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Fifty years is a long enough time to dissipate the impact of war. In the United States, the Vietnam War is no longer much discussed. Scholars still plow the field, but the war that tore America apart, spurred a counterculture movement, killed 57,000 Americans (and vastly more Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians), led to a restructuring of the U.S. military and the all-volunteer force, and was an impetus to Desert Storm no longer shapes the discourse.My students were born in 2002 or 2003; they're voting age. Even those with living grandparents who served in Vietnam don't know much if anything about the conflict. Of course, there have been intervening failures that proved costly, although not on the same scale. But proximity bias — the hard-wired human tendency to accord greater importance to things that are closer than others in time or distance — ensured that the mayhem generated by the Iraq and Afghan Wars would eclipse the awfulness of Vietnam.The Yom Kippur War of 1973 has likewise receded in the Israeli imagination. But its specter is more complex. The 2,500 Israeli soldiers killed (a fraction of the 15,000 Arabs who perished) was three times the per capita human cost of the Vietnam War to the United States. I was in Israel during that time, and everyone knew someone who'd been killed. The war was also far shorter, about 10 days, so the casualty list had an outsized emotional impact. It was not the long slog of Vietnam, but rather an avalanche.Early in the war, Syrian armor destroyed the Israeli tank brigade deployed to the Golan Heights and reached Gesher B'not Yaakov (Jisr Banat Yaqub). Just beyond it was the Jezreel Valley. The prospect of a large Syrian armored formation penetrating the Israeli heartland was as ghastly for Israelis as it must have been thrilling for the Syrians. The United States has never experienced anything like this, including 9/11.In the space of this instant, violence burgeoned. The largest tank battle since World War II, when German and Soviet armored juggernauts collided at Kursk, unfolded on the Golan. Fierce battles developed in the Sinai and then on the left bank of Suez, where Israeli forces encircled an entire Egyptian army. A week into the war, the U.S. launched its largest-ever intra-war arms transfer. For days, U.S. C-5 cargo aircraft touched down at Israeli airfields every six minutes. The airlift, however, occurred after Israel had regained its balance and counterattacked, halting an hour outside of Damascus and holding Egyptian territory — in addition to the Sinai, where Israel stopped the main thrust of Egyptian armor toward the mountains passes and destroyed the advancing units.The war also included other dramatic moments. Apparently believing that the Soviets were preparing to intervene militarily on Syria's behalf, the Nixon administration raised the United States' nuclear readiness level, an extraordinary step. Saudi Arabia led an OPEC oil embargo against the United States that carried profound implications for its economic and political stability for the ensuing decade, bringing the so-called long summer of postwar economic growth to an end and guaranteeing an era of sluggish economic growth and high inflation.The long-term effects of the war on Israel were profound as well. The outcome, despite the phenomenal recovery of Israeli forces under the much maligned but in fact highly competent IDF chief of staff, was traumatically dislocating for an Israeli public accustomed to thinking that its victory in the 1967 war rendered the state immune to Arab military challenge.Within four years, the Labor Party that had dominated Israeli politics in one form or another since 1948 was dislodged. Trust in the old elites was shattered. The intelligence community failed to credit the Egyptian and Syrian commitment to waging war. Across the board there was a conviction that the conditions under which the Arabs would launch an offensive simply did not exist. And Military Intelligence disregarded Mossad's success in recruiting a senior member of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's entourage who underscored that a war was in the cards. Moreover, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who had presided over the disaster, had heeded stern guidance from Nixon and Kissinger not to preempt Arab war preparations when these were finally acknowledged 24 hours before the start of hostilities.Whether or not this was a wise call on Washington's part, it certainly increased the butcher's bill Israel was to pay and undermined the Labor government. Meir would come under attack later for having ignored Sadat's peace feelers following the 1969 War of Attrition along the Suez Canal. Sadat, however, tended to frame his overtures as demands for an upfront Israeli withdrawal from all of the Sinai Peninsula, which the Israeli government could not meet. There was plenty of blame to go around. In any case, combined with serious ethnic tensions generated by the political mobilization of Mizrahim — Jews who had immigrated from the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa — the cratering of Labor credibility enabled the ascendance of the Likud Party.Half a century later, what lingering significance does the war have? Israel and Saudi Arabia are negotiating normalization, which will entail a civilian Saudi nuclear capability that is inherently dual-purpose. The Abraham Accords have already normalized Israel's relations with Bahrain, the UAE, Sudan, and Morocco. Egypt and Jordan have longstanding peace treaties with Israel. Syria has been neutered by a long, destructive civil war. Lebanon has ceased to exist as a functioning state and has not engaged Israel in hostilities since 2006. Two eviscerating wars with the United States removed Iraq as a potential combatant of the old rejectionist front.A cataclysmic ground war between Israel and its neighbors has been inconceivable during this veritable Age of Aquarius. But if the Yom Kippur War is no longer relevant, the present irenic reality — excluding the West Bank and Gaza — is largely due to the instrumentalization of that conflict by the Nixon administration for the purpose of peacemaking. One really can't contemplate these developments without implicitly thinking about the 1973 war.Another potent outcome of the war was the diplomatic process that surrounded the ceasefire and the years that followed. Kissinger gets credit for this, not unfairly. He was not one to waste a crisis. He seized the opportunity the war presented to use Sadat's evident interest in joining the Western camp and Israel's reliance on American support to bind each closer to Washington while crowding out the Soviet Union. Although his diplomatic strategy yielded disengagement agreements on both fronts, the fact remains that Egypt and Israel had embarked on a quiet bilateral process even as the guns were still cooling.Sadat had waged the war to shatter the status quo by drawing Israeli blood and bringing the U.S. into the conflict. His goal was the negotiated return of Sinai to Egyptian control. The war, for him, had a clear and well-defined political purpose. Although the seven years that preceded the Camp David Accords were at times touch and go — down to the climactic talks themselves — the so-called peace process would be difficult to imagine without the bloody impetus of 1973. Kissinger's key insight, regrettably abandoned by his successors but seemingly grasped now by Beijing, is that it pays to maintain ties with both sides in a conflict.As the Arab-Israeli conflict has devolved to Israel and the Palestinians, this lesson of the 1973 war has faded for Israel as well. Israel's use of force now has no political objective. Its purpose is solely conflict management and deterrence. To borrow from Lord Carrington's verdict on NATO, it is to keep the Palestinians down, the U.S. out, and wealthy Persian Gulf states in.Yet, perversely, the possibility of change is in the air. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners are less interested in managing the level of violence on the West Bank than in informally annexing it. Their commitment to Israeli settlement of the West Bank is greater than their interest in grand geopolitical deals that might boost the Tel Aviv stock exchange but defer redemption of biblical lands. One could construe the hard right's agenda as restoring a true political objective to Israel's fight with the Palestinians.The 1973 war also altered Israeli military doctrine. Planners have recognized that — beginning with that war — Israel has not won any major ones. (Neither has the United States.) The reasons for this are legion, but one stands out: the losers do not concede defeat. They take a licking but keep on ticking. Hence the most recent development in Israel's military doctrine, accorded the acronym Mabam, meaning "the battles between the wars."The idea is that major wars are no longer decisive and will therefore recur periodically. The best course is to delay these wars and weaken adversaries' ability to wage them by fighting draining low-level battles in the interim. This makes some sense, naturally, but militates against any attempt to leverage the fighting to achieve durable peace. This applies to the Palestinians as well. Their violence is expressive, perhaps reflecting their view that there is no conceivable political objective.There's a larger theme here, though. The international system was vastly different in 1973. The Cold War framework in which the United States and Soviet Union conducted their foreign policies and made it possible for Sadat to conduct a war with such a bold but cogent purpose is long gone. We will see whether the U.S.-China in the Middle East recreates it.The leftist post-colonial Arab states that fought Israel are scarcely even remembered. The Israeli state and society that fought the Yom Kippur War, like the America that waged war in Vietnam, no longer exists. The values that animated it no longer shape the nation's thoughts and actions.Fifty years after the war, this should come as no surprise. In the ongoing demonstrations against judicial reform in Israel, one can see veterans of 1973 claiming that their wartime sacrifice would be betrayed by the triumph of the hard right. They are correct, but they're old duffers and out of touch with young Israeli mainstream voters, who, if they dwell on the 1973 war at all, likely see the left as the guilty party. Thus, policy makers, mostly in the West, can noodle about the war's lessons for diplomacy and statecraft, but for Israel — and the Arabs — it's ancient history.

