Jan 14, 2011
A book based on interviews that probe Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew on his core beliefs will hit bookstores from next Friday. Elgin Toh speaks to the team of Straits Times journalists involved to piece together the story behind the book, Hard Truths.
DEC 22, 2008.
Seven journalists met in The Straits Times newsroom for a last-minute powwow on battle plans.
They were fine-tuning questions for an interview on the issues of leadership, talent recruitment and ministerial salaries. They discussed interview techniques. Mr Han Fook Kwang, 57, the editor of ST who led the team, would sit across the table from the interview subject. He would be flanked by deputy editor Zuraidah Ibrahim, 46, on one side, and on the other, by the writer tasked to write the chapter, deputy political editor Lydia Lim, 39.
Mr Han would be direct in the line of fire in case of verbal ripostes. 'We'll be right behind you,' quipped deputy review editor Chua Mui Hoong, 42.
The team had spent over four months preparing for this encounter with their interview subject: Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, now 87, Singapore's founding prime minister.
The encounter would be the beginning of 16 interviews for a book project. The format was deliberately adversarial. The ST team would pose hard questions and challenge Mr Lee's assumptions on core issues on Singapore and the world, and Mr Lee would answer and rebut them.
The ST team knew they faced a formidable opponent. The towering figure in Singapore's development had everything a politician could possibly ask for: oratorical skill, cerebral prowess and unflagging popular support. He had more than 50 years of experience and insight leading a country. And he had a reputation not only for speaking his mind, but also for not suffering fools gladly - and was known to tear to shreds not only arguments put to him, but also occasionally, the person who happened to be making them.
It had taken four months of painstaking work to prepare for the series of interviews which stretched from December 2008 to October 2009. Reporters Rachel Lin, 25, and Robin Chan, 27, pored through books and articles on Singapore and Mr Lee. Together with the other writers, they organised focus-group discussions and interviewed more than 200 Singaporeans.
Among them were academics and economists. News editor and former Money desk editor Ignatius Low, 38, and Mr Chan spoke separately with five leading economists here. Recalled Mr Chan: 'They helped us break down the fundamental structure of the Singapore economy and analyse alternative growth models.'
Some big themes that cropped up: Were the poor getting left behind? How many foreigners would be enough? Is Singapore overly dependent on multinational corporations?
'We gathered all their arguments and drafted 10 pages of questions just on the economy,' said Mr Chan.
Good, pertinent questions came not just from the experts. The authors made it a point to meet, in focus groups, ordinary, young Singaporeans.
Said Ms Lim: 'We asked them what questions they would ask Mr Lee if they had the chance, no matter how trivial or stupid they thought the questions were.'
In hindsight, these were the exchanges that churned out many pointed questions, said Ms Lin. 'The young Singaporeans were less willing to take political assumptions at their face value. They were a bit more brash in the way they stated their opposition.'
Said Ms Zuraidah: 'From all these varied discussions, we came up with a strong mix of questions, reflective of the dilemmas our society finds itself confronting.
'Of course, as reporters, we also wanted scoops and so we added questions that would unearth new stories and revelations from MM.'
The team arrived at the Istana in the late afternoon. They were taken to a waiting room, where Mr Lee's principal private secretary Chee Hong Tat and press secretary Yeong Yoon Ying joined them. A uniformed butler poured a round of piping hot fragrant Chinese tea. Nervous banter ensued.
Like troops girding for battle, each prepared in his or her personal way for the coming two-hour verbal joust.
Mr Han braced himself mentally. Ms Lim flipped through her notes. Ms Zuraidah checked her tape recorder and lined up two pens, black for writing and red to underline quotable quotes. She hoped there would be a lot of red used. Ms Chua practised diaphragmatic breathing. Mr Low remembered the advice he had been given by folk who had dealt with the mercurial interviewee: Count to five after he finishes speaking, before asking the next question.
The younger ones tried not to think of apocryphal stories they had heard - of people who quailed in front of Mr Lee, or worse, stood up to him and were rumoured to be doomed to lacklustre careers ever after.
The team went into the wood-panelled Cabinet room, so called because it was where Cabinet meetings are usually held. A long, oval table dominated the space. Mr Lee would sit across the team, with Mr Chee and Madam Yeong around him.
A lift took Mr Lee from his office straight into the Cabinet room. He walked in, steady and slow, puffing out his cheeks in his trademark manner. He sat down and settled himself.
Mr Han leaned forward and started.
'The interviews did not get off to a good start,' said Ms Stephanie Yeow.
The 39-year-old deputy picture editor of ST was the photographer present at all 16 interviews.
'The air was tense, especially at the first interview,' she said. 'Mr Lee was a bit impatient. But as the interviews got on, he warmed up to us.'
Ms Yeow was accompanied by her colleagues who shot the video footage of the interviews: Mr Kemburaju Thangarajan, 52, and Mr T. Kumar, 47. The three would always arrive at the Cabinet room - or the Sheares room depending on where the interview was held - two hours ahead of time to set up the equipment.
The project had actually begun in August 2008, when Mr Lee rang Mr Han one evening to say he had written drafts of chapters for a third volume of his memoirs, after The Singapore Story (1998), and From Third World To First (2000).
Mr Lee wanted a new book - a platform to convince younger Singaporeans of the country's quintessentially unique qualities, of its inherent vulnerability despite its successful present, and of the need to remain 'sturdy and robust' both economically and militarily, to avoid jeopardy.
He asked for Mr Han's opinion on the draft chapters. Mr Han went over them and consulted his colleagues at ST before reverting to him.
Speaking to Insight via e-mail, Mr Lee said: 'They told me that in this format young Singaporeans will not read it. They suggested that I answer questions a team of reporters put to me that the young want to know.'
Once he agreed, he embraced the question-and-answer format.
'Do not fear putting hard questions,' Mr Lee told the group. The remark would later prompt them internally to codename the project 'ST Ask Anything'.
Mr Han assembled a team from The Straits Times newsroom.
'I wanted to field some of our best writers who could make this cut-and-thrust approach work. We needed strong interviewers and writers who could give a fresh spin to Mr Lee's views and make them come alive in the book.
'We also wanted a book that will connect with young Singaporeans, so we selected two younger journalists, Rachel and Robin, who understood their perspectives better.'
Then began the frenetic period of preparatory research and brainstorming of questions, ahead of the interviews. The team started with the idea of organising the interviews around '10 key questions you would want to ask LKY'.
This quickly ballooned during brainstorming sessions into 10 broad topics. Eventually, the team settled for 11 areas of questioning: Singapore's fundamentals, leadership, politics, economics, welfare, the environment, geopolitics, foreigners, race and religion, family, and young Singaporeans.
Mr Lee was a combative, at times testy, interviewee. He was familiar with most, if not all, of the lines of arguments, after more than five decades in politics. Sometimes, he would dismiss them out of hand. Other times, he would hit back with full argumentative force.
Ms Lin described one particularly vigorous outburst from Mr Lee that 'left all of us shell-shocked'.
One of the journalists tried to submit to Mr Lee that the younger generation of Singaporeans was not quite convinced that Singapore was as vulnerable militarily as Mr Lee would suggest.
'And he just blew up,' said Ms Lin.
'He said: 'You tell me we're not vulnerable? God! What do we spend all this money on defence for? Are we mad?''
The sheer store of information at his disposal was also overpowering.
'He has amassed this huge store of knowledge - from reading, experience from governing, the meetings he's had with other world leaders, and the corporate boards he has been on. And he can wield this anecdote or that factoid, just like that. So it became doubly intimidating,' said Mr Low.
Nevertheless, the debates were free-flowing, with writers not hesitating to jump in to challenge the assumptions behind Mr Lee's remarks.
As the book will show, the reporters often persisted politely but doggedly with pointed questions, prompting an irate Mr Lee to say, in response to probing on whether Singapore could afford to be more generous in its welfare policy: 'For 50 years, I've tried to pilot my way through. Did it succeed?
'You won't convince me. Whether I convince you or not is irrelevant to me because I know these are the real facts. You're not going to shift me. And if the ministers believe like you would, then they are going to waste a lot of time and money, that's all.'
Sometimes, things even got a little personal.
Mr Lee once went round the table asking his interviewers: Where do you live? Are you married?
He asked Mr Chan his age (26 then) and retorted that if Mr Chan still felt the same way at 46, then he would not have learnt much. He asked Mr Han if he had daughters, and how he would feel if his daughter came back to say she wanted to marry a black man. During the interviews on race and religion, he asked Ms Zuraidah, the only Malay-Muslim in the group, about her faith.
Such personal scrutiny, and Mr Lee's piercing direct gaze as he listens to your question or answers it, is disconcerting to those unused to him, said Ms Chua.
'But you have to realise that it is not targeted at you, but your viewpoint. And you will also have to learn to respond not to him personally, but to the substance of his argument,' she said.
On the robust nature of his rebuttals, Mr Han said: 'That is what makes Mr Lee a very interesting person from a journalist's perspective. At the end of the day, it is never just an intellectual argument for him. It is about the welfare of millions of Singaporeans, and so it becomes a matter of life and death.'
Quite often throughout the interviews, Mr Lee would reveal gems of previously unreported information. Putting aside views on issues and policies, the writers found most memorable the glimpses Mr Lee gave into his personal and family life.
Said Ms Lim: 'I was struck when he said that his family and his country were the two most important things to him, and later when he said the happiest moment in his life was when he got his wife a scholarship at Cambridge so they could be together in the United Kingdom. It tells you that he brings the same determination and devotion to the two great commitments in his life.'
In a way, the book was overtaken by events when Mrs Lee died in October last year. The interviews had ended and the book was being written up and edited. Editors decided to run excerpts from the unpublished book in The Straits Times.
Mr Lee appeared frail during some interviews. He would be nursing a sprain from a fall or a bad throat, but would insist on going ahead as scheduled. He brought along his remedies: A heat pack for his injured thigh, a luminous strap for his aching back, and soothing mints for his sore throat.
Said Ms Zuraidah: 'Even then, whenever a question seized him, he would go at it, sharp as ever.'
Said Ms Lin: 'He would spray medication into his mouth, or have a heat pack tied around his thigh in front of everybody.
'And I'm thinking, this guy doesn't have anything to prove any more.'
'He knows it won't diminish his standing in our eyes at all.'
He was always courteous to those around him - the butler who brought him hot tea, his security officers, his secretaries, and the writers.
The conclusion of the 16th interview marked the start of the formal writing process. The writers pored through over 1,000 pages of transcripts. They chose the most interesting excerpts and wrote an introductory section for each chapter.
At the outset, the team decided to videotape all the interviews. The authors were quite aware that these were rare opportunities to record Mr Lee defending his record at this late stage in his political career. A DVD bundled with the book lets readers not only read Mr Lee's words but also hear and see him in action.
Ms Shirley Hew of The Straits Times Press - publisher of the book together with Singapore Press Holdings - and book editor Shova Lim proposed the book title Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going, a reference to Mr Lee's statements that there were hard facts about Singapore that made it essential for the country to have a stable, strong government.
Executive design artist Sally Lam, 42, designed the book cover, choosing contemporary fonts, a gentler picture of Mr Lee and a soft, olive green background.
'We wanted the book to appeal visually to the younger generation, so they would pick it up and read it,' she said.
The book will be launched next Friday by Mr Lee. Much of it is in racy Q&A style, with a short introductory segment per chapter. It promises a refreshing take on familiar topics such as politics, economics, race and religion, climate change and geopolitics, and also wanders into uncharted waters. Does he believe in astrology and fengshui? Or love at first sight?
Says Mr Han: 'There hasn't been a book like this where his views are subjected to such intense questioning and scrutiny. Mr Lee's views are quite controversial, and many people have issues with them. But whether you agree with him or not, you can't argue with the force of his conviction.
'I hope even his critics will read the book and judge for themselves whether those views make sense for Singapore.'
Would it become lost in the sea of existing literature on Mr Lee? Prominent statesmen who were shown the book ahead of its launch seemed to think there was enough to distinguish Hard Truths.
Said former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in a blurb for the book: 'The 32 hours of interviews that Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew gave are unprecedented in their candour and in the variety of issues discussed.'
President Lee Myung Bak of South Korea said: 'Lee speaks out his mind with clear, candid and forceful words that will surely have a strong and lasting impact on the readers.'
The two younger writers found plenty to disagree with: Ms Lin was put off by his almost radical views on genetics and Mr Chan was unconvinced by the need to keep political activism out of university campuses. But as Mr Chan said: 'If you want to improve things in Singapore, you really need to understand its founding philosophies, the principles that have taken us to where we are today. That's what the book will give you.'
Added Mr Low: 'I always believe that people have a grand theory on life, a worldview that holds everything together. This book is the Lee Kuan Yew grand theory on life and politics and love and government and everything. It is the most systematic collection of his views to date.'
As for the MM's own take on the book: His instruction to the ST team was to leave everything uncensored.
'Write it as you think is bearable.'
He added: 'I wanted to write a few chapters. You say no, no, nobody will read me because they know my stand. All right. We do it this way. They will read you. Then they will read me to know what I say, either summing you up or contradicting you, that's all. But I want them to know that these are hard truths.'
He had this parting shot for the writers:
'If I don't agree with you, I'll rebut it.'
elgintoh@sph.com.sg
Face to Face
'He holds very strongly to his views. And if you don't watch it, it can become a monologue, because he will hold forth and speak without interruption for 15, 20 minutes. That's not how we wanted to do the book. There has to be cut and thrust, we have to be challenging him.'
Mr Han Fook Kwang
'We asked him about a comment he made that he would rather be feared than loved. He said, 'Yes, if you're not feared, you say something, people don't notice. I'm not interested in being loved, what's the profit in that?' He always speaks his mind.'
Ms Lydia Lim
'Some people might think that the PAP is evolving with the times, and hence MM must surely have changed his views. People will be surprised to find that in many cases, he hasn't.'
Mr Ignatius Low
'It was an awesome experience. I got to learn a lot more about Singapore. Prior to this, I was quite apathetic about Singapore, but the interviews made me more patriotic.'
Ms Rachel Lin
'I asked him if he believed in love, and he said, 'Yes'. Then he told us about how he courted Mrs Lee. He's a sensitive guy, he was in love, and it was touching. It was good to know that beyond this guy who absolutely destroyed his opponents, he had that in him.'
Mr Robin Chan
'I came away reflecting that we are all engaged in this human endeavour to lead a good and purposeful life. For him, it was service to country and devotion to family. Isn't that what we all aim for? No matter our station in life, we all struggle with the challenge of how to lead a good life.'
Ms Chua Mui Hoong
'At 87, MM is still thinking hard about our collective future and how to keep the Singapore story going. You have to admire such dedication to a dream.'
Ms Zuraidah Ibrahim
Friday, January 14, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Unconventional Wisdom
A special anniversary report challenging the world's most dangerous thinking.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
In Foreign Policy's first issue, published at the height of American exhaustion with the war in Vietnam, founders Samuel P. Huntington and Warren D. Manshel promised to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy in Washington. And with provocative essays from the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith -- who famously coined the term "conventional wisdom" and spent a career fighting against it -- and Richard Holbrooke -- who as a serving Foreign Service officer ripped the State Department as "the machine that fails" -- an insurgency was born. Forty years later, upending assumptions is embedded in FP's DNA. In that spirit, we offer this, our 40th Anniversary package tackling the world's most dangerous conventional wisdoms.
* Economies Can't Just Keep On Growing, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
* Homeland Security Hasn't Made Us Safer, by Anne Applebaum
* China's Rise Doesn't Mean War…, by Joseph S. Nye Jr.
* …And China Isn't Beating the U.S., by Daniel W. Drezner
* Understanding History Won't Help Us Make Peace, by Aluf Benn
* America Pressures Israel Plenty, by Leslie H. Gelb
* Actually, the Retirement Age Is Too High, by James K. Galbraith
* The Rich Really Don't Care About the Poor, by Carl Pope
* The Global Economy Won't Recover, Now or Ever, by Immanuel Wallerstein
* Sovereignty Is Far From Dead, by Nina Hachigian
* Democracy Is Still Worth Fighting For, by Morton Halperin
* Sometimes, the Conventional Wisdom Is Right, by Stephen Sestanovich
Thomas Homer-Dixon
ECONOMIES CAN'T JUST KEEP ON GROWING
Humanity has made great strides over the past 2,000 years, and we often assume that our path, notwithstanding a few bumps along the way, goes ever upward. But we are wrong: Within this century, environmental and resource constraints will likely bring global economic growth to a halt.
