It's a glorious day in New England, and I hope President Obama's vacation improves now that it's stopped pouring. Now that he's got a little down-time, I hope he's thinking hard about his economic and foreign policy team. He's been in office for more than a year and a half, and he's had to wrestle with more than the usual number of alligators. He inherited an American economy in free fall, a lost war in Iraq and a losing war in Afghanistan, a declining U.S. image abroad, a comatose peace process in the Middle East, and assorted challenges in places like Sudan, Somalia, and Colombia. 

Given that array of troubles, one would hardly expect him to achieve a perfect record of success after a little more than nineteen months. But having said that, does Obama have any private concerns about the people upon whose advice he's been relying? As the economic recovery effort slows, does he still have the same confidence in people like Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Ben Bernanke? With the GOP poised to make big gains in November, does he still think advisors like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod have the fingers on the pulse of the people? As his own approval ratings slip (despite a slight bump up this month), does he think his media team is doing a good job of managing public perceptions?

Then there's foreign and defense policy. With Secretary of Defense Robert Gates contemplating retirement sometime next year, who is waiting in the wings to give him balanced and sage advice on national security matters? After the roller-coaster ride Obama experienced on Middle East issues (the initial demand for a settlement freeze, the Cairo speech, the humiliating climb-down, and now direct talks that hardly anyone thinks will succeed), does he still have faith in his Middle East team? What about Richard Holbrooke and Stephen Bosworth, the high-profile special envoys who were supposed to work their magic in AfPak and North Korea? And has the seemingly endless parade of bad news and the dearth of tangible progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan raised any doubts in his mind about the wisdom of those who encouraged him to escalate there?

I don't expect President Obama to voice any of these concerns (if he has them), and for all I know he still believes that he's got the best and the brightest on his team. But no president makes all the right appointments, and one sign of effective leadership is the ability to reshuffle your team over time. Back when he took office, I wrote that one sign of his effectiveness would his willingness to replace people who weren't performing well, but the only high-profile departures I can think of so far are the resignation of DNI Dennis Blair and Obama's decision for relieve Afghan commander Stanley McChrystal. And Obama took the latter step because McChrystal made some ill-advised remarks to a journalist, not because he had lost confidence in McChrystal's handling of the war itself.

But I'm still wondering if we're on the cusp of a significant reshuffle. It's pretty common for some people to depart after a couple of years anyway, because these jobs are killers and because academics serving in government normally get no more than two years of leave. The midterms are going to be seen as a referendum on Obama's performance to date, and it's not going to be pretty. The Right hates him, the progressive left has lost faith, and the middle is muddled. Obama will have to start looking forward to 2012, and he will want to inject some new blood and new energy into the Executive Branch. And lord knows he needs a prominent win somewhere. But where? And which of his current team can deliver it?

From the New York Times story revealing that Mohammed Zia Salehi, an aide that Afghan President Hamid Karzai intervened to free from charges of corruption, has been on the CIA payroll:

Anonymous American official: "If we decide as a country that we'll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road ... put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now."

Sounds like a plan to me. I don't mean to be flip (well, maybe I do), but how much more evidence of the fundamental contradictions bedeviling our war effort do we need? We say corruption is endemic and is making the Karzai government unpopular, yet our own CIA is busily buying off Afghan politicians. We say our real goal is to defeat or destroy al Qaeda, yet we are spending billions on anti-corruption efforts and "nation-building." We pour millions of dollars into a very poor country, which then flows into the pockets of Afghan politicians and back out into private bank accounts in Dubai and elsewhere. We add more troops in order to quell violence, but that makes us look like foreign occupiers and leads to additional civilians casualties, no matter how careful we try to be. And we never seem to have a serious discussion of the actual stakes in Afghanistan, the costs of an open-ended effort, the definition of "success," or the likelihood that we will achieve it. 