With a whirlwind of dramatic events gripping the world's attention, it can be easy to forget that we are now less than one year away from the 2024 presidential election.Despite their expected focus on domestic issues, candidates will have a lot to answer for this cycle when it comes to foreign policy as the war in Ukraine drags on and U.S.-China relations continue to deteriorate.The Democratic Party has chosen not to hold debates despite growing concerns about President Joe Biden's chances next year. With only a couple of months to go before the primaries start, the Quincy Institute decided that it would be useful to survey Biden's challengers from the left on how they would handle a range of foreign policy issues if elected.The candidates' responses show interesting differences on a range of questions, from a potential Israeli-Saudi normalization deal to the possibility of using military force to fight the cartels in Mexico. The questionnaire went out before the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, but we pulled together candidates' reactions to the events where possible.We received responses from Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson as well as independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. Biden's campaign declined to participate, so we have aggregated relevant quotes and information about the president's stances where possible. We did the same for Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who entered the race in late October and has not responded to our requests. We will update this page if we receive further responses.Biggest challenges to U.S. security; how to avoid war with China; potential negotiations to end the war in Ukraine; U.S. role in Saudi-Israeli normalization; withdrawing troops from Middle East; military force and the Mexican cartels; Israel-Hamas warWhat, in your view, are the three most pressing challenges to U.S. national security?Joe Biden (D)While President Biden has not directly addressed this question, his national security adviser said the following about the White House's 2022 National Security Strategy: "Our strategy proceeds from the premise that the two strategic challenges — geopolitical competition and shared transnational threats — are intertwined. We cannot build the broad coalitions we need to out-compete our rivals, if we sideline the issues that most directly impact the lives of billions of people." He further argued that "this is a decisive decade for shaping the terms of competition, especially with the PRC [China]. This is a decisive decade for getting ahead of the great global challenges — from climate to disease to emerging technology."Marianne Williamson (D)"The three most pressing challenges to U.S. national security are the nuclear threat, climate change, and our inability to go beyond the adversarial positioning in which countries view each other. We are closer to nuclear war than we've been in a long time. We must move towards a nuclear-free world, and we must begin by adopting a no first use policy. Once we adopt this policy, it will be much easier for us to get other nuclear-armed countries to do the same. There is no threat I am more concerned about than climate change. We are living through the last few years where we have a chance to save humanity. We must immediately undergo a just transition from a dirty fossil fueled economy to a clean renewable economy, and create millions of good jobs in the process. The time for incrementalism on climate is over. If we only view other countries through an adversarial lens, in terms of how they can harm or serve our interests, then we cannot deal with these crucial issues that challenge the security of all of us. We must work together with the international community for the common interest so that we can begin to deal with climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics, and other threats."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"The most pressing challenges are the ones we have created ourselves. First is the risk of nuclear war, which belligerent and provocative U.S. policy has elevated to levels not seen since the Cold War.The second is the bankrupting of America's wealth, the result of decades of elevated military spending. The trillions spent on armaments could have gone toward building modern infrastructure, feeding and housing people, tackling chronic disease, and nourishing a thriving domestic economy.A third threat to national security is the epidemic of violence in our streets and in our homes. When we wage endless wars abroad, their mirror image afflicts us at home. Realistically, our nation is not threatened by an armed invasion by a foreign power. We have to broaden what we mean by 'national security' to include the things that actually make Americans feel insecure."Cornel West (I)"Climate Change: Climate change is not an endpoint that awaits us in the distant future, it is among us right now and impacting lives across the country and the entire world, especially the most vulnerable and most disadvantaged populations here in the U.S. — Black, Brown, Indigenous, and the poor. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), climate change-related damages cost the United States an estimated $165 Billion in 2022, Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 storm that massacred communities in Florida, including the loss of 150 lives, cost taxpayers approximately $112.9 Billion alone. Moreover, NOAA estimates that in the last 40 years, 341 storms exacerbated by climate change have cost the nation more than $2.5 Trillion. To put that into perspective, that's $80 Billion more than the national deficit of approximately $1.7 Trillion, thus far, for Fiscal Year 2023, and 1.5 percent of the national debt that stands at $161.7 trillion and counting. A nation already in massive debt, coupled with the astronomical costs of a growing climate crisis is the direct antithesis of national security. It's undeniable that more calamities associated with the climate crisis, including more powerful weather incidents that induce extreme flooding, extreme heat, and other environmental stressors, are inevitable. These events will have profound impacts on myriad systems and institutions that are necessary to maintain a livable society including, but not limited to, the production of food, access to clean water sources, the quality and availability of housing, transportation, education, and healthcare. The collapse of these systems could reasonably engender massive social unrest that would result in the massive displacement and forced migration of people as we are already witnessing with the United Houma Nation, Pointe-au Chien Indian Tribe, and Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw of present-day Louisiana, who are the first federally recognized climate migrants, whose land is literally sinking due to oil and gas extraction in the Gulf of Mexico, which has rendered their land susceptible to the impacts of climate change. In fact, the United Nations Office of the High Commissions for Refugees has predicted that more than 200 million people, globally, will be forced to relocate due to climate change, including 40% of United Statesians who currently reside in coastal areas. From the atrocities of Hurricane Katrina to the current situation at the United States border with Mexico, we have already witnessed the consequences of climate-related breakdowns of social, economic, and other systems necessary to maintain quality of life and life itself breakdown all coupled with mass migration of innocent people seeking refuge.Increased Militarism: The United States is the single biggest military spender in the world with an annual budget roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets combined. According to records kept by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), in any given year, military spending accounts for over half of the federal government's annual discretionary budget. The U.S. military's bloated budget is utilized to build weapons and warcraft, which are in turn utilized to threaten other nations and demand their cooperation with the perceived U.S. military hegemony or offered to cooperative nations as part of military alliances. In FY 2023 alone, out of a $1.8 trillion federal discretionary budget, $1.1 trillion – or 62 percent – was for militarized programs. On top of war and weapons for the Pentagon, these expenditures include domestic militarism for police departments across the country and mass incarceration, as well as increased detentions and deportation, which represent direct threats to the security of Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people in the United States. As we are witnessing right now, the current administration is complicit in thousands of civilian deaths by giving Israel military aid at $3.8 billion this year, half of which goes to Israel's missile system. They are now requesting a combined supplemental aid package at $106 billion for Israel along with Ukraine, Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific region, and US immigration enforcement at the US-Mexico southern border. To put this in perspective, combined with the estimated $113 billion in military aid the US has already sent to Ukraine, should the Congress grant President Biden's additional $105 billion package to Ukraine and Israel, this would represent almost 60% of the initially estimated $379 billion in climate change expenditures over 10 years included as part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Further, the $105 billion military aid package to Israel and Ukraine is one hundred times the paltry $1 billion that the US pledged to the Green Climate Fund earlier this year, to fund climate mitigation and adaptation in the formerly colonized countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. Our friends at IPS also indicate that the U.S. could safely redirect at least $350 billion from the Pentagon's current spending per year and achieve true security by ending wars, reducing our aggressive posture overseas, and reining in military contracts that drain public coffers for private gain - all measures that would actually increase national security, while making resources available for critical domestic needs including, but not limited to, increased access to healthcare, improving the nation's broken education system - including an iniquitous student loan debt crisis, and real action to address the climate crisis. With the largest military in the world, the US is the single largest greenhouse gas emitting institution and consumer of fossil fuels on the entire planet, with a carbon footprint bigger than 140 other countries. The environmental and climate impacts of global militarism and war are staggering. Militarization continues to increase greenhouse gas emissions and pollute and poison land, water and air through weapons production, storage, and use, which is ironic Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, himself recently declared, 'There is little about what the Defense Department does to defend the American people that is not affected by climate change. It is a national security issue, and we must treat it as such.'Rising White Supremacy and Nationalism: We have already observed how the interlinked crises of the calamities associated with climate change, which push those disproportionately impacted further to the margins and thereby increasing the militarization of the southern border, urban areas, and throughout the world to address associated entropy of social systems and infrastructure tends to increase sentiments that beguile far too many U.S. residents to embrace elements of white supremacy ideology, thereby increasing instances of violence and acceptance of authoritarian and fascist paradigms that represent clear and present dangers to national security – no one knows this better than the U.S. Department of Justice. In 2001, Attorney General, Merrick Garland admonished the Senate Appropriations Committee stating, in part, "Domestic violent extremists pose an elevated threat in 2021 and in the FBI's view, the top domestic violent extremist threat we face comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race." This salient issue has the potential to literally tear our nation asunder. A nation this divided is itself a national security risk that can be taken advantage of by nations hostile to the U.S. due to imperialist and interventionist past and present foreign policies of our country and their lasting impacts to [a] marked number of nations across the globe. Dismantling growing white supremacy and nationalism will require a multifaceted and intersectional approach that seeks to deracinate the root causes of this epidemic that prevents the U.S. from living up to its best self while also remaining a seemingly indelible threat. This will require tying requisite economic relief from an oligarchic approach to wealth accumulation and redistribution that exacerbates the white supremacy ideology ensconced in the fabric of this nation in such a way that has been negatively radicalizing poor white folk who may not even realize how the capitalist domination system upheld by the political duopoly extract from them as much as non-white people they are bamboozled to hate and stigmatize. I am confident that my Economic Justice prescriptions that include establishing a federal Universal Basic Income commission, wealth tax on all billionaire holdings and transaction, ending all tax loopholes for the oligarchy, and establishing a national $27 minimum wage, with special considerations for specific geographies where $27/hour would not be a family-sustaining wage, will be key steps in eviscerating the rise of white supremacy and nationalism in our nation that hurts the people perpetrated against as much as the people doing the perpetrating."As president, what would you do to avoid a direct military confrontation with China?Joe Biden (D)Biden has not directly addressed this question since becoming president, but a White House readout from his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last year gives a good summary of his administration's stated approach to relations with China. "President Biden explained that the United States will continue to compete vigorously with the PRC, including by investing in sources of strength at home and aligning efforts with allies and partners around the world. He reiterated that this competition should not veer into conflict and underscored that the United States and China must manage the competition responsibly and maintain open lines of communication. The two leaders discussed the importance of developing principles that would advance these goals and tasked their teams to discuss them further. President Biden underscored that the United States and China must work together to address transnational challenges – such as climate change, global macroeconomic stability including debt relief, health security, and global food security – because that is what the international community expects."Marianne Williamson (D)"We absolutely cannot have a direct military confrontation with China, which would be one step away from World War III and nuclear Armageddon. The U.S. must accept that we are in a multipolar world. While I am deeply concerned about China's authoritarianism and serious violations of human rights, I do not think that China is interested in invading the U.S. or in starting a war with us. While we should do what we can through peaceful diplomacy to lessen Chinese human rights violations, we cannot start World War III between two nuclear-armed countries. Our military must stop trying to encircle China in the South China Sea. Instead, we must talk to China and seek peaceful coexistence."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"We believe that China has no desire for military confrontation. We will therefore ratchet down the tensions and cease the provocations in the South China Sea and elsewhere. We will adopt a posture that does not see China as an 'adversary,' and begin to negotiate arms control treaties in good faith so that both countries can reduce military spending to better the lives of their citizens."Cornel West (I)"We all know where a direct military confrontation with the People's Republic of China (PRC) will lead — irreparable nuclear holocaust that will lead to the loss and alteration of hundreds of millions of innocent lives over a conflict engendered by two so-called superpowers. We need to be honest with the people of the world, the U.S. and PRC are currently in a cold war that must be thawed to save lives and a global economy both hanging in the balance. The first step in thawing the current cold war will require a cessation to the myriad proxy wars that use nations like Ukraine, Taiwan, and numerous global south nations from Africa to Southeast Asia, to Latin America as pawns in an arms and resource extraction race. As president I will cease the saber rattling and chest beating that are doing nothing but instigating the PRC with military war games in waterways of Southeast Asia such as the Sea of Japan, Yellow Sea, East China Sea and others. I am confident this will open pathways for diplomacy that leads to cooperation in lieu of competition with the PRC. I agree with the Quincy Institute's assessment that the current administration's rhetoric of competition with the PRC is a feckless attempt to marginalize and exclude the nation from the global community, which in turn pushes them to form alliances with nations the U.S. also finds itself in a contemporary cold war with including, but not limited to, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia. One area where I believe we should especially be cooperating rather than competing with the PRC is the climate crisis. While it's true that the PRC is the largest emitter in the world, the U.S. remains the largest historic emitter despite only representing five percent of the world's population. Planetary survival literally requires less finger pointing at who is most responsible for the climate crisis and more finger pointing towards mutual and cooperative solutions. And rather than compete with the PRC for requisite critical resources to develop the infrastructure for renewable energy and regenerative economies, we must cooperate with them such that we don't render the need to address the climate crisis into a rationalization for casus belli over possession critical resources that will also drag global south nations into proxy wars they want no part of. The PRC, the U.S., and the entire world has a collective interest in protecting lives and the planet from the impacts of climate change. As president, my first step in avoiding a military confrontation with the PRC would be to invite and work with them to be a leading partner in addressing the climate crisis by exchanging ideas, resources, and technologies that can rapidly emancipate both nations from reliance on fossil fuels, which will improve relations, cooperation, and the habitability of the planet at once, while also preventing a military confrontation that will take more lives than the climate crisis."Is it in the U.S. national interest for the president to convene negotiations in an effort to end the war in Ukraine?Joe Biden (D)Biden generally emphasizes that Ukraine should be the driving force behind any peace negotiations and has argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin has not shown signs that he is ready to negotiate. He has, however, helped to convene several international conferences to discuss a diplomatic path forward, one of which reportedly included discussions about concessions that Ukraine may make in exchange for peace. (The administration denied these reports.)Marianne Williamson (D)"Firstly, this question is framed in terms of the 'U.S. national interest,' but I think it's time we start concerning ourselves more with the interests of humanity as a whole than the interests of the American government or American corporations, which is usually what is meant by 'U.S. national interest.'Yes, I think the U.S. should convene negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a despicable crime, and we should support Ukraine and their autonomy. However, we need to do what we can to bring about a just but realistic peace. It seems extremely unlikely that either side in this conflict will have a complete victory over the other anytime soon, so if we don't want to let this draw out for two decades like our war in Afghanistan, then we should press for negotiations. I think that the withdrawn letter by progressive Congress members from last year that urged negotiations was a good and reasonable letter, and they should not have buckled to pressure and withdrawn it."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"Yes. Current U.S. strategic thinking is that the war serves the national interest by weakening Russia. That thinking is faulty on two counts. First, it is not weakening Russia. Second, a weak and unstable Russia would make us much less secure, not more secure. The United States and the world will be best served when Russia knows that we are not out to destroy her."Cornel West (I)"The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is not going to be ameliorated by military means. With $113 billion of taxpayer dollars already sent to Ukraine leading to no more than an endless war of attrition, as well as poll numbers indicating dithering support for a series of blank checks to continue it, it's clear the people of the United States have had enough. It's not just in the national interest for a diplomatic solution to this conflict, it's the duty of the President of the United States to lead this process with our global partners in Europe, Asia, and Africa. As president, I will give Ukraine no other choice but to enter a diplomatic process as part of my commitment to cease all war funding and weapons to Ukraine and instead invest in peacemaking."If Saudi Arabia agreed to normalize relations with Israel but requested a guarantee from the United States to defend the Kingdom militarily in exchange, would you seek to ratify a treaty making that commitment?Joe Biden (D)President Biden has not directly commented on this proposal, but his administration has led the initiative to negotiate a defense commitment in exchange for normalization.Rep. Dean Phillips (D)Phillips has endorsed the Biden administration's approach. "Never did we imagine it possible in our lifetimes to see the possible normalization of relations between the Saudis and Israelis. It's an extraordinary and historic opportunity not just for these two countries, but for the entire world," he told NPR. "The United States plays a significant role relative to a defense pact with the Saudis equipment and materiel relative to their military and potentially a civilian nuclear program as well. If those things can be met and also meeting some of the needs of the Palestinians, this could be an extraordinary legacy at a time the world surely needs it." Marianne Williamson (D)"No. The U.S. cannot get involved in another war in the Middle East – especially not in order to defend Saudi Arabia, arguably the worst human rights violator in the region. It is time the U.S. stops aiding Saudi Arabia and Israel in their egregious human rights violations."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"We think the premise of this question to be unlikely. Saudi Arabia is armed to the teeth and has no need of such a guarantee. As it has good relations with most other nations, its [only] plausible national security threat is Iran. However, much of the Sunni-Shiite conflict in the past arose from U.S. geopolitical maneuvering that elevated tensions throughout the region."Cornel West (I)"I wouldn't even qualify this request as a treaty as it would be more of a death sentence for innocent civilians in the region and more service members, too many who have already been lost due to U.S. empire building in the Middle East, mainly to protect oil profits of fossil fuel cartels both domestically and globally. We need less iron domes and a more iron-clad diplomatic process that leads to lasting peace and mutual dignity for all people in the Middle East. To this end, as president I would insist that any normalization of relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the State of Israel include immediate steps to liberate Palestinian people from occupation and a wanton cycle of violence that's killing precious Palestinian and Israeli lives alike."As Commander-in-Chief, would you bring home the U.S. troops currently stationed in Iraq and Syria?Joe Biden (D)While Biden has not directly addressed this question, a senior Pentagon official recently said the U.S. "has no intent to withdraw in the near future" from Syria.Marianne Williamson (D)"Yes I would, but in Syria, I would first negotiate an agreement that ensures the Kurds will not be harmed before withdrawing the troops that are protecting them."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"Yes. Those nations do not want our troops there. I will instigate bold peace initiatives in places where there are still military tensions, in some cases replacing troops with international peacekeepers."Cornel West (I)"As indicated in my Policy Pillars Rooted in a Movement of Truth, Justice, and Love, as president I would immediately embark on a responsible and expeditious closure of global U.S. military bases as part of a larger initiative to cease and desist U.S. empire building and maintenance and slash the bloated military budget, including the disbanding of NATO, such that we can reinvest those funds in myriad social and economic justice programs domestically. As tensions in the Middle East associated with the crisis in Palestine/Israel grow, the U.S. presence is only exacerbating an already incendiary situation while putting brave service people in harm's way for no other reason than to maintain U.S. empire and a military hegemony in a region that needs less bullets and rockets and more diplomacy. To this end, as president, I would bring those troops home immediately, honor them for their service and ensure a Just Transition so that they can use the skills they gained in the military and put them to use for beneficial services to the people of the U.S."If elected, would you request an authorization from Congress to use military force against drug cartels in Mexico?Joe Biden (D)Biden has not commented directly on calls to authorize military force against the cartels, but a National Security Council spokesperson said in April that the administration "is not considering military action in Mexico.""Designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would not grant us any additional authorities that we don't already have," the spokesperson added.Marianne Williamson (D)"No. The U.S. has invaded and militarily intervened in Latin America time after time, and it has only brought violence and misery and fueled the immigration that we now complain about. It is time we reject the imperialist Monroe Doctrine, which declared Latin America our backyard. It is time we respect our neighbors to the south and stop invading their countries."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)"Absolutely not. The Mexicans have the power to overcome the drug cartels themselves. We can aid them by sharing intelligence, by shutting down the illegal weapons trade, by cracking down on money laundering activities of US banks, and by prosecuting the cartels' collaborators in this country."Cornel West (I)"Absolutely not. To be clear, asking the Congress for authorization to use military force in Mexico would essentially be asking Congress to approve a military invasion through a declaration of war against Mexico. The so-called war against drugs in the United States has been and continues to be an abject failure. This 50-year war has been used as a rationalization for crimes against humanity, especially those most marginalized by failed drug policies - Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people, who have been subjected to a racialized and classist mass incarceration pogrom that has needlessly locked up over 400,000 people for non-violent drug-related crimes between 1980 and 1997 alone. A failed domestic drug war should not be an impetus to start a foreign drug war in the sovereign territory of one of our North American partners. It should instead be an impetus to enact efficacious policies that treat addiction as a national threat to public health. Instead of increasing militarism and launching a foreign war, we should declare war against the lack of access to healthcare and the lack of economic opportunities that contribute to drug use. Reducing and decriminalizing drug use in the United States will directly reduce the amount of drugs that are smuggled across the border, thereby reducing revenues for drug cartels in Mexico. This is less an issue of militarism and more an issue of addiction driven by supply and demand."Reactions to Israel-Hamas warJoe Biden (D)In a speech on Oct. 20, Biden said: "In Israel, we must make sure that they have what they need to protect their people today and always.The security package I'm sending to Congress and asking Congress to do is an unprecedented commitment to Israel's security that will sharpen Israel's qualitative military edge, which we've committed to — the qualitative military edge.We're going to make sure Iron Dome continues to guard the skies over Israel. We're going to make sure other hostile actors in the region know that Israel is stronger than ever and prevent this conflict from spreading.Look, at the same time, [Prime Minister] Netanyahu and I discussed again yesterday the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. The people of Gaza urgently need food, water, and medicine."Rep. Dean Phillips (D)In a long tweet, Phillips said, "The destruction of Hamas is necessary, but the military campaign must follow international law and conventions of civilized nations. [...]I support a pause in hostilities and the immediate safe passage of civilians from Gaza into temporary shelters in Egypt and/or Jordan and the largest humanitarian relief effort in world history.I am pro-Israeli and anti the Netanyahu government — and [its] enabling of settlements on Palestinian land. [...]Israel has a right to exist, defend itself, and ensure the terror and butchering of Oct 7 never happens again.Palestinians have a right to a nation of their own, and that begins with a free and fair election for the first time since 2006 in which a choice can be made; peace or war.Israelis must also be afforded the same right to choose peace or war."Marianne Williamson (D)Williamson tweeted: "For Israel to prosecute an all out war on Gaza is already a catastrophe for the people of Gaza. It can easily become a catastrophe for the people of Israel as well. There's no end game there, for them or for the rest of the world, that doesn't multiply the horror. The United States should join an international consortium — Egypt, Jordan and others — in efforts to secure release of the hostages and cessation of the bombing."Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (I)On Oct. 7, Kennedy said the following in a statement: "This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state's right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now. As President, I'll make sure that our policy is unambiguous so that the enemies of Israel will think long and hard before attempting aggression of any kind.I applaud the strong statements of support from the Biden White House for Israel in her hour of need. However, the scale of these attacks means it is likely that Israel will need to wage a sustained military campaign to protect its citizens. Statements of support are fine, but we must follow through with unwavering, resolute, and practical action. America must stand by our ally throughout this operation and beyond as it exercises its sovereign right to self-defense."Kennedy later warned against using the attacks and subsequent war as a justification for war with Iran. "It didn't take long for the neocons in Washington to spin the Hamas terror attacks to advance their agenda of war against Iran," he tweeted on Oct. 27. "If President Biden doesn't resist them, they might get their wish."Cornel West (I)