Limits on available resources already restrict economic activity in many sectors, though their impact usually goes unacknowledged. Take rare-earth elements -- minerals and oxides essential to the manufacture of many technologies. When China recently stopped exporting them, sudden shortages threatened to crimp a wide range of industries. Most commentators believed that the supply crunch would ease once new (or mothballed) rare-earth mines are opened. But such optimism overlooks a fundamental physical reality. As the best bodies of ore are exhausted, miners move on to less concentrated deposits in more difficult natural circumstances. These mines cause more pollution and require more energy. In other words, opening new rare-earth mines outside China will result in staggering environmental impact.
Or consider petroleum, which provides about 40 percent of the world's commercial energy and more than 95 percent of its transportation energy. Oil companies generally have to work harder to get each new barrel of oil. The amount of energy they receive for each unit of energy they invest in drilling has dropped from 100 to 1 in Texas in the 1930s to about 15 to 1 in the continental United States today. The oil sands in Alberta, Canada, yield a return of only 4 to 1.
Coal and natural gas still have high energy yields. So, as oil becomes harder to get in coming decades, these energy sources will become increasingly vital to the global economy. But they're fossil fuels, and burning them generates climate-changing carbon dioxide. If the World Bank's projected rates for global economic growth hold steady, global output will have risen almost tenfold by 2100, to more than $600 trillion in today's dollars. So even if countries make dramatic reductions in carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, global carbon dioxide emissions will triple from today's level to more than 90 billion metric tons a year. Scientists tell us that tripling carbon emissions would cause such extreme heat waves, droughts, and storms that farmers would likely find they couldn't produce the food needed for the world's projected population of 9 billion people. Indeed, the economic damage caused by such climate change would probably, by itself, halt growth.
Humankind is in a box. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to satisfying the most basic requirements of human dignity. And in much wealthier societies, people need growth to pay off their debts, support liberty, and maintain civil peace. To produce and sustain this growth, they must expend vast amounts of energy. Yet our best energy source -- fossil fuel -- is the main thing contributing to climate change, and climate change, if unchecked, will halt growth.
We can't live with growth, and we can't live without it. This contradiction is humankind's biggest challenge this century, but as long as conventional wisdom holds that growth can continue forever, it's a challenge we can't possibly address.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is the CIGI chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada.
Anne Applebaum
HOMELAND SECURITY HASN'T MADE US SAFER
Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more -- presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer.
DHS serves only one clear purpose: to provide unimaginable bonanzas for favored congressional districts around the United States, most of which face no statistically significant security threat at all. One thinks of the $436,504 that the Blackfeet Nation of Montana received in fiscal 2010 "to help strengthen the nation against risks associated with potential terrorist attacks"; the $1,000,000 that the village of Poynette, Wisconsin (pop. 2,266) received in fiscal 2009 for an "emergency operations center"; or the $67,000 worth of surveillance equipment purchased by Marin County, California, and discovered, still in its original packaging, four years later. And indeed, every U.S. state, no matter how landlocked or underpopulated, receives, by law, a fixed percentage of homeland security spending every year.
As for the TSA, I am not aware of a single bomber or bomb plot stopped by its time-wasting procedures. In fact, TSA screeners consistently fail to spot the majority of fake "bombs" and bomb parts the agency periodically plants to test their skills. In Los Angeles, whose airport was targeted by the "millennium plot" on New Year's 2000, screeners failed some 75 percent of these tests.
Terrorists have been stopped since 2001 and plots prevented, but always by other means. After the Nigerian "underwear bomber" of Christmas Day 2009 was foiled, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed "the system worked" -- but the bomber was caught by a passenger, not the feds. Richard Reid, the 2001 shoe bomber, was undone by an alert stewardess who smelled something funny. The 2006 Heathrow Airport plot was uncovered by an intelligence tip. Al Qaeda's recent attempt to explode cargo planes was caught by a human intelligence source, not an X-ray machine. Yet the TSA responds to these events by placing restrictions on shoes, liquids, and now perhaps printer cartridges.
Given this reality -- and given that 9/11 was, above all, a massive intelligence failure -- wouldn't we be safer if the vast budgets of TSA and its partners around the world were diverted away from confiscating nail scissors and toward creating better information systems and better intelligence? Imagine if security officers in Amsterdam had been made aware of the warnings the underwear bomber's father gave to the U.S. Embassy in Abuja. Or, for that matter, if consular officers had prevented him from receiving a visa in the first place.
Better still, DHS could be broken up into its component parts, with special funding and planning carried out at the federal level only for cities and buildings that are actually at risk of terrorist attack. Here is the truth: New York City requires a lot more homeland security spending, per capita, than Poynette. Here is the even starker truth: Poynette needs no homeland security spending at all. The events of 9/11 did not prove that the United States needs to spend more on local police forces and fire brigades; they proved that Americans need to learn how to make better use of the information they have and apply it with speed and efficiency.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate.
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
CHINA'S RISE DOESN'T MEAN WAR…
Thucydides famously attributed the Peloponnesian War to the rise in power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. A century ago, Germany's rise and the fear it created in Britain helped cause World War I. Now, it's become a new conventional wisdom in some circles that China's rise and the fear it is creating in the United States -- where recent polls show 60 percent believe the country is in decline -- could doom the 21st century to a similar fate. As scholar John Mearsheimer has put it, China's rise cannot be peaceful.
One should be skeptical about such dire projections. Americans go through cycles of declinism every decade or so, but that tells us more about America's psychology than its power resources. Not only is the United States likely to remain the most powerful country in the first half of this century, but China still has a long way to go to catch up in military, economic, and soft power.
In contrast, Germany had already surpassed Britain in industrial power by 1900, and the kaiser was pursuing an adventurous, globally oriented foreign and military policy that was bound to bring about a clash. But China today has focused its policies primarily on its region and its own economic development. China's "market-Leninist" economic model is attractive in authoritarian countries, but this so-called Beijing Consensus has the opposite effect in most democracies.
And even if China's GDP passes U.S. GDP around 2027 (as Goldman Sachs now projects), the two economies would be equivalent in size, not equal in composition. China would still face massive rural poverty and enormous inequality, and it will begin to encounter demographic problems from the delayed effects of its one-child policy. Moreover, as countries develop, there is a natural tendency for growth rates to slow. By my calculations, if China's annual growth goes down to 6 percent and the U.S. economy grows at 2 percent per year after 2030, China will not equal the United States in per capita income until decades later. So China is a long way from posing the kind of challenge to America that the kaiser's Germany posed to Britain in 1900.
None of this means the dangers of conflict can be completely ruled out in Asia, as China's recent disputes over various contested island chains remind us. But given shared global challenges like financial stability, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, and climate change, China and the United States also have much to gain from working together. Unfortunately, faulty projections that create hubris among some Chinese and unnecessary fear of decline among some Americans could make it difficult to ensure this future.
Not every power's rise leads to war -- witness America's peaceful overtaking of Britain at the end of the 19th century. So remembering Thucydides's advice, it is important to prevent exaggerated fears from leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, we can make ourselves safer by being wary of fear itself.
Joseph S. Nye Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and author of The Future of Power.
Daniel W. Drezner
…AND CHINA ISN'T BEATING THE U.S.
China is a great power in every sense of the word. It is the most populous country in the world. The Middle Kingdom has weathered the Great Recession better than the West. It is developing a blue-water navy to rival the United States in the Pacific. In 2010, China surpassed Japan as the world's second-largest economy. For many Americans, however, this is not enough. Politicians, commentators, and the public believe China has already supplanted the United States to achieve primacy in world politics. This is not only wrong -- it is dangerously wrong.
According to a November 2009 Pew Research Center survey, 44 percent of Americans believe that China is "the world's leading economic power," compared with 27 percent who name the United States. Elites have fed this mass perception. After a midterm election cycle that featured anti-China ad after anti-China ad, President Barack Obama warned, "Other countries like China aren't standing still, so we can't stand still either." With public perception and political rhetoric like this, it is little wonder that Forbes magazine recently named Chinese President Hu Jintao the world's most powerful individual.
It's time to make a few things clear. If one measures power strictly according to GDP at market exchange rates, then the United States is roughly 250 percent more powerful than China. If one uses a combination of metrics -- as does, for example, the U.S. National Intelligence Council's 2025 project -- then China possesses a little less than half of America's relative power. Even on the financial side, the U.S. still reigns, and, hype notwithstanding, the dollar is not going anywhere as the world's reserve currency. The renminbi could be an alternative in the far future -- but after the 2008 financial crisis, China is loath to open up its capital markets. Even by the less tangible metrics of soft power, the United States still outperforms China handily in new public opinion surveys from the Pacific Rim by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Right now, the United States is vastly more powerful than the People's Republic of China. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
Why the massive misperception? In part, people are looking at the wrong measures. China has the world's largest currency reserves, leading many to conclude that Beijing now has the ability to dictate terms to the United States and everyone else. But that just ain't so. The "balance of financial terror" constrains China as well as the United States because China needs American consumers at least as much as the United States needs China to buy its debt.
No doubt, China amassed more power while American might ebbed over the last decade, and Beijing is now throwing its weight around. But the United States still has a huge lead. As for China's recent bout of belligerence, it has yielded Beijing little beyond Japan releasing a fishing-boat captain -- while pushing South Asia and the Pacific Rim closer to the United States.
Exaggerating Chinese power has consequences. Inside the Beltway, attitudes about American hegemony have shifted from complacency to panic. Fearful politicians representing scared voters have an incentive to scapegoat or lash out against a rising power -- to the detriment of all. Hysteria about Chinese power also provokes confusion and anger in China as Beijing is being asked to accept a burden it is not yet prepared to shoulder. China, after all, ranks 89th in the 2010 U.N. Human Development Index, just behind Turkmenistan and the Dominican Republic (the United States is fourth). Treating Beijing as more powerful than it is feeds Chinese bravado and insecurity at the same time. That is almost as dangerous a political cocktail as fear and panic.
Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, blogs at ForeignPolicy.com.
Aluf Benn
UNDERSTANDING HISTORY WON'T HELP US MAKE PEACE
We're often told that understanding history will help us better understand the present. But the past can be a very dangerous place. Just look at the world's longest-lasting conflicts -- between Palestinians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, the peoples of the Balkans. All involve long, and unhealthy, glances in the rearview mirror.
Where I come from, the political culture has been shaped by incessant digging in history, aimed at supporting the dueling narratives in the Palestine conflict. My inbox often collapses under the weight of contradicting evidence that either the Jews or the Arabs lived in the Holy Land before the other. There is hardly a scientific discipline that has not been invoked to support conflicting claims about the past, from archaeology and philology to biology and genetics.
Resolving the mystery of who was here first has become an obsession because it seems to offer a final judgment on who is right and who is wrong, on who were the indigenous people of Palestine and who were the usurpers. Alas, whenever one side boasts about the ultimate proof, its adversary produces another, better one. A 2003 Israeli textbook aimed at teaching the conflicting narratives side by side shows how pointless our debates have become: The Jewish narrative relies on the Bible to link today's Israelis to the ancient Israelites while the Palestinian counternarrative reaches back to the Jebusites, who ruled Jerusalem before King David's occupation, as the forefathers of contemporary Palestinians.
Unfortunately, this pseudo-historical dispute lies at the heart of the current political debate. At the most crucial moment of the 2000 Camp David summit, for example, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat argued with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and U.S. President Bill Clinton about whether a Jewish temple preceded the Muslim shrines on the Jerusalem site known as the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif. Having failed to resolve the present-day conflict, the leaders retreated to a pointless debate about history. Their failure led to the bloodbath of the Second Intifada.
The current Israeli and Palestinian leaders are similarly obsessed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, son of an eminent historian, demands Palestinian recognition of Israel as "the state of the Jewish people," arguing that only such recognition could end the conflict. Recently, he declared Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron as "national heritage sites." When UNESCO argued that these sites reside in occupied Palestinian territory, Netanyahu blamed it for trying to "detach the people of Israel from its heritage." For his part, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas focuses on his people's victimhood and seeks "justice" for past abuses, the 1948 exile foremost among them.
Because accepting the other side's narrative amounts to destroying your own, there can be no compromise.
This has not always been so. When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat negotiated their peace deal in the late 1970s, they put the past aside and constructed a new relationship rather than fruitlessly debate who had been the aggressor and who had been the victim. When Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, they wasted little time on history lessons and focused instead on building a future. But Rabin's 1995 assassination and the ensuing collapse of Oslo brought the ghosts back to the negotiating table, where they have stayed ever since.
In Europe, the belligerent past is visible everywhere, but contemporary European politicians wisely ignore it and look forward. Would that our squabbling leaders in the Middle East could do the same.
Aluf Benn is editor at large of the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Leslie H. Gelb
AMERICA PRESSURES ISRAEL PLENTY
Scholars, pundits, propagandists, and journalists have created two dangerous pieces of conventional wisdom about the Middle East: that Israelis, not Palestinians, have been the main stumbling block to peace, and that the United States has failed to use its influence to pressure Israel for serious compromises. Both propositions are largely untrue. If uncorrected, these myths could make both Palestinians and Israelis feel irretrievably wronged and unwilling ever to negotiate in good faith.
Israel has a long and compelling history of making major concessions to Arabs. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem in 1977, and less than two years later, Israel agreed to return the entire Sinai Peninsula, booty of a war it did not start and an act of territorial generosity unprecedented in modern history. Israelis negotiated with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, whom they rightly considered a terrorist. At the end of U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians several key concessions, including more than 90 percent of the West Bank. After the Annapolis initiative put forward by George W. Bush's administration, one of Barak's successors, Ehud Olmert, upped the offerings considerably: more of the West Bank, a sliver of Arab East Jerusalem for a Palestinian capital, and a land swap to give the new Palestinian state a land link to Gaza. Olmert even privately accepted "the right of return" to Israel for a certain number of Palestinian refugees. To both generous proposals, the Palestinians said either no or nothing.
In return, the Israelis received little, and the Palestinians insisted on more of everything. Their rationale was that they needed further concessions to compensate for Israeli demands limiting the size and capability of Palestinian security forces. These restrictions, they said, would undermine the very feasibility of a sovereign Palestinian state. The Israelis argued that they needed these added protections because Israel could not count on Arabs to accept Israel's existence. They cited the Palestinians' rejection of a Jewish history in Israel and even any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in the heart of Jerusalem. For good measure, the Palestinians still refuse to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Nor do the Palestinians acknowledge that when Israel departed Gaza in 2005, it uprooted 9,000 Israeli settlers. In return, Israel got rockets and a terrorist enclave run by Hamas.
At each step in this tortuous negotiating process, the United States has pushed and pulled Israel toward concessions, but received little or no credit from the Arab side. Sometimes this pressure has been public, as in President Barack Obama's recent scolding of Israel over its West Bank settlements, but more often it has been private. Yet Arabs have not wanted to credit Washington's role as a peacemaker because they think the United States is capable of exerting even more pressure on Israel. Nonetheless, the American role has been real and substantial.
Israel has only made this world of misperceptions worse. It has explained its concessions badly, if at all. Consider, for example, how Israeli governments refuse to tout their history of concessions on the West Bank for fear these would be taken as starting points in ongoing negotiations. Apparently, Israelis would rather look guilty than weak.
Israelis certainly deserve criticism for continuing their West Bank settlements. But they deserve credit for their concrete efforts to make peace. And so does the United States. Yet the myths prevail, and dangerously so.
Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former senior U.S. government official, and a former columnist for the New York Times.
James K. Galbraith
ACTUALLY, THE RETIREMENT AGE IS TOO HIGH
The most dangerous conventional wisdom in the world today is the idea that with an older population, people must work longer and retire with less.
This idea is being used to rationalize cuts in old-age benefits in numerous advanced countries -- most recently in France, and soon in the United States. The cuts are disguised as increases in the minimum retirement age or as increases in the age at which full pensions will be paid.
Such cuts have a perversely powerful logic: "We" are living longer. There are fewer workers to support each elderly person. Therefore "we" should work longer.
But in the first place, "we" are not living longer. Wealthier elderly are; the non-wealthy not so much. Raising the retirement age cuts benefits for those who can't wait to retire and who often won't live long. Meanwhile, richer people with soft jobs work on: For them, it's an easy call.
Second, many workers retire because they can't find jobs. They're unemployed -- or expect to become so. Extending the retirement age for them just means a longer job search, a futile waste of time and effort.
