of that, we also open our society up to say things like, 'ok, well what's left?'
And then, well, maybe a lot of things are left, and some of them are not so bad. Maybe we start to imagine something better. That's where I'd rejoin Jackson and Weber; after that set of ethical/emotional/spiritual moves. I think, by the way, that Patrick mostly agrees with me; it's only a question of what his work emphasizes and what mine has emphasized. On this point, consider Ned Lebow's notion of tragedy. He and I disagree on some of the details of that notion. But on top of his remarkable erudition, he's a survivor of the Shoah. I suspect he has thought very deeply about grief and mourning, and in ways that might not be open to me.
The final question I want to pose to you is a substantive one: Your understanding of critique somehow does relate to sustaining progress, in a way. Perhaps on the one hand, you are not so optimistic as Weber was, but on the other hand, your work conveys the sense that it is possible to bridge the gap between concepts and things. I'm not sure if it's possible, but perhaps you can relate it to the substantive example of how your work relates to concrete political situations. I think the example of Israel-Palestine comes to mind best.
Again, I don't think I am as optimistic as that. In my heart of hearts, I desperately wish this to be the case. To think of the people who were most influential on my intellectual development—my cohort of fellow grad students at Johns Hopkins and our teachers, to whom as a group I owe, really, everything in intellectual terms—I was certainly in the minority view. Most of them were, I think, working in the Deleuzian vein of making 'theory worthy of the event.' I just don't believe that's possible; or anyway I think it's really, really, really hard, the work of a generation to tell that story well and have it percolate out into our discipline and our culture. In the meantime, we must muddle through. I hope I'm wrong and I hope they're right. I'm rooting for them, even as I try to give them a hard time—just as I give Keohane (Theory Talk #9) and Waltz and Wendt and everyone else I write about a hard time. But I'd be happy, very happy, to be wrong.
What I do think can be done is that you can sustain an awareness of the space between things-in-themselves and concepts, and by extension some sense of the fragility and the tenuousness of the things that you think and their links to the things that you do. Out of this emerges a kind of chastened political praxis.
You mentioned Israel and Palestine, which I care a great deal about and am trying to address more squarely in the work I'm doing now, partly on my own and partly in pieces I've worked on with my colleague Daniel Monk. What we observe is that though the diplomatic negotiations failed pretty badly twelve and a half years ago, we're still looking at the same people running the show: the same principal advisers and discussants and interlocutors: in the US and Israel and in the Palestinian Authority. The same concepts and assumptions too. Just a few days ago, Dennis Ross published a long op-ed about how we get the peace process back on track, and you might think that you're reading something from another time—as though the conflict were a technical challenge rather than a political one. You know that Prince song about 'partying like it's 1999'?
I don't know what a peaceful, enriching, meaningful Israeli-Jewish-Arab-Palestinian-Muslim-Christian collective co-existence or sharing of space or world looks like, but I know that this pseudo-politics ain't that. When I see something that's just a re-hashing, I can say, 'come on guys, that is not thinking, that's recycling the old stuff and swapping out dates, proper nouns and a few of the verbs.' Nor is it listening to other voices who might inspire us in different ways, or might help us rethink our interests, categories and beliefs. Lately, I've been listening to a band called System Ali, hip-hop guys from Jaffa's Ajami quarter, who sing in four languages. What they say matters less to me than the fact that they really seem to like another, they trust each other, they let each voice sing its song and use its words. They have something to teach me about listening, thinking, acting and feeling—because it's music after all—and that can produce its own political openings.
Of course, there are pressure groups, from industry and AIPAC to whatever else in the US, and those groups merit discussion and debate, but I'm also wary of the counter-assumption which follows from folks who talk about this too reductively: that there actually is an American interest, or a European or Arab or Israeli one, which somehow transcends partisan interest—one that can be recovered once the diaspora Jews, the oil moguls, the arms dealers or the Christian 'Left Behind' people are taken out of the picture. That feels like the same heady brew that Treitschke and Meinecke and the German realpolitik scholars poured and drank: that the national state has some transcendent purpose to which we gain access by rising above or tuning out the voices of the polity or its chattering classes. Only with a light liberal-internationalist gloss: Meinecke meets David Lake (Theory Talk # 46), Anne-Marie Slaughter or John Ikenberry.
I can also go meet starry-eyed idealists who want to hold hands and sing John Lennon, I can say to them yes, I want to hold your hand and sing John Lennon, but I am also enough of a social scientist to know that if a policy does not respond to real and pressing problems—water, land, borders etc.—that any approach that does not respond to those things will be hopelessly idealist. It will be what my granny called luftmentsch-nachess—the silly imaginings of men with their heads in the clouds, like the parable about Thales and the Thracian maiden. I am not interested in being either a luftmentsch nor a technocrat. So what does that leave with you with? You need to balance.
You can look at groups at the margins of political culture to see what they can tell you. In Israel and Palestine, it's groups like Ta'ayush, Breaking the Silence and Zochrot, and this settler leader who recently died, Rabbi Frohman, who was going out and meeting every Palestinian leader he could because for him, being a Jew in the land was not, in the first instance about his Israeli passport. There were and are possibilities for discussion that feel really pregnant and feel very different from the conversation we are sustaining now; which reveal its shallowness and its limitations and its pretentiousness. These other voices are of course not ideal either, they are going to have their own problems and limitations, their own descent into power and exclusion and so on, but they reveal some of the lie of what we're doing now.
I guess in the end, social scientists make a living imagining the future on the basis of the past. I also spend a lot of time reading novels and watching books and films. Partly because I am lazy and I like them. Partly because I'm looking for those novels and films to help me imagine other possibilities of being that aren't drawn from the past. Art, Dewey tells us in The Public and its Problems, is the real bearer of newness. Maybe then, I get to grab onto those things and say ok, what if we made those them responsive to an expansive materialist analysis of what an Israeli-Palestinian peace would need to survive? What if we held the luftmentsch's feet to the materialist/pragmatic fire, even as we held the wonk's feet to the luftmentsch's fire? Let them both squeal for a while. There's possibility there.
Daniel J. Levine is assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Among his recent publications (see below) stands out his book Recovering International Relations.
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Faculty Profile at U-Alabama Read the first chapter of Levine's Recovering IR (2012) here (pdf) Read Barder and Levine's The World is Too Much (Millennium, 2012) here (pdf) Read Levine's Why Morgenthau was not a Critical Theorist (International Relations, 2013) here (pdf) Read Monk and Levine's The Resounding Silence here (pdf)
학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 국제대학원 국제학과(국제통상전공), 2020. 8. 안덕근. ; Over the past 25 years, the WTO has brought considerable achievements as the principal institution of the world trading system. However, it now faces an unprecedented challenge to its fundamental reform since the paralysis of the Appellate Body (AB) function in December 2019. Among many other topics, the area for imperative reforms includes the existing rules associated with "unfair" trade. This study considers two main backgrounds underlying the need for newly refined rules on trade remedies in legal and economic contexts. The first one relates to widening the discrepancies among nation-states' trade policies, which is largely attributable to substantial discretion to Member states rendered by the ambiguity of the WTO legal texts. Furthermore, along with the criticism for "judicial activism", the conflicts between the panels and the Appellate Body in understanding and interpreting the trade remedy laws of the WTO have certainly aggravated the integrity of the dispute settlement system expected to provide "security and predictability" to the multilateral trading system. The other aspect to understanding the discussion for the refinement on trade remedies is that the existing trade remedy rules have not reflected adequately the profound changes to the degree of the economic integration across the world. Indeed, multilateral rules on unfair trade practices such as dumping and subsidization are regarded as one of the most long-standing trade norms. Anti-dumping and countervailing rules made more than one hundred years ago are still the core framework at the WTO, but already conceptually outdated as national economies are inextricably interdependent with each other. Especially, proliferation of global value chains (GVCs) in the twenty first century calls for new thinking on invocation of traditional trade defense instruments and on reform of all disciplines, rules, and decisions governing trade remedies to incorporate such economic changes into the relevant regime. In all this respect, this study aims to assess legal adequacy and economic reasonableness of existing WTO disciplines on unfair trade and to suggest possible areas for improvement and refinement. This study particularly examines two specific topics, namely, targeted dumping and input subsidies, which have many economic and legal problems in its national operation, but the WTO provides little disciplines regarding these matters. Although this study attempts to analyze the possibility of the WTO to embrace more reasonable disciplines on such specific issues legally and economically, the study lastly addresses the area of retaliation when it comes to non-compliance with WTO rulings in anti-dumping or countervailing disputes. The present study in conjunction with an examination of two contentious dumping and subsidies ultimately aims to contribute to effective function of the WTO's dispute settlement system. ; 세계무역기구(WTO)는 출범 이후 지난 25년 여간 다자통상기구로서 큰 성과를 거두어 왔지만 2019년 12월부터 상소기구 기능이 마비되면서 분쟁해결제도와 국제통상규범에 대한 근본적인 개혁의 필요성에 직면해 있다. 특히 불공정 무역과 관련된 무역구제 규범은 가장 빈번하게 WTO 분쟁 대상이 되었을 뿐 아니라 현재 WTO 개혁 논의 중 가장 핵심 이슈로 부각되고 있어 규범의 정비와 개정이 시급해 보인다. 이는 WTO 무역구제규범이 이미 태생부터 법적 모호성을 내포하고 있었을 뿐 아니라, 과거 전형적인 국가간 무역형태를 기반으로 만들어져 급변하는 경제적 현실과의 괴리가 커져갔기 때문이다. 