In a recent statement, West said, "US taxpayers want no part in funding the Israeli war machine that is committing genocidal war crimes in Gaza. We need stronger, clearer headed representation like this within our highest levels of government." He has also said, "We want a ceasefire. We want an end of the siege. We want an end of occupation. We want equal rights, equal dignity, and equal access for Palestinians and Jews."

             Previously posted on May 10/22 and Jan 30/23            Kissinger in Washington, May 7, 2022Henry Kissinger will be one hundred years old in a few weeks and has published five books since he turned ninety. Along with President Nixon, he futilely prolonged and escalated the Vietnam War for four years when defeat was already inevitable. But he also received the Nobel Peace Prize precisely for negotiating the ceasefire for that same war.     His doctrine also has these two faces. On the one hand, he conceives international politics as the interaction between states seeking power. On the other hand, he favors the balance of powers so that no one is able to fully impose its dominance on the others.   In the academic literature, Kissinger's approach is called "realism" and is widely accepted. The main alternative is the so-called "liberal" approach, which trusts in the ability of institutions to prevent wars and keep peace. From there arose the League of Nations, which failed, and the United Nations and its specialized organizations, which have had significant success on many issues, but are also currently showing their insufficiency.    The most accurate postulate of the realists is that the world is more peaceful when there are multiple powers than when there are only two, as in the Cold War, or a single super-dominant one, as seemed to be the case with the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.   The success of the formula requires that the multilateral equilibrium could only be overthrown by an effort of a magnitude too difficult to mount. As a historical example, Kissinger has analyzed and praised the so-called Concert of Europe that was formed, after the defeat of Napoleon's France, by Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and also recovered France. According to his interpretation, the Concert "came close to constituting the government of Europe" and achieved a long period without European-wide wars. The balance was upset by the unification of Germany at the end of the 19th century and its consequent aggressive expansionism, which led to the absurd and catastrophic First World War. Taking a similar approach, Kissinger continues to praise the construction of the European Union, which has prevented new general wars on the continent.    During his time in government, the biggest concern was that communism would end up dominating the world according to the domino theory, whereby the fall of a piece like Indochina would be followed by Burma and Thailand, as well as Indonesia (which, in fact, was very close), and from there, India, Japan, the Middle East... That's why the Vietnam war extended to Laos and Cambodia. But this is also the reason for the diplomatic opening to China, to break the Sino-Soviet bloc and achieve a certain multilateral balance.    The current interest of the discussion is that the role of the United States as the only superpower may be less exclusive and exclusionary than it seemed. A version of political realism in academia tends to analyze international relations "after hegemony" as a ground for "anarchy", that is, destructive conflicts and wars. However, the changes around the Ukrainian war can be read as a new opportunity for multilateral cooperation.    The United States has the initiative and many economic and military resources, but, paradoxically, it may have a good opportunity to expand pluralism. In the new situation of divided government between the Presidency and Congress, the most ambitious projects in domestic policy are paralyzed, so Joe Biden can focus on foreign policy, where he has more power, and expand multilateral cooperation.    The European Union is beginning to develop, for the first time, a spirited common international policy, in contrast to the dissent during the Iraq war, when the governments of Britain and Spain were on one side and those of France and Germany on the other. The rulers of China and India, which are rivals to each other, have told Russia that the world is not ready for war.    This configuration with more than three major powers points to a balance of powers capable of avoiding polarization, since, otherwise, a coalition of two-to-one preludes conflict.     Specifically, the Group of Seven, which is the nucleus of a latent world government, needs to work more closely with some members of the Group of Twenty, which includes India and China, so that its decisions are widely accepted and effective.    Negotiations between the US and the EU for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), in which substantive agreements had been reached, were paralyzed by Trump, and could now be revived.    The Trans-Pacific Agreement for Economic Cooperation was also abandoned by Trump, but the other eleven initial countries went ahead on their own and ended up signing the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), to which China has presented its candidacy. Many in the United States are clamoring for re-entry in what had been its own initiative.    And after the war in Ukraine, a new international structure will have to be defined, especially for Central and Eastern Europe, in which, as Kissinger said in a recent interview, "Russia should find a place."    Realism shows that the seeking for power explains many things, and the balance of power can prevent a general war. But when there is neither a single dominant power nor a confrontation between two, "liberal" rules and institutions may be the best mechanism for peace and multilateral cooperation.Also in Spanish in the daily La Vanguardia-click       While President Biden is not clear, and sometimes he is confusing about how the war in Ukraine could end, some other voices in Washington can speak and suggest more clearly. Several of them did it a few days ago at the Financial Times Weekend Festival, which was held, for the first time outside England, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington.The first surprisingly constructive intervention was from William J. Burns, the current CIA Director. Just a year ago, he came from retirement after a long career as a diplomat, and as such, in his presentation, the conversation with an FT journalist, and the dialogue with the audience, he showed a broader vision than the usual spies. When he was Ambassador in Boris Yeltsin's Moscow in the mid-1990s, Burns already felt that the NATO expansion until the borders of Russia was "premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst." More specifically, to push for NATO membership of Ukraine and Georgia was "a serious strategic mistake that did indelible damage" –an opinion that at the time was shared by the governments of France and Germany. In an official encounter, Putin had told him that Ukraine in NATO "would be a hostile act toward Russia."Burns emphasized, of course, that there is "absolutely no justification for the invasion of Ukraine." Yet, he resumed that kind of strategic explanation while dismissing the ideological elaborations that pretend either justify or condemn the attack. In short: Russia has "pushed back" after Ukraine moved westward away from Russian influence.In his view, nevertheless, Putin miscalculated regarding the power of the Russian Army (which was sent to a "special operation" not planned by its generals), about Ukrainian resistance, and with the supposition that the West would be distracted by elections in Germany and France. He tried to explain the recent candidacies of Sweden and Finland to NATO as a deterrent against Putin's other potential attacks in the future. But the Director of the CIA did not utter a word that could be interpreted as supporting Ukraine's NATO membership.Even more thrilling was the participation of Henry Kissinger on "the new world disorder." The former Secretary of State is 99 years old this month, announced a new book of immediate publication, and for nearly one hour was focused, clear, and insightful, also in a dialogue with the audience. Kissinger started by using his academic background and remarking that the foreign policy's main priority of Russia, which is the largest country in the world, has always been to protect its huge territory from invasions. From this perspective, after the Cold War, the country's leadership was "offended" by NATO's absorption of Eastern Europe.Now –he noted— public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation, but by reflecting on the previous failures of the several governments he advised, he lamented that, again, nobody knows where we are going. Kissinger had already opposed Ukraine's candidacy to NATO when President Bush and Vice-president Cheney launched it in 2008. Six years later, at the Russian occupation of Crimea, he warned that Ukraine should not join either the East or the West, but it should function as "a bridge" between the two. He had predicted that otherwise, "the drift toward confrontation would accelerate."Most striking was his warning about the use of nuclear weapons. "I would not make Ukraine's membership to NATO a key issue," he remarked at the Kennedy Center. It would be "unwise to take an adversarial position," mainly because of the horrible danger of a nuclear war. His approach was certainly in contrast with that in the 1970s, of which he was reminded, when the gibberish theory of the "domino" was used to attack one country after another. Bush and Cheney still used that approach in the early 2000s to justify "preventive wars." I got the impression that with aging, intelligent people like Kissinger may feel that it is not worth trying to deceive himself again, and despite his physical frailness (or perhaps because of that), his more mature brain moves in the direction of more honest and clear thinking. His main argument was that in the past, although confrontation was addressed to "preserve the balance of power" between the US and the Soviet Union, at the same time, he also promoted agreements for nuclear arms reduction and control. Nowadays, modern technology would produce much worse destruction, so he claimed for a "new era" in which the governments should take more care about the consequences of nuclear arms and favor diplomacy above all. Kissinger reminded the audience that, in the past, nuclear countries such as the Soviet Union and the United States accepted military defeats from non-nuclear countries, such as in Vietnam and (both) in Afghanistan. Even more now, "we have to deescalate to conventional arms and learn to live with adversarial relations." Kissinger has met Putin more than twenty times and asserted that "there is still room for negotiation" with him. In Spanish in the daily La Vanguardia

Bertrand Badie on the Trump Moment, the Science
of Suffering, and IR between Power and Weakness



Lire en français




IR retains a traditional focus on the
game of power between states as its defining characteristic. But what, so asks Bertrand
Badie, if this means that our discipline is based on a negation of our humanity?
A giant in Francophone IR, Badie has labored to instead place human suffering
at the center of analysis of the international, by letting loose sociological
insights on a truly global empirical reality. In this Talk, Badie—amongst others—challenges the centrality of the idea of
state power, which makes little sense in a world where most of the IR agenda is
defined by issues emanating from state weakness; argues for the centrality of
suffering to a more apt IR; and uses this to contextualize the Trump Moment.