Third, we don't need the workers. Productivity gains and cheap imports mean that we can and do enjoy far more farm and factory goods than our forebears, with much less effort. Only a small fraction of today's workers make things. Our problem is finding worthwhile work for people to do, not finding workers to produce the goods we consume.
In the United States, the financial crisis has left the country with 11 million fewer jobs than Americans need now. No matter how aggressive the policy, we are not going to find 11 million new jobs soon. So common sense suggests we should make some decisions about who should have the first crack: older people, who have already worked three or four decades at hard jobs? Or younger people, many just out of school, with fresh skills and ambitions?
The answer is obvious. Older people who would like to retire and would do so if they could afford it should get some help. The right step is to reduce, not increase, the full-benefits retirement age. As a rough cut, why not enact a three-year window during which the age for receiving full Social Security benefits would drop to 62 -- providing a voluntary, one-time, grab-it-now bonus for leaving work? Let them go home! With a secure pension and medical care, they will be happier. Young people who need work will be happier. And there will also be more jobs. With pension security, older people will consume services until the end of their lives. They will become, each and every one, an employer.
A proposal like this could transform a miserable jobs picture into a tolerable one, at a single stroke.
James K. Galbraith is author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.
Carl Pope
THE RICH REALLY DON'T CARE ABOUT THE POOR
We spend far too much time and energy worrying about the supposed global divide between north and south, rich country and poor country. It doesn't actually exist. The planet's real fault line is between elites and the middle class in some countries, and the bottom of the pyramid, everywhere.
The world's four richest citizens -- Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Mukesh Ambani -- have more in common with each other than they do with the bottom strata of their respective countries. Yes, they do handle their wealth differently. Gates and Buffett are giving most of it away, Ambani just built the world's most expensive house, and Slim is somewhere in the middle. But all four can count on their home governments to take care of their needs first. Preserving that kind of social hierarchy is an unwritten assumption in deciding which solutions to the world's problems arrive on the table and which do not.
Many have observed that countries whose boundaries happen to include large deposits of oil, diamonds, tropical timber, or some other valuable commodity tend to have miserable populations that suffer from poverty and violence -- the "resource curse." But we politely overlook the reality that for every resource-cursed country, there is a resource-blessed kleptocracy. With rare exceptions like Sudan, those who pillage their countries' wealth are accepted into the top ends of global society. They come to Davos, stay at the Four Seasons, bank in Switzerland. The oil oligarchs of the Persian Gulf are welcomed as investors in News Corporation and American banks, even when they hold views that might otherwise put them on a U.S. terrorism watch list.
India, justifiably, comes to global climate negotiations to argue that it has hundreds of thousands of villages with no access at all to electricity and that the United States and Europe cannot reasonably say, "Well, given the climate crisis, those villages are just going to remain in the dark." That reality gets a lot of attention. But the other reality is that India devotes very little of its energy investment to getting light for those villages, while it invests considerably more in keeping Ambani's streetlights on. India is not exceptional. In fact, the poor pay 20 percent of the world's lighting bill -- and get only 0.1 percent of the world's lighting services in exchange. Seventy-five years after Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated that reliable access to credit was the key to electrifying rural households, the United States still has a shameful number of off-grid communities on Native American reservations.
We write and talk glibly about the increasing emphasis in our economies on "knowledge," but rarely focus on the reality that a knowledge-based society makes it far easier for much of the workforce to be left behind. Ugandan coffee farmers receive only 2.5 percent of the British retail price and 4.5 percent of the U.S. retail price for their coffee. A few cents added to a cup of coffee or a basket of strawberries would cover the costs of doubling or tripling the wages of peasant farmers. But if we raised prices in today's world economy, the increases would be absorbed not by the farmers but by marketing, wholesaling, and retailing markups.
The knowledge workers and investors who benefit from this global supply chain have far more in common with each other than they do with the peasant coffee growers who supply their corner Starbucks. Enriching them would mean lowering the status and wealth of bankers, distributors, and advertisers -- and they've got all the leverage.
Together, Slim, Gates, Buffett, and Ambani control more wealth than the world's poorest 57 countries. The danger is that while we have a global economy that knows how to concentrate money and power in an ever smaller set of hands, we have no robust mechanism to alert us to the injustice, dangers, and instability that come along with this package. Someday, to our peril, the poor will find their own way to remind us.
Carl Pope is chairman of the Sierra Club.
Immanuel Wallerstein
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WON'T RECOVER, NOW OR EVER
Virtually everyone everywhere-economists, politicians, pundits -- agrees that the world has been in some kind of economic trouble since at least 2008. And virtually everyone seems to believe that in the next few years the world will somehow "recover" from these difficulties. After all, upturns always occur after downturns. The remedies recommended vary considerably, but the idea that the system shall continue in its essential features is a deeply rooted faith.
But it is wrong. All systems have lives. When their processes move too far from equilibrium, they fluctuate chaotically and bifurcate. Our existing system, what I call a capitalist world-economy, has been in existence for some 500 years and has for at least a century encompassed the entire globe. It has functioned remarkably well. But like all systems, it has moved steadily further and further from equilibrium. For a while now, it has moved too far from equilibrium, such that it is today in structural crisis.
The problem is that the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a significant increase in taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle.
What we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation.
The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue. The fundamental political struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive. The choice is between a new system that replicates some of the present system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that is relatively democratic and egalitarian.
The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been followed by a long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been rank speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The latest financial crisis didn't bring down this system; it merely exposed it as hollow. Our recent "difficulties" are merely the next-to-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since around 1970. The last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies.
Most people do not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in which we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive.
Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted rules. We meet at G-20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets. We "develop" our economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural crisis. The real action, the struggle over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.
Immanuel Wallerstein is a senior research scholar at Yale University.
Nina Hachigian
SOVEREIGNTY IS FAR FROM DEAD
In his latest book, How Barack Obama Is Endangering Our National Sovereignty, John Bolton lays out what has become a consensus view on the American right. Those who argue that the United States must engage with international organizations to address global problems, he argues, are really saying we should "cede some of our sovereignty to institutions that other nations will also influence." And that, warns this U.N.-bashing former Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations, "is unquestionably a formula for reducing U.S. autonomy and reducing our control over government."
One wonders just where Ambassador Bolton has been for the past 362 years. Here's the truth: The United States regularly contravenes the 17th-century view of countries as autonomous entities, free of outside interference, and instead works with other countries to bring opportunity and greater safety to Americans. Asserting independence remains a preoccupation of some U.S. politicians-not to mention authoritarian leaders around the world. But their brittle interpretation of sovereignty is an old-fashioned, and even dangerous, notion in world affairs.
Stephen D. Krasner, a former top State Department official, argues that from the very beginning, this absolutist definition of sovereignty, which dates back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, has been, at best, "organized hypocrisy." After all, simply mailing a letter abroad requires countries to follow a common set of postal rules that no single one of them controls.
But globalization has increased the pace of sovereignty's erosion. Today, the United States lets external actors affect its internal decisions all the time; there are simply too many benefits to be gained in return for agreeing to a common set of trade rules so that, for example, Americans can profit from exporting farm machinery and eat bananas year-round. To settle disputes that could flare into costly trade wars, the United States submits to arbitration under the World Trade Organization. The likelihood of a nuclear accident or terrorist incident has gone down thanks to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires the United States and the other 188 signatories to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency at their nuclear facilities.
Nevertheless, Bolton and others continue to make hay of "permission slips," pillory the international organizations that carry America's water far more often than not, and warn of dire consequences from just about any treaty that requires U.S. compliance, such as the New start nuclear-arms deal between the United States and Russia or the Law of the Sea Treaty. They imply, absurdly, that a little sovereignty offered up here and there, and soon the French will be drafting U.S. zoning regulations.
The real problem is not that norms of sovereignty are changing in the United States, but that they are not changing fast enough elsewhere. China, for example, clings to a very traditional, absolutist view that the U.S. right might appreciate. While Beijing has been the No. 1 beneficiary of globalization's international rules and treaties, it often demands at the same time that the world mind its own business. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official insisted, was "a violation of China's judicial sovereignty." A major sticking point in climate-change negotiations has been China's refusal to allow international inspectors to verify reductions in its carbon dioxide emissions, and the head of its delegation at the 2009 Copenhagen climate-change summit explicitly invoked sovereignty to explain that stance. Chinese leaders have said the value of the yuan is a sovereign issue for Beijing-even though other countries, notably the United States, suffer from its artificially low level.
Despite the need for countries to be more flexible with their sovereignty, the nation-state is alive and well. Its authority to make decisions for the benefit of its people is unassailable. National governments retain the right to control their borders and govern as they wish-so long as they don't commit mass atrocities. States are still the main actors in international affairs, albeit under guidelines that they do not fully control individually.
And that's OK. The United States has to be the role model for a pragmatic, progressive view of sovereignty. If Americans cling to outmoded notions of national autonomy, they will be leading themselves, and the world, down a path of emboldened threats, stifled cooperation, and missed opportunities.
Nina Hachigian is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-author of The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise.
Morton H. Halperin
DEMOCRACY IS STILL WORTH FIGHTING FOR
As the United States struggles to wind down two wars and recover from a humbling financial crisis, realism is enjoying a renaissance. Afghanistan and Iraq bear scant resemblance to the democracies we were promised. The Treasury is broke. And America has a president, Barack Obama, who once compared his foreign-policy philosophy to the realism of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: "There's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain," Obama said during his 2008 campaign. "And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things."
But one can take such words of wisdom to the extreme-as realists like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and writer Robert Kaplan sometimes do, arguing that the United States can't afford the risks inherent in supporting democracy and human rights around the world. Others, such as cultural historian Jacques Barzun, go even further, saying that America can't export democracy at all, "because it is not an ideology but a wayward historical development." Taken too far, such realist absolutism can be just as dangerous, and wrong, as neoconservative hubris.
For there is one thing the neocons get right: As I argue in The Democracy Advantage, democratic governments are more likely than autocratic regimes to engage in conduct that advances U.S. interests and avoids situations that pose a threat to peace and security. Democratic states are more likely to develop and to avoid famines and economic collapse. They are also less likely to become failed states or suffer a civil war. Democratic states are also more likely to cooperate in dealing with security issues, such as terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
As the bloody aftermath of the Iraq invasion painfully shows, democracy cannot be imposed from the outside by force or coercion. It must come from the people of a nation working to get on the path of democracy and then adopting the policies necessary to remain on that path. But we should be careful about overlearning the lessons of Iraq. In fact, the outside world can make an enormous difference in whether such efforts succeed. There are numerous examples-starting with Spain and Portugal and spreading to Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia-in which the struggle to establish democracy and advance human rights received critical support from multilateral bodies, including the United Nations, as well as from regional organizations, democratic governments, and private groups. It is very much in America's interest to provide such assistance now to new democracies, such as Indonesia, Liberia, and Nepal, and to stand with those advocating democracy in countries such as Belarus, Burma, and China.
It will still be true that the United States will sometimes need to work with a nondemocratic regime to secure an immediate objective, such as use of a military base to support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, or in the case of Russia, to sign an arms-control treaty. None of that, however, should come at the expense of speaking out in support of those struggling for their rights. Nor should we doubt that America would be more secure if they succeed.
Morton H. Halperin is senior advisor to the Open Society Institute and co-author of The Democracy Advantage.
Stephen Sestanovich
SOMETIMES, THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS RIGHT
The old battle between "conventional wisdom" and its debunkers isn't what it used to be. When liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith started using the term in the 1950s, his targets were not just any widely held wrong opinions, but those that were the product of inertia and convenience. Conventional wisdom, Galbraith thought, reinforced complacency. It enabled us to "avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life," he wrote in The Affluent Society.
Since then, of course, we've all become debunkers. (Just google the term "conventional wisdom watch" -- virtually everyone is on alert for the stuff.) But something has happened to the mainstream ideas that need to be shaken up. Today's conventional wisdom isn't complacent. Its hair is on fire. It wants us to see that climate change threatens all humanity, that the United States is in decline, that we're all going to have to work harder and longer in the future, that China is going to rule the world -- unless perhaps a nuclear-armed Iran gets there first.
The debunking impulse has also changed. Far from trying to rouse us from slumber, its role is now to offer us a cup of warm milk before bed. If you doubt this, just dip into the debate about some important element of contemporary conventional wisdom, like the idea that America's global dominance is eroding. This may seem so obvious as barely to require discussion. Yet some of our best, most independent-minded commentators on international politics, scholars and practitioners alike, are saying that your eyes deceive you: America's decline is definitely not inevitable, and might not be happening at all.
These commentators acknowledge, of course, that preventing decline will oblige Americans to put their economic house in order and repair the damage done to their country's image worldwide -- all while preserving its global military edge and managing its alliances better than any president has done in the last 20 years. (And that's just for starters!) But too often these little details are in the fine print. The heart of the debunking message -- and what most readers carry away from it -- is reassurance. America will be No. 1 for decades to come.
You see the same pattern in debates on other issues, and it doesn't matter whether the left or the right holds the high ground. The earlier consensus on Afghanistan has begun to break up, for example. But it's still probably conventional wisdom, at least in Washington, to favor continuing the war, given the damage that retreat would do to U.S. interests across the Middle East and South Asia. The debunkers, by contrast, reassure us that withdrawal won't be so bad. If, as they now seem to have decided, defeat in Vietnam was no big deal, why should Afghanistan be any different?
Conventional wisdom is rarely good at explaining itself, least of all when its message is that the United States faces one big challenge after another and that they can't be successfully addressed without "unwelcome dislocation of life." The debunkers may well be right that America can avoid decline, but only by dint of gigantic effort. They might also be right that President Barack Obama or his successor can find ways to limit the damage of withdrawal from Afghanistan, but doing so will surely require more resources, focus, and commitment than the debunkers foresee. And that holds for other issues, whether it's coping with a nuclear Iran, the economic crisis, or climate change.
The most dangerous idea Americans face these days is that they can do less (or do nothing) and still get by. On this question, the conventional wisdom -- in all its hair-on-fire banality -- is absolutely right.
Stephen Sestanovich is a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
In Foreign Policy's first issue, published at the height of American exhaustion with the war in Vietnam, founders Samuel P. Huntington and Warren D. Manshel promised to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy in Washington. And with provocative essays from the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith -- who famously coined the term "conventional wisdom" and spent a career fighting against it -- and Richard Holbrooke -- who as a serving Foreign Service officer ripped the State Department as "the machine that fails" -- an insurgency was born. Forty years later, upending assumptions is embedded in FP's DNA. In that spirit, we offer this, our 40th Anniversary package tackling the world's most dangerous conventional wisdoms.
* Economies Can't Just Keep On Growing, by Thomas Homer-Dixon
* Homeland Security Hasn't Made Us Safer, by Anne Applebaum
* China's Rise Doesn't Mean War…, by Joseph S. Nye Jr.
* …And China Isn't Beating the U.S., by Daniel W. Drezner
* Understanding History Won't Help Us Make Peace, by Aluf Benn
* America Pressures Israel Plenty, by Leslie H. Gelb
* Actually, the Retirement Age Is Too High, by James K. Galbraith
* The Rich Really Don't Care About the Poor, by Carl Pope
* The Global Economy Won't Recover, Now or Ever, by Immanuel Wallerstein
* Sovereignty Is Far From Dead, by Nina Hachigian
* Democracy Is Still Worth Fighting For, by Morton Halperin
* Sometimes, the Conventional Wisdom Is Right, by Stephen Sestanovich
Thomas Homer-Dixon
ECONOMIES CAN'T JUST KEEP ON GROWING
Humanity has made great strides over the past 2,000 years, and we often assume that our path, notwithstanding a few bumps along the way, goes ever upward. But we are wrong: Within this century, environmental and resource constraints will likely bring global economic growth to a halt.
Limits on available resources already restrict economic activity in many sectors, though their impact usually goes unacknowledged. Take rare-earth elements -- minerals and oxides essential to the manufacture of many technologies. When China recently stopped exporting them, sudden shortages threatened to crimp a wide range of industries. Most commentators believed that the supply crunch would ease once new (or mothballed) rare-earth mines are opened. But such optimism overlooks a fundamental physical reality. As the best bodies of ore are exhausted, miners move on to less concentrated deposits in more difficult natural circumstances. These mines cause more pollution and require more energy. In other words, opening new rare-earth mines outside China will result in staggering environmental impact.