Earlier this summer I mentioned that I was reading Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and I promised to sum up the insights that I had gleaned from it. The book is well-worth reading -- if not quite on a par with his earlier Guns, Germs, and Steel -- and you'll learn an enormous amount about a diverse set of past societies and the range of scientific knowledge (geology, botany, forensic archaeology, etc.) that is enabling us to understand why they prospered and/or declined.  

The core of the book is a series of detailed case studies of societies that collapsed and disappeared because they were unable to adapt to demanding and/or deteriorating environmental, economic, or political conditions. He examines the fate of the Easter Islanders, the Mayans, the Anasazi of the Pacific Southwest, the Norse colonies in Western Greenland (among others), and contrasts them with other societies (e.g., the New Guinea highlanders) who managed to develop enduring modes of life in demanding circumstances.  He also considers modern phenomenon such as the Rwandan genocide and China and Australia's environmental problems in light of these earlier examples.

I read the book because I am working on a project exploring why states (and groups and individuals) often find it difficult to "cut their losses" and abandon policies that are clearly not working. This topic is a subset of the larger (and to me, endlessly fascinating) question of why smart and well-educated people can nonetheless make disastrous (and with hindsight, obviously boneheaded) decisions. Diamond's work is also potentially relevant to the perennial debate on American decline: Is it occurring, is it inevitable, and how should we respond?

So what lessons does Diamond draw from his case studies, and what insights might we glean for the conduct of foreign policy? Here are a few thoughts that occurred to me as I finished the book.

First, he argues that sometimes societies fail to anticipate an emerging problem because they lack adequate knowledge or prior experience with the phenomenon at hand. Primitive societies may not have recognized the danger of soil depletion, for example, because they lacked an adequate understanding of basic soil chemistry. A society may also fail to spot trouble if the main problem it is facing recurs only infrequently, because the knowledge of how to detect or deal with the problem may have been forgotten. As he emphasizes, this is especially problematic for primitive societies that lack written records, but historical amnesia can also occur even in highly literate societies like our own. 

By analogy, one could argue that some recent failures in U.S. foreign policy were of this sort. Hardly anybody anticipated that U.S. support for the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in Afghanistan would eventually lead to the formation of virulent anti-American terrorist groups, in part because the U.S. leaders didn't know very much about that part of the world and because public discourse about U.S. policy in the Middle East is filled with gaping holes. Similarly, the people who led us into Iraq in 2003 were remarkably ignorant about the history and basic character of Iraqi society (as well as the actual nature of Saddam's regime). To make matters worse, the U.S. military had forgotten many of the lessons of Vietnam and had to try to relearn them all over again, with only partial success.

Second, societies may fail to detect a growing problem if their leaders are too far removed from the source of the trouble. Diamond refers to this as the problem of "distant managers," and it may explain why U.S. policymakers often make decisions that seem foolish in hindsight. As I've noted here before, one problem facing U.S. foreign policymakers is the sheer number and scope of the problems they are trying to address, which inevitably forces them to rely on reports from distant subordinates and to address issues that they cannot be expected to understand very well. Barack Obama doesn't get to spend the next few years learning Pashto and immersing himself in the details of Afghan history and culture; instead, he has to make decisions based on what he is being told by people on the ground (who may or may not know more than he does). Unfortunately, the latter have obvious reasons to tell an upbeat story, if only to make their own efforts look good. If things are going badly, therefore, the people at the top back in Washington may be the last to know. 

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If you're looking for another realistic counter to the official optimism about Afghanistan, check out Christopher Layne's op-ed from two days ago in the Chicago Tribune.  In a handful of sharp, short paragraphs, Layne reminds us that 1) the "surge" in Iraq (the approach now being adapted to Afghanistan) didn't work, 2) the current emphasis on counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare misdiagnoses the origins of our troubles in the Middle East and Central Asia, and 3) our current fascination with COIN "sets exactly the wrong strategic priorities for the United States." 

Smart piece. It will take some time before this view become the conventional wisdom, but I'm still betting that it will.  Unfortunately, it will be many billions of dollars and thousands of lives too late.  