Print version (pdf) of this Talk



What is (or should be), according to
you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current International
Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



Unquestionably, it would be the matter of change. It is time to conceptualize,
and further than that, to theorize the change that is happening in the field of
International Relations (IR). Humans have always had the feeling that they are
living in a period of upheaval, but contemporary IR is really characterized by several
landmarks that illustrate the drastic extent of change. I see at least three of
them.



The first one concerns the inclusive nature of the international system.
For the first time in the history of mankind, the international system covers
nearly the whole humanity, while the Westphalian system was an exclusively European
dynamic in which the United States of America entered to turn it into a system,
that I would call, Euro-North-American.



The second element, around which publications abound (see notably Mary
Kaldor's work, Theory Talk #30), is the deep mutation of the nature of conflict. War used to be, in
the Westphalian model, a matter of competition between powers. Today we have
the feeling that weakness is replacing power, in that power cannot any longer
function as central explanatory term of conflictual situations, which are
rather manifestations of state weakness. Think of 'failing' or 'collapsing'
states, which refers to the coming apart of nations that have been built badly
as well as the deliquescence of social ties. This new form of conflictuality
completely turns the international environment upside down and constitutes a
second indicator of transformation.



The third aspect concerns mobility. Our international system used to be
fully based on the idea of territory and boundaries, on the idea that fixity
establishes the competences of States in a very precise way. In this
perspective, the state refers to territory—as the definition given by Max Weber
states very clearly—but today this territorial notion of politics is challenged
by a full range of mobilities, composed of international flows that can be
either material, informational, or human.



These are three indicators illustrating a deep transformation of the
inner nature of IR that encourage me to speak about 'intersocial relations'
rather than 'interstate relations'. The notion of interstate relations no
longer captures the entirety of the global game. Our whole theory of IR was
based on the Westphalian model as it came out of the peace of Westphalia, as it
was confirmed by the accomplishment of the nation-state construction process
and as it dominated the historical flow of international events until the fall
of the Berlin wall.



Until the fall of the wall, all that was not related to Europe or to the
United States of America, or more precisely North-America, was simply called 'periphery',
which says enough. Today, by contrast, the periphery is central at least
regarding conflictuality. We should therefore drop our Westphalian prism and
build up new analytical tools for IR that would take these mutations as their
point of departure. Doing away with our Westphalian approach to IR would mean
questioning both our classical IR theories and questioning the practical models
of action in international politics, which means the uses of diplomacy and
warfare.





How did you arrive at where you
currently are in your thinking about International Relations?



You know when we write, when we work, we are first of all influenced by
our dissatisfaction. The classical Westphalian approach to IR, as I said
earlier, did not satisfy me as I had the feeling that it was focusing on events
that no longer had the importance that we kept giving them—for instance the arms
race, great power politics, or the traditional diplomatic negotiations—while I
was seeing, maybe this was the trigger, that the greatest part of suffering in
the world was coming from places that IR theory was not really covering.



I have always told my students that IR is the science of human suffering.
This suffering exists of course where we are—in Europe, in North America, they
exist everywhere in the world—but the greatest part is outside of the
Westphalian area, so the classical approach to IR gives a marginal and
distorted image. Africa and the Middle East seen through the Westphalian prism are
a dull image, strongly different from the extraordinary wealth, both for good and
bad, that these areas of the world have. I've also always held that in a world
where 6 to 9 million people starve to death each year, the main foci of traditional
IR were derisory. Even terrorism, to which we collectively attribute so much
importance, hardly comes near how important a challenge food security is.



My three latest books take a stand against traditional IR theories. In Diplomacy of
Connivance (2012) I tried to
show that the great power game is really a game way that is much more
integrated than we usually say and that this game plays out in all multilateral
fora. There is indeed a club, and that is precisely what I wanted to describe,
a club of powers—one which results to the detriment of less powerful members in
the international system.



In Le Temps des humiliés ('the
era of the humiliated', 2014), I tried to crystallize what the classical theory
could not express, which is domination seen through the lens of the dominated,
humiliation as felt by the humiliated, violence as experienced by the
desperate. For instance, even if we look at powers as accomplished as China
today—sharing the first place with the USA in terms of GDP—we have to admit
that their historical experience of humiliation constitutes a huge source of inspiration
when it comes to the elaboration of its foreign policy.



And then, in my last book Nous ne
sommes plus seuls au monde ('we are no longer alone in the world', 2016), this
critique was even more explicit. We are writing an IR that encompasses only about
one billion of human beings, while forgetting all the others. Today it is
simply no longer true that these old powers are setting the international
agenda. Global politics today is written by the little, the weak, the dominated;
often with recourse to extreme forms of violence, but this needs to be analyzed
and understood, which would mean to totally change the IR theory.



We should not forget that in large part, IR theory was a given as the USA
triumphed in 1945. The well-known 'great power politics' that dominates
traditional IR theory, inaugurated by Morgenthau and supported by so many others,
described what was true at that time: the ability of American power to set us
free from the Nazi monster. Today the challenge is strongly different, and it
is by the way meaningful that two of the greatest American internationalist
political scientists, Robert Keohane (TheoryTalk #9) and Ned Lebow (Theory Talk #53),
have both written books that elude to the end of this global order
(respectively After Hegemony and Goodbye Hegemony). Well what interests
me is exactly to dig into what comes after hegemony.





What would a student
need to become a specialist in International Relations or understand the world
in a global way?



First of all, I would advise them to rename their science, as I said
earlier, and to call it intersocial relations. The future of what we call IR
comes down to the ability to understand the extremely rich, multiple and
diversified interactions that are happening among and across the world's
societies. It does not mean that we have to completely abandon the state-centric
perspective, but rather dethrone states from the middle of this multiplicity of
actors in order to realize how very often these states are powerless when faced
with these different actors. That would be my first advice.



My second advice would be to look
ahead and not back. Do not let yourself be dominated by the Westphalian model,
and to try to build up what we need—since almost nothing has been done yet
today to construct this post-Westphalian, meta-Westphalian model. Beyond power,
there are things that we still misidentify or overlook while they are the driving
forces of today's and tomorrow's IR. From this point of view, sociology could
prove particularly useful. I consider, for instance, that Émile Durkheim is a very important inspiration to understand the
world today. Here is an author to study and to apply to IR.



The third advice that I would give them would be to not forget that IR
or intersocial relations are indeed the sciences of human suffering. We should
be able to place suffering at the core of the thinking. We've lost far too much
time staring at power, now it is time to move on to place human suffering at
the center. Why? First of all because it is ethically better; maybe will we be
able to learn from it? But also because in today's actual international
politics suffering is more proactive than power, which is not necessarily
optimistic but if recognized, would allow us a better questioning of new forms
of conflictuality. Perhaps unfortunately, the international agenda is no longer
fixed with canons, but with tears. Maybe this is the key point on which we
should concentrate our reflection.



Your insistence on placing suffering at the center of
IR scholarship seems to place you firmly alongside those who recognize "grievance" ratherthan "greed" as a central logic of international politics. What do you make of this parallel?



You are right: the idea of grievance, of recrimination, is a structuring
logic of the international game today. We did not see it coming for two
reasons. First of all because our traditional analysis of international
politics presupposed a unity of time, as if the African time, the Chinese time,
the Indian time and the European time where all identical. Yet this is
completely wrong because we, in our European culture, have not understood that
before Westphalia there were
political models, political histories, that profoundly marked the people that would
then shape contemporary politics. Remember that China is 4000 years of empire,
remember that precolonial Africa was composed of kingdoms, empires,
civilizations, philosophies, arts... Remember that India also is multi-millenary.
The Westphalian time came to totally deny and crush this temporality, this
historicity, almost in a negationist way, which means that, in the spirit of
those who were defending the Westphalian model, only this model was associated
to the Renaissance; and that the age of enlightenment and reason with a big R
had a calling to reformat the world as if it were a hard drive. This was a
senseless bet, a bet for which our European ancestors who led it had excuses
because at that time we did not know all these histories, at that time we did
not have all the knowledge we today have of the other and thus we simply
resolved it, through the negation of alterity. Yet, IR ought on the contrary aspire
to the accomplishment of alterity. Inevitably, all those who saw themselves
denied their historicity, over several centuries and even several millenaries,
accumulated a feeling of recrimination, of particularly deep grievances.



The second element is that all of this happened in a context of
disequilibrium of power resources, linked to different factors that reflected
indeed the fact that at a given moment of time western powers were both
literally and figuratively better armed than other societies. Abovementioned negation
of alterity was mapped onto, and amplified, by the forceful imposition of a
multilateral system that turned into the worst situation, into a proclaimed
hierarchy of cultures; as a result and there were, as Jules Ferry put it in the France
of the 19th century, 'races'; as in, 'We have the obligation to
educate inferior races'. It is not the beginning of history, but it is the
beginning of a history of humiliation. And through subsequent waves of globalization,
this humiliation has turned into a central nerve running through international
life. A nerve that has been used by both the powerful, who made a tool out of
humiliating the others to better dominate them (think here of the opium wars, colonization)
and simultaneously a nerve that fed the reaction of mobilization in the extra-Westphalian
world by those that had to stand up against those who were humiliating them. So
you see how it truly lies at the basis of IR. In my mind, it became a forceful paradigm,
it explains everything, even though others factors continue to weigh in on
actual dynamics.



In order to appreciate all this, we need a sociological approach, which
has for me two aspects. Both these aspects must be considered together for the
approach to be well understood. The first one is a timeless aspect, which is to
consider that everywhere and in all eras politics is a social product. Politics
cannot be understood as somehow outside society. This I would say contradicts the
majority of IR scholars, who believe excessively in the autonomy of politics
and of the state—even if only for analytical purposes. The second element of
this sociological approach is the historical or temporal component. That is
what I was talking about earlier: with globalization the social fabric strongly
progressed compared to the political fabric, and considering that intersocial
relations grew, we need a sociological approach to understand them.





Do you think that the Trump period constitutes a
fundamental break with the conduct of IR?



Trump himself maybe not, but what he represents certainly. If we look at
the USA today we see, since the new millennium, three models succeeding each
other. After 11-09 there was a time of neo-conservatism where globalization was
considered by American leaders as a means or maybe a chance to universalize the
American model, willingly or not. By force, as was the case in Iraq in 2003.
This model failed.



This lead to a second model which I would describe as a liberal model,
neo-liberal, incarnated by Obama who learnt from the lessons of the failure of neo-conservatism,
and had the courage to question the hypothesis hitherto considered as indisputable
of American leadership in the world, and who considered that the USA could win
only through soft power or smart power or free-trade. That is the reason why
Obama was just a little bit interventionist and was counting a lot on the TTIP
and on all these transregional agreements.



With Trump we arrive at a third model, one that I would call
neo-nationalist, that looks at globalization in a different way. In his perspective,
globalization constitutes a chance to satisfy the national American interests. The
idea of the national comes back after a long interlude of a globalizing vision.
It does not mean that we are not interventionist anymore. What happened in
Syria proves it. It means that we will intervene not according to the needs of
globalization but rather to American interests. It is about sharing a strong
and powerful image of the USA on the one hand and on the other serving the
concrete interests of the American people and nation.



This neo-nationalist model is not defended only by Trump, that is the
reason why I was saying that we should not consider Trump individually. We find
it exactly the same way with Putin. We find it by many other world leaders,
such as Erdogan or Duterte or Victor Orbán—really different figures—or Marshal
Sissi in Egypt.



We find it as well in attitudes, for instance Brexit in Great Britain, in
right-wing neo-populism in Europe: Ms. Le Pen, Mr. Wilders...  or in a certain left-wing neo-populism as
Mélenchon in France. It is in the air, seeming almost a passing fad. But it
constitutes perhaps a double rupture within IR. First of all because since the
emergence of globalization, let's say around the 70's, the national interest as
a thought category was bit by bit replaced with approaches in terms of collective
goods. Today by contrast we witness the abandonment of this image of collective
goods for a return to the national interest. This is very clear in Trump's renouncing
of the COP21 of Paris. At the same time, second, this constitutes some form of the
rehabilitation of the idea of power, which again seeps into the language of IR.




You know the IR scholar is not a neutral person, we have to use our science
towards positive action and for the definition of sound public policies. Going
against the idea of collective goods, casting doubt on the ideas of human
security, environmental security, food security, and sanitary security is
extremely dangerous because the composition of national interests and egoism
will never converge to a globally coherent policy. It is the weak that will
suffer first.