Or consider petroleum, which provides about 40 percent of the world's commercial energy and more than 95 percent of its transportation energy. Oil companies generally have to work harder to get each new barrel of oil. The amount of energy they receive for each unit of energy they invest in drilling has dropped from 100 to 1 in Texas in the 1930s to about 15 to 1 in the continental United States today. The oil sands in Alberta, Canada, yield a return of only 4 to 1.
Coal and natural gas still have high energy yields. So, as oil becomes harder to get in coming decades, these energy sources will become increasingly vital to the global economy. But they're fossil fuels, and burning them generates climate-changing carbon dioxide. If the World Bank's projected rates for global economic growth hold steady, global output will have risen almost tenfold by 2100, to more than $600 trillion in today's dollars. So even if countries make dramatic reductions in carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, global carbon dioxide emissions will triple from today's level to more than 90 billion metric tons a year. Scientists tell us that tripling carbon emissions would cause such extreme heat waves, droughts, and storms that farmers would likely find they couldn't produce the food needed for the world's projected population of 9 billion people. Indeed, the economic damage caused by such climate change would probably, by itself, halt growth.
Humankind is in a box. For the 2.7 billion people now living on less than $2 a day, economic growth is essential to satisfying the most basic requirements of human dignity. And in much wealthier societies, people need growth to pay off their debts, support liberty, and maintain civil peace. To produce and sustain this growth, they must expend vast amounts of energy. Yet our best energy source -- fossil fuel -- is the main thing contributing to climate change, and climate change, if unchecked, will halt growth.
We can't live with growth, and we can't live without it. This contradiction is humankind's biggest challenge this century, but as long as conventional wisdom holds that growth can continue forever, it's a challenge we can't possibly address.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is the CIGI chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada.
Anne Applebaum
HOMELAND SECURITY HASN'T MADE US SAFER
Hardly anyone has seriously scrutinized either the priorities or the spending patterns of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), since their hurried creation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they get criticized plenty. But year in, year out, they continue to grow faster and cost more -- presumably because Americans think they are being protected from terrorism by all that spending. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that the agencies are making Americans any safer.
DHS serves only one clear purpose: to provide unimaginable bonanzas for favored congressional districts around the United States, most of which face no statistically significant security threat at all. One thinks of the $436,504 that the Blackfeet Nation of Montana received in fiscal 2010 "to help strengthen the nation against risks associated with potential terrorist attacks"; the $1,000,000 that the village of Poynette, Wisconsin (pop. 2,266) received in fiscal 2009 for an "emergency operations center"; or the $67,000 worth of surveillance equipment purchased by Marin County, California, and discovered, still in its original packaging, four years later. And indeed, every U.S. state, no matter how landlocked or underpopulated, receives, by law, a fixed percentage of homeland security spending every year.
As for the TSA, I am not aware of a single bomber or bomb plot stopped by its time-wasting procedures. In fact, TSA screeners consistently fail to spot the majority of fake "bombs" and bomb parts the agency periodically plants to test their skills. In Los Angeles, whose airport was targeted by the "millennium plot" on New Year's 2000, screeners failed some 75 percent of these tests.
Terrorists have been stopped since 2001 and plots prevented, but always by other means. After the Nigerian "underwear bomber" of Christmas Day 2009 was foiled, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed "the system worked" -- but the bomber was caught by a passenger, not the feds. Richard Reid, the 2001 shoe bomber, was undone by an alert stewardess who smelled something funny. The 2006 Heathrow Airport plot was uncovered by an intelligence tip. Al Qaeda's recent attempt to explode cargo planes was caught by a human intelligence source, not an X-ray machine. Yet the TSA responds to these events by placing restrictions on shoes, liquids, and now perhaps printer cartridges.
Given this reality -- and given that 9/11 was, above all, a massive intelligence failure -- wouldn't we be safer if the vast budgets of TSA and its partners around the world were diverted away from confiscating nail scissors and toward creating better information systems and better intelligence? Imagine if security officers in Amsterdam had been made aware of the warnings the underwear bomber's father gave to the U.S. Embassy in Abuja. Or, for that matter, if consular officers had prevented him from receiving a visa in the first place.
Better still, DHS could be broken up into its component parts, with special funding and planning carried out at the federal level only for cities and buildings that are actually at risk of terrorist attack. Here is the truth: New York City requires a lot more homeland security spending, per capita, than Poynette. Here is the even starker truth: Poynette needs no homeland security spending at all. The events of 9/11 did not prove that the United States needs to spend more on local police forces and fire brigades; they proved that Americans need to learn how to make better use of the information they have and apply it with speed and efficiency.
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate.
Joseph S. Nye Jr.
CHINA'S RISE DOESN'T MEAN WAR…
Thucydides famously attributed the Peloponnesian War to the rise in power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. A century ago, Germany's rise and the fear it created in Britain helped cause World War I. Now, it's become a new conventional wisdom in some circles that China's rise and the fear it is creating in the United States -- where recent polls show 60 percent believe the country is in decline -- could doom the 21st century to a similar fate. As scholar John Mearsheimer has put it, China's rise cannot be peaceful.
One should be skeptical about such dire projections. Americans go through cycles of declinism every decade or so, but that tells us more about America's psychology than its power resources. Not only is the United States likely to remain the most powerful country in the first half of this century, but China still has a long way to go to catch up in military, economic, and soft power.
In contrast, Germany had already surpassed Britain in industrial power by 1900, and the kaiser was pursuing an adventurous, globally oriented foreign and military policy that was bound to bring about a clash. But China today has focused its policies primarily on its region and its own economic development. China's "market-Leninist" economic model is attractive in authoritarian countries, but this so-called Beijing Consensus has the opposite effect in most democracies.
And even if China's GDP passes U.S. GDP around 2027 (as Goldman Sachs now projects), the two economies would be equivalent in size, not equal in composition. China would still face massive rural poverty and enormous inequality, and it will begin to encounter demographic problems from the delayed effects of its one-child policy. Moreover, as countries develop, there is a natural tendency for growth rates to slow. By my calculations, if China's annual growth goes down to 6 percent and the U.S. economy grows at 2 percent per year after 2030, China will not equal the United States in per capita income until decades later. So China is a long way from posing the kind of challenge to America that the kaiser's Germany posed to Britain in 1900.
None of this means the dangers of conflict can be completely ruled out in Asia, as China's recent disputes over various contested island chains remind us. But given shared global challenges like financial stability, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, and climate change, China and the United States also have much to gain from working together. Unfortunately, faulty projections that create hubris among some Chinese and unnecessary fear of decline among some Americans could make it difficult to ensure this future.
Not every power's rise leads to war -- witness America's peaceful overtaking of Britain at the end of the 19th century. So remembering Thucydides's advice, it is important to prevent exaggerated fears from leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, we can make ourselves safer by being wary of fear itself.
Joseph S. Nye Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and author of The Future of Power.
Daniel W. Drezner
…AND CHINA ISN'T BEATING THE U.S.
China is a great power in every sense of the word. It is the most populous country in the world. The Middle Kingdom has weathered the Great Recession better than the West. It is developing a blue-water navy to rival the United States in the Pacific. In 2010, China surpassed Japan as the world's second-largest economy. For many Americans, however, this is not enough. Politicians, commentators, and the public believe China has already supplanted the United States to achieve primacy in world politics. This is not only wrong -- it is dangerously wrong.
According to a November 2009 Pew Research Center survey, 44 percent of Americans believe that China is "the world's leading economic power," compared with 27 percent who name the United States. Elites have fed this mass perception. After a midterm election cycle that featured anti-China ad after anti-China ad, President Barack Obama warned, "Other countries like China aren't standing still, so we can't stand still either." With public perception and political rhetoric like this, it is little wonder that Forbes magazine recently named Chinese President Hu Jintao the world's most powerful individual.
It's time to make a few things clear. If one measures power strictly according to GDP at market exchange rates, then the United States is roughly 250 percent more powerful than China. If one uses a combination of metrics -- as does, for example, the U.S. National Intelligence Council's 2025 project -- then China possesses a little less than half of America's relative power. Even on the financial side, the U.S. still reigns, and, hype notwithstanding, the dollar is not going anywhere as the world's reserve currency. The renminbi could be an alternative in the far future -- but after the 2008 financial crisis, China is loath to open up its capital markets. Even by the less tangible metrics of soft power, the United States still outperforms China handily in new public opinion surveys from the Pacific Rim by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Right now, the United States is vastly more powerful than the People's Republic of China. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
Why the massive misperception? In part, people are looking at the wrong measures. China has the world's largest currency reserves, leading many to conclude that Beijing now has the ability to dictate terms to the United States and everyone else. But that just ain't so. The "balance of financial terror" constrains China as well as the United States because China needs American consumers at least as much as the United States needs China to buy its debt.
No doubt, China amassed more power while American might ebbed over the last decade, and Beijing is now throwing its weight around. But the United States still has a huge lead. As for China's recent bout of belligerence, it has yielded Beijing little beyond Japan releasing a fishing-boat captain -- while pushing South Asia and the Pacific Rim closer to the United States.
Exaggerating Chinese power has consequences. Inside the Beltway, attitudes about American hegemony have shifted from complacency to panic. Fearful politicians representing scared voters have an incentive to scapegoat or lash out against a rising power -- to the detriment of all. Hysteria about Chinese power also provokes confusion and anger in China as Beijing is being asked to accept a burden it is not yet prepared to shoulder. China, after all, ranks 89th in the 2010 U.N. Human Development Index, just behind Turkmenistan and the Dominican Republic (the United States is fourth). Treating Beijing as more powerful than it is feeds Chinese bravado and insecurity at the same time. That is almost as dangerous a political cocktail as fear and panic.
Daniel W. Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, blogs at ForeignPolicy.com.
Aluf Benn
UNDERSTANDING HISTORY WON'T HELP US MAKE PEACE
We're often told that understanding history will help us better understand the present. But the past can be a very dangerous place. Just look at the world's longest-lasting conflicts -- between Palestinians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, the peoples of the Balkans. All involve long, and unhealthy, glances in the rearview mirror.
Where I come from, the political culture has been shaped by incessant digging in history, aimed at supporting the dueling narratives in the Palestine conflict. My inbox often collapses under the weight of contradicting evidence that either the Jews or the Arabs lived in the Holy Land before the other. There is hardly a scientific discipline that has not been invoked to support conflicting claims about the past, from archaeology and philology to biology and genetics.
Resolving the mystery of who was here first has become an obsession because it seems to offer a final judgment on who is right and who is wrong, on who were the indigenous people of Palestine and who were the usurpers. Alas, whenever one side boasts about the ultimate proof, its adversary produces another, better one. A 2003 Israeli textbook aimed at teaching the conflicting narratives side by side shows how pointless our debates have become: The Jewish narrative relies on the Bible to link today's Israelis to the ancient Israelites while the Palestinian counternarrative reaches back to the Jebusites, who ruled Jerusalem before King David's occupation, as the forefathers of contemporary Palestinians.
Unfortunately, this pseudo-historical dispute lies at the heart of the current political debate. At the most crucial moment of the 2000 Camp David summit, for example, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat argued with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and U.S. President Bill Clinton about whether a Jewish temple preceded the Muslim shrines on the Jerusalem site known as the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif. Having failed to resolve the present-day conflict, the leaders retreated to a pointless debate about history. Their failure led to the bloodbath of the Second Intifada.
The current Israeli and Palestinian leaders are similarly obsessed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, son of an eminent historian, demands Palestinian recognition of Israel as "the state of the Jewish people," arguing that only such recognition could end the conflict. Recently, he declared Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron as "national heritage sites." When UNESCO argued that these sites reside in occupied Palestinian territory, Netanyahu blamed it for trying to "detach the people of Israel from its heritage." For his part, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas focuses on his people's victimhood and seeks "justice" for past abuses, the 1948 exile foremost among them.
Because accepting the other side's narrative amounts to destroying your own, there can be no compromise.
This has not always been so. When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat negotiated their peace deal in the late 1970s, they put the past aside and constructed a new relationship rather than fruitlessly debate who had been the aggressor and who had been the victim. When Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, they wasted little time on history lessons and focused instead on building a future. But Rabin's 1995 assassination and the ensuing collapse of Oslo brought the ghosts back to the negotiating table, where they have stayed ever since.
In Europe, the belligerent past is visible everywhere, but contemporary European politicians wisely ignore it and look forward. Would that our squabbling leaders in the Middle East could do the same.
Aluf Benn is editor at large of the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Leslie H. Gelb
AMERICA PRESSURES ISRAEL PLENTY
Scholars, pundits, propagandists, and journalists have created two dangerous pieces of conventional wisdom about the Middle East: that Israelis, not Palestinians, have been the main stumbling block to peace, and that the United States has failed to use its influence to pressure Israel for serious compromises. Both propositions are largely untrue. If uncorrected, these myths could make both Palestinians and Israelis feel irretrievably wronged and unwilling ever to negotiate in good faith.
Israel has a long and compelling history of making major concessions to Arabs. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem in 1977, and less than two years later, Israel agreed to return the entire Sinai Peninsula, booty of a war it did not start and an act of territorial generosity unprecedented in modern history. Israelis negotiated with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, whom they rightly considered a terrorist. At the end of U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians several key concessions, including more than 90 percent of the West Bank. After the Annapolis initiative put forward by George W. Bush's administration, one of Barak's successors, Ehud Olmert, upped the offerings considerably: more of the West Bank, a sliver of Arab East Jerusalem for a Palestinian capital, and a land swap to give the new Palestinian state a land link to Gaza. Olmert even privately accepted "the right of return" to Israel for a certain number of Palestinian refugees. To both generous proposals, the Palestinians said either no or nothing.
In return, the Israelis received little, and the Palestinians insisted on more of everything. Their rationale was that they needed further concessions to compensate for Israeli demands limiting the size and capability of Palestinian security forces. These restrictions, they said, would undermine the very feasibility of a sovereign Palestinian state. The Israelis argued that they needed these added protections because Israel could not count on Arabs to accept Israel's existence. They cited the Palestinians' rejection of a Jewish history in Israel and even any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount in the heart of Jerusalem. For good measure, the Palestinians still refuse to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Nor do the Palestinians acknowledge that when Israel departed Gaza in 2005, it uprooted 9,000 Israeli settlers. In return, Israel got rockets and a terrorist enclave run by Hamas.
At each step in this tortuous negotiating process, the United States has pushed and pulled Israel toward concessions, but received little or no credit from the Arab side. Sometimes this pressure has been public, as in President Barack Obama's recent scolding of Israel over its West Bank settlements, but more often it has been private. Yet Arabs have not wanted to credit Washington's role as a peacemaker because they think the United States is capable of exerting even more pressure on Israel. Nonetheless, the American role has been real and substantial.
Israel has only made this world of misperceptions worse. It has explained its concessions badly, if at all. Consider, for example, how Israeli governments refuse to tout their history of concessions on the West Bank for fear these would be taken as starting points in ongoing negotiations. Apparently, Israelis would rather look guilty than weak.
Israelis certainly deserve criticism for continuing their West Bank settlements. But they deserve credit for their concrete efforts to make peace. And so does the United States. Yet the myths prevail, and dangerously so.
Leslie H. Gelb is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former senior U.S. government official, and a former columnist for the New York Times.
James K. Galbraith
ACTUALLY, THE RETIREMENT AGE IS TOO HIGH
The most dangerous conventional wisdom in the world today is the idea that with an older population, people must work longer and retire with less.
This idea is being used to rationalize cuts in old-age benefits in numerous advanced countries -- most recently in France, and soon in the United States. The cuts are disguised as increases in the minimum retirement age or as increases in the age at which full pensions will be paid.
Such cuts have a perversely powerful logic: "We" are living longer. There are fewer workers to support each elderly person. Therefore "we" should work longer.
But in the first place, "we" are not living longer. Wealthier elderly are; the non-wealthy not so much. Raising the retirement age cuts benefits for those who can't wait to retire and who often won't live long. Meanwhile, richer people with soft jobs work on: For them, it's an easy call.
Second, many workers retire because they can't find jobs. They're unemployed -- or expect to become so. Extending the retirement age for them just means a longer job search, a futile waste of time and effort.
Third, we don't need the workers. Productivity gains and cheap imports mean that we can and do enjoy far more farm and factory goods than our forebears, with much less effort. Only a small fraction of today's workers make things. Our problem is finding worthwhile work for people to do, not finding workers to produce the goods we consume.