먼저, WTO 반덤핑 협정과 보조금 및 상계조치에 관한 협정 문언의 모호성으로 인해 각 회원국이 시행하는 반덤핑 및 상계조치 정책 간에는 상당한 불일치 및 재량권 남용이 발생해왔다. 또한 '무역구제'와 관련된 분쟁에서 협정문의 모호성을 보완하기 위한 상소기구의 해석은 사법 적극주의로 종종 비판받으며, 일부 쟁점에 대해서는 패널과 해석 상의 갈등이 지속되어 WTO 분쟁해결제도 기능의 약화에도 공히 기여했다. 이러한 문제를 근본적으로 해결하기 위해 그동안 국내 정책상의 무역구제제도 활용과 WTO 분쟁해결절차의 판정 과정에서 WTO 무역구제 협정문이 어떻게 남용되거나 확대 해석되었는지를 면밀히 검토할 필요가 있다. 무역구제 규범의 재정비가 필요한 또 다른 배경은 WTO 무역구제 규범이 국가간 투자 확대, 초국경 기업들의 성장, 글로벌 공급망의 발전이라는 세계 통상환경의 변화를 적절히 반영하지 못하고 있다는 점이다. 현재 무역구제 규범의 기본 틀은 원재료 조달에서 상품의 생산이 모두 한 국가 내에서 일어난 뒤 다른 국가에서 소비되는, 이른바 '국가 영역' 개념에 기반한 전통적 형태의 상품무역 구조를 전제하고 있다. 현행 무역구제 규범이 지속되는 한 변화된 통상환경을 적절히 고려하지 못 해 개별 국가 차원의 무역구제 제도가 무차별적으로 제정, 적용될 수 있으며, 이로 인한 국가간 분쟁이 증가할 소지가 크다. 무역구제 규범과 관련된 상기 두 가지 과제를 염두에 두고, 동 연구는 현재 WTO 무역구제 규범의 법적 충분성과 경제적 타당성을 평가하고자 한다. 동 연구는 특히 WTO 법 상 구체적인 규율은 없는 반면 미국에서 별도의 규정을 두고 적용해 온 '표적 덤핑'과 '원재료 보조금' 문제를 법적 측면과 경제적 측면에서 검토하고 WTO하에서 보다 타당한 규범의 정비 가능성에 대해 고찰하였다. 먼저, '표적 덤핑'은 WTO 무역구제 분쟁 역사 상 가장 큰 논쟁 대상이었던 제로잉이 허용될 수 있는 마지막 영역으로서 그동안 여겨져 왔던 반면, 반덤핑 협정문 자체는 표적 덤핑 하에서 예외적 가격 비교 방법을 허용하는 것 외에 이 문제를 다루는 별도의 규범을 두고 있지 않아, 각국의 관련 정책에 많은 차이와 남용을 야기하였다. 동 연구에서는 '표적 덤핑'이 일반적 덤핑의 개념과 구별되는 경제학적 근거가 있는지 살펴보고, '표적 덤핑' 조항의 발생 배경과 이 문제를 처음 다룬 US-Washing Machine 상소기구 판정을 비판적으로 검토하였다. 그 결과, 상소 기구의 판정이 표적 덤핑 조항인 반덤핑협정 제2.4.2조 제2문의 실질적 기능을 가능케 하기는 어렵다는 점을 사례 연구를 통해 확인하였으며, 제로잉에 대한 문제도 근본적으로 남아있다는 점에 비추어 동 항에 대한 재정비 필요성에 대해 모색하였다. 두 번째 연구에서는 WTO하에서 원재료 보조금의 규율가능성을 검토하였다. 원재료 보조금은 지속적으로 국가간 통상분쟁을 야기해 왔는데, 이에 대한 구체적인 규율은 보조금 협정상 마련되어 있지 않다. 동 연구는 이미 1984년 국내법 상 원재료 보조금 규정을 도입한 미국에서 해당 조항을 어떻게 적용해 왔는지 사례와 법규를 분석하며, WTO하에서는 원재료 보조금 규율에 대한 법적 논의와 발전이 어떻게 있었는지 검토하였다. 그리고 간접 보조금으로서의 원재료 보조금을 규율할 경우 원재료의 범위를 정의하는 문제와 보조금 혜택의 크기 측정 문제에 대해 경제학적 측면에서 분석하고 원재료 보조금 규율 가능성의 한계를 분석하였다. 마지막으로, WTO 분쟁해결제도의 마지막 구제절차인 양허 또는 기타 의무의 정지, 소위 보복 조치와 관련하여, WTO법 위반인 반덤핑, 상계관세 조치에 대한 불이행에 대해 보복조치 수준 계산 시 발생되는 방법론적 문제점을 분석하였다. 이 연구에서는 US-Washing Machines (Art. 22.6)에서 보복조치 수준을 산정한 방법론을 중심으로, '반덤핑 조치'와 관련된 보복조치 수준의 산정 방식은 중재 패널이 여타 수입 제한적 조치에 대해 산정해 온 전통적 방식과 유사하면서도 고유의 구별되는 시장 환경적 특징으로 인해 특별히 신중한 고려가 필요하다는 점을 분석한다. 특히 기업의 전략적 경영활동과 반덤핑 조치 간의 불명확한 인과관계, 기업과 국가에 귀속되는 무역흐름의 불일치를 고려할 때 기존에 '이행기간 종료일'에 근접한 최근 기간을 분석 기간으로 삼았던 관행을 수정하는 것은 다소 불가피한 측면이 있음을 확인하였다. 또한, 방법론 측면에서 경제학적 모델을 사용하여 무역효과를 산출할 때 사용되는 가정과 변수에 따라 무역효과가 얼마나 크게 변하는지 살펴보았다. 특히 세탁기 사건에 사용된 Armington가정과 대체탄력성의 문제점을 검토함으로써 보다 정교한 무역효과를 산출할 것으로 기대되는 경제학적 모델이 '동등한' 수준의 이익의 무효화 또는 침해수준을 산정함에 있어 가정적, 데이터 측면에서의 취약성을 가지고 있으며, 상당히 제한된 수준의 분석을 제공한다는 점을 비판적으로 고찰하였다. 상기와 같이 '표적 덤핑' 과 '원재료 보조금', 그리고 반덤핑, 상계관세 조치 불이행시 '보복조치 수준의 산정'을 통해 본 연구가 추후 WTO 무역구제 규범 재정비와 관련된 논의에 도움이 되고, 궁극적으로 분쟁해결제도의 기능이 개선되는데 기여하고자 한다. ; Chapter I. General Introduction 1 1. Purpose of the Study 1 2. Historical and Policy Background of Unfair Trade Rules 4 3. Contemporary Challenges to WTO Trade Remedy Rules 7 4. Structure of Contents 9 Chapter II. Disciplines for Targeted Dumping in the WTO Anti-Dumping Law 11 1. Introduction 11 1.1. Research Background 11 1.2. Research Purpose and Structure of Contents 14 2. Economic Rationale of Targeted Dumping 15 3. History of Legal Development of Targeted Dumping 20 3.1. Historical Development of Targeted Dumping in GATT/WTO 20 3.2. Evolution of US Laws and Regulations for Targeted Dumping 23 4. US DOC's Analysis of Targeted Dumping 28 4.1. Targeted Dumping Analysis in the Washers AD Investigation 28 4.2. The DOC's Current Analytic Framework for Targeted Dumping 31 5. WTO Decisions on Targeted Dumping Before US – Washing Machines 35 5.1. US – Softwood Lumber V (Art. 21.5) Case 35 5.2. US – Zeroing (EC) Case 37 5.3. US – Zeroing (Japan) Case 39 5.4. Summary Remarks 40 6. Structural Issues of Targeted Dumping from US-Washing Machines 41 6.1. Interpretation of What Constitutes a "Pattern" 42 6.2. Interpretation of the Assessment Criteria for a "Pattern" 45 6.3. Obligation of Investigating Authorities in the Explanation Clause 47 6.4. Limiting the Calculation of Dumping Margins to "Targeted" Sales 53 6.4.1. New Issues Arising from the AB's Findings 57 6.4.2. Rethinking "Zeroing" Under the W-T Comparison Methodology 61 7. Concluding Remarks 62 Chapter III. Disciplines for Input Subsidies in the WTO Countervailing Duty Law 70 1. Introduction 70 1.1. Research Background 70 1.2. Research Purpose and Structure of Contents 74 2. Rules on Upstream Subsidies in the United States 75 2.1. Legislative History and the Framework of the Statue and the Regulation 75 2.1.1. Prior to the Omnibus Tariff and Trade Act of 1984 75 2.1.2. The Omnibus Tariff and Trade Act of 1984 and Afterwards 79 2.1.3. Changes in Regulations Governing Upstream Subsidies 81 2.2. Application of the Upstream Subsidy Provision since 1994 85 2.2.1. Delineating the Scope of Input 86 2.2.2. Agricultural and Non-Agricultural Products 89 2.2.3. Consistency of the Cross-Ownership Regulation with The Upstream Subsidy Provision of the Act 90 2.2.4. Absence of a Competitive Benefit 93 3. The GATT and the WTO Jurisprudence on Input Subsidies 94 3.1. Discussions on Input Subsidies during the GATT 94 3.2. GATT Case Law 100 3.3. WTO Case Law 102 3.3.1. US – Softwood Lumber III and IV (DS 236, DS257) 102 3.3.2. Mexico – Olive Oil (DS341) 106 4. Should Something Be Done About Input Subsidies? 108 4.1. Calculation of the Amount of a Subsidy 108 4.2. Conceptual Viability of the Scope of Input Subsidies 114 4.3. Countervailing "Cross-National Input Subsidies" 116 5. Concluding Remarks 118 Chapter IV. Retaliatory Level against Anti-Dumping /Countervailing Measures in the WTO 141 1. Introduction 141 1.1. Research Background 141 1.2. Research Purpose and Structure of Contents 143 2. Measurement of NOI in GATT Practices and the Negotiating History 146 2.1. From GATT 1947 to 1986 Post Tokyo Round Dispute Settlement 146 2.2. Uruguay Round Negotiation 151 3. Legal and Economic Grounds Governing the Measurement of Equivalence 154 4. WTO Decisions on a Retaliatory Level before US – Washing Machines (Art.22.6) 159 4.1. The Relevant Time-Frame for Analysis of Counterfactual 161 4.2. Methodology for Quantification of NOI 165 4.2.1. Conventional Approach to Estimating Direct Trade Effects 165 4.2.2. Approach to Beyond-Trade Effects 171 4.3. Causation, Quantification, and Non-Trade Effects 171 4.3.1. Causation 172 4.3.2. Quantifiability or Non-Trade Effects 173 5. Findings in the US – Washing Machines 22.6 Arbitration 175 5.1. Counterfactual and Timeframe in "As Applied" Measures on Washing Machines 175 5.2. Economic Model and Data Used in 'As Applied' Measures on Washing Machines 178 5.3. Findings Associated with 'As Such' Measures on Other Products 179 6. Issues Arising from the Calculation of NOI Concerning Non-Compliant AD/CVD Actions 181 6.1. Determination of Actual and Counterfactual Level of Export Value 181 6.2. Limitations of Using an Economic Model 187 7. Concluding Remarks 194 Chapter V. Conclusion 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY 201 국 문 초 록 220 ; Doctor
In this work the management effectiveness of a Cuban MPA is assessed using an interdisciplinary approach. A series of three hypotheses are tested to determine how effective the Punta Frances Marine Protected Area (PFMPA) has been in meeting the multiple objectives of conserving biological diversity and ecological integrity, while allowing for the development of economic opportunities for tourism, and satisfying the needs of local and distant human populations. A new typology of benefits derived from MPAs was produced to provide managers with a practical tool that enable them to: 1) identify the benefits at the early stages of MPA creation, 2) state MPA objectives in a clear and measurable way, 3) assess the effectiveness of their MPA in meeting their management objectives. A new methodology was also developed to assess MPA effectiveness. This methodology constitutes an advancement from previous work, and it is based on qualitative and quantitative measurements of benefits depicted in the proposed typology. It has several advantages over previous methods. One of the main advantages is that it can be applied to assess one single MPA or a group of MPAs in a comparative fashion. The case study analyzed showed that to date, the PFMPA shows little signs of being negatively affected by the recreational SCUBA diving activities for which it was intended, given that no significant differences were found between intensively used diving areas and unused diving areas in terms of fish abundance, coral cover and macroalgae cover. Despite this, the PFMPA is not currently providing the full set of benefits to humans and the rest of nature, due mainly to administrative issues. If the PFMPA eventually becomes a National Marine Park (i.e. is fully protected from extractive activities), and management is correctly implemented, an annual economic value of almost USD $127,164,116.37 is forecast. At present the PFMPA does not provide any social or economic benefit to the nearby coastal community of Cocodrilo, thereby maintaining a divorce between local people and the users and managers of the MPA. Conversely, foreigners are receiving most of the benefits associated with recreation in a pristine tropical coastal ecosystem situated on the edge of the Caribbean Sea basin. The interdisciplinary methodologies for assessing effectiveness of MPAs developed in this study provided quantitative and qualitative evidence of a poor level of success in meeting the multiple management objectives of the PFMPA. 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In: Decision analysis: a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, INFORMS, Band 9, Heft 2, S. 204-210
ISSN: 1545-8504
Debarun Bhattacharjya (" Formulating Asymmetric Decision Problems as Decision Circuits " and " From Reliability Block Diagrams to Fault Tree Circuits ") is a research staff member in the Risk Analytics team within the broader Business Analytics and Math Sciences division at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received his Ph.D. in management science and engineering at Stanford University. His primary research interests lie in decision and risk analysis, and probabilistic models and decision theory in artificial intelligence. Specifically, he has pursued research in probabilistic graphical models (influence diagrams and Bayesian networks), value of information, sensitivity analysis, and utility theory. His applied work has been in domains such as sales, energy, business services, and public policy. He has coauthored more than 10 publications in highly refereed journals and conference proceedings, as well as two patents. He was nominated by IBM management for the Young Researcher Connection at the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Practice Conference in 2010. Email: debarunb@us.ibm.com . May Cheung (" Regulation Games Between Government and Competing Companies: Oil Spills and Other Disasters ") is an undergraduate senior in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo. Her research interests are in decision analysis, optimization, and simulation with respect to complex, high-impact decisions. Email: mgcheung@buffalo.edu . Léa A. Deleris (" From Reliability Block Diagrams to Fault Tree Circuits ") is a research staff member and manager at IBM Dublin Research Laboratory, where she oversees the Risk Collaboratory, a three-year research project funded in part by the Irish Industrial Development Agency around risk management, from stochastic optimization to the communication of risk information to decision makers. Prior to joining the Dublin lab, she was a