And the same time that power is reinstated as a driving principle of IR
praxis, the paradox is that great powers are becoming more and more powerless. If
we look only since 1989, and ask, when did state power ever triumph in IR?
Where did the strongest ever find a battleship enabling him to resolve a
problem to his benefit and according to his goals? Never. Not in Somalia, not
in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, not in Syria, not in Palestine. Nowhere. Not in
Sahel, not in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nowhere. So I am a little
worried, indeed, about this naive and old-fashioned rehabilitation of state
power.





Can we say that globalization, or rather the ambition of
integration at either the European or global scale, has failed? Can today be
considered a good moment to bury of the idea of integration?



I do not like burials, it is not an expression that I would use, but
your question is very pertinent. For around twenty years I have been saying and
teaching that regional integration constituted an intermediary and realistic
level of adaptation between the era of the nation state and that of globalization,
which means that I believed for a long time that regional integration was the
final step towards a global governance of the world.



I thought for a long time that what was not possible at the global
scale, a global government, was possible at the regional level and this would already
strongly simplify the world map and thus go in the way of this adhesion to the
collective dimension required by globalization. Nevertheless, not only Europe
suffers a setback, but all the regional constructions in the world are in a
similar situation. Mr. Trump openly shoves the NAFTA agreement, MERCOSUR is
down as every State that is composing it has recriminations against it, and we
could extend the list… All the forms of integration that have been set by
Chavez around his Bolivian ideal have ceased to exist; Africa progresses very
slowly in terms of regional integration; the Arab Maghreb Union, which is an
essential device, totally failed. Thus indeed the situation does not look good.



In the case of Europe there is a double phenomenon: on the one hand,
there is this really grave failure due to the secession of Great Britain from
Europe, and then there is a general malaise of the European model. Brexit is
really rare, if you look at the contemporary history of IR it is simply
unprecedented that a state shuts the door on a regional or global organization.
As far as I remember, it only happened a few times before, with Indonesia in
the UN in 1964, which lasted only 19 months. It happened with Morocco with the
African Union and Morocco is currently reintegrating in it. This British
situation came as a thunderbolt, worsened by the fact that paradoxically it is
not so much because of regional integration that the British voted against the
European Union. It was more from an anti-migration, xenophobic and nationalist
(in reference to that nationalism trend that I was earlier talking about)
perspective and what is dramatic is that we can clearly see that the
nationalist sentiment is really attacking the inner principles of regional
integration.



I was saying that in the European case there are internal problems which
run even deeper than the British defection, and I will underline at least two
of them. First of all there is a democratic deficit of Europe, meaning that
Europe was not able to match electoral spaces with the ones where decisions get
made; people still vote at the national level while the decisions are taken in
Brussels. In consequence, democratic control over these decisions is extremely
weak. How to resolve this equation? And here the breakdown is total since very
few people are coming up with suggestions. The other factor of this crisis is,
according to me, the fact that Europe has been built with success after World
War II in a progressive way around association and indeed, Durkheim proved it,
the integrative logic makes sense. Unity makes strength and it did make
strength once in Europe to prevent war, a third World War, and secondly to
encourage the reconstruction of European countries where economy was totally
collapsed. This time is now over and it is the fault of Europe to not have
known how to recontextualize itself, to react to the new contexts.



Paying one more time tribute to Durkheim who guessed it right, Durkheim
said that there are two ways of constructing social ties: around association
and around solidarity. I think that the time of association is now over, we
should enter in the time of solidarity, which does not consist in saying 'We
Germans are associated with Greece', but rather 'We Germans are joined together
with Greece because we know that if Greece collapses, in a long term
perspective, we will suffer the consequences'. Thus this idea of fundamental
unity is an idea that has been a little bit overlooked, abandoned by the
Europeans and now they find themselves in a complete paralysis.





Is the decolonization period still having an impact on
contemporary IR?



Oh totally, totally. I would first say because it is a major event in
the field of IR, which made the World switch from 51 sovereign States of the UN
in 1945 to 193 today but above all, a very aggravating circumstance, is that
this decolonization has been a complete failure and this failure weighs
enormously on international politics.



It has been a failure because decolonization assumed the format of copying
the western state model in countries that were accessing independence, while
this model was not necessarily adapted, which provoked a proliferation of
failed states, and these collapsed states had a terrible effect on IR.



Secondly because decolonization should have led to the enrichment and to
the substantial modification of multilateralism, by creating new institutions
able to take charge of new challenges resulting from decolonization. Yet,
except the creation of UNCTAD in 1964 and of
UNDP in 1965, there have been very little innovations in terms of global governance.
Thus global governance remains dominated by what I earlier called 'the club',
which means the great powers from the north, and this is very dysfunctional for
the management of contemporary crises. Then also because the ancient colonial
powers happen to find new forms of domination that did somehow complicate the
international game. Thus in fact decolonization is a daily aspect of the crisis
that the international system faces today.





In conclusion, which question should we have asked? In
other terms, which question have we forgot?



I found your questions very pertinent as it allowed the discussion of themes
that I consider essentials. Now, the big problem that makes me worry is the
great gap between the analysts and the actors in IR. I am not saying that the
analysts understood everything, far from it, but I think that IR theorists are
very conscious of some of these transformations I have mentioned. If you look
at some great authors such as James Rosenau, Ned Lebow or Robert Keohane, to
name just a few—there are way more—they all contributed to the reconstruction
of IR.



What truly strikes me is the autism of political actors, they think that
they are still at the time of the Congress of Vienna and that is an
extraordinary source of tension. Thus as long as this spirit of change does not
reach political actors, maybe Barack Obama was the first one to enter this game
and then the parenthesis was closed, as long as there will not be this move
towards the discovery of a new world, maybe as well through the inclusion in
our reflection about the international fabric such partners as China, it is not
normal that this very powerful China does not have any choice but to share the
paradigm and the model of action proper to occidental diplomacy, as long as we
would not have done this precise effort, well, we will remain in the negation
of the human, and that is the essential problem today, we are unable to
understand that at the end there is just one unity, which is the human being.



I had the chance to visit 105 countries and everywhere I met the same
men and the same women, with their pain, with their happiness, their hardship,
their joy, their sorrow, their needs that were everywhere identical. As long as
we will not understand that, well, we will be living in a world that is in total
contradiction with what it is truly and essentially. We will live in a world of
artifice and thus a world of violence.



Related links  



Read Badie's
The Arab Spring: A starting point (SER
Études 2011) here
(pdf)



Print version (pdf) of this Talk

Robert Wade on Zombie Ideas, Being inside the World
Bank, and the Death of Ethics in Economics after the Marginal Revolution







The global
economy is at the core of some of the main issues in contemporary International
Relations. But how do we understand the global economy and what impact does
that have on how we deal with the power politics around it? A fault line seems
to have emerged between those who take economic theory seriously and those who
denounce it for being part of the problem. Informed by his training as an
anthropologist, Robert H. Wade—professor at the LSE—takes a different tack: he
bases his engagement with the way in which Adam Smith has been appropriated to
advocate for a dominant view of 'free markets' on real-world economics and in-depth
accounts of insiders. In this Talk,
Wade—among others—discusses experimentation in international economic
regimes, why the International Financial Institutions don't fight economic
crises, and the powers and perils of being inside the World Bank.




Print version of this Talk (pdf)




What is,
according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current
International Relations? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in
this debate?



If we'd reframe
your question as being more broadly about global studies, I think that one of
the really fundamental questions is how and why it is that the precepts of neoliberalism
have penetrated into every nook and cranny of Western societies, and have
penetrated to a very large extent many non-Western countries.



This has
happened especially, but not only, through the agency of the IMF and the World
bank, which have imbued these neoliberal principles; through the mechanism of
graduate education: children of the elites in developing countries go out to
American, British, other Western universities, and they learn that this is
'true' economics, or 'true' IPE, or 'true' Political Science, and then they
come back and implement these same principles and make them a reality back
home. But across the globe, this even holds for the Nordic countries. In
Iceland and other Nordic countries, from the 1980s, networks of people sharing
a belief in neo-liberal precepts, began to form and sort of place each other in
key positions within the state, and in politics, and built a momentum in this
direction. These precepts have become understood as just natural, as in
Margaret Thatcher's 'there is no alternative'.



I live in the
UK, and the great bulk of the British public really does believe that the
government is just like a household writ large, and the same rules of budgeting
that apply to the household should apply to the state. That when times are
tough the household has to tighten its belt, cut back on spending, and it is
only fair that the government does the same, and if the government does not, if
the government runs a deficit in hard times, then the government is being
irresponsible. And this is a completely mistaken and pre-Keynesian idea, but it
is a 'zombie idea'—that is, however much arguments and evidence may be mounted
against it, it just keeps coming up and up and up, and governments come to
power riding on this zombie idea and a flotilla of related ideas.



The persistence
of this zombie idea is all the more amazing as we just had a global financial
crisis in 2007/8, which would prompt a rethinking of these ideas. But these
neoliberal precepts have been, if anything, more strongly reinforced. In
previous hard times—and obviously the 1930s depression is the exemplary
case—there has been a stronger move towards, what you could call, social
democratic precepts. But not this time! Indeed, even after the crisis, the
whole of the European Union with 500 million people is even more thoroughly structured
on the basis of these ideas. I am thinking of what is popularly known as the Fiscal Compact signed by the EU Member States in 2012, which commits all governments
to balance budgets all the time—that is, first, the structural deficit may not
rise above 0.5 percent of GDP. Second, the public debt may not rise above 60
percent of GDP. Third, automatic financial sanctions are levied on governments
that exceed these two thresholds. Fourth, the whole procedure is supervised by
the European Commission, and this is presented as in the name of sound
budgeting. This package is presented as justified by the proposition that
government is a household writ large. The most elementary principles of
Keynesian macroeconomics show why this is not simply mistaken, but a disaster,
and will keep generating recessionary pressures. It is sold as a kind of excuse
for avoiding to put in place the essential conditions for the monetary union,
namely, a common budget and a sizable transfer mechanism to the regions just as
exists in the United States. But they do not want to do that, but still they
call this agreement 'cooperation', which is all about not cooperation, but
about writing these dictates around this zombie idea written into the very
basic architecture of the EU. Beyond EU politics, it materializes all the way
down to, I don't know, the function of the privatization of the Post Office, it
goes all the way down to the sort of capillaries of how universities are run,
and the incentive systems that have placed upon academics, and there is very
little pushback. The one reason, why I am almost completely delighted about
Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour party, is that this is one
small case of where there seems to be some concerted pushback against these
zombie ideas. The point being that the established Labour party basically
bought into this whole set of neo-liberal ideas. It combined maintaining the
overall structure of inequality in society with more emphasis on providing some
help to the poor, but they had to be hardworking poor.



Yet, one knows
that there can be dramatic changes in the prevailing zeitgeist of norms. One
knows that there can be big changes in the space of a few decades and the
question is can one imagine a scenario in which they might be a big change in
norms back to a more kind of social-democratic direction. So where will this
take place? Because of technological change in the labor market, there is a
real big crisis of employment with many middle-class jobs cut out and
polarization in the labor market. This might then induce a political movement
to have a much bigger change in income distribution than anybody with power is
now talking about. Talk of re-distribution these days is really almost entirely
around redistribution through the state, but the point I would make is that if
there is to be any significant reduction of inequality, especially inequality
at the top, there has to be more attention to changes in market-income
distribution.



Let me explain. The
share of profits in national income has been going up and the share of labor
income has been going down. So we should harness the shareholder structure of
the market to affect a more equal income distribution by enabling a much wider
section of the population to buy into the profit share. At the moment the
profit share goes to senior executives and equity holders, but equity holders
are highly concentrating at the top of the income and wealth distribution. If
equity earners could be spread much more equally, then a much wider section of the
population would get income, while they sleep so to speak. We could institute
something like trusts, whose members could be the employees of a company, the
customers, the neighbors of the company, and the trust would borrow on capital
markets and take out insurance against the repayment of the lending of loan and
then it would buy shares, it would use that borrowed money to buy shares in the
company, and the company would pay out dividends on the shares and then that
dividend income coming out of profits would be distributed to the members of
the trust. That would be a way of getting the rising share of profits in
national income distributed out to the population at large. I particularly like
this metaphor of "earning income while you sleep", since at the moment it is
only the rich people, who are earning income while they sleep. Somehow that facility
of earning income while you sleep has to be made much more widely and available—by
using the market against itself, so to speak.





How did you arrive at where
you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?