In the United States, the financial crisis has left the country with 11 million fewer jobs than Americans need now. No matter how aggressive the policy, we are not going to find 11 million new jobs soon. So common sense suggests we should make some decisions about who should have the first crack: older people, who have already worked three or four decades at hard jobs? Or younger people, many just out of school, with fresh skills and ambitions?
The answer is obvious. Older people who would like to retire and would do so if they could afford it should get some help. The right step is to reduce, not increase, the full-benefits retirement age. As a rough cut, why not enact a three-year window during which the age for receiving full Social Security benefits would drop to 62 -- providing a voluntary, one-time, grab-it-now bonus for leaving work? Let them go home! With a secure pension and medical care, they will be happier. Young people who need work will be happier. And there will also be more jobs. With pension security, older people will consume services until the end of their lives. They will become, each and every one, an employer.
A proposal like this could transform a miserable jobs picture into a tolerable one, at a single stroke.
James K. Galbraith is author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.
Carl Pope
THE RICH REALLY DON'T CARE ABOUT THE POOR
We spend far too much time and energy worrying about the supposed global divide between north and south, rich country and poor country. It doesn't actually exist. The planet's real fault line is between elites and the middle class in some countries, and the bottom of the pyramid, everywhere.
The world's four richest citizens -- Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Mukesh Ambani -- have more in common with each other than they do with the bottom strata of their respective countries. Yes, they do handle their wealth differently. Gates and Buffett are giving most of it away, Ambani just built the world's most expensive house, and Slim is somewhere in the middle. But all four can count on their home governments to take care of their needs first. Preserving that kind of social hierarchy is an unwritten assumption in deciding which solutions to the world's problems arrive on the table and which do not.
Many have observed that countries whose boundaries happen to include large deposits of oil, diamonds, tropical timber, or some other valuable commodity tend to have miserable populations that suffer from poverty and violence -- the "resource curse." But we politely overlook the reality that for every resource-cursed country, there is a resource-blessed kleptocracy. With rare exceptions like Sudan, those who pillage their countries' wealth are accepted into the top ends of global society. They come to Davos, stay at the Four Seasons, bank in Switzerland. The oil oligarchs of the Persian Gulf are welcomed as investors in News Corporation and American banks, even when they hold views that might otherwise put them on a U.S. terrorism watch list.
India, justifiably, comes to global climate negotiations to argue that it has hundreds of thousands of villages with no access at all to electricity and that the United States and Europe cannot reasonably say, "Well, given the climate crisis, those villages are just going to remain in the dark." That reality gets a lot of attention. But the other reality is that India devotes very little of its energy investment to getting light for those villages, while it invests considerably more in keeping Ambani's streetlights on. India is not exceptional. In fact, the poor pay 20 percent of the world's lighting bill -- and get only 0.1 percent of the world's lighting services in exchange. Seventy-five years after Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated that reliable access to credit was the key to electrifying rural households, the United States still has a shameful number of off-grid communities on Native American reservations.
We write and talk glibly about the increasing emphasis in our economies on "knowledge," but rarely focus on the reality that a knowledge-based society makes it far easier for much of the workforce to be left behind. Ugandan coffee farmers receive only 2.5 percent of the British retail price and 4.5 percent of the U.S. retail price for their coffee. A few cents added to a cup of coffee or a basket of strawberries would cover the costs of doubling or tripling the wages of peasant farmers. But if we raised prices in today's world economy, the increases would be absorbed not by the farmers but by marketing, wholesaling, and retailing markups.
The knowledge workers and investors who benefit from this global supply chain have far more in common with each other than they do with the peasant coffee growers who supply their corner Starbucks. Enriching them would mean lowering the status and wealth of bankers, distributors, and advertisers -- and they've got all the leverage.
Together, Slim, Gates, Buffett, and Ambani control more wealth than the world's poorest 57 countries. The danger is that while we have a global economy that knows how to concentrate money and power in an ever smaller set of hands, we have no robust mechanism to alert us to the injustice, dangers, and instability that come along with this package. Someday, to our peril, the poor will find their own way to remind us.
Carl Pope is chairman of the Sierra Club.
Immanuel Wallerstein
THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WON'T RECOVER, NOW OR EVER
Virtually everyone everywhere-economists, politicians, pundits -- agrees that the world has been in some kind of economic trouble since at least 2008. And virtually everyone seems to believe that in the next few years the world will somehow "recover" from these difficulties. After all, upturns always occur after downturns. The remedies recommended vary considerably, but the idea that the system shall continue in its essential features is a deeply rooted faith.
But it is wrong. All systems have lives. When their processes move too far from equilibrium, they fluctuate chaotically and bifurcate. Our existing system, what I call a capitalist world-economy, has been in existence for some 500 years and has for at least a century encompassed the entire globe. It has functioned remarkably well. But like all systems, it has moved steadily further and further from equilibrium. For a while now, it has moved too far from equilibrium, such that it is today in structural crisis.
The problem is that the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers pass on the costs of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization of the world has led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions, and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a significant increase in taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called the elasticity of demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle.
What we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation.
The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue. The fundamental political struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive. The choice is between a new system that replicates some of the present system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that is relatively democratic and egalitarian.
The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been followed by a long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been rank speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The latest financial crisis didn't bring down this system; it merely exposed it as hollow. Our recent "difficulties" are merely the next-to-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since around 1970. The last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies.
Most people do not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in which we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive.
Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted rules. We meet at G-20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets. We "develop" our economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural crisis. The real action, the struggle over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.
Immanuel Wallerstein is a senior research scholar at Yale University.
Nina Hachigian
SOVEREIGNTY IS FAR FROM DEAD
In his latest book, How Barack Obama Is Endangering Our National Sovereignty, John Bolton lays out what has become a consensus view on the American right. Those who argue that the United States must engage with international organizations to address global problems, he argues, are really saying we should "cede some of our sovereignty to institutions that other nations will also influence." And that, warns this U.N.-bashing former Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations, "is unquestionably a formula for reducing U.S. autonomy and reducing our control over government."
One wonders just where Ambassador Bolton has been for the past 362 years. Here's the truth: The United States regularly contravenes the 17th-century view of countries as autonomous entities, free of outside interference, and instead works with other countries to bring opportunity and greater safety to Americans. Asserting independence remains a preoccupation of some U.S. politicians-not to mention authoritarian leaders around the world. But their brittle interpretation of sovereignty is an old-fashioned, and even dangerous, notion in world affairs.
Stephen D. Krasner, a former top State Department official, argues that from the very beginning, this absolutist definition of sovereignty, which dates back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, has been, at best, "organized hypocrisy." After all, simply mailing a letter abroad requires countries to follow a common set of postal rules that no single one of them controls.
But globalization has increased the pace of sovereignty's erosion. Today, the United States lets external actors affect its internal decisions all the time; there are simply too many benefits to be gained in return for agreeing to a common set of trade rules so that, for example, Americans can profit from exporting farm machinery and eat bananas year-round. To settle disputes that could flare into costly trade wars, the United States submits to arbitration under the World Trade Organization. The likelihood of a nuclear accident or terrorist incident has gone down thanks to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires the United States and the other 188 signatories to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency at their nuclear facilities.
Nevertheless, Bolton and others continue to make hay of "permission slips," pillory the international organizations that carry America's water far more often than not, and warn of dire consequences from just about any treaty that requires U.S. compliance, such as the New start nuclear-arms deal between the United States and Russia or the Law of the Sea Treaty. They imply, absurdly, that a little sovereignty offered up here and there, and soon the French will be drafting U.S. zoning regulations.
The real problem is not that norms of sovereignty are changing in the United States, but that they are not changing fast enough elsewhere. China, for example, clings to a very traditional, absolutist view that the U.S. right might appreciate. While Beijing has been the No. 1 beneficiary of globalization's international rules and treaties, it often demands at the same time that the world mind its own business. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official insisted, was "a violation of China's judicial sovereignty." A major sticking point in climate-change negotiations has been China's refusal to allow international inspectors to verify reductions in its carbon dioxide emissions, and the head of its delegation at the 2009 Copenhagen climate-change summit explicitly invoked sovereignty to explain that stance. Chinese leaders have said the value of the yuan is a sovereign issue for Beijing-even though other countries, notably the United States, suffer from its artificially low level.
Despite the need for countries to be more flexible with their sovereignty, the nation-state is alive and well. Its authority to make decisions for the benefit of its people is unassailable. National governments retain the right to control their borders and govern as they wish-so long as they don't commit mass atrocities. States are still the main actors in international affairs, albeit under guidelines that they do not fully control individually.
And that's OK. The United States has to be the role model for a pragmatic, progressive view of sovereignty. If Americans cling to outmoded notions of national autonomy, they will be leading themselves, and the world, down a path of emboldened threats, stifled cooperation, and missed opportunities.
Nina Hachigian is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-author of The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise.
Morton H. Halperin
DEMOCRACY IS STILL WORTH FIGHTING FOR
As the United States struggles to wind down two wars and recover from a humbling financial crisis, realism is enjoying a renaissance. Afghanistan and Iraq bear scant resemblance to the democracies we were promised. The Treasury is broke. And America has a president, Barack Obama, who once compared his foreign-policy philosophy to the realism of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: "There's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain," Obama said during his 2008 campaign. "And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things."
But one can take such words of wisdom to the extreme-as realists like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and writer Robert Kaplan sometimes do, arguing that the United States can't afford the risks inherent in supporting democracy and human rights around the world. Others, such as cultural historian Jacques Barzun, go even further, saying that America can't export democracy at all, "because it is not an ideology but a wayward historical development." Taken too far, such realist absolutism can be just as dangerous, and wrong, as neoconservative hubris.
For there is one thing the neocons get right: As I argue in The Democracy Advantage, democratic governments are more likely than autocratic regimes to engage in conduct that advances U.S. interests and avoids situations that pose a threat to peace and security. Democratic states are more likely to develop and to avoid famines and economic collapse. They are also less likely to become failed states or suffer a civil war. Democratic states are also more likely to cooperate in dealing with security issues, such as terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
As the bloody aftermath of the Iraq invasion painfully shows, democracy cannot be imposed from the outside by force or coercion. It must come from the people of a nation working to get on the path of democracy and then adopting the policies necessary to remain on that path. But we should be careful about overlearning the lessons of Iraq. In fact, the outside world can make an enormous difference in whether such efforts succeed. There are numerous examples-starting with Spain and Portugal and spreading to Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia-in which the struggle to establish democracy and advance human rights received critical support from multilateral bodies, including the United Nations, as well as from regional organizations, democratic governments, and private groups. It is very much in America's interest to provide such assistance now to new democracies, such as Indonesia, Liberia, and Nepal, and to stand with those advocating democracy in countries such as Belarus, Burma, and China.
It will still be true that the United States will sometimes need to work with a nondemocratic regime to secure an immediate objective, such as use of a military base to support the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, or in the case of Russia, to sign an arms-control treaty. None of that, however, should come at the expense of speaking out in support of those struggling for their rights. Nor should we doubt that America would be more secure if they succeed.
Morton H. Halperin is senior advisor to the Open Society Institute and co-author of The Democracy Advantage.
Stephen Sestanovich
SOMETIMES, THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS RIGHT
The old battle between "conventional wisdom" and its debunkers isn't what it used to be. When liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith started using the term in the 1950s, his targets were not just any widely held wrong opinions, but those that were the product of inertia and convenience. Conventional wisdom, Galbraith thought, reinforced complacency. It enabled us to "avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life," he wrote in The Affluent Society.
Since then, of course, we've all become debunkers. (Just google the term "conventional wisdom watch" -- virtually everyone is on alert for the stuff.) But something has happened to the mainstream ideas that need to be shaken up. Today's conventional wisdom isn't complacent. Its hair is on fire. It wants us to see that climate change threatens all humanity, that the United States is in decline, that we're all going to have to work harder and longer in the future, that China is going to rule the world -- unless perhaps a nuclear-armed Iran gets there first.
The debunking impulse has also changed. Far from trying to rouse us from slumber, its role is now to offer us a cup of warm milk before bed. If you doubt this, just dip into the debate about some important element of contemporary conventional wisdom, like the idea that America's global dominance is eroding. This may seem so obvious as barely to require discussion. Yet some of our best, most independent-minded commentators on international politics, scholars and practitioners alike, are saying that your eyes deceive you: America's decline is definitely not inevitable, and might not be happening at all.
These commentators acknowledge, of course, that preventing decline will oblige Americans to put their economic house in order and repair the damage done to their country's image worldwide -- all while preserving its global military edge and managing its alliances better than any president has done in the last 20 years. (And that's just for starters!) But too often these little details are in the fine print. The heart of the debunking message -- and what most readers carry away from it -- is reassurance. America will be No. 1 for decades to come.
You see the same pattern in debates on other issues, and it doesn't matter whether the left or the right holds the high ground. The earlier consensus on Afghanistan has begun to break up, for example. But it's still probably conventional wisdom, at least in Washington, to favor continuing the war, given the damage that retreat would do to U.S. interests across the Middle East and South Asia. The debunkers, by contrast, reassure us that withdrawal won't be so bad. If, as they now seem to have decided, defeat in Vietnam was no big deal, why should Afghanistan be any different?
Conventional wisdom is rarely good at explaining itself, least of all when its message is that the United States faces one big challenge after another and that they can't be successfully addressed without "unwelcome dislocation of life." The debunkers may well be right that America can avoid decline, but only by dint of gigantic effort. They might also be right that President Barack Obama or his successor can find ways to limit the damage of withdrawal from Afghanistan, but doing so will surely require more resources, focus, and commitment than the debunkers foresee. And that holds for other issues, whether it's coping with a nuclear Iran, the economic crisis, or climate change.
The most dangerous idea Americans face these days is that they can do less (or do nothing) and still get by. On this question, the conventional wisdom -- in all its hair-on-fire banality -- is absolutely right.
Stephen Sestanovich is a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Think Again: American Decline
This time it's for real.
BY GIDEON RACHMAN JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."
This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world." Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.
In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.
The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world's leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.
Japan, of course, also experienced many years of rapid economic growth and is still an export powerhouse. But it was never a plausible candidate to be No. 1. The Japanese population is less than half that of the United States, which means that the average Japanese person would have to be more than twice as rich as the average American before Japan's economy surpassed America's. That was never going to happen. By contrast, China's population is more than four times that of the United States. The famous projection by Goldman Sachs that China's economy will be bigger than that of the United States by 2027 was made before the 2008 economic crash. At the current pace, China could be No. 1 well before then.
China's economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.
And China is only the largest part of a bigger story about the rise of new economic and political players. America's traditional allies in Europe -- Britain, France, Italy, even Germany -- are slipping down the economic ranks. New powers are on the rise: India, Brazil, Turkey. They each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which collectively constrain America's ability to shape the world. Think of how India and Brazil sided with China at the global climate-change talks. Or the votes by Turkey and Brazil against America at the United Nations on sanctions against Iran. That is just a taste of things to come.
"China Will Implode Sooner or Later."
Don't count on it. It is certainly true that when Americans are worrying about national decline, they tend to overlook the weaknesses of their scariest-looking rival. The flaws in the Soviet and Japanese systems became obvious only in retrospect. Those who are confident that American hegemony will be extended long into the future point to the potential liabilities of the Chinese system. In a recent interview with the Times of London, former U.S. President George W. Bush suggested that China's internal problems mean that its economy will be unlikely to rival America's in the foreseeable future. "Do I still think America will remain the sole superpower?" he asked. "I do."
But predictions of the imminent demise of the Chinese miracle have been a regular feature of Western analysis ever since it got rolling in the late 1970s. In 1989, the Communist Party seemed to be staggering after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the 1990s, economy watchers regularly pointed to the parlous state of Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises. Yet the Chinese economy has kept growing, doubling in size roughly every seven years.
Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power forever. And the country's traditional dependence on exports and an undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the United States and other international actors demanding a "rebalancing" of China's export-driven economy. The country also faces major demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened by water shortages and pollution.
Yet even if you factor in considerable future economic and political turbulence, it would be a big mistake to assume that the Chinese challenge to U.S. power will simply disappear. Once countries get the hang of economic growth, it takes a great deal to throw them off course. The analogy to the rise of Germany from the mid-19th century onward is instructive. Germany went through two catastrophic military defeats, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the collapse of democracy, and the destruction of its major cities and infrastructure by Allied bombs. And yet by the end of the 1950s, West Germany was once again one of the world's leading economies, albeit shorn of its imperial ambitions.