research staff member with the Risk Analytics Group, Business Application and Mathematical Science Department, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. Her primary interests have been in the fields of decision theory and risk analysis. Her work is currently focused on leveraging natural language processing techniques to facilitate the construction of risk models, distributed elicitation of expert opinions, and value of information problems. She holds a Ph.D. in management science and engineering from Stanford University. Email: lea.deleris@ie.ibm.com . Philippe Delquié (" Risk Measures from Risk-Reducing Experiments ") is an associate professor of decision sciences at the George Washington University, and holds a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Delquié's teaching and research are in decision, risk, and multicriteria analysis. His research is at the nexus of behavioral and normative theories of decision, addressing issues in preference elicitation, value of information, nonexpected utility models of choice, and risk measures. Prior to joining the George Washington University, he held academic appointments at INSEAD, the University of Texas at Austin, and École Normale Supérieure, France, and visiting appointments at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He is on the editorial board of Decision Analysis and has completed a term as an associate editor. Email: delquie@gwu.edu . Lorraine Dodd (" Regulating Autonomous Agents Facing Conflicting Objectives: A Command and Control Example ") is a highly respected international contributor to command and leadership studies within military and UK governmental command, control, intelligence and information analysis, and research. She has an honours degree in pure mathematics and an M.Sc. in operational research and management science from the University of Warwick majoring in catastrophe theory and nonlinearity. Her main interest is in sense-making, decision making, and risk taking under conditions of uncertainty, confusion, volatility, ambiguity, and contention, as applied to the study of institutions, organizations, society, people, and governance. She uses analogy with brain functions and coherent cellular functions to develop mathematical models of complex decision behavior. Her most recent studies include an application of a multiagency, multiperspective approaches to collaborative decision making and planning, and development of an "open-eyes/open-mind" framework to provide support to leaders when dealing with complex crises and "black swans." She has developed an understanding of the nonlinear, slow and fast dynamics of behavior, in particular, of means of organizing for agility in complex and uncertain environments. Email: l.dodd@cranfield.ac.uk . Rachele Foschi (" Interactions Between Ageing and Risk Properties in the Analysis of Burn-in Problems ") has an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Rome La Sapienza, where she also worked as a tutor for the courses of calculus and probability. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Economics and Institutional Change Research Area at IMT (Institutions, Markets, Technologies) Advanced Studies, in Lucca, Italy. Her research interests include stochastic dependence, reliability, stochastic orders, point processes, and mathematical models in economics. Random sets and graphs, linguistics, and behavioral models are of broader interest to her. Email: rachele.foschi@imtlucca.it . Simon French (" Expert Judgment, Meta-analysis, and Participatory Risk Analysis ") recently joined the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick to become the director of the Risk Initiative and Statistical Consultancy Unit. Prior to joining the University of Warwick, he was a professor of information and decision sciences at Manchester Business School. Simon's research career began in Bayesian statistics, and he was one of the first to apply hierarchical modeling, particularly in the domain of protein crystallography. Nowadays he is better known for his work on decision making, which began with his early work on decision theory. Over the years, his work has generally become more applied: looking at ways of supporting real decision makers facing major strategic and risk issues. In collaboration with psychologists, he has sought to support real decision makers and stakeholders in complex decisions in ways that are mindful of their human characteristics. He has a particular interest in societal decision making, particularly with respect to major risks. He has worked on public risk communication and engagement and the wider areas of stakeholder involvement and deliberative democracy. Simon has worked across the public and private sectors, often in contexts that relate to the environment, energy, food safety, and the nuclear industry. In all of his work, the emphasis is on multidisciplinary and participatory approaches to solving real problems. Email: simon.french@warwick.ac.uk . L. Robin Keller (" From the Editors: Games and Decisions in Reliability and Risk ") is a professor of operations and decision technologies in the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. and M.B.A. in management science and her B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has served as a program director for the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Her research is on decision analysis and risk analysis for business and policy decisions and has been funded by NSF and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Her research interests cover multiple attribute decision making, riskiness, fairness, probability judgments, ambiguity of probabilities or outcomes, risk analysis (for terrorism, environmental, health, and safety risks), time preferences, problem structuring, cross-cultural decisions, and medical decision making. She is currently the editor-in-chief of Decision Analysis, published by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). She is a fellow of INFORMS and has held numerous roles in INFORMS, including board member and chair of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society. She is a recipient of the George F. Kimball Medal from INFORMS. She has served as the decision analyst on three National Academy of Sciences committees. Email: lrkeller@uci.edu . Miguel A. Lejeune (" Game Theoretical Approach for Reliable Enhanced Indexation ") is an assistant professor of decision sciences at the George Washington University (GWU) and holds a Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University. Prior to joining GWU, he was a visiting assistant professor in operations research at Carnegie Mellon University. His areas of expertise/research interests include stochastic programming, financial risk, and large-scale optimization. He is the recipient of a Young Investigator/CAREER Research Grant (2009) from the Army Research Office. He also received the IBM Smarter Planet Faculty Innovation Award (December 2011) and the Royal Belgian Sciences Academy Award for his master's thesis. Email: mlejeune@gwu.edu . Jason R. W. Merrick (" From the Editors: Games and Decisions in Reliability and Risk ") is a professor in the Department of Statistical Sciences and Operations Research at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has a D.Sc. in operations research from the George Washington University. He teaches courses in decision analysis, risk analysis, and simulation. His research is primarily in the area of decision analysis and Bayesian statistics. He has worked on projects ranging from assessing maritime oil transportation and ferry system safety, the environmental health of watersheds, and optimal replacement policies for rail tracks and machine tools, and he has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the United States Coast Guard, the American Bureau of Shipping, British Petroleum, and Booz Allen Hamilton, among others. He has also performed training for Infineon Technologies, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Capital One Services. He is an associate editor for Decision Analysis and Operations Research. He is the information officer for the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS. Email: jrmerric@vcu.edu . Gilberto Montibeller (" Modeling State-Dependent Priorities of Malicious Agents ") is a tenured lecturer in decision sciences in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics (LSE). With a first degree in electrical engineering (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, 1993), he started his career as an executive at British and American Tobacco. Moving back to academia, he was awarded a master's degree (UFSC, 1996) and a Ph.D. in production engineering (UFSC/University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom, 2000). He then continued his studies as a postdoctoral research fellow in management science at the University of Strathclyde (2002–2003). He is an area editor of the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, and he is on the editorial board of Decision Analysis and the EURO Journal on Decision Processes. His main research interest is on supporting strategic-level decision making, both in terms of decision analytic methodologies and of decision processes. He has been funded by the AXA Research Fund, United Kingdom's EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council), and Brazil's CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior). His research has been published in journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Decision Support Systems, and OMEGA—The International Journal of Management Science. One of his papers, on the evaluation of strategic options and scenario planning, was awarded the Wiley Prize in Applied Decision Analysis by the International Society of Multi-Criteria Decision Making. He has had visiting positions at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, Austria) and the University of Warwick (United Kingdom), and is a visiting associate professor of production engineering at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). He also has extensive experience in applying decision analysis in practice; over the past 17 years he has provided consulting to both private and public organizations in Europe and South America. He is a regular speaker at the LSE Executive Education courses. Email: g.montibeller@lse.ac.uk . M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell (" Games, Risks, and Analytics: Several Illustrative Cases Involving National Security and Management Situations ") specializes in engineering risk analysis with application to complex systems (space, medical, etc.). Her research has focused on explicit inclusion of human and organizational factors in the analysis of systems' failure risks. Her recent work is on the use of game theory in risk analysis with applications that have included counterterrorism and nuclear counterproliferation problems. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the French Académie des Technologies, and of several boards, including Aerospace, Draper Laboratory, and In-Q-Tel. Dr. Paté-Cornell was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from December 2001 to 2008. She holds an engineering degree (applied mathematics and computer science) from the Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble (France), an M.S. in operations research and a Ph.D. in engineering-economic systems, both from Stanford University. Email: mep@stanford.edu . Jesus Rios (" Adversarial Risk Analysis: The Somali Pirates Case ") is a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He has a Ph.D. in computer sciences and mathematical modeling from the University Rey Juan Carlos. Before joining IBM, he worked in several universities as a researcher, including the University of Manchester, the University of Luxembourg, Aalborg University, and Concordia University. He participated in the 2007 SAMSI program on Risk Analysis, Extreme Events, and Decision Theory, and led work in the area of adversarial risk analysis. He has also worked as a consultant for clients in the transportation, distribution, energy, defense, and telecommunication sectors. His main research interests are in the areas of risk and decision analysis and its applications. Email: jriosal@us.ibm.com . David Rios Insua (" Adversarial Risk Analysis: The Somali Pirates Case ") is a professor of statistics and operations research at Rey Juan Carlos University and a member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. He has written 15 monographs and more than 90 refereed papers in his areas of interest, which include decision analysis, negotiation analysis, risk analysis, and Bayesian statistics, and their applications. He is scientific advisor of AISoy Robotics. He is on the editorial board of Decision Analysis. Email: david.rios@urjc.es . Fabrizio Ruggeri (" From the Editors: Games and Decisions in Reliability and Risk ") is the director of research at IMATI CNR (Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technology at the Italian National Research Council) in Milano, Italy. He received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Milano, an M.Sc. in statistics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Ph.D. in statistics from Duke University. After a start as a researcher at Alfa Romeo and then a computer consultant, he has been working at CNR since 1987. His interests are mostly in Bayesian and industrial statistics, especially in robustness, decision analysis, reliability, and stochastic processes; recently, he got involved in biostatistics and biology as well. Dr. Ruggeri is an adjunct faculty member at the Polytechnic Institute (New York University), a faculty member in the Ph.D. program in mathematics and statistics at the University of Pavia, a foreign faculty member in the Ph.D. program in statistics at the University of Valparaiso, and a member of the advisory board of the Ph.D. program in mathematical engineering at Polytechnic of Milano. An ASA Fellow and an ISI elected member, Dr. Ruggeri is the current ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis) president and former ENBIS (European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics) president. He is the editor-in-chief of Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry and the Encyclopedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability, and he is also the Chair of the Bayesian Inference in Stochastic Processes workshops and codirector of the Applied Bayesian Statistics summer school. Email: fabrizio@mi.imati.cnr.it . Juan Carlos Sevillano (" Adversarial Risk Analysis: The Somali Pirates Case ") is a part-time lecturer at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research II (Decision Methods) at the School of Economics of Complutense University. He holds a B.Sc. in mathematics from Complutense University and an M.Sc. in decision systems engineering from Rey Juan Carlos University. Email: sevimjc@ccee.ucm.es . Ross D. Shachter (" Formulating Asymmetric Decision Problems as Decision Circuits ") is an associate professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where his teaching includes probability, decision analysis, and influence diagrams. He has been at Stanford since earning his Ph.D. in operations research from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982, except for two years visiting the Duke University Center for Health Policy Research and Education. His main research focus has been on the communication and analysis of the relationships among uncertain quantities in the graphical representations called Bayesian belief networks and influence diagrams, and in the 1980s he developed the DAVID influence diagram processing system for the Macintosh. His research in medical decision analysis has included the analysis of vaccination strategies and cancer screening and follow-up. At Duke he helped to develop an influence diagram-based approach for medical technology assessment. He has served on the Decision Analysis Society (DAS) of INFORMS Council, chaired its student paper competition, organized the DAS cluster in Nashville, and was honored with its Best Publication Award. For INFORMS, he organized the 1992 Doctoral Colloquium and has been an associate editor in decision analysis for Management Science and Operations Research. He has also served as Program Chair and General Chair for the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Conference. At Stanford he served from 1990 until 2011 as a resident fellow in an undergraduate dormitory, and he was active in planning the university's new student orientation activities and alcohol policy. Email: shachter@stanford.edu . Jim Q. Smith (" Regulating Autonomous Agents Facing Conflicting Objectives: A Command and Control Example ") has been a full professor of statistics at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom for 18 years, receiving a Ph.D. from Warwick University in 1977, and has more than 100 refereed publications in the area of Bayesian decision theory and related fields. He has particular interests in customizing probabilistic models in dynamic, high-dimensional problems to the practical needs of a decision maker, often using novel graphical approaches. As well as teaching decision analysis to more than 3,000 top math students in the United Kingdom and supervising 23 Ph.D. students in his areas of expertise, he has been chairman of the Risk Initiative and Statistical Consultancy Unit at Warwick for 10 years, engaging vigorously in the university's interaction with industry and commerce. His book Bayesian Decision Analysis: Principles and Practice was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Email: j.q.smith@warwick.ac.uk . Refik Soyer (" From the Editors: Games and Decisions in Reliability and Risk ") is a professor of decision sciences and of statistics and the chair of the Department of Decision Sciences at the George Washington University (GWU). He also serves as the director of the Institute for Integrating Statistics in Decision Sciences at GWU. He received his D.Sc. in University of Sussex, England, and B.A. in Economics from Boğaziçi University, Turkey. His areas of interest are Bayesian statistics and decision analysis, stochastic modeling, statistical aspects of reliability analysis, and time-series analysis. He has published more than 90 articles. His work has appeared in journals such as Journal of the American Statistical Association; Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Ser. B.; Technometrics; Biometrics; Journal of Econometrics; Statistical Science; International Statistical Review; and Management Science. He has also coedited a volume titled Mathematical Reliability: An Expository Perspective. Soyer is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, a fellow of the Turkish Statistical Association, and a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was vice president of the International Association for Statistical Computing. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and is currently an associate editor of the Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry. Email: soyer@gwu.edu . Fabio Spizzichino (" Interactions Between Ageing and Risk Properties in the Analysis of Burn-in Problems ") is a full professor of probability theory at the Department of Mathematics, the Sapienza University of Rome. He teaches courses on introductory probability, advanced probability, and stochastic processes. In the past, he has also taught courses on basic mathematical statistics, Bayesian statistics, decision theory, and reliability theory. His primary research interests are related to probability theory and its applications. A partial list of scientific activities includes dependence models, stochastic ageing for lifetimes, and (semi-)copulas; first-passage times and optimal stopping times for Markov chains and discrete state-space processes; order statistics property for counting processes in continuous or discrete time, in one or more dimensions; sufficiency concepts in Bayesian statistics and stochastic filtering; and reliability of coherent systems and networks. He also has a strong interest in the connections among the above-mentioned topics and in their applications in different fields. At the present time, he is particularly interested in the relations among dependence, ageing, and utility functions. Email: fabio.spizzichino@uniroma1.it . Sumitra Sri Bhashyam (" Modeling State-Dependent Priorities of Malicious Agents ") is a Ph.D. candidate in the Management Science Group at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her Ph.D. thesis is supervised by Dr. Gilberto Montibeller and cosupervised by Dr. David Lane. Her research interests include decision analysis, multicriteria decision analysis, preference modeling, and preference change. Before coming to study in the United Kingdom, Sri Bhashyam studied mathematics, physics, and computer sciences in France for two years, after which she moved to the United Kingdom to complete a B.A.Hons in marketing communications and then an M.Sc. in operational research from the LSE. She worked as a project manager at Xerox and, subsequently, as a consultant for an SME (small and medium enterprise) to help them set up their quality management system. Alongside the Ph.D., and participating in other research and consultancy projects, she has been a graduate teaching assistant for undergraduate, master, and executive students at the LSE. The courses she teaches include topics such as normative and descriptive decision theory, prescriptive decision analysis, simulation modeling and analysis. Email: s.sribhashyam@lse.ac.uk . Jun Zhuang (" Regulation Games Between Government and Competing Companies: Oil Spills and Other Disasters ") has been an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York (SUNY-Buffalo), since he obtained his Ph.D. in industrial engineering in 2008 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dr. Zhuang's long-term research goal is to integrate operations research and game theory to better mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from both natural and man-made hazards. Other areas of interest include healthcare, sports, transportation, supply chain management, and sustainability. Dr. Zhuang's research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) and National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) through the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Dr. Zhuang is a fellow of the 2011 U.S. Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (AF SFFP), sponsored by the AFOSR. Dr. Zhuang is also a fellow of the 2009–2010 Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers Program, sponsored by the NSF. Dr. Zhuang is on the editorial board of Decision Analysis and is the coeditor of Decision Analysis Today. Email: jzhuang@buffalo.edu .