I suppose the starting point was really this; my
father was a New Zealand diplomat, so we moved quite often. By that time I was
twelve my parents were posted to Colombo, Ceylon as it was called then. After
having lived just in Western countries, I suddenly encountered at this very
formative age Colombo and Sri Lanka. I was just amazed by that experience; by
the color, the taste, the exoticness, but I was also very struck by how the
many boys at the same age as me, were walking around with no shoes. I particular
remember this boy carrying a baby on his shoulder, the baby looked half-dead
and covered in scabs, and I think it was then I got the idea of just how
unequal the world was. Then at university I studied economics, but I also
visited my parents in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and I got another sense of that
great disparity in wealth and living standards. At this time I had come across
Adam Smith and the wealth of nations question and that helped to encapsulate or
to crystalize my interests. So I wanted to go the Institute of Development
Studies in Sussex and  got enrolled for a
PhD in economics, but en route I spent several weeks in India and during that
time I began to dwell upon just how boring and how useless everything I studied
under the name of microeconomics. I kept thinking of these dreadfully dry
textbooks of marginal cost curves and marginal revenue curves and utility function
and difference curves etc., which I had forced myself to sit exams in. By this
time I had done a little bit of fieldwork, living on Pitcairn Island in the
middle of the Pacific.



When I got back to Sussex after fieldwork I announced
that I wished to not do a PhD in economics, but to do one in anthropology
thinking all the time, that this would actually be more use for understanding
why for example India, where I had been, was so very poor. So that's what I did:
a PhD in anthropology… In some ways I regard that as having been a mistake,
because the sort of mainstream of anthropology is very far away from the Adam
Smith questions. Having done the degree in anthropology, pretty soon I began to
change direction and pay much more attention to the state, to the state
bureaucracy. I went to India and I studied the Irrigation Department and other
related departments. I went to South Korea and I studied state irrigation
agencies and I went to Taiwan and I studied the state more broadly. So I was
kind of moving up from my Italian village, moving kind of up the scale in terms
of state agencies and then the state as a whole.



Then I went to work for the World Bank in the 1980s and
my main reason for doing that was not to do the research the World Bank wanted
me to do, but rather to study the World Bank from the inside as fieldwork. If
in some ways switching to anthropology was a mistake, in other ways it was not,
because I approached those kind of Wealth-of-Nations-questions in a way very
different from how economists approached them. For example when I went to
Taiwan and studied the trade regime, the first thing I did was to go and talk
to people who operated through the trade regime, whereas I noticed that the
published works by economists celebrating Taiwan's free trade regime was based
on what the rules said and what certain government officials told them was the
case. They had never actually talked to
people who traded through the trade regime. If they would have, they would
have learned about all the covert controls that went on such that there was
quite a distinction between the liberal face of the trade regime and the
reality of the trade regime. The reality was that the government was managing
trade in line with industrial policy, but the government absolutely did not
want the world to know that. So all this was kept hidden and I was really
regarded as rather unwelcome visitor—and in fact to this day my book Governing the Market (1990, read the
introduction here) is not well
received in Taiwan. It says the government of Taiwan did a good job of managing
the market, but they want the world to believe that Taiwan is a free trade
country. So that is the kind of intellectual trajectory that I have been on.



So I think that the value of the anthropology PhD was
that it really taught me, in practical terms, the meaning of the
anthropological maxim, which is 'soaking and poking'. To put it another way—I
love this—anthropologists are social scientists, who believe that the plural of
anecdote is evidence. And indeed I place a lot of weight on anecdotes, on
gossip, on the stories people tell, whereas economists would be much happier
reducing, let us say, South Korea's trade regime to one data point in a matrix,
and then compare that data point with, let us say, Malaysia's data point to see
how the trade regimes are correlated with growth, or something like that, and
that is really not my interest.





What would a student need to
become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?



Despite what I've just said, I do think that a graduate
training in economics is very useful, provided one does not believe it. And that is really
difficult, because the socialization pressures are intense: if you do not say
the right things—which are neoliberal type things on the whole—then you will
likely not get a high grade. But I have noticed that economists tend to know
how to think, how to make arguments,
they tend to understand the idea of causality, and that may seem an astonishing
thing to say on my part, because it implies that students coming from other
disciplines are often weak in understanding the very basic ideas of causality,
but that is my experience. I had many students coming from, who knows, IR or
Political Science or Sociology or Anthropology, who clearly do not have much
idea of causality; they can describe things, but they find thinking in terms of
cause and effect, in terms of independent and dependent variables, in terms of
left and right side, they just find it difficult. So I do think that there is a
lot to be said for studying economics, and mastering the maths, provided that
the critical facility is not lost. That is point number one.



Point number two is that I think that there is a huge
premium on doing fieldwork, and the field work maybe in developing countries,
but when I say field work, I don't just mean going out to villages, going out
to see poor people 'over there'. I am talking of fieldwork inside bureaucracies:
to try and understand the culture, the incentive systems that people are
working under—fieldwork at home so to speak, in the countries one comes from. From
the students' point of view, it is clearly much easier to sit in the LSE
library to do the research. So in my marking I give quite a premium to a
student actually doing fieldwork, going out and interviewing, and having the
experience of writing up and interpreting the interviews and somehow fitting it
back into a larger argument—but really few students actually do that, and I
think that that is a real, real big mistake. Mind you, the same risk holds for fieldwork in economics as it does for
studying economics: I encourage students to work for (do fieldwork in,
experience) the World Bank; and several have—but to the best of my knowledge
almost none of them has kept their critical perspective. They really come to
buy into it.





The relations between states are settled
either through diplomacy or warfare. Why would we have to focus on economics to
understand IR?



Because economics—such as
for example balances of payment, surpluses and deficits—set the constraints and
incentives on countries in terms of their relationships with each other. A great
deal of diplomacy is driven by economic pressures: diplomacy to get other
countries to for example open their markets, or to cut deals with countries—'if
you do this, we will do that'—deals that may relate to areas that are rather
different, for instance if you buy more of these of our exports, we will help
you fight such and such country, because the manufactures are in my
constituency.



So, in a way, the way you
framed the question is part of the reason why I react against the discipline of
IR: because it tends to treat diplomacy, war, and so on, as somehow rather
separate from economic pressures, and I see these economic pressures as very
powerful drivers of both of the other two things. As another example, one of
the drivers of the Syrian conflict was that there was an acute drought (like
Weizman observed in Theory Talk #69, red), which meant that many people
were rendered destitute; rural areas flooded into the cities, and the Assad
regime just was—understandably—unable to cope; and large numbers of young men,
concentrated in cities, rootless and with no jobs, just were recruiting fodder for
the Wahhabi sect. I have always thought of economics—not so much as in the
making choices in conditions of scarcity, that is sort of Lionel Robin's definition—in the sense of Alfred Marshal, about how people make a
living, as a very fundamental driver of a lot of what happens in International
Relations.





Pikkety recently published Capital in the
21st Century, causing quite the stir. But why would inequality
between people matter for IR?



Let me comment by invoking
a very contemporary exhibit—the migration crisis in Europe now. Maybe a decade
ago I looked at the figures and if you took the
average income of the EU-15 prior to latest extensions and then expressed the
average income of countries outside of the EU—including sub-Sahara Africa—as a
percentage, then there was a really dramatic falling away of income levels
relative to the EU, in countries all around the EU and whether you took market
exchange rates or purchasing power parity. If you went round to sub-Sahara
Africa and took the average, it was more like two percent in market exchange rates
and seven percent in purchasing power parity; and the 'problem' is that there
is certainly here a rather thin slither of sea between Africa and the promised
land of Europe and to the east there are these great open planes, where armies
can go up and down to the speed of light, so to speak, but people can also move
pretty quickly across these planes.



So all one has to do—and this
might just be only a bit of an exaggeration—if one is on the poor end of this
poverty pyramid is hop across the border and you have a chance at least of
getting a very appreciable increase in living conditions and income, with which
you can then get savings to remit back to home. So the migrations pressures are
just huge. So that is one reason for linking inequality to issues in International
Relations—really fundamental issues, and very very difficult to dissolve.





You've done anthropological fieldwork inside
the World Bank—an institution drawing a lot of criticism from its detractors in
IR. Can you shed some kind of light about what kind of 'animal' the World Bank
is?



First of all, let me say
that at the micro-level—the level of the people you know and the people I know
inside the World Bank—I agree that there are people doing a lot of good work.
But if you look at the organization more generally—the World Bank and also the
IMF—they are clearly instruments mainly of US foreign policy—and any number of
US senators, members of the House, have basically said that. When they are
defending the International Financial Institutions (they often criticize them),
they do so by saying they are important for US foreign policy. And you have to
look at the governance structures to see how it is that the US in particular—but
Western states more generally—have from the beginning, through the very Articles
of Agreement, created a structure which locks in their power, and has made it
very difficult for other countries (including Japan) to significantly increase their
shareholdings. The US has kept the presidency of the Bank and the much less
recognized Number Two position of the IMF, and has used these positions to have
a very strong influence.



Just to illustrate what the
Bank and the Fund do: at the time of the East-Asian crisis—specifically the
Korean crisis in 1997-1998—the IMF mission was in Seoul. The negotiations were
in a hotel there. David Lipton from the US Treasury (and a former student of
Larry Summers who was by then Deputy Secretary) was just down the corridor of
where the negotiations took place, and every so often the IMF people would walk
out of the negotiations and consult with David Lipton, then come back in and—as
Paul Blustein reports in his book called The Chastening—often said
something rather different from what they had been saying before they consulted
with David Lipton.



Just to take another
example, the US being able to appoint the president of the Bank—to appoint a
person known personally to the Treasury Secretary or to the Secretary of the
State, or both—is really of great value: when there is a 'trustful relationship'—or
a relationship of dependency, the president being dependent on those who
appointed him in the Administration—it is possible for those people in the Administration,
or people close to them, to just ring up the president of the Bank, and talk in
a very informal, confidential, trustful way about what is happening in Latin
America, or what is happening in the Middle East, and what the US thinks the
Bank should or should not be doing in those places. Larry Summers appointed a
protégé of his to one of the regional development banks, and this person—who is
very senior in the bank—told me that Larry would frequently ring him, while he
is being driven home in the evening from the Treasury, just to have a chat
about how things were going in her region, and to pass on suggestions about
what the Bank should be doing there, and to get intelligence from her about
what was happening in the region, and so on. The point is that, making these
personal connections is of immense value, but at the same time, the US
Congress, in particular, is very much against having a big Bank against allowing
a capital increase for the World Bank—so that the bank could, as it should be
doing, increase its lending for infrastructure investment ten times. It is just
a complete scandal how little the Bank has been lending for the past 20 years
or more for infrastructure, for roads and power stations and so on. The US does
not want the Bank providing socialistic competition with the private sector: it
says these things are for the private sector to do, and the Bank has to take
care of poverty, because the private sector is not interested in poverty.



So the US wants to keep the
presidency of the Bank, it wants to keep, secondly, its unique veto right on
the big decisions, such as decisions on whether to increase the capital base—but
provided those two things are met it does not care that much about the Bank. In
the case of the Fund, the US is also very powerful, but of course the Europeans
have a bit more relative power. Right now I think the world is in an even more dangerous
sort if financial condition than might appear, because the IMF is acutely short
of secure or guaranteed lending resources, so if there is to be another round
of crisis—as I think is entirely likely within the next five years—the Fund
depends upon borrowing short-term from member countries, like on six months
terms, but member countries can say 'no', and that means that the Fund's
ability to fight crises is quite constrained. The Fund should implement what
was agreed in 2010 by all the member countries represented on the board of the
IMF: to roughly double the quote of the guaranteed lending resources, that is,
resources the countries actually hand over to the Fund, over which they
actually give up country control. All the relevant capitals ratified it with
one exception—the US—because Congress refused because the individual barons,
who are not under that much party discipline, each said to the Treasury: 'look,
the question of the IMF is of zero significance to my electorate, so if you
want my vote on the IMF, you have to give me things that I want like projects
in my constituency and so on'. The Treasury added up the demands of the people,
whose vote had to be won, and it considered those demands were just way, way,
way over the top. As long as a Democrat is in the presidency, while the House
is controlled by Republicans the world is sort of held hostage to this. Beyond
this example, this actually entails a structural problem: the US blocking or
producing a gridlock in international organizations, because the Congress is
hostile to international organizations, because Congress sees it to imply a
loss of US sovereignty. The only way to end this gridlock is to end the US veto
in the Fund and the Bank, but the problem is that the US can veto any measures.



One response of the big
developing countries is to create bypass organizations—such as the Asian
Infrastructure Investment Banks, such as the new Development Bank, such as the
Contingent Reserve arrangement the BRICs have established, and then a growing
number of sort of regional development banks. And I think that that is a good
thing, but it does raise questions about coordination, about who is looking
after, if you will, the global interests, global issues such as climate change.
In short, we need a genuine World Bank, rather than the American-Bank-in-the-World
we have today.



You engage thoroughly with economics and
economic theory. Now there seem to be two kinds of critical approaches to
economics in IPE: one criticizes its rationality as flawed, and another buys
into its rationality but attempts to point out where actual policy gets it
wrong. Where do you stand in this?



If you take the example of
how the EU attempted to impose fiscal rules on Greece, you see a notion of
rationality which draws upon these very primitive notions that I referred to
right at the beginning, where the government is just a household writ large,
and the same set of rules that apply to the budgeting of the household must
apply to the government as well. Here, the assumption is that any macroeconomic
proposition must have microeconomic foundations, that it must be derivable from
propositions about microeconomic agents acting in this sort of self-maximizing
way, and if you cannot derive macroeconomic propositions from those micro
foundations, then there is something unreliable, un-rigorous about your macroeconomics.
So what are then the sources of these micro-economic assumptions?