In a nuclear age, China is unlikely to get sucked into a world war, so it will not face turbulence and disorder on remotely the scale Germany did in the 20th century. And whatever economic and political difficulties it does experience will not be enough to stop the country's rise to great-power status. Sheer size and economic momentum mean that the Chinese juggernaut will keep rolling forward, no matter what obstacles lie in its path.
"America Still Leads Across the Board."
For now. As things stand, America has the world's largest economy, the world's leading universities, and many of its biggest companies. The U.S. military is also incomparably more powerful than any rival. The United States spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. And let's also add in America's intangible assets. The country's combination of entrepreneurial flair and technological prowess has allowed it to lead the technological revolution. Talented immigrants still flock to U.S. shores. And now that Barack Obama is in the White House, the country's soft power has received a big boost. For all his troubles, polls show Obama is still the most charismatic leader in the world; Hu Jintao doesn't even come close. America also boasts the global allure of its creative industries (Hollywood and all that), its values, the increasing universality of the English language, and the attractiveness of the American Dream.
All true -- but all more vulnerable than you might think. American universities remain a formidable asset. But if the U.S. economy is not generating jobs, then those bright Asian graduate students who fill up the engineering and computer-science departments at Stanford University and MIT will return home in larger numbers. Fortune's latest ranking of the world's largest companies has only two American firms in the top 10 -- Walmart at No. 1 and ExxonMobil at No. 3. There are already three Chinese firms in the top 10: Sinopec, State Grid, and China National Petroleum. America's appeal might also diminish if the country is no longer so closely associated with opportunity, prosperity, and success. And though many foreigners are deeply attracted to the American Dream, there is also a deep well of anti-American sentiment in the world that al Qaeda and others have skillfully exploited, Obama or no Obama.
As for the U.S. military, the lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars is that America's martial prowess is less useful than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others imagined. U.S. troops, planes, and missiles can overthrow a government on the other side of the world in weeks, but pacifying and stabilizing a conquered country is another matter. Years after apparent victory, America is still bogged down by an apparently endless insurgency in Afghanistan.
Not only are Americans losing their appetite for foreign adventures, but the U.S. military budget is clearly going to come under pressure in this new age of austerity. The present paralysis in Washington offers little hope that the United States will deal with its budgetary problems swiftly or efficiently. The U.S. government's continuing reliance on foreign lending makes the country vulnerable, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's humbling 2009 request to the Chinese to keep buying U.S. Treasury bills revealed. America is funding its military supremacy through deficit spending, meaning the war in Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese credit card. Little wonder that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has identified the burgeoning national debt as the single largest threat to U.S. national security.
Meanwhile, China's spending on its military continues to grow rapidly. The country will soon announce the construction of its first aircraft carrier and is aiming to build five or six in total. Perhaps more seriously, China's development of new missile and anti-satellite technology threatens the command of the sea and skies on which the United States bases its Pacific supremacy. In a nuclear age, the U.S. and Chinese militaries are unlikely to clash. A common Chinese view is that the United States will instead eventually find it can no longer afford its military position in the Pacific. U.S. allies in the region -- Japan, South Korea, and increasingly India -- may partner more with Washington to try to counter rising Chinese power. But if the United States has to scale back its presence in the Pacific for budgetary reasons, its allies will start to accommodate themselves to a rising China. Beijing's influence will expand, and the Asia-Pacific region -- the emerging center of the global economy -- will become China's backyard.
"Globalization Is Bending the World the Way of the West."
Not really. One reason why the United States was relaxed about China's rise in the years after the end of the Cold War was the deeply ingrained belief that globalization was spreading Western values. Some even thought that globalization and Americanization were virtually synonymous.
Pundit Fareed Zakaria was prescient when he wrote that the "rise of the rest" (i.e., non-American powers) would be one of the major features of a "post-American world." But even Zakaria argued that this trend was essentially beneficial to the United States: "The power shift … is good for America, if approached properly. The world is going America's way. Countries are becoming more open, market-friendly, and democratic."
Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that globalization and free trade would serve as a vehicle for the export of American values. In 1999, two years before China's accession to the World Trade Organization, Bush argued, "Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side."
There were two important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing. The first was that economic growth would inevitably -- and fairly swiftly -- lead to democratization. The second was that new democracies would inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the United States. Neither assumption is working out.
In 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Western analysts would have believed that 20 years later China would still be a one-party state -- and that its economy would also still be growing at phenomenal rates. The common (and comforting) Western assumption was that China would have to choose between political liberalization and economic failure. Surely a tightly controlled one-party state could not succeed in the era of cell phones and the World Wide Web? As Clinton put it during a visit to China in 1998, "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is … essential to the greatness of any modern nation."
In fact, China managed to combine censorship and one-party rule with continuing economic success over the following decade. The confrontation between the Chinese government and Google in 2010 was instructive. Google, that icon of the digital era, threatened to withdraw from China in protest at censorship, but it eventually backed down in return for token concessions. It is now entirely conceivable that when China becomes the world's largest economy -- let us say in 2027 -- it will still be a one-party state run by the Communist Party.
And even if China does democratize, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will make life easier for the United States, let alone prolong America's global hegemony. The idea that democracies are liable to agree on the big global issues is now being undermined on a regular basis. India does not agree with the United States on climate change or the Doha round of trade talks. Brazil does not agree with the United States on how to handle Venezuela or Iran. A more democratic Turkey is today also a more Islamist Turkey, which is now refusing to take the American line on either Israel or Iran. In a similar vein, a more democratic China might also be a more prickly China, if the popularity of nationalist books and Internet sites in the Middle Kingdom is any guide.
"Globalization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game."
Don't be too sure. Successive U.S. presidents, from the first Bush to Obama, have explicitly welcomed China's rise. Just before his first visit to China, Obama summarized the traditional approach when he said, "Power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another.… We welcome China's efforts to play a greater role on the world stage."
But whatever they say in formal speeches, America's leaders are clearly beginning to have their doubts, and rightly so. It is a central tenet of modern economics that trade is mutually beneficial for both partners, a win-win rather than a zero-sum. But that implies the rules of the game aren't rigged. Speaking before the 2010 World Economic Forum, Larry Summers, then Obama's chief economic advisor, remarked pointedly that the normal rules about the mutual benefits of trade do not necessarily apply when one trading partner is practicing mercantilist or protectionist policies. The U.S. government clearly thinks that China's undervaluation of its currency is a form of protectionism that has led to global economic imbalances and job losses in the United States. Leading economists, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the Peterson Institute's C. Fred Bergsten, have taken a similar line, arguing that tariffs or other retaliatory measures would be a legitimate response. So much for the win-win world.
And when it comes to the broader geopolitical picture, the world of the future looks even more like a zero-sum game, despite the gauzy rhetoric of globalization that comforted the last generation of American politicians. For the United States has been acting as if the mutual interests created by globalization have repealed one of the oldest laws of international politics: the notion that rising players eventually clash with established powers.
In fact, rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in Asia to human rights. It is mercifully unlikely that the United States and China would ever actually go to war, but that is because both sides have nuclear weapons, not because globalization has magically dissolved their differences.
At the G-20 summit in November, the U.S. drive to deal with "global economic imbalances" was essentially thwarted by China's obdurate refusal to change its currency policy. The 2009 climate-change talks in Copenhagen ended in disarray after another U.S.-China standoff. Growing Chinese economic and military clout clearly poses a long-term threat to American hegemony in the Pacific. The Chinese reluctantly agreed to a new package of U.N. sanctions on Iran, but the cost of securing Chinese agreement was a weak deal that is unlikely to derail the Iranian nuclear program. Both sides have taken part in the talks with North Korea, but a barely submerged rivalry prevents truly effective Sino-American cooperation. China does not like Kim Jong Il's regime, but it is also very wary of a reunified Korea on its borders, particularly if the new Korea still played host to U.S. troops. China is also competing fiercely for access to resources, in particular oil, which is driving up global prices.
American leaders are right to reject zero-sum logic in public. To do anything else would needlessly antagonize the Chinese. But that shouldn't obscure this unavoidable fact: As economic and political power moves from West to East, new international rivalries are inevitably emerging.
The United States still has formidable strengths. Its economy will eventually recover. Its military has a global presence and a technological edge that no other country can yet match. But America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008. Those days are over.
BY GIDEON RACHMAN JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011
"We've Heard All This About American Decline Before."
This time it's different. It's certainly true that America has been through cycles of declinism in the past. Campaigning for the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy complained, "American strength relative to that of the Soviet Union has been slipping, and communism has been advancing steadily in every area of the world." Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One was published in 1979, heralding a decade of steadily rising paranoia about Japanese manufacturing techniques and trade policies.
In the end, of course, the Soviet and Japanese threats to American supremacy proved chimerical. So Americans can be forgiven if they greet talk of a new challenge from China as just another case of the boy who cried wolf. But a frequently overlooked fact about that fable is that the boy was eventually proved right. The wolf did arrive -- and China is the wolf.
The Chinese challenge to the United States is more serious for both economic and demographic reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed because its economic system was highly inefficient, a fatal flaw that was disguised for a long time because the USSR never attempted to compete on world markets. China, by contrast, has proved its economic prowess on the global stage. Its economy has been growing at 9 to 10 percent a year, on average, for roughly three decades. It is now the world's leading exporter and its biggest manufacturer, and it is sitting on more than $2.5 trillion of foreign reserves. Chinese goods compete all over the world. This is no Soviet-style economic basket case.
Japan, of course, also experienced many years of rapid economic growth and is still an export powerhouse. But it was never a plausible candidate to be No. 1. The Japanese population is less than half that of the United States, which means that the average Japanese person would have to be more than twice as rich as the average American before Japan's economy surpassed America's. That was never going to happen. By contrast, China's population is more than four times that of the United States. The famous projection by Goldman Sachs that China's economy will be bigger than that of the United States by 2027 was made before the 2008 economic crash. At the current pace, China could be No. 1 well before then.
China's economic prowess is already allowing Beijing to challenge American influence all over the world. The Chinese are the preferred partners of many African governments and the biggest trading partner of other emerging powers, such as Brazil and South Africa. China is also stepping in to buy the bonds of financially strapped members of the eurozone, such as Greece and Portugal.
And China is only the largest part of a bigger story about the rise of new economic and political players. America's traditional allies in Europe -- Britain, France, Italy, even Germany -- are slipping down the economic ranks. New powers are on the rise: India, Brazil, Turkey. They each have their own foreign-policy preferences, which collectively constrain America's ability to shape the world. Think of how India and Brazil sided with China at the global climate-change talks. Or the votes by Turkey and Brazil against America at the United Nations on sanctions against Iran. That is just a taste of things to come.
"China Will Implode Sooner or Later."
Don't count on it. It is certainly true that when Americans are worrying about national decline, they tend to overlook the weaknesses of their scariest-looking rival. The flaws in the Soviet and Japanese systems became obvious only in retrospect. Those who are confident that American hegemony will be extended long into the future point to the potential liabilities of the Chinese system. In a recent interview with the Times of London, former U.S. President George W. Bush suggested that China's internal problems mean that its economy will be unlikely to rival America's in the foreseeable future. "Do I still think America will remain the sole superpower?" he asked. "I do."
But predictions of the imminent demise of the Chinese miracle have been a regular feature of Western analysis ever since it got rolling in the late 1970s. In 1989, the Communist Party seemed to be staggering after the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the 1990s, economy watchers regularly pointed to the parlous state of Chinese banks and state-owned enterprises. Yet the Chinese economy has kept growing, doubling in size roughly every seven years.
Of course, it would be absurd to pretend that China does not face major challenges. In the short term, there is plenty of evidence that a property bubble is building in big cities like Shanghai, and inflation is on the rise. Over the long term, China has alarming political and economic transitions to navigate. The Communist Party is unlikely to be able to maintain its monopoly on political power forever. And the country's traditional dependence on exports and an undervalued currency are coming under increasing criticism from the United States and other international actors demanding a "rebalancing" of China's export-driven economy. The country also faces major demographic and environmental challenges: The population is aging rapidly as a result of the one-child policy, and China is threatened by water shortages and pollution.
Yet even if you factor in considerable future economic and political turbulence, it would be a big mistake to assume that the Chinese challenge to U.S. power will simply disappear. Once countries get the hang of economic growth, it takes a great deal to throw them off course. The analogy to the rise of Germany from the mid-19th century onward is instructive. Germany went through two catastrophic military defeats, hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the collapse of democracy, and the destruction of its major cities and infrastructure by Allied bombs. And yet by the end of the 1950s, West Germany was once again one of the world's leading economies, albeit shorn of its imperial ambitions.
In a nuclear age, China is unlikely to get sucked into a world war, so it will not face turbulence and disorder on remotely the scale Germany did in the 20th century. And whatever economic and political difficulties it does experience will not be enough to stop the country's rise to great-power status. Sheer size and economic momentum mean that the Chinese juggernaut will keep rolling forward, no matter what obstacles lie in its path.
"America Still Leads Across the Board."
For now. As things stand, America has the world's largest economy, the world's leading universities, and many of its biggest companies. The U.S. military is also incomparably more powerful than any rival. The United States spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world put together. And let's also add in America's intangible assets. The country's combination of entrepreneurial flair and technological prowess has allowed it to lead the technological revolution. Talented immigrants still flock to U.S. shores. And now that Barack Obama is in the White House, the country's soft power has received a big boost. For all his troubles, polls show Obama is still the most charismatic leader in the world; Hu Jintao doesn't even come close. America also boasts the global allure of its creative industries (Hollywood and all that), its values, the increasing universality of the English language, and the attractiveness of the American Dream.
All true -- but all more vulnerable than you might think. American universities remain a formidable asset. But if the U.S. economy is not generating jobs, then those bright Asian graduate students who fill up the engineering and computer-science departments at Stanford University and MIT will return home in larger numbers. Fortune's latest ranking of the world's largest companies has only two American firms in the top 10 -- Walmart at No. 1 and ExxonMobil at No. 3. There are already three Chinese firms in the top 10: Sinopec, State Grid, and China National Petroleum. America's appeal might also diminish if the country is no longer so closely associated with opportunity, prosperity, and success. And though many foreigners are deeply attracted to the American Dream, there is also a deep well of anti-American sentiment in the world that al Qaeda and others have skillfully exploited, Obama or no Obama.
As for the U.S. military, the lesson of the Iraq and Afghan wars is that America's martial prowess is less useful than former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others imagined. U.S. troops, planes, and missiles can overthrow a government on the other side of the world in weeks, but pacifying and stabilizing a conquered country is another matter. Years after apparent victory, America is still bogged down by an apparently endless insurgency in Afghanistan.
Not only are Americans losing their appetite for foreign adventures, but the U.S. military budget is clearly going to come under pressure in this new age of austerity. The present paralysis in Washington offers little hope that the United States will deal with its budgetary problems swiftly or efficiently. The U.S. government's continuing reliance on foreign lending makes the country vulnerable, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's humbling 2009 request to the Chinese to keep buying U.S. Treasury bills revealed. America is funding its military supremacy through deficit spending, meaning the war in Afghanistan is effectively being paid for with a Chinese credit card. Little wonder that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has identified the burgeoning national debt as the single largest threat to U.S. national security.
Meanwhile, China's spending on its military continues to grow rapidly. The country will soon announce the construction of its first aircraft carrier and is aiming to build five or six in total. Perhaps more seriously, China's development of new missile and anti-satellite technology threatens the command of the sea and skies on which the United States bases its Pacific supremacy. In a nuclear age, the U.S. and Chinese militaries are unlikely to clash. A common Chinese view is that the United States will instead eventually find it can no longer afford its military position in the Pacific. U.S. allies in the region -- Japan, South Korea, and increasingly India -- may partner more with Washington to try to counter rising Chinese power. But if the United States has to scale back its presence in the Pacific for budgetary reasons, its allies will start to accommodate themselves to a rising China. Beijing's influence will expand, and the Asia-Pacific region -- the emerging center of the global economy -- will become China's backyard.
"Globalization Is Bending the World the Way of the West."
Not really. One reason why the United States was relaxed about China's rise in the years after the end of the Cold War was the deeply ingrained belief that globalization was spreading Western values. Some even thought that globalization and Americanization were virtually synonymous.
Pundit Fareed Zakaria was prescient when he wrote that the "rise of the rest" (i.e., non-American powers) would be one of the major features of a "post-American world." But even Zakaria argued that this trend was essentially beneficial to the United States: "The power shift … is good for America, if approached properly. The world is going America's way. Countries are becoming more open, market-friendly, and democratic."
Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton took a similar view that globalization and free trade would serve as a vehicle for the export of American values. In 1999, two years before China's accession to the World Trade Organization, Bush argued, "Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy.… Trade freely with China, and time is on our side."
There were two important misunderstandings buried in this theorizing. The first was that economic growth would inevitably -- and fairly swiftly -- lead to democratization. The second was that new democracies would inevitably be more friendly and helpful toward the United States. Neither assumption is working out.
In 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, few Western analysts would have believed that 20 years later China would still be a one-party state -- and that its economy would also still be growing at phenomenal rates. The common (and comforting) Western assumption was that China would have to choose between political liberalization and economic failure. Surely a tightly controlled one-party state could not succeed in the era of cell phones and the World Wide Web? As Clinton put it during a visit to China in 1998, "In this global information age, when economic success is built on ideas, personal freedom is … essential to the greatness of any modern nation."
In fact, China managed to combine censorship and one-party rule with continuing economic success over the following decade. The confrontation between the Chinese government and Google in 2010 was instructive. Google, that icon of the digital era, threatened to withdraw from China in protest at censorship, but it eventually backed down in return for token concessions. It is now entirely conceivable that when China becomes the world's largest economy -- let us say in 2027 -- it will still be a one-party state run by the Communist Party.
And even if China does democratize, there is absolutely no guarantee that this will make life easier for the United States, let alone prolong America's global hegemony. The idea that democracies are liable to agree on the big global issues is now being undermined on a regular basis. India does not agree with the United States on climate change or the Doha round of trade talks. Brazil does not agree with the United States on how to handle Venezuela or Iran. A more democratic Turkey is today also a more Islamist Turkey, which is now refusing to take the American line on either Israel or Iran. In a similar vein, a more democratic China might also be a more prickly China, if the popularity of nationalist books and Internet sites in the Middle Kingdom is any guide.
"Globalization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game."
Don't be too sure. Successive U.S. presidents, from the first Bush to Obama, have explicitly welcomed China's rise. Just before his first visit to China, Obama summarized the traditional approach when he said, "Power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another.… We welcome China's efforts to play a greater role on the world stage."
But whatever they say in formal speeches, America's leaders are clearly beginning to have their doubts, and rightly so. It is a central tenet of modern economics that trade is mutually beneficial for both partners, a win-win rather than a zero-sum. But that implies the rules of the game aren't rigged. Speaking before the 2010 World Economic Forum, Larry Summers, then Obama's chief economic advisor, remarked pointedly that the normal rules about the mutual benefits of trade do not necessarily apply when one trading partner is practicing mercantilist or protectionist policies. The U.S. government clearly thinks that China's undervaluation of its currency is a form of protectionism that has led to global economic imbalances and job losses in the United States. Leading economists, such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and the Peterson Institute's C. Fred Bergsten, have taken a similar line, arguing that tariffs or other retaliatory measures would be a legitimate response. So much for the win-win world.
And when it comes to the broader geopolitical picture, the world of the future looks even more like a zero-sum game, despite the gauzy rhetoric of globalization that comforted the last generation of American politicians. For the United States has been acting as if the mutual interests created by globalization have repealed one of the oldest laws of international politics: the notion that rising players eventually clash with established powers.
In fact, rivalry between a rising China and a weakened America is now apparent across a whole range of issues, from territorial disputes in Asia to human rights. It is mercifully unlikely that the United States and China would ever actually go to war, but that is because both sides have nuclear weapons, not because globalization has magically dissolved their differences.
At the G-20 summit in November, the U.S. drive to deal with "global economic imbalances" was essentially thwarted by China's obdurate refusal to change its currency policy. The 2009 climate-change talks in Copenhagen ended in disarray after another U.S.-China standoff. Growing Chinese economic and military clout clearly poses a long-term threat to American hegemony in the Pacific. The Chinese reluctantly agreed to a new package of U.N. sanctions on Iran, but the cost of securing Chinese agreement was a weak deal that is unlikely to derail the Iranian nuclear program. Both sides have taken part in the talks with North Korea, but a barely submerged rivalry prevents truly effective Sino-American cooperation. China does not like Kim Jong Il's regime, but it is also very wary of a reunified Korea on its borders, particularly if the new Korea still played host to U.S. troops. China is also competing fiercely for access to resources, in particular oil, which is driving up global prices.
American leaders are right to reject zero-sum logic in public. To do anything else would needlessly antagonize the Chinese. But that shouldn't obscure this unavoidable fact: As economic and political power moves from West to East, new international rivalries are inevitably emerging.
The United States still has formidable strengths. Its economy will eventually recover. Its military has a global presence and a technological edge that no other country can yet match. But America will never again experience the global dominance it enjoyed in the 17 years between the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 and the financial crisis of 2008. Those days are over.
An America hurting itself
ST Editorial
Jan 13, 2011
ONCE again, an act of political violence has sent America into a paroxysm of self-examination. Less uplifting is that this is being accompanied by recriminations and invective across the spectrum. The outside world looking in on the shooting rampage which left a Democratic congressman critically wounded may have a clearer sense of the questions Americans should be confronting.
Was the assault on Ms Gabrielle Giffords a disavowal by sections of the Republican conservative core of the Democrats' legitimacy to govern? How and why has a whiff of vigilantism crept into the nation's political life? Might the stimulus have been the election of the first non-white person as President? It was a liberating, epochal event for many Americans when it happened. Two years on, the political mood has turned mean-spirited, with the admirable Mr Barack Obama made an object of calumny by his detractors despite a reasonably good showing tending to domestic concerns and regaining some respect for the United States abroad.
How do Americans square their political maturation with the sight of demagogues commanding as much credence as those who demonstrably can do the country good? How could gun metaphors and imagery in public contests be tolerated when gun violence has set back political and civic progress enough times in the past? Has extremism become respectable?
It is proper at this early stage of a judicial process to not presume that the young man who shot the legislator and several others at a political event in Arizona was motivated by ideology. Behaviour suggests he is a troubled person, but investigators and the court charges say Ms Giffords had been his intended victim. It is however patently false to protest, as the far-right political constituency now does, that the dangerous baiting it adopted during the debate on health-care reform had not poisoned the political atmosphere.
Powerful grassroots forces are being deployed against Mr Obama and the Democrats to deny them an extended stay in office, because large swathes of the population are convinced the leadership has betrayed American values and made light of their concerns. Their putative leaders will resort to all means to prevail, including incitement to violence. The political culture is permissive, and it had at least something to do with what had happened in Arizona.
The shooting of a legislator said to be destined for bigger things is a warning to pull back. A fair question the campaigners could ask of themselves is whether the venerated American ideals of fairness and the triumph of ideas are not better served by engaging in an honourable contest.
[Americans and American Media are quick to denounce hate speech that are based on racism, sexism, ageism, or any other kind of -ism. It's time that they recognise that promoting violence is also wrong, even if it is intended as hyperbole.]
Jan 13, 2011
ONCE again, an act of political violence has sent America into a paroxysm of self-examination. Less uplifting is that this is being accompanied by recriminations and invective across the spectrum. The outside world looking in on the shooting rampage which left a Democratic congressman critically wounded may have a clearer sense of the questions Americans should be confronting.
Was the assault on Ms Gabrielle Giffords a disavowal by sections of the Republican conservative core of the Democrats' legitimacy to govern? How and why has a whiff of vigilantism crept into the nation's political life? Might the stimulus have been the election of the first non-white person as President? It was a liberating, epochal event for many Americans when it happened. Two years on, the political mood has turned mean-spirited, with the admirable Mr Barack Obama made an object of calumny by his detractors despite a reasonably good showing tending to domestic concerns and regaining some respect for the United States abroad.
How do Americans square their political maturation with the sight of demagogues commanding as much credence as those who demonstrably can do the country good? How could gun metaphors and imagery in public contests be tolerated when gun violence has set back political and civic progress enough times in the past? Has extremism become respectable?
It is proper at this early stage of a judicial process to not presume that the young man who shot the legislator and several others at a political event in Arizona was motivated by ideology. Behaviour suggests he is a troubled person, but investigators and the court charges say Ms Giffords had been his intended victim. It is however patently false to protest, as the far-right political constituency now does, that the dangerous baiting it adopted during the debate on health-care reform had not poisoned the political atmosphere.
Powerful grassroots forces are being deployed against Mr Obama and the Democrats to deny them an extended stay in office, because large swathes of the population are convinced the leadership has betrayed American values and made light of their concerns. Their putative leaders will resort to all means to prevail, including incitement to violence. The political culture is permissive, and it had at least something to do with what had happened in Arizona.
The shooting of a legislator said to be destined for bigger things is a warning to pull back. A fair question the campaigners could ask of themselves is whether the venerated American ideals of fairness and the triumph of ideas are not better served by engaging in an honourable contest.
[Americans and American Media are quick to denounce hate speech that are based on racism, sexism, ageism, or any other kind of -ism. It's time that they recognise that promoting violence is also wrong, even if it is intended as hyperbole.]
Queensland Flood
Jan 13, 2011
BRISBANE: Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were yesterday inundated by raging waters that converged on Brisbane, Australia's third-largest city, and surrounding towns, creating a vast zone which officials said could remain under water for days.
The torrent of water has so far killed 22 people, and the toll is expected to rise as some 40 others are missing. The floods are the worst to hit the city in a century, eclipsing the devastating events of 1974, when 14 people were killed.
Hit: Homes, livelihoods, the economy
Floods take toll on small businesses, industries and the tourism sector
Floods take toll on small businesses, industries and the tourism sector
BRISBANE: Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were yesterday inundated by raging waters that converged on Brisbane, Australia's third-largest city, and surrounding towns, creating a vast zone which officials said could remain under water for days. The torrent of water has so far killed 22 people, and the toll is expected to rise as some 40 others are missing. The floods are the worst to hit the city in a century, eclipsing the devastating events of 1974, when 14 people were killed.
An estimated 20,000 homes in Brisbane are said to be at risk, affecting up to 45,000 people and 3,500 businesses.
The flooding is set to reach its peak today, and more than 1,600 roads are expected to be closed.
Even as Brisbane was inundated, danger signs were flashing in Melbourne, the country's second-largest city, in neighbouring Victoria state.
Even as Brisbane was inundated, danger signs were flashing in Melbourne, the country's second-largest city, in neighbouring Victoria state.
Flash floods hit several parts of the city and other areas of the state yesterday. In towns near Melbourne, drivers had to be rescued from trapped cars, while some home owners were forced to evacuate.
A 40km stretch of the Great Ocean Road, a popular tourist driving route on the south-eastern coast, had to be closed off to traffic as a result of floods, heavy rains and rockfall.
It was in Brisbane, however, that the devastation was at its worst.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard arrived in the city yesterday and said she was deeply concerned about the impact of the floods on jobs and livelihoods.
'I have been shocked. I think we've all been shocked by the images of that wall of water just wreaking such devastation. The dimensions of it are truly mind-boggling,' she said.
The city was all but shut down as unrelenting rain lashed the area, unleashing what some called an 'inland tsunami' on the city centre. What were dry suburban streets in the morning morphed into rivers mere hours later, leaving the city's central business district a watery ghost town of high rise towers.
Residents in the city of two million were told to evacuate homes early, but many were caught out by the speed of the rising water, which is predicted to remain high for at least a few more days.
The city's mayor said 190,000 sandbags had been laid in the city in the past few days, with many filled by volunteers, some from the disappearing banks of the flooded Brisbane River.
The city's mayor said 190,000 sandbags had been laid in the city in the past few days, with many filled by volunteers, some from the disappearing banks of the flooded Brisbane River.
The scale of the flooding has put a dampener on the country's previously thriving economy. The Australian dollar dipped to its lowest level in the four weeks since the floods started, and economists have doubled their estimates of the impact of the flooding, saying the disaster could shave 1 per cent off the country's gross domestic product, or almost A$13 billion (S$16.6 billion).
Queensland's mining industry and agricultural productions have already been badly hit, suffering billions of dollars in damage, and the state's tourism industry is also taking a severe beating as thousands of tourists cancel trips there.
Queensland Tourism Industry Council chief Daniel Gschwind told Reuters that the potential losses would be a 'staggering' amount: 'It will be very, very significant and we are certainly talking in hundreds of millions (of dollars) rather than anything smaller.'
Queensland has long been among the top attractions in Australia's A$32 billion tourism industry, with its Gold Coast stretch of beaches and the Great Barrier Reef among its main draws.
Livelihoods are also being torn asunder as a result of the floods. In downtown Brisbane, the manager of the Salt 'n' Pepper catering business, Ms Kim Hung, surveyed the destruction after shoulder-high water swamped her unit and ruined almost everything in sight: 'This is my whole life, everything is gone. I never thought it would get this bad.'
Amid the devastation, however, there were silver linings: Stories have emerged of Australian pluck, and news reports have been peppered with tales of heroes who risked their lives to save others, and of strangers helping each other.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh urged residents to keep up their spirit.
'We need to make every effort to stay calm and stick together,' she said. 'If you live on high ground, now is the time to reach out and offer help to neighbours... and offer a bed for the night.'
REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, NEW YORK TIMES
THE HEROES
Acts of valour amid sea of tragedy
THERE was the communications coordinator who spent hours in the dark of night ferrying residents to safety after they had been plucked off their rooftops.
Acts of valour amid sea of tragedy
THERE was the communications coordinator who spent hours in the dark of night ferrying residents to safety after they had been plucked off their rooftops.
There was the fireman who continued to rescue an old man even when he was told his own family had been stranded on a rooftop.
Then there was the panel beater who, with several others, braved surging flood waters to try to rescue two women from a car stranded by rising waters.
Amid the ongoing disaster have come such stories of heroism and acts of selflessness, carried out by professional rescuers as well as ordinary Australians rising to the occasion.
Some were firefighters and emergency workers risking their lives to reach people stranded on rooftops and in cars. Others were bystanders who did not hesitate and joined in rescue efforts, using whatever tools they had on hand.
Local media have run several reports on heroes of the hour, whose actions had saved lives as thousands continue to battle the raging waters. The floods, as the Australian Daily Telegraph put it, have become a landscape for 'true national valiance and fearlessness'.
Mr Jason Cubit, a communications coordinator for the Lockyer Valley Regional Council in Gatton, a rural town, had helped to get about 100 stranded Queenslanders off the roofs of their homes in Grantham town.
For three hours, the 26-year-old drove an eight-seater van back and forth, ferrying people from the submerged parts of town to higher ground as other heroes plucked residents from rooftops.
Then, after ensuring everyone was safe, Mr Cubit simply went home, put on his work clothes and turned up for work.
Then, after ensuring everyone was safe, Mr Cubit simply went home, put on his work clothes and turned up for work.
Over in Oakey town, a firefighter helping to rescue an old man did not flinch when colleagues told him his wife and four children had been forced onto their roof by rising waters. Rescue helicopters could not reach them because of the weather, and the colleagues were worried about the fireman's response.
'They'll be right,' the fireman said, and continued with his task. The old man had suffered a heart attack, and the fireman believed he was needed there most.
'It took the pressure off his mates back at the base,' Queensland MP Peter Pyke was quoted as saying by The Daily Telegraph as he recounted the story.
'It also demonstrates the level of community spirit that we have in these small communities, where everyone has lost everything and yet everyone still helps one another out.'
In the Toowoomba region, one of the worst hit, panel beater Colin McNamara, 28, and several others risked their lives to try to rescue two women trapped in a car caught in the raging waters.
'They were petrified. Absolutely petrified. They were wet and basically pleading for help. They weren't saying much but you could see it in their eyes,' he recalled.
'They were petrified. Absolutely petrified. They were wet and basically pleading for help. They weren't saying much but you could see it in their eyes,' he recalled.
They tried to walk out to the pair with ropes in chest-deep water, but to their horror, the two women were washed away before their eyes.
'The torrent was too strong,' Mr McNamara told the Brisbane Times. 'I was almost pulled in by the torrent.'
After a sleepless night, however, he got word that they survived.
Said Mr Pyke: 'In times like this, I know that all Australians are good... We have that famous mateship thing and it is in times like this that it again comes to the fore.'
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Smokescreen around Arizona shooting
Jan 12, 2011
The issue isn't hate speech or politics, but violence and gun control
By Chua Chin Hon
FOLLOWING the shocking shooting rampage in Arizona, American politicians and media outlets have embarked on a predictable round of soul-searching about the country's heated political discourse.