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I have been wondering whether I should write about Michel Maisonneuve's op-ed, which is entirely about ... me. As I have long admitted to being a narcissist, I am, of course, flattered by the attention. But as a professor, when I see bad reading comprehension, ad hominen attacks, and wild analogies, I have a hard time refraining from commenting. To set this up, last fall, Michel Maisonneuve used his Vimy Gala award speech to rant about a variety of things that upset him--including a woke media and a government that apologizes too much. I wrote about it, which got much attention. This seemed to lead to Maisonneuve, who complained about cancel culture, getting a regular column or its equivalent at the National Post, and the attention of the Conservative Party of Canada. They then chose him to have a big platform at their convention. I suggested this was a bad idea in an op-ed as it would be putting the military into partisan fire (and I am not alone) not unlike how platforming Michael Flynn and John Allen in 2016 did so in the US, and it is that op-ed to which Maisonneuve is responding. With that out of the way, let's go through this piece and consider what kind of grade it should get.Before getting into the text, we should note that the picture that comes with the piece has MM with a chest full of medals. This belies any assertion that he is not trying to parlay his military credentials into influence. Yes, he has the right to wear them, but to use this picture is not random, it is about wrapping himself in the CAF. I would give good marks to a student who so clearly identifies the target of his essay at the start, but then grade down for random references. Why does he note that I am a dual citizen? That I am not Canadian enough to assess his abetting of the politicization of the CAF? Am I so foreign that my opinion should be devalued? A hint of xenophobia here."Saideman was a non-paying guest." True (it suggests he read my blog post way back when and it tasks him). But why mention it? I was the guest of an embassy. And? Maybe it is for him to identify with me since he didn't pay for his ticket that night either? I would be putting a red line though this if I were grading him (and if I were, say, an editor of an op-ed page)I "didn't possess the courage to speak" to him after the speech? To be honest, I didn't think of approaching him because I was too busy sharing my shock and confusion with a great group of super sharp women who found his speech to be most problematic. But calling someone a coward is often a good strategy for evading responsibility. Tis, of course, an ad hominen attack, not really something that buttresses his argument, so points off. Again, I do have to ask: who is editing the stuff over at the National Post? So, again, he loses some points on his grade.He says that I missed him speaking not just as a former member of the CAF but as a Canadian. Is this trying to defend himself against how "Americanized" his argument is? I don't know, but I never denied he is a Canadian. MM then writes about his wife who also spoke with him at the convention. How does this fit into an argument about why he has the right to speak? She has spoken out about MeToo going too far and has written a letter to Macleans basically telling those who faced harassment to trust in a military justice system that retired Supreme Court justices have found to be quite problematic. Other than that and that she was MM's subordinate, I really don't know much about her. Again, a red pen would strike this out for dubious relevance.The invocation of his wife then goes into a paragraph about decades of service to protect free speech. This is where his argument really missed the mark--I never said he didn't have a right to speak. My piece was about responsibility--that the Conservatives should not provide MM with a platform because that would be politicizing the CAF. Of course, the implication of my op-ed is that MM himself should responsibly refrain from being part of a partisan event.One of the problems with the contemporary right wing is that they conflate any suggestion of responsibility that comes along with freedoms as restraints or censorship. Much of the free speech stuff today is not about the government restricting people from speaking but people wanting to speak without any consequences. They want to say offensive stuff and then not get called out for being offensive. Mrs. MM in her speech I linked to above expresses umbrage at people being called racist for being critical. Well, that can happen if one says racist stuff or it can happen because people are using racist as an epithet. When one speaks on a stage with multiple totem poles after an Indigenous dance group performed after a summer of discoveries of unmarked graves at residential schools and says that we shouldn't be apologizing for stuff, then one should expect to be considered insensitive on Indigenous issues and even a racist. So, no, this essay here should not be about MM's freedom of speech, which was never in question, but should be about speaking responsibly. This by itself means that this essay could not get more than a B since it misses the target.MM insists that he is not politicizing the military as he is no longer in active service, that he has been out of uniform for ten years. Technically true that he is no longer a member of the military. But since he worked at a military school for quite some time, he is probably well aware of the dynamic where the retired senior officers are seen as speaking for those still in uniform who cannot engage in partisan speech. Plus there is the whole picture he chose to give to the NP with a chest full of medals. That is no accident. And, no, for my picture for the G&M op-ed, I didn't choose to wear my graduation chapeau (I have no idea what they are called) nor did I choose to have a bunch of framed degrees behind me nor did I choose to have a pile of the books I have authored in my lap. This is where MM wants to have it both ways: he wants to be seen as a representative of the silent and oppressed military but does not want to be criticized for dragging the CAF into partisan conflict. There is a distinction between criticizing the military and the government (which I do all the time) and doing so at a national convention of a political party using one's title. To be clear, he says he and his wife were apolitical when they were in the military and are only now getting involved "by helping to develop policies and by electing representatives who will listen to Canadians ..." The big question then is: what policies? To roll back the efforts to change the military's culture? That will come up again. The argument here is that the Conservatives are a pro-military party, and that the Liberals are anti-military. Which is an argument one can make unless one is trying to represent the military. Then it is politicizing the military."My wife and I have never criticized the men and women in uniform." This is false as he mocks those in the military who "wear nail polish and man-buns," so I have to grade him down for being internally inconsistent. Moreover, my focus is not on his criticism of the military, but on the Conservatives weaponizing his criticism."Has the current government politicized the military?" He then lists a bunch of stuff, some of which are decent criticisms, such as replacing Anita Anand as Minister of National Defence, dithering on buying the F-35, being slow to complete the defence review. But none of these are politicizing the military--that is, making the military to be a partisan actor. Everything involving the military is, of course, political, as I noted in my original piece (and he calls boilerplate), but politicizing refers to involving the military in the domestic political competition of parties.MM then applies this politicizing stuff reference to the sexual misconduct and abuse of power crisis, referring to the mistreatment of senior leaders after they were found not guilty or not charged. There is an irony here as the former Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan argued before Parliament that he didn't follow up on accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse of power levied against former Chief of the Defence Staff Jonathan Vance because that would be politicizing the issue. The irony is not that one of my more noteworthy op-eds where I called for the Liberal defense minister to be fired, but that both Sajjan and MM have a crappy understanding of what is and what is not politicizing. Maybe something former military officers share? Of course, one key problem for MM's argument is that Vance pled guilty to obstruction of justice, and what justice was Vance obstructing? An investigation into his affair with a subordinate that he conducted over many years.MM might be referring to the case of Art McDonald, who lost his role as CDS because of credible accusations that he engaged in sexual assault as a commodore of a NATO exercise. McDonald claimed to be exonerated when the military investigators essentially said that all the witnesses were too drunk to testify. Again, we have multiple Supreme Court justices finding significant problems with the military justice system, so a lack of charges may not be evidence of senior officers being treated poorly. MM might have a better claim when it comes to Danny Fortin, who had the misfortune of having his case come to light after Vance and McDonald, as Fortin was tried in civilian court and acquitted. This view about the sexual misconduct and abuse of power crisis does suggest that MM's preferred policy options are to reverse the culture change effort, but more on that below.MM then discusses the recent announcement of budget cuts--something that I also oppose. But it is not clear how this fits into his argument that he deserves to be heard at a national party convention. The really fun move is for MM to identify himself with Kennedy, Eisenhower, Churchill and Pearson as they were veterans who served higher office. I'd refer him to Michael Flynn and a bunch of other folks who brought shame to the uniform in their post-military public service. Again, my point was not that he could not run for office, but that standing on a national party convention stage to blast the government of the day would be politicizing the military. So, his analogy is a bad one, as he is no Jack Kennedy. Nor is he Eisenhower, who proved to be an incredibly talented diplomat who had to manage the competing egos of Montgomery, Patton, and De Gaulle. Churchill? Which part of Churchill's legacy is MM embracing? MM then addresses my concern that if one politicizes the military, it would exacerbate the existing personnel crisis. He then says: "by the statistics I have seen, allowing members to wear nail polish and man-buns, or to choose their pronouns, has had zero effect on increasing the numbers joining." He is referring to efforts to make the military more inclusive, and his disdain here is a combination of misogyn, racism, anti-Sikh-ism, and transphobia. And, as I mentioned above, he is mocking people who are currently in the CAF. Since these people are almost lower in rank than MM's former rank as LGen, this is also punching down. Of course, the academic violation here is that he does not cite his sources for these stats, so again, reduced marks. MM is right that more needs to be done to improve recruitment. I would point to fixing the larger culture of abuse of power and entitlement that drives out good people who see toxic leaders who prey upon their subordinates getting promoted to the highest levels.MM is right that the personnel crisis needs more money, but I don't think we need to bring the "Armed Forces back from the dead." This hyperbole undermines the argument here by denigrating the CAF as it exists now--things are not great, but they are not as dire as he suggests, in part because it has much better leadership than when MM was in uniform.His penultimate paragraph should start to sum up his argument, but instead we get a slight based on academics being nerds who just rely on books. It is kind of like the insults I see online about whether the academics like myself have served in the military. This is part of an arrogance that has festered in many modern militaries--that they think the only expertise that one can develop is via experience. While that is one form of expertise, one can also understand something through extensive, rigorous study. Oh, and how have I studied civil-military relations? By systematic comparison via talking with folks in and out of uniform, learning from their experiences. Again, this attempt at an insult does not really help his argument here.MM's conclusion is, of course, vague. He says the public has to change their views about the CAF and national security. To what? He says that the government should follow the public's lead. So far, the public has not voted out politicians for underspending on the military unless one counts Harper in 2015, and that would be a stretch.His last lines are that I need to recognize that veterans care about the CAF and they are not politicizing it by doing so. Maybe some veterans, but not these veterans--not MM and his wife. So, looking over this asssessment, I can't say that Maisonneuve would pass a class on civil-military relations--he loses a lot of points for unsupported claims, for ad hominen arguments, for tangents. Most importantly, it is a strawman argument since I did not argue that he didn't have a right to speak. I argued that he should not be platformed. That is a distinction with a difference. The essay does not reflect an adequate understanding of the situation in which he has placed himself--that Maisonneuve is putting himself out there to be Canada's Michael Flynn.* He didn't shout lock him up at the convention, to be fair. Finally, he also never articulates what policy he really wants to advocate besides more money for the military (again, something with which I agree). I could guess that he wants to return the military to some vaunted past where the senior officers were not held accountable for preying upon their subordinates, but he does not make his argument clear. Even though I am a generous grader (must be my American background), I don't think I could give more than a C- for Maisonneuve's op-ed before factoring in the aforementioned misogyny, transphobia, racism, and anti-Sikhism.* I am not referring to Flynn serving as a foreign agent while National Security Advisor. While MM and I see things differently, I would not accuse him of being disloyal to Canada.