This leads us to one
fundamental and almost completely unaddressed weaknesses of economics can be
traced back to the Marginal Revolution in the late 19th
century. From that moment onwards, there has been an attempt to model economics
on physics, and that was very explicit on the part of people like Pareto and
Walras, and Jevons, early Marginalist thinkers. They even drew up tables with
terms of physics, like velocity, on one side, and then corresponding terms in
economics on the other. That had a huge benefit in terms of the 'science' of
economics, because it cut economics loose from Adam Smith's and other classical
economists' preoccupations with issues of morality and ethics. Adam Smith
thought his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but his Theory of Moral Sentiments, on which he was working,
revising yet again, when he died. For Smith, economics and morals were never
separate worlds, but intimately related. So for him, the Theory of Moral
Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations were just twins. The point
about the marginalist revolution, and the embrace of physics as the model, was
that it cut economics free of all that sort of subjective stuff about values. So
economics after the marginalist revolution set off with the assumption that not
production, but the movement of individuals in markets engaged in trading with
each other became the center of gravity of economics. Making the study of exchange
rather than the study of production central was analogous to, say, Boyle's Law
in physics. Boyle's Law in physics explained the
movement of molecules in gasses, as a function of the pressure applied to the
gas. So why did they make that analogy?



The point of likening of
individuals in microeconomic actions with molecules in gasses was the
following. Everybody knows that we do not apply any consideration of
ethics or moral sentiments to the movement of the molecules in gas, so neither should
we apply any notions of ethics or moral sentiments to the movements of
individuals in market exchanges. And that was the way that all considerations
of ethics, of morality were just removed from economics. I for instance asked the
question to well-known American growth theorist, as we were walking down the
street in Providence at Brown University: 'is it moral for people to freeride?'
And he said, 'yes of course, provided they do not break the law'. So ethics and
questions of morality have been almost completely expunged from economics in a
way that would horrify classical economists including Smith; and a particular idea
of rationality has been an important part of cleansing economics from those
moral considerations. George DeMartino, editor of the Oxford Handbook of
Professional Economics Ethics which just appeared has a wonderful phrase to
capture this—'econogenic harm': the harm built into the way that economics,
professional economists work.





Haven't specific fields, like development
economics—a field you engage with yourself—advanced to overcome these
weaknesses in economic theory?



Let me root my answer again
in observations about the linkages between theory and practice, for it is in
practice that economic theory really does its work and its politics becomes
visible. It always amazes me we have had a development industry in place for
roughly the past 70 years with vast numbers of people, organizations, money all
orchestrated underneath this umbrella of development; yet if you go back and
read what the early writers about development and economic growth said—I am
thinking of people like Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Myrdal, Hirschman, Prebisch, but also Moses Abramovitz. If you go back and look
at what they were saying, it seems to me that we have not advanced all that
much. Sure, we have advanced a lot in terms of econometric techniques, but in
terms of substance we have not. One conclusion I draw from that is that it is
really important that international regimes—for example, World Bank and IMF
loan conditions, but also WTO regimes—give room for experimentation, because it
is really not the case that 'there is no alternative'. This Washington
Consensus agenda has clearly not been effective in accelerating production,
upgrading it, and production diversification, or export upgrading, or export
diversification. So, there should be written into the regimes a lot of room for
experimentation. But this isn't there because of the political origin of these
regimes; because of what western countries want for the rest world, namely, to
open the rest of the world to their markets.



In the 80s there were a lot
of experts in industrial development in the World Bank and they did good work,
promoting industrial growth and investment in productive infrastructure. But
then Anne Krueger came in as chief economist, and brought in a whole lot of
people with her—who, like here, were arch-neoliberals. The industrial growth
people were invited to find employment elsewhere, or to rebrand themselves as
experts in who knows what, environmental assessment, primary education, or good
governance. There was no room for them. This also fitted well with some bad
experiences the Bank had had with investing in infrastructure. It had gotten
into a lot of trouble with large-scale infrastructural interventions such as
roads and dams and the like from, especially, US NGOs mobilizing Congress—which
then put pressure on the Treasury and so on. My lament throughout this whole
conversation has been that we seem to have become just locked into this
direction that was set in the 1980s, and it is very difficult to see what kind
of economic catastrophe would be necessary to give a sufficient shock to
reroute the global system of economic governance.



So after the 1980s, the
Bank sort of backed off and began saying that development, economic
development, was about poverty reduction—the slogan of the Bank became, 'our
dream is a world free of poverty'. You can understand that shift partly in
terms of pulling out of the concern with production to get into safe territory,
but also because poverty reduction seemed to sort of take care of inequality,
because you reduced inequality to poverty—to the poor 'over there', and we can
feel good about helping them; but we do not want talk about inequality, which
involves us, because then there is the question of justice of our income.



But then the most recent
turn is that we're seeing a renewed push for infrastructure in the World Bank
and western development agencies. I think that you can link this recent
infrastructure push to uncertainty about the sources of economic growth. In the
West there is a real question about sustaining economic growth without housing
bubbles and stock market bubbles—in other words, without endogenously building
financial instability. There may well be a similar sort of issue in terms of
the growth of developing countries.





Last question. Adam Smith seems to be
constantly present in your work as a critical interlocutor. How come?



I kind of engage in a
critical debate with Adam Smith, but especially with people today, who believe
his ideas. I often start to frame arguments in terms of his famous 40 word
summary of the causes of the relative wealth of nations, which he actually
wrote in 1755, which is to say long before the first edition of the Wealth
of Nations. I will just tell you what these 40 words say, and then I will
tell you the significance of them. He said:



'Little else is
requisite to carry a state to the highest degree
of opulence from the lowest
barbarism than peace, easy taxes, and tolerable
administration of justice; all the rest being
brought about by the natural course of things.'



So I am struck by how today
many economists say or imply that this is essentially right; you need some
qualifications of course, but essentially that is the nub of it. You might have
to translate peace, easy taxes, tolerable administration of justice into more
modern terms, but that is the essence of it. For example, Gregory
Mankiw—Professor of economics at Harvard, former chair of the National Council
of Economic Advisers during the Bush administration, and author of a very
popular textbook in economics—said in the Wall Street Journal in 2006: Adam Smith was right to
say that – and then he gave the 40 word quote. The renowned economists Timothy
Besley and Torsten Persson wrote Pillars of Prosperity, which also
begins with Smith's 40 words, and they even see the book as a kind of
elaboration, but in that same kind of spirit, of Smith's basic idea. So my
point is that these ideas are still current; they are still the sort of front
of a lot of neoliberal thinking. I am just astonished these ideas all these
centuries later remain so powerful. I have had at the back of my mind the idea
of organizing an international competition to provide a contemporary 40 word
statement, which is sort of equivalent to Smith's, which would obviously have
to be of a more global character, encompassing the globalized world economy.







Robert Hunter Wade worked at the Institute of
Development Studies, Sussex, 1972-95, World Bank, 1984-88, Princeton Woodrow
Wilson School 1989/90, MIT Sloan School 1992, Brown University 1996-2000.
Fellow of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 1992/93, Russell Sage
Foundation 1997/98, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin 2000/01. Fieldwork in
Pitcairn Is., Italy, India, Korea, Taiwan. Research on World Bank
1995-continuing. Author of Irrigation and Politics in South Korea (1982), Village
Republics: The Economic Conditions of Collective Action in India (1988,
1994), Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government
in East Asia's Industrialization (1990, 2003). Latter won American
Political Science Association's award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992.



Related links





Faculty profile at LSE
Read Wade's The Piketty
phenomenon and the future of inequality (2014, real-world economics review)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Capitalism
and Democracy at Cross-Purposes (2013, Challenge) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Rethinking
Industrial Policy for Low Income Countries (2007 ADB Conference paper) here
(pdf) 
Read Wade's Bringing the
State Back In (2005, IPG) here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Is
Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality? (2004, World Development)
here (pdf) 
Read Wade's Creating
Capitalisms (Introduction to 2003 book 'Governing the Market') here (pdf) 


Print version of this Talk (pdf)

NDI President Derek Mitchell and NDI Board Chairman Secretary Madeleine Albright talk about her new book Hell and Other Destinations, and her experiences as Secretary of State. She reflects on U.S. foreign policy, democratic trends, and her hopes for the future.

This podcast was recorded May 27, 2020, prior to demonstrations in support of racial equality across the United States.