It's time to take a retreat to civility, says one editorial. Politicians need to stop employing rhetoric that invokes guns and anti-government insurrection, notes another.
This is all well and good. Following last year's bitter mid-term elections, the country could do with a collective chill pill.
But no one should be under any illusion that the genie can be put back into the bottle.
For one thing, there is no way to roll back the technological advances driving the political conversation these days. The advent of 24-hour cable news channels, the Internet, and social media tools have simply rendered any notion of 'control' over the debate meaningless.
Second, the so-called anger in US politics - the constant reference to war, for instance - is merely an extension of a broader, popular culture steeped in increasingly violent imagery of every sort. The politicians' heated rhetoric feeds off the American population's acceptance of violence in movies, music and video games, not the other way around.
The bigger problem with this torrent of commentary about the dangers of hate speech, however, is that it is fast becoming a smokescreen for the real issue at hand: the lack of sensible laws on gun control.
Yes, incendiary comments by politicians and media figures can incite some people to violence.
But lest anyone should forget, the 20 people who were killed or wounded in the city of Tucson last Saturday - including a legislator, a federal judge, a nine-year- old girl and 17 others - were cut down by bullets fired from a semi-automatic Glock pistol with a high-capacity clip, not a knife or a baseball bat.
We now know that the suspected gunman Jared Loughner is a deeply troubled youth with a history of disturbing behaviour that includes angry outbursts and hysterical laughter in the classroom. He was also rejected by the army when he tried to enlist.
Yet by all accounts, the 22-year-old did not have trouble buying a firearm. He reportedly walked into an outdoor equipment store in Tucson last year and bought the Glock pistol legally.
Even without the benefit of hindsight, one has to ask why anyone in a civil society should have unfettered access to such dangerous weapons in the first place.
Baffled foreigners in the US are usually given two answers. First, the Second Amendment of the US Constitution upholds the people's right to bear arms.
The second argument that you typically hear: self-defence. Since moving here two years ago, I've had the chance to visit some Americans at their homes in the quiet woods of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
For them, their nearest neighbour is a 10- to 15-minute drive away. They count themselves lucky if the police can respond to an emergency call within the hour.
After surveying the isolated surroundings that they live in, I've learnt to appreciate their arguments about self-defence.
But surely allowing people to protect themselves at home is not the same as allowing them to buy assault weapons like AK-47s, or to carry concealed firearms without a permit.
In Arizona, one of the states with the most lax gun control laws, you can do just that following a new ruling last year that eliminated the need for gun owners to get a permit for carrying concealed weapons. You can also carry loaded guns in bars and restaurants in the south-western state if you want.
Arizona is not the only place in the US with increasingly lax gun control. In the past, you could not carry concealed or loaded weapons into national parks or wildlife refuges across the country. But a new ruling last February legalised concealed firearms in nearly all 391 parks across the US.
American politicians are not unaware of the real problem. But few are prepared to confront the National Rifle Association, the powerful and well-funded gun lobby group, or the polarised politics surrounding firearms control.
Following last Saturday's shooting, only two lawmakers have stepped forward with plans to introduce some modest new form of gun control. Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg and Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy have said that they want high-capacity ammunition clips, like the one Loughner used in Tucson, to be banned.
No one seems convinced that an attempt to reinstate the ban on the sale of assault weapons - which the US legislature allowed to expire in 2004 - would get very far.
The country's top leaders, including President Barack Obama and newly installed Republican House Speaker John Boehner, have also steered clear of the issue on gun control, sticking instead to the perfunctory task of offering condolences to the victims.
Until they find the courage to have a real conversation with their constituents about the boundaries to their rights to bear arms, the rampage that took place in Tucson will only return to haunt the country in a different form.
chinhon@sph.com.sg
[The classic hypothetical is that if law-abiding people can carry guns, then things like this is less likely to happen because when some madman stops shooting, the other armed citizen can shoot to defned themselves. But in one of the most liberal gun law states, no private citizen was able to respond with a firearm. What does that say?
The fact is law-abiding citizens don't go around thinking about defending themselves, or to look at every situation as a gun combat scenario, or even to go around carrying firearms. And when someone starts shooting but not at you, it still takes time to sort out the good guys from the bad.
If in this situation there were a private citizen and an armed plainclothes law enforcement officer imagine the possible chaos. If the lawman had drawn and fired at the shooter, and the armed citizen only saw the lawman shooting the gunman in the chaos, he might shoot the lawman thinking he was the gunman. Similarly, if the armed citizen had properly identified the gunman and shot him just as the lawman was arriving at the scene, the lawman might have shot the citizen by mistake.
Armed response by untrained and unauthorised personnel may cause more confusion and tragedy.
In this incident the gunman was finally stopped by unarmed citizens when he was reloading.
Perhaps it would have been better if he never had the chance to own a gun.
Wyatt Earp had the right idea to ban guns in the town. With a properly trained police force, there is no justification for armed citizenry in peacetime.
Update (14/01/2011):
http://www.slate.com/id/2280794/
Apparently, there was an armed citizen at the scene, and apparently he almost mistook an innocent man as the shooter. Fortunately, he did not shoot the man.]
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011, at 8:13 AM ET
The issue isn't hate speech or politics, but violence and gun control
By Chua Chin Hon
FOLLOWING the shocking shooting rampage in Arizona, American politicians and media outlets have embarked on a predictable round of soul-searching about the country's heated political discourse.
It's time to take a retreat to civility, says one editorial. Politicians need to stop employing rhetoric that invokes guns and anti-government insurrection, notes another.
This is all well and good. Following last year's bitter mid-term elections, the country could do with a collective chill pill.
But no one should be under any illusion that the genie can be put back into the bottle.
For one thing, there is no way to roll back the technological advances driving the political conversation these days. The advent of 24-hour cable news channels, the Internet, and social media tools have simply rendered any notion of 'control' over the debate meaningless.
Second, the so-called anger in US politics - the constant reference to war, for instance - is merely an extension of a broader, popular culture steeped in increasingly violent imagery of every sort. The politicians' heated rhetoric feeds off the American population's acceptance of violence in movies, music and video games, not the other way around.
The bigger problem with this torrent of commentary about the dangers of hate speech, however, is that it is fast becoming a smokescreen for the real issue at hand: the lack of sensible laws on gun control.
Yes, incendiary comments by politicians and media figures can incite some people to violence.
But lest anyone should forget, the 20 people who were killed or wounded in the city of Tucson last Saturday - including a legislator, a federal judge, a nine-year- old girl and 17 others - were cut down by bullets fired from a semi-automatic Glock pistol with a high-capacity clip, not a knife or a baseball bat.
We now know that the suspected gunman Jared Loughner is a deeply troubled youth with a history of disturbing behaviour that includes angry outbursts and hysterical laughter in the classroom. He was also rejected by the army when he tried to enlist.
Yet by all accounts, the 22-year-old did not have trouble buying a firearm. He reportedly walked into an outdoor equipment store in Tucson last year and bought the Glock pistol legally.
Even without the benefit of hindsight, one has to ask why anyone in a civil society should have unfettered access to such dangerous weapons in the first place.
Baffled foreigners in the US are usually given two answers. First, the Second Amendment of the US Constitution upholds the people's right to bear arms.
The second argument that you typically hear: self-defence. Since moving here two years ago, I've had the chance to visit some Americans at their homes in the quiet woods of West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
For them, their nearest neighbour is a 10- to 15-minute drive away. They count themselves lucky if the police can respond to an emergency call within the hour.
After surveying the isolated surroundings that they live in, I've learnt to appreciate their arguments about self-defence.
But surely allowing people to protect themselves at home is not the same as allowing them to buy assault weapons like AK-47s, or to carry concealed firearms without a permit.
In Arizona, one of the states with the most lax gun control laws, you can do just that following a new ruling last year that eliminated the need for gun owners to get a permit for carrying concealed weapons. You can also carry loaded guns in bars and restaurants in the south-western state if you want.
Arizona is not the only place in the US with increasingly lax gun control. In the past, you could not carry concealed or loaded weapons into national parks or wildlife refuges across the country. But a new ruling last February legalised concealed firearms in nearly all 391 parks across the US.
American politicians are not unaware of the real problem. But few are prepared to confront the National Rifle Association, the powerful and well-funded gun lobby group, or the polarised politics surrounding firearms control.
Following last Saturday's shooting, only two lawmakers have stepped forward with plans to introduce some modest new form of gun control. Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg and Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy have said that they want high-capacity ammunition clips, like the one Loughner used in Tucson, to be banned.
No one seems convinced that an attempt to reinstate the ban on the sale of assault weapons - which the US legislature allowed to expire in 2004 - would get very far.
The country's top leaders, including President Barack Obama and newly installed Republican House Speaker John Boehner, have also steered clear of the issue on gun control, sticking instead to the perfunctory task of offering condolences to the victims.
Until they find the courage to have a real conversation with their constituents about the boundaries to their rights to bear arms, the rampage that took place in Tucson will only return to haunt the country in a different form.
chinhon@sph.com.sg
[The classic hypothetical is that if law-abiding people can carry guns, then things like this is less likely to happen because when some madman stops shooting, the other armed citizen can shoot to defned themselves. But in one of the most liberal gun law states, no private citizen was able to respond with a firearm. What does that say?
The fact is law-abiding citizens don't go around thinking about defending themselves, or to look at every situation as a gun combat scenario, or even to go around carrying firearms. And when someone starts shooting but not at you, it still takes time to sort out the good guys from the bad.
If in this situation there were a private citizen and an armed plainclothes law enforcement officer imagine the possible chaos. If the lawman had drawn and fired at the shooter, and the armed citizen only saw the lawman shooting the gunman in the chaos, he might shoot the lawman thinking he was the gunman. Similarly, if the armed citizen had properly identified the gunman and shot him just as the lawman was arriving at the scene, the lawman might have shot the citizen by mistake.
Armed response by untrained and unauthorised personnel may cause more confusion and tragedy.
In this incident the gunman was finally stopped by unarmed citizens when he was reloading.
Perhaps it would have been better if he never had the chance to own a gun.
Wyatt Earp had the right idea to ban guns in the town. With a properly trained police force, there is no justification for armed citizenry in peacetime.
Update (14/01/2011):
http://www.slate.com/id/2280794/
Apparently, there was an armed citizen at the scene, and apparently he almost mistook an innocent man as the shooter. Fortunately, he did not shoot the man.]
Friendly Firearms
Gabrielle Giffords and the perils of guns: How an armed hero nearly shot the wrong man.
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2011, at 8:13 AM ET
Does the Tucson, Ariz., massacre justify tighter gun control? Don't be silly. Second Amendment advocates never look at mass shootings that way. For every nut job wreaking mayhem with a semiautomatic weapon, there's a citizen with a firearm who could have stopped him. Look at the 1991 slaughter in Killeen, Texas, where 23 people died in a restaurant while a patron's handgun, thanks to a dumb law, was left outside in her car. Look at the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, where 32 people died because under the university's naïve policy, nobody in the invaded classrooms was allowed to carry a firearm. Guns save lives. So the argument goes.
Now comes the tragedy in Tucson. And what do gun advocates propose? More guns. Arizona already lets people carry concealed weapons without requiring permits. The legislature is considering two bills to expand this right, and as Slate's David Weigel reports, the Arizona Citizens Defense League is preparing legislation that would require the state to offer firearms training to politicians and their staff. The bill is tentatively titled the Giffords-Zimmerman Act in honor of the wounded congresswoman and her slain aide. "When everyone is carrying a firearm, nobody is going to be a victim," argues the state's top pro-gun legislator. Beyond Arizona, at least two members of Congress say they'll bring guns while traveling their districts.
The new poster boy for this agenda is Joe Zamudio, a hero in the Tucson incident. Zamudio was in a nearby drug store when the shooting began, and he was armed. He ran to the scene and helped subdue the killer. Television interviewers are celebrating his courage, and pro-gun blogs are touting his equipment. "Bystander Says Carrying Gun Prompted Him to Help," says the headline in the Wall Street Journal.
Advertisement
But before we embrace Zamudio's brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let's hear the whole story. "I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!' "
But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.
Zamudio agreed:
I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.
When Zamudio was asked what kind of weapons training he'd had, he answered: "My father raised me around guns … so I'm really comfortable with them. But I've never been in the military or had any professional training. I just reacted."
The Arizona Daily Star, based on its interview with Zamudio, adds two details to the story. First, upon seeing the man with the gun, Zamudio "grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall" before realizing he wasn't the shooter. And second, one reason why Zamudio didn't pull out his own weapon was that "he didn't want to be confused as a second gunman."
This is a much more dangerous picture than has generally been reported. Zamudio had released his safety and was poised to fire when he saw what he thought was the killer still holding his weapon. Zamudio had a split second to decide whether to shoot. He was sufficiently convinced of the killer's identity to shove the man into a wall. But Zamudio didn't use his gun. That's how close he came to killing an innocent man. He was, as he acknowledges, "very lucky."
That's what happens when you run with a firearm to a scene of bloody havoc. In the chaos and pressure of the moment, you can shoot the wrong person. Or, by drawing your weapon, you can become the wrong person—a hero mistaken for a second gunman by another would-be hero with a gun. Bang, you're dead. Or worse, bang bang bang bang bang: a firefight among several armed, confused, and innocent people in a crowd. It happens even among trained soldiers. Among civilians, the risk is that much greater.
We're enormously lucky that Zamudio, without formal training, made the right split-second decisions. We can't count on that the next time some nut job starts shooting. I hope Arizona does train lawmakers and their aides in the proper use of firearms. I hope they remember this training if they bring guns to constituent meetings. But mostly, I hope they don't bring them.
[Unfortunately, I think it will take a tragedy of immense proportion for gun control to happen. A scenario of a firefight among many innocent would-be heroes battling perception, fear and adrenaline will probably need to happen before the gun-right lobby can be defeated for their erroneous assumptions. ]Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Two neighbours' bodies found at Bishan block
Jan 11, 2011
By Kimberly Spykerman & Chong Zi Liang
THE body of a woman suffering from depression was found barely a metre away from that of her 15th floor neighbour at the foot of their Bishan St 13 block yesterday.
Administrative assistant Ng Sock Luan, 48, and retiree Lau Fong Kien, 55, who lived on the 11th and 15th floor respectively, were long-time residents of the block but did not know each other.
A member of the public had alerted police at about 11.20am about the two bodies.
Both were pronounced dead at the scene when paramedics arrived shortly later. Some medication and food items were discovered next to Ms Lau's body.
It is believed that they died around the same time.
The two women had very different personalities, relatives told The Straits Times, adding that Madam Ng could have fallen on Ms Lau.
Madam Ng's husband, a quality assurance manager who declined to be named, said she had been diagnosed with depression about two months ago, and was on medication. She would usually be closely supervised by him or their teenage children.
However, she had been left on her own for a few hours yesterday as her husband had an urgent meeting and the children were busy with school.
It was only when her husband returned home around 3pm and realised she was missing that he suspected something might be wrong.
Ms Lau's younger brother, technical support officer Lau Fang Cheng, 51, said that his sister had been returning from her weekly trip to a Chinese sinseh.
He said: 'She is very strong willed, she survived breast cancer two years ago.'
The police have classified both cases as unnatural death and are investigating.
By Kimberly Spykerman & Chong Zi Liang
THE body of a woman suffering from depression was found barely a metre away from that of her 15th floor neighbour at the foot of their Bishan St 13 block yesterday.
Administrative assistant Ng Sock Luan, 48, and retiree Lau Fong Kien, 55, who lived on the 11th and 15th floor respectively, were long-time residents of the block but did not know each other.
A member of the public had alerted police at about 11.20am about the two bodies.
Both were pronounced dead at the scene when paramedics arrived shortly later. Some medication and food items were discovered next to Ms Lau's body.
It is believed that they died around the same time.
The two women had very different personalities, relatives told The Straits Times, adding that Madam Ng could have fallen on Ms Lau.
Madam Ng's husband, a quality assurance manager who declined to be named, said she had been diagnosed with depression about two months ago, and was on medication. She would usually be closely supervised by him or their teenage children.
However, she had been left on her own for a few hours yesterday as her husband had an urgent meeting and the children were busy with school.
It was only when her husband returned home around 3pm and realised she was missing that he suspected something might be wrong.
Ms Lau's younger brother, technical support officer Lau Fang Cheng, 51, said that his sister had been returning from her weekly trip to a Chinese sinseh.
He said: 'She is very strong willed, she survived breast cancer two years ago.'
The police have classified both cases as unnatural death and are investigating.
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