Most post-modern societies are being challenged by a widening gap that divides their populations by the classic cleavages of age, class, region and religion. Exacerbated by the forces of globalization and the immediacy of technology, they result in constant clashes that cause an exponential increase in social tensions and insecurity. Even if the Norwegian killer was insane and can not be used as example, he was still a member of the dominant culture failing to accommodate to post-modern circumstances. In the United States this gap is vividly evident in the current debt ceiling debate, which is only a symptom of much serious divisions that threaten the country's social unity and political future.A brief look at recent headlines in the United States can give outsiders and idea of the country's social and political environment.On Sunday July 24th, a new law approving gay marriage came into effect in New York, making it the sixth and largest state in the nation (plus the District of Columbia) to have legalized same-sex marriage. In Manhattan, people celebrated on Fifth Avenue, singing and dancing to the music and well-suited lyrics of New York, New York ("If we can make it here, we'll make it anywhere…"). On July 0th, Republican candidates Michelle Bachman and Rick Santoro a "Marriage Vow" swearing fidelity to their spouses, promising they would "vigorously oppose any redefinition of marriage" and would take steps to amend welfare legislation that did not reinforce conventional marriage. This is only a sample of the extreme polarization the country is facing both economically and socially. It is a critical moment in United States history, one that may require a deep reflection on the basic principles the nation was founded upon and a renewal of the social compact.Prodded by the Tea Party leaders, who presently wield an amount of power disproportionate to their numbers, Republican candidates have been signing pledges on an array of different topics in order to prove their conservative credentials. Both Michelle Bachman and Mitt Romney also signed a no-new-taxes pledge, together with a "cut, cap and balance pledge" to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget and congressional super majorities to raise taxes. These two pledges, albeit non-enforceable and thus largely symbolic, are now the single most important obstacle to reach a deal in Congress about balancing the budget and avoiding default on the national debt. Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips has threatened to recruit candidates to mount primary challenges against any GOP member that votes for a compromise on the debt ceiling that involves any type of revenue increases to balance the budget. The GOP Congressional leadership has been hijacked by intransigent ideologues, represented in the House by 87 freshmen with disproportionate power over the more established professional politicians who understand that democratic governance requires give and take, and that politics in a pluralistic society is the art of the achievable.This country was founded on the premise of compromise, negotiation and cooperation, as it is evident from the history of the Constitution and the layers of governmental power devised mainly to counterbalance one another: states versus federal, legislative versus executive, Senate v. House, and an independent judiciary. It was clear even then, that solutions in what promised to be a huge, diverse society with deep regional and religious cleavages would require compromise. But today, in the "worst Congress ever" as Norman Ornstein calls it in his recent article in Foreign Policy, compromise is a bad word. The House is controlled by a GOP freshmen class that owes its seats to Tea Party ideologues and is refusing to raise the debt ceiling even as President Obama has agreed to cuts in spending that include cuts in entitlements, in exchange for ending subsidies on ethanol and other corporate subsidies (he has even given up on the expiration of the Bush era tax cuts he had included in his first proposal). This package that would represent over 3 trillion dollars in cuts from the federal budget, including reductions in Medicare and other social programs, would have allowed the debt ceiling to be raised so that the US could avoid defaulting on its debt by August 2nd. It was on the table last week and close to being signed on by House Speaker John Boehner but he refused it at the last minute because of pressure from his own caucus. The Tea Party is pushing professional legislators toward the abyss, and with them, the whole country. The Tea Party is a social movement that was born out of frustration and disappointment with government spending over the last twelve years. President George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus from the Clinton-Gingrich years. But that surplus quickly vanished as Bush proposed and got passed serious tax cuts on the wealthy and then embarked on two wars that are still going on today. In response, a large coalition of Independents, Republicans and a few former Democrats formed a protest movement that defines itself for what it is against: big government, big media, big banks, unsustainable deficits and intrusive federal regulation. In spite of some evident intrinsic contradictions in their philosophy (for example some the new regulations they so vehemently oppose such as the Dodd-Frank legislation are meant to constrain the actions of "big banks" they so strongly abhor), the Tea Party has been very successful in focusing the public's attention on the federal budget deficit and on the federal debt that has ballooned in the last two decades. Those are its core concerns, together with a deep-seated contempt for and rejection of, everything the well-educated elites are for the most in favor of: environmental sustainability, a foreign policy based on multilateralism, gay rights and immigration reform legislation that recognizes the realities of the estimated twelve million undocumented workers in the country. After two months of wrangling, neither side has managed to get what it wanted, the US credit rating is about to be downgraded (with the subsequent increase in interest rates and damaging effects on an already slow economy) and the vitriolic Washington environment is alienating people on the Right and on the Left. Pressured by the Tea Partiers and their anti-tax obsession, Republicans have refused to compromise to avoid a default, and in so doing they are sabotaging their own chances for 2012. Most Americans are appalled at the GOP's refusal to endorse Obama's proposal that would cut the deficit by $3.7 trillion through a mix of spending cuts, entitlement reform and ending some corporate subsidies and tax deductions. In so doing, the GOP is alienating independent voters that want to avoid default and are ready for a deal. A new political center of gravity is forming. The number of registered voters that identify themselves as Independent is growing (40% in latest poll), while the numbers of Republicans and Democrats are sinking and there is a new online movement from the grassroots to form a third party.Paradoxically, out of all this Byzantine intrigue in the hallways of Congress, and given the outcome of no deal announced on Monday night, President Obama may come out as the winner. To the dismay of his most progressive base, Obama, intent on finding some common ground with the opposition has shifted to the center-right of the political spectrum on his proposals, daring to sacrifice some cuts on entitlements in exchange for revenue increases, only to see them rejected by the Republicans. He is close to winning a stand-alone debt ceiling increase while having proven to be the only reasonable adult in this struggle. This would gain him the support of many independents and help him avoid a confrontation within his own party. It would also allow him to focus on unemployment, the real immediate crisis that most directly impacts people's lives. However, Democrats in the House and Senate are afraid that concessions on reducing some Medicare benefits, for example, or postponing the eligibility age, would ruin the clarity of their message to seniors during the election. Conversely, Tea Partiers see a compromise involving any sort of revenue increases by the government, even non-tax measures such as ending corporate subsidies, as a betrayal of their principles. The Tea Partiers have brought into focus the spending crisis that has been growing unchecked for a long time, and one the country cannot obviously tax its way out of. Some facts cannot be denied: debt is the result of spending not backed by revenue. Total government spending at all levels has risen to 37% of the GDP today from 27% in 1960. It could reach 50% by 2038. The debt-to-GDP ratio has reached 100% today, from 42% in 1980. The big moral struggle is still ahead. There is no question that the government is spending too much, but the real debate is about priorities and the philosophies that underlie those priorities. The President has recognized that the budget deficit is important to voters, most of which have come to the conclusion that since the stimulus spending did not solve the problem of unemployment, deficit reduction appears to be a better way to improve the economy than investing in education, infrastructure and new energy technologies. Obama must acknowledge this, and make it part of his discourse.But the President must also continue to make a case for the common good ("there are things we can still do together", he said in his last speech), the social safety net and America's future. He can do this by personalizing the budget battles the way Clinton did. Are budget battles about choices or necessities? Why give more tax cuts to the wealthy if their wealth has grown through the recession while the rest saw their wealth diminish? Why subsidize corporate agriculture and ethanol production? Social programs like Medicare serve all Americans, why focus on cutting it while giving a pass to the upper income- and- wealth echelon? General elections are won from the center. Strong strident advocates make for weak candidates. Undoubtedly, the 2012 election will be about money, about fiscal discipline, but it will also be about a more equal distribution, and it will require strong leadership from the two respective philosophical corners to come to a consensus. That is why the Republican establishment is so worried about the lack of gravitas in their field of candidates. That is why some yearn for budget whiz Paul Ryan, or Governor Chris Christie or Rick Perry….or anybody really, that looks and sounds as if he can take on Obama in the intricacies of the budget, the debt ceiling, and social programs reform. That may also be why Jeb Bush was asked on Fox News about his intentions to run for President again two days ago. This time his response was more nuanced: he said that while he doesn't anticipate it, he hasn't ruled it out ("but, he added, "I haven't ruled out being in Dancing with the Stars, either").In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal today announced that, based on the Pew Research Center tabulations of SIPP and Census date, the wealth gap between America's whites and its two largest minorities, Blacks and Hispanics, has widened to unprecedented levels due to the housing crisis and the Great Recession. Alan Greenspan, former President of the Federal Reserve has said repeatedly that the wealth gap that has grown consistently for the last decade is a threat not only to our country but to capitalism itself. Poverty and unemployment are a combustive mix: if fiscal responsibility ends up being based on the back of the poor, social conflict will erupt. It is unconscionable, for example, to think that hedge fund managers pay significantly less taxes than their secretaries.Some Republicans want to abolish every piece of social legislation and re-litigate every progressive judicial decision since the New Deal. As part of pledge game, Michelle Bachman and four other candidates also signed the "Susan B. Anthony pledge "promising to appoint abortion opponents to their cabinets and to deny all funding for Planned Parenthood when they become presidents. The bizarre "Marriage Vow "pledge signed by Bachmann and Santoro not only opposes same-sex marriage and includes a personal promise to be faithful to their spouses, but (most peculiarly yet redundantly) it also rejects Sharia Law (which, by the way, like Bachman, also opposes gay marriage and female adultery, which it punishes by death!)The only candidate that has refused to sign any pledge is Jon Huntsman, who understands the perils of siding too closely with the rebellious Tea Party. Even if some of its main points have successfully brought into focus the deficit issue, the Tea Party is still supported by a minority and resented by most Republicans. Its anti-technocratic, anti-Washington message has resonance, but it may have pushed the GOP too far into a corner. Its message is also becoming blurred when it steps into the social arena: its racist and homophobic overtones do not reflect the spirit of the times and are offensive to the "millenials", the youngest generation of voters born in the 80s and 90s, which Republicans still hope to attract in 2012. Social movements are major vehicles of participation and can re-energize a worn out party. They reflect the spirit of the times, often in an extremist way that is what gives them prominence: their passion for the cause, their original approach, are all important, but their message has to resonate with the public if they are to succeed. They emerge, coalesce, grow and achieve some successes. However, once their main point is made, three things can happen: they can become a party, their main ideas can be incorporated into mainstream politics, or they dissipate and be quickly forgotten. The Tea Party brought into focus the issue of fiscal responsibility, it infused conservatism with new energy and found a natural home in the Republican Party, which had become profligate, and will have to prove from now on that it is sincere about austerity. Its impact is undeniable: it has also attracted Independents and in so doing, has per force moved the Democratic Party to the center-right. Mimicking the "big tent" approach of Republicans, the Tea Party has lately been focusing strategically on fiscal responsibility, limited government and free markets and its main groups have avoided divisive social issues when speaking to the general public. But their demands of ideological purity from their candidates, their emphasis on returning to the strict meaning of the Constitution and the values of the Founding Father, their defense of states rights and gun rights, belie their claims of inclusiveness for all Americans; in its coded language, its contempt for immigrants and its not-so- veiled racism, one senses a strongly reactionary sentiment bordering on uncontainable fanaticism which is completely out of step with most Americans and which will make it very difficult to widen its appeal beyond what it has already achieved.To paraphrase deceased Republican leader Barry Goldwater, the Tea Party's aim isnot to streamline government or make it more efficient, but to get rid of every piece of social legislation and economic regulation passed since the New Deal. Their purpose is not to share the burden of the weakest members of society, nor to educate their children so they can have equality of opportunity, but to defend the individual freedoms of those who can stand on their own. In sum, they are extremists for whom tolerance and moderation are vices, not virtues, and therefore they have no place in a democracy.Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Geography Director, ODU Model United Nations Program Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia
ESTADOS DÉBILES Y FALLIDOSMucho se habla de operaciones internacionales de intervención en aquellos casos en los que se percibe sufrimiento humanitario y violaciones de derechos humanos. También se pone énfasis en la amenaza que los Estados débiles pueden terminar configurando en el sistema internacional. Cabría incursionar aquí, entonces, en una conceptualización de Estados fallidos y/o débiles que muestran inapropiadas formas de soberanía, a los efectos de profundizar sobre el tema. Categorizando los Estados débiles y fallidosHabría que definir de qué se está hablando cuando decimos Estados fallidos. Así, Stephan Rabimov (2005), define Estados fallidos diciendo que "Son países en los cuales el gobierno central no ejerce un control efectivo ni brinda servicios vitales en partes significantes de su propio territorio debido a conflictos, gobierno inefectivo o colapso estatal."(s.p.) Por su parte, Robert Rotberg (2003), dice que los Estados son fallidos cuando se consumen en violencia interna y se deja de brindar los bienes políticos más esenciales a sus habitantes. Sus gobiernos pierden credibilidad y la propia naturaleza del Estado es cuestionada y sus habitantes la perciben como ilegítima. Pero esta caracterización genérica no se agota en los Estados fallidos, sino que también nos dice que Estados débiles son los que tienen gobiernos centrales con poder atenuado y amenazado. En el mismo sentido, son frágiles aquellos que aunque tengan un gobierno fuerte, tiene partes de su territorio fuera de control. Así, Rotberg va más allá y determina al Estado colapsado como un tipo de Estado fallido, donde existe un total vacío de poder y autoridad. Colapsado y fallido serían diferentes estados de situación (pp. 1 – 14).También sobre el punto, Noam Chomsky (2006) nos dice que existe una imprecisión conceptual en el concepto "Estado fallido", lo que termina promoviendo intervenciones humanitarias con el objetivo de proteger poblaciones en una suerte de "ilegalidad legítima." Frente a vacíos de poder, dice este autor, EEUU se termina viendo forzado a llenarlo en aras de su propia seguridad, lo que estaría configurando un escenario global donde existe un superpoder que preserva para sí la soberanía absoluta y westfaliana, mientras que deja de lado tal tipo de soberanía como fuera de moda y sin sentido para otros países. (pp. 107 – 110)Rotberg (2003) también menciona algo que, por simple, no deja de ser importante en relación con este asunto. Los Estado fallidos, dice Rotberg, no son un accidente de la naturaleza ni otro tipo de hecho fortuito, sino que los Estados fallidos son "hechos por el hombre." (pp. 25 – 27) Relacionado con esto agregamos lo que nos dice Brian Atwood (s. f.): "La pobreza y una desigual distribución de la riqueza no serían condiciones suficientes para la generación del conflicto, pero aumenta la percepción relativa de privación y eventualmente la violencia" (s. p.).Entonces, cuando existe debilidad de un Estado, sus impactos en los seres humanos, la economía y las instituciones no quedarían necesariamente circunscriptos a ese Estado en cuestión sino que, en función del escenario global que ya hemos descrito, las consecuencias de esa debilidad institucional trascendería las fronteras estatales y cuestionaría la seguridad regional e internacional.Valoración de eventuales debilidades de los EstadosEs muy complejo establecer métodos de evaluación y de apreciación estratégica en relación con los Estados y sus posibilidades de falla y deterioro de las condiciones de vida de su población, y los consecuentes impactos que ello conlleva en su región y en la seguridad internacional como un todo.Robert Rotberg (2003, p. 30) nos dice que la prevención es menos costosa que la solución de una situación de Estado fallido cuando éste ya se ha instalado. Partiendo de ello se podría considerar aquí importante que pudiesen existir instancias a través de las cuales la comunidad internacional pueda tomar conocimiento – e incluso quedar advertida en tanto asunción de responsabilidad colectiva – de la potencialidad de conflicto que un escenario dado pueda estar configurando.Sobre el tema, el Informe Brahimi manifiesta la complejidad de valoración de los escenarios conflictivos, donde se mezclan elementos políticos, sociales y económicos, a la vez que resalta la especial dificultad que conllevan cuando se vinculan con elementos étnicos y religiosos. También se reconocen allí las dificultades vinculadas con los envíos de misiones de determinación de hechos, en relación con la percepción de violación a la soberanía que lógicamente tienen los Estados, en especial los más pequeños. Dicho informe también apoya y recomienda continuar con la política de análisis estratégico de los diferentes escenarios conflictivos, especialmente a través de dichas "misiones de determinación de los hechos," a los efectos de concretar una efectiva acción preventiva que logre minimizar las pérdidas humanas. (1)Por su parte Rotberg (2003, pp. 6 y 21), a los efectos de ponderar la fortaleza o debilidad de un Estado, nos menciona la importancia de revisar indicadores tales como la caída pronunciada del producto bruto interno así como también del ingreso y del estándar de vida, el aumento de la violencia, la decadencia de los niveles de salud y de educación.Pero debemos decir aquí que también existen evaluaciones sistemáticas en tal sentido. El Índice de Estados Fallidos, (2) cuya elaboración es liderada por Fund for Peace, nos muestra un análisis de diferentes indicadores, tanto políticos como económicos y sociales, a través de los cuales se categorizan a los Estados en su grado de debilidad y posibilidad de generación de escenarios conflictivos. Desde nuestra perspectiva, una evaluación preventiva, especialmente en las dos primeras etapas del conflicto, lo que la metodología de elaboración del Índice de Estados Fallidos menciona como las raíces de larga duración y a las causas inmediatas de los conflictos, (3) podría servirnos como base para la articulación de intervenciones en busca de la paz, antes que escale el conflicto.Desde la óptica de este artículo, todos estos elementos podrían constituirse en insumos relevantes a los efectos de poder evaluar la fortaleza o debilidad de un Estado, en relación con su funcionamiento institucional, su desarrollo y el respeto de los derechos humanos. CONCLUSIONESEn este escenario mundial y en el marco de una irreversible globalización, ya no es posible mantenerse al margen porque la economía, la información, los riesgos ecológicos y los conflictos en general, impactan en las fronteras en la cotidianeidad de las personas y en la articulación de políticas de los Estados. El poder de conducción de éstos y su centralidad, basada en la territorialidad, está siendo cuestionada y se va transformando en función de la pobreza, del accionar de organizaciones delictivas y del terrorismo, de los daños ecológicos, los fundamentalismos religiosos y étnicos, y sus consecuencias en la generación de conflictos, erosionando y desnacionalizando las capacidades estatales en general. Es que en nuestros días los conflictos se están relacionando especialmente con las debilidades institucionales de los Estados los que, por acción, omisión o deslegitimación, generan escenarios que terminan abonando la conflictividad.En ese escenario se van configurando nuevos retos y desafíos para la política, las ciencias y las instituciones, los que no será posible enfrentar con viejas armas institucionales. Estaría siendo necesario el fortalecimiento de organizaciones multilaterales, fortalecimiento éste que tal vez tenga que pasar por una eventual readecuación conceptual de soberanía, en tanto responsabilidad compartida, siendo que la soberanía nacional y la articulación estatal en organizaciones multilaterales no tienen por qué ser consideradas como excluyentes. Todo ello podría tener como consecuencia el fortalecimiento y articulación de los propios Estados en tanto participantes del sistema internacional y en el aumento de la seguridad internacional.La soberanía westfaliana sentó las bases del ejercicio de la autoridad sobre un territorio y la resolución de controversias entre Estados. Pero el debate sobre el concepto de soberanía, en los últimos tiempos y especialmente después de la guerra fría con el aumento de las operaciones internacionales de intervención frente a diferentes crisis, se ha potenciado. Existen opiniones en las que la soberanía absoluta y exclusiva ya no sería funcional a los tiempos que corren y que una era global requiere de compromisos globales. Así, la responsabilidad es compartida, tanto por el gobierno que soberanamente ejerce la autoridad sobre el territorio o escenario conflictivo, como también es responsabilidad de la comunidad internacional, en tanto ésta no puede mirar para otro lado cuando de sufrimiento humano se trata. En esa línea, se visualiza que el imperativo humanitario va pesando cada vez más.Entonces, reconociéndose que las intervenciones humanitarias suspenden en cierta forma la soberanía de un Estado, su legitimidad se vincularía con la multilateralidad. Así, cada Estado participante en cada una de las operaciones internacionales de intervención, también tiene la posibilidad de analizar cada caso concreto para correlacionar la situación promovida desde organismos multilaterales, articulándolo con su propio marco de valores y principios. La multilateralidad legitima internacionalmente y cada Estado legitima a su vez según su propio esquema institucional, lo cual brinda legitimidad interna al Estado participante.En este trabajo se mencionan las operaciones internacionales de intervención en escenarios conflictivos, los que se pueden vincular con Estados fallidos o débiles. En tal sentido, se resalta aquí que los Estados fallidos son consecuencia del accionar humano, cuya situación conflictiva no queda circunscripta a un Estado dado, sino que ese escenario trasciende las fronteras estatales y cuestiona la seguridad regional e internacional. Por ello y en pos del fortalecimiento de la seguridad internacional, sería importante analizar los eventuales escenarios conflictivos, contando para ello con un marco conceptual de referencia. Por ello, sería importante que existiesen instancias a través de las cuales la comunidad internacional pueda tomar conocimiento – e incluso quedar advertida en tanto asunción de responsabilidad colectiva – de la potencialidad de conflicto que un escenario específico se pueda estar configurando.En esa línea, la posibilidad de evaluación de escenarios conflictivos por organismos multilaterales y bajo el marco de los valores de los países que participarían en una intervención, podría ir dotando de contenido fresco a una eventual y – pensamos desde aquí – inevitable discusión sobre los alcances de la soberanía estatal en el marco de la globalización, concepto que aparentemente hoy estaría en cierta tensión con el desarrollo de las operaciones internacionales de intervención o, al menos, con algunas de ellas.(1) Informe Brahimi en su parte II, apartado A "Definiciones de los elementos de las operaciones de paz", apartado C "Consecuencias para las medidas preventivas" y Anexo III, "Resumen de recomendaciones." Recuperado el 3 de agosto de 2010 de http://www.un.org/spanish/peace/operations_report/(2) Documento recuperado el 3 de agosto de 2010 de http://www.fundforpeace.org/web/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=452&Itemid=900 también publicado en Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/21/the_failed_states_index_2010(3) Documento recuperado el 24 de Octubre de 2007 de http://www.fundforpeace.org/web/images/stories/fsi/map1-l.png También en tal sentido, el Informe Brahimi en su parte II, apartado A "Definiciones de los elementos de las operaciones de paz", coincide con la importancia de la prevención de conflictos en sus causas, por vía diplomática y discreta.*Licenciado en Ciencia Política, Universidad de la República de Uruguay. Se ha desempeñado como asesor del área política en el Centro de Altos Estudios Nacionales y en la Escuela de Comando y Estado Mayor Aéreo de la Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya. Fue el Secretario General del Centro de Estudios Estratégicos del Ejército Nacional durante el período 2002 – 2004 y Consejero de Institutos de Formación Militar del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional durante el período 2008 – 2010. BIBLIOGRAFÍA Y OTRAS FUENTESLibrosBellamy, Alex J., Paul Williams and Stuart Griffin. (2004) Understanding Peacekeeping.Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing Inc.Binnendijk, Hans and Jonson, Stuart. (2004) Transforming for stabilization and reconstruction operations. Washington D.C. USA.: National Defense University.Beck, Ulrich. (2003) Sobre el terrorismo y la guerra. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós Asterisco.Beck, Ulrich. (2000) La democracia y sus enemigos. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós.Beck, Ulrich. (1998a) ¿Qué es la globalización? Buenos Aires: Editorial Paidós.Beck, Ulrich. (1998b) La sociedad del riesgo. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós.Brown, Chris. (2002) Sovereingty, rights and justice. Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publisher Ltd. Cambridge – Oxford.Chomsky, Noam. (2006) Failed States: the abuse of power and the assault on democracy. New York: Metropolitan Books.Deng, Francis; Kimaro, Sadikiel; Lyons, Terrence; Rotchild, Donald and Zartman, William. (1996) Sovereignty and Responsibility. Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, R. R. Donnelley and Sons Co.Einstein, Albert y Freud, Sigmund. (2001) ¿Por qué la guerra? Barcelona: Editorial Minúscula.Frye, Alton. (2000) Humanitarian Intervention: Crafting a Workable Doctrine. Washington DC: Brookings.Giddens, Anthony. (2000) El mundo desbocado. Madrid: Taurus.Lyon, Gene and Michael Mastanduno, (1995) Beyond Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International intervention. Baltimore, MD, USA: The Johns Hopkins University Press.Rotberg, Robert. (2003) When States fail: Causes and Consequences. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Ruggie, John Gerald. (1993) Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis for an Institutional Form. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.The Responsibility to Protect. (2001) International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Ottawa, Canada; International Development Research Centre.The Challenges Project, Challenges of Peace Operations: into de 21st Century. (2002) Stockholm: Elanders Gotab.Weiss, Thomas G. (2004) The Sunset of Humanitarian Intervention? The Responsibility to Proterct in a Unipolar Era, Securiy Dialoue. New York: The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. Vol. 35(2).ArtículosRotberg, Robert. (2002) Failed States in a World of Terror, Foreign Affairs, Vol . 81, Nº 4, July / August 2002. pp. 127 – 140.The Status that fail us. (2007) Foreign Policy. July – August. pp. 54 – 63.Publicaciones ElectrónicasAtwood Brian. Security and Development University of Minnesota; Minneapolis, MN US Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Recuperado el 27 de octubre de 2007 en http://www.un-globalsecurity.org/pdf/Atwood_paper_security_devlpmt.pdfBattaleme, Juan. Soberanía y amenazas asimétricas: volviendo a pensar el principio de no intervención en los albores del siglo XXI. Argentina Global. Nº 11. Octubre – Diciembre de 2002. Recuperado el 15 de enero de 2004 dehttp://www.geocities.com/globargentina/Batt02.htm.Brahimi Report. Recuperado el 9 de agosto de 2010 dehttp://www.un.org/spanish/peace/operations_report/Carlos Gutiérrez (2001) Concepto de seguridad: más que fronteras, un tema de supervivencia global. Recuperado el 9 de agosto de 2010 de http://www.cee-chile.org/publicaciones/revista/rev02/rev2-1.pdfRabimov, Stephan. Threats of Weak, Fragile, Mailing States and Mitigation Strategies. Global Political Risk Consulting, LLC. Recuperado el 27 de febrero de 2005 en www.grprisk.comRojas Aravena, Francisco (1999). América Latina y la seguridad internacional. Contribuciones y desafíos para el siglo XXI. OEA Foro El futuro de la seguridad internacional en el Hemisferio, CP/CSH-INF 2/00 Recuperado el 9 de agosto de 2010 dehttp://www.oas.org/csh/docs/Francisco%20Rojas%20Aravena.pdf
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I woke up in the middle of the night because I am old and I ate and drank too much. I couldn't resist schnitzel and strudel as I am in Vienna for a talk and for some other shenanigans (more on that in another post). And then I saw Phil Lagassé's post on the Conservatives and if they might spend on defence if elected. On that general topic, I am a skeptic as I think the CPC cares more about deficits than about defence, and the place to cut the budget is, alas, defence. That is where the money is. This was true under Harper. I don't know what Pierre Poilevre believes in, other than opportunism and pandering to the far right, but I don't think he will commit lots of money to get Canada to 2% of GDP (on the other hand, he could tank the economy, and that is the other way to get there). Oh, and to be clear, I think we need to spend significantly more on the military--I am just not going to threat inflate to get us there.Anyway, Phil said in his piece that we need to spend more to deal with the threat in the Arctic, and I had to scoff. Which led to a fun exchange in bluesky, reminiscent of the old days on twitter where we would argue and people thought we hated each other. Hint: I don't co-author with people I don't like. Ir don't co-author with the same person several times unless we get along very well. But it is both fun and educational to push back against one of the very sharpest defence minds in Canada.Specifically, Phil said: "Canadians know their Arctic is vulnerable." And my ensuing commentary focused on that: what exactly is the threat to Canada from on high? And should we consider this the most significant/dangerous threat? My point is that it is way back in line. Phil says we need to have better situational awareness up north. My rejoinder is: no invasion coming, just some spy ships on the water and below it. Others chimed in: more ships going through the northwest passage means more environmental stuff could go awry. And, I agree. But where does that line up in the threat picture? Here's my cranky, awakened with acid in my throat, ranking of the threats facing Canada. Climate change: Canadians are paying a high price for the changing climate even if we could joke about being a beneficiary as our winters get mostly shorter. Milder? Variance is more certain than anything else. Anyhow, people are dying in floods and fires, much property is being destroyed. When I speak of threat, I think of real harms to Canadians, to the economy, to governance. Climate change is first and it is not close. I was mocked by someone via email when I said this on TV, but I have never been a super lefty, green environmentalist type in my work. It is just the reality that in dollar amounts and in lives, the warming planet is harming Canadians in a big way and it is only going to get worse. A recurring theme is that many of the threats either cannot or will not have the military as the lead agency. This actually comes the closest given that the provinces underinvest in emergency management, knowing that the military will act if asked and won't present a bill.Pandemics: how many people were killed by covid in Canada? Nearly 60,000, which is more than Canadians killed in all foreign wars combined if one leaves out WWI. Plus many people now have long covid. It did a heap of damage to the economy, and, if you care about deficits (I don't really), guess what blew a big hole in the budget? I am very glad the Liberal government poured a ton of money into the economy as we didn't have runs on food banks during the height of the pandemic. I just wish Conservative-led provinces actually spent the money allotted to health care on.... health care. Will covid be the last pandemic? No. Indeed, given what it has done to attitudes about vaccinations, quarantines, and masking, I doubt we will respond as well next time. Scary, eh? The military was called out because other agencies lacked capacity, but this was really a medical/scientific thing, so let's not allocate a ton of money to the military for pandemic preparedness.Cyber attacks. Wars are distant, but cyber attacks are hitting Canadians every day, disrupting people's lives, hurting various businesses and public agencies, and pose a significant threat where some country could bring down our power or harm dams and more. Is this the military's job? Partially but not really. We don't need people who are trained to fire weapons and ready to deploy abroad and all that stuff to fight a cyber war. We need smart folks at well equipped desks. We definitely need to have more money spent on the military to survive and thrive in a cyberwar environment, but the CAF is not really our answer to thwarting cyber attacks against the Canadian public.Far right violence. We live in a time of increasing attacks by xenophobes, misogynists, homophobes, racists, anti-semities, Islamophobes, and white supremacists (these hates tend to travel together). Yes, left wing extremists can have many of these attributes, but it is clear that the violence is almost entirely coming from the far right. These haters are doing real harm to Canadians right now, and the trend is in the wrong direction. Can the military do anything about this? I think the general rule of not having the military police the public is a very good idea. Instead, the military's role is mostly to make sure it is not training the next generation of far right terrorists. Disinformation. This is, of course, related to the prior one, but it also involves foreign actors who are trying to tilt election outcomes. We are increasingly living in a time where people can't trust what they see and hear, or they are trusting the wrong actors. This leads to develop dangerous beliefs--like vaccines are poisonous, that the government in power is engaging in great, deliberate harm against its ideological opponents, and so forth, While the Liberals have screwed up many things, they need some trust in government to operate on our behalf, just as the Conservatives or NDP would need people to trust in institutions. The military should not be the primary actor at home on this either even as they engage in info ops abroad.People might I was joking about the increases in truck/SUV size being a threat, but more than 2000 people died in car accidents in 2023, and the trend is going up, even if one cuts the peak covid years from the dataset.North Korean missiles. While China and Russia have nuclear missiles, I have a bit more faith in the workings of deterrence and a bit less worried about accidental/deliberate first use. North Korea would not have any reason to attack Canada, but I could imagine that their aim might be that good. Of course, what is the CAF's role in this? Providing warning that Vancouver is doomed and then helping to respond to the aftermath. We have no defences against ballistic missiles nor will Canada have any such systems anytime in the future. I am a skeptic about American strategic defense (although tactical anti-missile systems seem to range from pretty good to amazing), but I do think Canada should join the US system as the ABM treaty is very dead. This is a military job and would justify the massive investment in NORAD modernization. Otherwise, it really is a system to warn us to give us a few minutes to kiss our loved ones goodbye. Oh, and manage relations with the US.US relations! The Canadian economy and its security crucially depend on the US, and, oh my, Canada will be so very, very fucked if Trump were to win. Democracies have lived beside authoritarian regimes before (hey, Finland!), but so much of Canada's position in the world relies on this huge market and this peaceful border and cooperation with the US. When was the last time Canada fought abroad without the US beside its side? UN missions? Guess again as the UN relies heavily on American support to do its ops. One could argue this would mean less wars for Canada--no more Afghanistans (which was purely to help its ally). But Canada would be even at greater risk of being bullied by the China's and Saudi Arabia's of the world. And, of course, by Trump himself. But again, this is not the CAF's job to prevent or mitigate this. If Trump is elected, most of the problems above get worse and this item zooms to the top.Maybe here goes: incomplete understanding of what is happening in the Arctic. Yes, that stuff up north is still Canada, but the threat to Canadians up there is not really that posed by Russia or China but by the lack of infrastructure and by the aforementioned climate change, pandemics, etc.So, if the military is not needed for this stuff, or only needed for domestic emergency ops, why spend tens of billions on it? Why increase spending? It comes down to this: the military is an instrument of policy. This means that it can and is used to further Canadian government objectives even if most of those objectives are not about thwarting threats to Canada. Canada has consistent interests in the world for which the CAF is a key tool, such as helping to foster stability in Europe and Asia. Canada, like the US, has learned that when those continents catch fire, it damages Canadian interests and hurts Canadians. A war in the South China Sea with or without the Canadian navy would be catastrophic to the Canadian economy. War west of Ukraine would also be quite damaging. NATO itself is an important interest that requires the Canadian military to invest in itself and in NATO missions. Ultimately, Canadians want to do good in the world and want to support the international order, whether we call it liberal or rules-based or American hegemony or whatever. Because we understand that Canadians have more influence within institutions than outside of them, that the rules have favored the Canadian economy, and helped the Canadian people to enjoy the fruits of international cooperation.Ultimately, one wants a well armed, well trained, well staffed military to prepare for the worst. In my ranking of threats, I focused on both likelihood of the threat being realized and the amount of harm that is likely if the threat happens. Climate change is at the top because it is happening and is not going away and is going to do heaps of damage. The threat in the Arctic is lower down because it is unlike that any foreign actor will attack that way and the damage they can do is not that great, again compared to everything else.Oh, and what is also a threat? Having an under-funded, unprepared, ill-equipped military sent off to war--that way lies tragedy. So, yes, spend more, but let's not exaggerate where the threats are coming from and what the role of the military is.