Find us on: SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | Google Play

Derek Mitchell: Hello. Welcome to DemWorks. My name is Derek Mitchell, president of the National Democratic Institute.
We indeed are honored to once again to have Secretary Albright join us. Madam Secretary first, thank you again very much for doing this. Do you want to share some opening thoughts? I want to turn it over to you. Perhaps some things that have happened since we last got together about a month back.
Secretary Albright: Terrific. Thank you very much, Derek. Two important meetings I've participated in the past weeks. What was very interesting, it was the ... First was a virtual hearing convened by the house foreign affairs committee. They couldn't have testimony, so this was a briefing, and I did it alongside Derek and Dan Twining from IRI, and the subject was authoritarianism, disinformation and good governance during COVID-19. And this was the first time that the committee had done this kind of a hearing, And I think it's a very important signal that they chose to focus on the subject of democracy. And I think that it's a great tribute to NDI that we were the first organization asked to debrief the committee.
What is very, I think, positive is that leaders in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats recognize that good governance is critical to responding to the pandemic. And they know that NDI therefore has a key role to play in helping the world overcome the challenge and others like it.
DM: We discussed it at that last town hall, featuring our chairman about how she was on the cusp of releasing a new memoir about her life. This one being about her very eventful life after leaving her job as the first woman vice secretary of state. Hell and Other Destinations was released in mid April. During my time in doors last month, I read her book and it really is funny, a funny and fascinating read. So my intention today is to open up another conversation with our chairman and do so first by asking some questions based on themes from her life that she discusses in her book.
You said in your book that everyone should write a memoir. Why do you say that? And do you, or did you, have you kept a journal yourself?
SA: Well let me say this. I have thought, because basically I come from an academic background that when one looks at what happened in a certain period of history, it's very important to read people's memoirs. Now what I have found as I've analyzed memoirs, and I have, is that people write it from a different perspective. And so it's important because often we disagree on the context or what we did or what our role was. But I think it is interesting to kind of have the memoirs and it's really worth the doing. And I think especially people that have been in public positions, but everybody, I think in terms of ...
So let me just say, I have tried over the years to keep a journal. And I haven't really, because at a certain stage I was made much ... Obviously when I was young and had met a lot of people, I thought, "Isn't this great. I have to write about it." And then it always kind of stops after one month. Then, I did actually not keep a journal when I was in the government, because as we know ... I don't know if you remember, everything was being subpoenaed. But I had a lot of scratchy notes. And then what happened as I was writing Madam Secretary initially, was that when I found the schedule it was like the Rosetta Stone, because I could identify what the scratchy notes actually has something to do with. But embarrassingly, my mind would wander, and all of a sudden in the middle of my scratchy notes it was say, "Buy yogurt." And so I was multitasking even then, but I didn't keep a journal. And in many ways I wish I did, but there are so many records of the kinds of things that we all did together that I think my memoirs have been fairly complete.
DM: I felt one of the most poignant chapters in the book was the story about how you discovered your maternal grandmother's journal. It was about five or six years ago while you're going through your father's artifacts. And it turned out your grandmother had been killed in the Holocaust in 1942, and the journal, you have excerpts with the journal in the back of the book and it was written as a kind of dialogue she had ... She wanted to have with your mother and maybe with you while you're all in England. It also reads like kind of a lonely mother who wanted to connect with an absent family alone and isolated and Czechoslovakia, as things happened around her. Dangerous world was swirling in 1942 ... Well, really it started in 42 for her in that journal.
Can you talk a bit about the experience of discovering this journal, and through it your grandmother, so late and what it meant to you? Because we're also being isolated with things swirling out our doors, but also just what it meant to you to discover this and discover your grandmother so late.
SA: Well, thank you for asking that. And I ... Just for people that don't know my story, I was raised a Catholic, married and Episcopalian, and found out I was Jewish. So I can have my religious discussions sitting in a corner. But basically, I did not know about my Jewish background until 1996. And I had gotten a letter from somebody that had the names of the villages and my grandparents' names and dates right, and that was just as I was being vetted to be secretary of state, and the White House lawyer asked all the questions about taxes and nannies and stuff, but then he said, "We always ask this question of everybody. Is there anything you'd like to tell us that we didn't ask you?" And I said, "Well, it's perfectly possible I'm of Jewish background." And they said, "So what? The president is not antisemitic."
And it was only later when I was already an office that I was visited by some reporters who started giving me this disgusting index cards. These Nazis were very good record keepers and they had names of my relatives that have been sent to concentration camps. So to get to the journal part of it is my parents, we left Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, or escaped frankly. My father was in the Czechoslovak diplomatic service, and we escaped to England. And they ... When I think about all the things that happened, I find it harder and harder to get my head around it.
My parents were in their 30s, they left their families behind and went to England, where they were isolated in many different ways. We came back and I won't go through the whole story, but my father died in 1997 and he had lots of papers, and then my mother moved to Washington and she brought all his stuff with her. And when she died, all of a sudden all of it got transferred to me. And I had some hesitation in looking at anything, frankly, because of how the memories, but then what happened is when I became a public official diplomatic security moved into in my garage and were around all the time and there were all these boxes. And they said, "You've got to put these in storage." So I put all these boxes into storage and I didn't look at them, and it wasn't until 2015 that I had to find something and I went to the storage and I start poking through the boxes. And all of a sudden, there's this old envelope, and inside it is a diary. A journal. And it kind of blows my mind.
I look at it, obviously it's a ... And it's from my grandmother, and it is something that she wrote to ... They were letters to my mother describing what was going on. And it was kind of an interesting mixture of just day to day kind of things. "I did this, I washed my hair and I went shopping." And then all of a sudden it began to say things like, "They're talking about Aryans and non Aryans. I've never heard that distinction," she says. And goes through the kinds of things that the Jews in the town we're not able to shop in a variety of places. Oh, they had to give up all their warm clothes to the Nazi soldiers, and ... Just stunning. And in the middle it would say things, "How was it [Mudlanka 00:08:45]?" Which was me. "She's so cute." And it just was unbelievable.
And it was really like a message in a bottle where all of a sudden it's hearing from a previous generation in terms of their hopes and their wishes. And obviously in the most incredibly complex time. And the other thing I try to figure out, how my mother even got this and I've tried to put together what the path of it was and how stunned she must've been when it showed up. And so I have translated it, and it is in the book. But it's really very meaningful and it has hope in it, which I think is such an important part. And one of my messages just generally is that we can't control everything around us. We can only control our behavior. And I think that that's something that also came through in my grandmother's journal.
DM: It also is you talked about the various identities you have in a way as a Catholic Episcopalian Jew, in terms of heritage. And that issue of identity is a big one that we work with at NDI. And there's a big question for nations nowadays, given your past and your family, that of your family, how has the question of identity shaped you?
SA: Well, I have definitely been a lot of different things. As a child, we spent the war in England then went back to Czechoslovakia briefly, and then my father was made ambassador to Yugoslavia. I think some of you've heard me tell this. The little girl in the national costume that gave flowers at the airport, that's what I did for a living. My father didn't want me going to school with communists, so I had a governess. And then I got ahead of myself, and as people know in Europe, you have to be a certain age to get into the next level. So my parents sent me to school in Switzerland, where I was finally told how I should spell my name, because my mother used to pronounce it [Mudlan 00:00:10:44]. And so anyway, I have the French spelling and I learned to speak French. And then we come to the United States.
And so I was recently asked to describe myself in six words, and it is, worried optimist, problem-solver, and grateful American. And I think those are my identities and I'm grateful to be an American, but I'm also grateful for the background that I've had in terms of trying to understand how other people see themselves. I do think identity is important. I think we all want to know who we are. We may get surprised, but it's worth it knowing. What I don't like, and this is what troubles me and I wrote about this in my previous book on fascism is when my identity hates your identity, because that then is obviously very divisive. And it's one thing to be proud of your identity, it's another, hyper nationalism, which we're seeing that is undercutting everything. And we know that the virus knows no borders. So there are an awful lot of paradoxes that are going on now in terms of wanting to know who you are, but not thinking that you're better than everybody else.
And my, as I describe, authoritarian leaders and fascists, I begin with Mussolini. It's a matter of the leader identifying himself. And by the way, they're all his, with one group at the expense of another and makes them scapegoats. And that's why I'm very troubled by the divisions that are being exacerbated now.
DM: There's individual identity and there's national identity. And the national identity, as you say, that's most pernicious is an exclusive identity, rather than an inclusive identity, which is what we're all about. We're all about an inclusive identity. We're all treated equally. And these authoritarians are about identifying those exclusive identities, us and them, that tear countries apart and create the instability and insecurity that results. So this is a key part of what we do, I think absolutely.
During the writing process, we you able to identify the moment in your life when you knew what your life purpose was? At what point did you know what Mark you wanted to leave in this world?
SA: And it's a hard question to answer, because I do think that one of the things that was a motivating factor for me growing up was that I was, and am, a grateful American, and wanted to give back in some form. I also ... My father had, obviously, a great influence on me. So did my mother, and my father kept saying that Americans are taking democracy for granted. We had just left the country of our birth twice. Once because of the Nazis and then because of the communists. And the fragility of democracy. And so I looked at trying to figure out, in looking back, what were the different methods that I thought I could use to give back to America?
By the way, it never occurred to me that I would be secretary of state. There's some people who think I planned that. Never. But I do think that I wanted to have some kind of a role where I was able to talk about the necessity of supporting democracy. And I got fascinated by the UN because that's what brought us to America. And so kind of looking at institutional structures, but it never, never occurred to me. Nor did it occur to me, frankly, that I would be able to have a post secretary of state life, where I was able to put together the various things that I was interested in.
What I tried to do always is to make whatever I was doing next more interesting than what I'd done before. Not easy if you've been secretary of state, but the reason I wanted to write this book was to show how the various things that I got involved in related to each other and how I learned from one thing to another. My greatest talent, frankly, is dot connection, of trying to figure out how one thing relates to another.
I do want to talk about one specific moment that's so stands out. My favorite thing to do is to give naturalization certificates at the ceremonies. And so the first time I did it was July 4th, 2000 at Monticello, and I'm handing out a certificate and I hear this man. He goes away and he says, "Can you believe I'm a refugee, and I just got my naturalization certificate from the secretary of state?" And I go up to him and I say, "Can you believe that a refugee is secretary of state?" And I so believe in what America stands for and what we can do to be helpful to others, which is why I say that at this moment, the statue of Liberty is weeping.
DM: Our research in Ukraine has uncovered historical memory as a significant target of Russian information attacks. Ukrainians appear to be vulnerable to attacks that speak to evoke nostalgia for the economic stability of the Soviet period. These attacks exploit an actual democratic challenge for Ukraine, which is an economy that is not working for all citizens. In the US, what vulnerabilities do you worry similar information attacks could seek to exploit.
SA: I do think that I have been ... I love history. When I teach at Georgetown, I always try to put everything into historical context. And I have to say what I was just doing before we started this discussion was watching a program about a project in the United States about slavery. And there's ... The New York Times was doing something called 16 19, and there were some very strong arguments on Morning Joe this morning about this, between those who recollect history differently, or are trying to use it in particular ways for political movement, which we do. And I think people do that in terms of understanding what their history means.
And then one of the people there said, "History is to be argued about," which I find interesting because you kind of think, "Okay, well, we know what history is." But it goes back to your first question, Derek, about writing memoirs. Because people have different ideas of their history. I think the question is, do you have a society where you can dispute the history? And the Ukrainian one is clearly unbelievably complicated, in terms of that a modern Russia comes out of Ukraine, and that that relationship and Ukraine itself is a complicated country in terms of East and West and religion, and the aspect of communism that gave people a certain sense of understanding what the system was. They might not have gotten the kinds of things ...
Not everybody just wants the freedom to talk. Some of them want to be able to what their history is about. Are they going to have retirement? What group do they belong to? Can they send their kids to school? And I found this in a lot of research that I did about central and Eastern Europe at the time, right after the fall of the wall. What is it that the people thought that they ... What was communism and what were the possibilities of democracy? And I do think that Ukraine is one of the more complex countries, and the fact that it has been invaded, and the fact that the economic situation is something that is being pushed by the Russian hacking and the way that they operate, and their way of trying to divide us and divide Ukrainians from each other.
DM: Rebuilding a United Europe was one of the success stories of the second part of the 20th century. The last few years have seen the foundations of Europe shake with Brexit and the rise of authoritarian populace. How do we ensure that the European project continues as a liberal democratic one?
SA: I think that it is something that I ... I keep going back, trying to figure out what went wrong. Why did this happen? And I think partially we didn't appreciate enough the problems of societies that had been under communism for 50 years, and that it was much ... We spent a lot of time, I think, with a lot of the wonderful dissidents and intellectuals, and didn't think enough about how it affected the people that had had jobs. I mentioned that a little bit. And I think that also there are the issues now of this identity and the hyper nationalism, and that has been created to some extent in Europe, by the differences in the economic lives of, initially, Northern and Southern Europe, and trying to figure out why some were doing better than others, which then did lead to the fact that there were some leaders like Orban and the Poles that started blaming the other. And that was the most evident in many ways in why Brexit happened.
So these are big trends. I happen to believe in a European Union, but I think that as a structure, it also needs some fixing in terms of how it works with the different economic situations in the central and eastern European countries.
DM: In your book, you speak about how you dealt with misogyny as you progressed in your career. Can you share what helped to keep you steadfast in fighting this prejudice?
SA: I think that what is interesting ... And I often say that I went to college sometime between the invention of the iPad and the discovery of fire, but here it was a women's college. And basically we were told by our commencement speaker to get married and raise children. And I think that what I've been trying to do is to understand why women, why we're so hard on ... Tough on each other in terms of being very judgmental or finding our own inadequacies and other women. And so I have been very much for having ... Creating groups of women that can support each other.
And that is why I think it is so important, the kind of things that NDI is doing, in terms of working with women, to make sure that they are participants in society, run for office, and are respected. And I'd love talking about the fact now that the countries that are doing best on dealing with the coronavirus are ones that are run by women. New Zealand, Taiwan, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Iceland. And I think trying to make clear what the characteristics are of women that make that possible in terms of multitasking, of caring, not setting their children against each other, but you have to keep ... I do think that what is important is for women to support each other, and so that you're not the only woman in the room.
DM: Sometimes moments of crisis and trial like this pandemic lead to better things. What are your hopes in that regard? And also what is the significance of today's pin?
SA: My hope, this is where my optimism comes from, our young people. I love learning from my students, and students that are particularly interested in foreign policy and diplomacy. Many of whom have traveled and they speak different languages and they certainly are tech literate. And I think that they question ... I think the important part for all of us as a democracy organization is to make sure that they participate, that they do vote, that they are interested in the institutional structures in the countries where they are. But that is definitely what gives me hope. And not ...
And I think it's very important, and I say this wherever I can, that democracy is not a spectator sport. It is something that the people need to be involved in. They need to be informed. They need to be respected. And I think the other part that I often talk about, and this is so true of NDI activities, is to spend time with people with whom you disagree and try to figure out where they're coming from, and understand what their needs are, and have a dialogue with civil society, and then understand the various institutions that are important. But definitely what makes me hopeful, our young people.
DM: On this issue of hopes of how moments of crisis and trial can lead to better things, I do think that's a very important question. I really hope that moments of trial by fire are sometimes very important, to set priorities to remember what's important, and to tell you how precarious things always are. I think we can get kind of complacent about things, as we are as a country, or we as individuals, that everything is going to be simply easy. I'm sure it's not easy for any of us. I'm sure many people have gone through lots of trials in their lives, as we all have. But crises can be moments where we focus on how ... Okay, we take stock of where our priorities are, and what kind of choices we want to make, which is what Madame Secretary said. Not just ... Crisis don't just happen to you, you also have a choice in how you respond to that crisis, both individually and as a collective, as a country, as a unit.
So I do think it's an opportunity and I'm certainly seeing that NDI of having better communication and doing more to force change, even potentially in culture because of this moment that's quite different than we've ever experienced. So we should be thinking in those terms. What are the things that we can do to take advantage of this moment, even when there's a lot of stress and anxiety? To take advantage of the opportunity as well. And that's my hope for all of us at NDI, again, as an organization and individually, that we can do that. And I think we can come out better on the back end if we go through it together on those terms.
SA: One of my heroes was Harry Truman. He was my first American president. We came to the United States, November 11th, 1948. He is the one that understood, to a great extent, America's role in the world, a democracy. And understand linking domestic to foreign policy. But I think there's so many other people that I have admired. I admire the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, who married an American. And the first Czechoslovak constitution was modeled on the American one with one difference. It had a women's rights in it in 1918.
And so I think that one can have more than one hero, and I think it's important to point them out and to understand that people have gone through very difficult periods before. And I do think that what is important is to really be proud of things that we can do, and the thing that I personally am proudest of, because it put things together and how I used representing the United States was what we were able to do to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And going there with President Clinton made a big difference cause they kept saying, "We were just there. We are so grateful to the United States."
DM: Well Madam Secretary, let me just close the book conversation with a quote from the book that I saw that I just want to share with everybody that you say at the end. I think it's in the acknowledgements at the end. The central theme of this book is about how people of all descriptions can work together for common goals against the background of accelerating history. It is about trying to make sense of the world we have while attempting to contribute to something better. Madam Secretary and everybody out there, stay safe, be well. Thank you all. Have a good day, and we'll talk again soon.
SA: Thank you so much for everything that you do. Thank you.
DM: Please visit our website at www.ndi.org. Thanks very much.

NDI Board Chairman Secretary Madeleine Albright



Derek Mitchell & Secretary Madeleine Albright on her past and democracy's future

Democracy (General), Podcast Listen Secretary Albright Madeleine AlbrightCountries: All Regions