I decided to become a political scientist in the spring of 1976, while I was attending the Stanford-in-Berlin overseas study program. I had already declared an International Relations major, but was trying to decide between going to law school (the supposedly safe option) or pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science (looked risky). While in Berlin, I took Professor Gordon Craig's course on German history, and one lecture -- on the role of intellectuals in the Weimar Republic -- finally tipped the balance for me. 

In that particular class, Craig argued that one of the many forces that doomed the Weimar Republic was the irresponsible behavior of both left-wing and right-wing intellectuals. The German left was contemptuous of the liberal aspirations of the Weimar Constitution and other bourgeois features of Weimar society, while right-wing "thinkers" like Ernst Junger glorified violence and disparaged the application of reason to political issues. So-called "liberal" intellectuals saw politics as a grubby business unworthy of their refined sensibilities, and so many just disengaged from politics entirely. This left the field to rabble-rousers and extremists of various sorts and helped prepare the ground for Nazism. (You can read Craig's account of this process in his book Germany 1866-1945, chapter 13, on "Weimar Culture").

The lesson I took from Craig's lecture was that when intellectuals abandon liberal principles, disengage from politics, and generally abdicate their role as "truth-tellers" for society at large, it is easy for demagogues to play upon human fears and lead a society over the brink to disaster.  So I decided to forego a legal career and get a Ph.D. instead, hoping in some way to contribute to more reasonable discourse about issues of war, peace, and politics. 

Whether I succeeded in that aspiration I leave for others to decide, but I've been thinking about that episode as I contemplate the current state of American political discourse. There's plenty of reasoned debate out there, of course, and one could argue that the rise of the Internet and the blogosphere may even have increased the amount of serious discussion by smart people across the political spectrum. But when I watch videos like this one, and I read the xenophobic bile spewed by hate-mongers like Islamophobe Pam Geller, then I can't help but hear echoes of the Weimar experience. The left has never been very influential in American politics, but disappointment with Obama is already reinforcing its disregard for existing U.S. institutions and may render it even less relevant going forward.  Meanwhile, the supposedly "conservative" American right is getting nuttier by the minute. Instead of serious policy debate, it indulges in bizarre theories about Obama's religious beliefs, and his supposedly "socialist" (or "Muslim") agenda and takes its marching orders from entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck (who once admitted he's only in it for the money). When the Party of Lincoln's leading lights include unprincipled opportunists like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, you know you're a long way from the days of Dwight Eisenhower or Brent Scowcroft.

Meanwhile, where are the tough-minded and courageous defenders of the liberal values of tolerance, freedom of expression, and reasoned discourse? There are a few -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg comes to mind -- but how many prominent politicians have shown any genuine political courage or been willing to take a tough position and stick to it in the face of the mob? Extremists start to look admirable because at least they appear to stand for something (even if it is dangerous and fear-mongering bombast), while many traditional liberals seem all too willing to compromise whenever there is PAC money on the line or the poll winds shift. 

Yes, I understand that politics is the art of the possible and some degree of compromise is inevitable, but wouldn't you like to see a few liberals really dig down deep and fight for something they believe in? Like the Constitution?

Apologies for the rant, but I really do think there's reason to worry. The U.S. economy is still in very bad shape, the Iraq War isn't over despite what you're being told, the war in Afghanistan still looks like a lost cause, and we've made zero progress on long-term issues like climate change.  And don't even get me started about the Middle East peace process. And yet we are burning up bandwidth on manufactured controversies like the Park 51 issue, mostly because a bunch of out-of-town and out-of-power politicos decided they could exploit the issue for their own selfish agendas. 

I guess this means that if I became a political scientist to help preserve intelligent discourse about important political topics, then I haven't done a very good job.

 UPDATE: Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald lists several other politicians who are standing up for traditional American values of religious tolerance and civil discourse, including: Russ Feingold, Joe Sestak, Grover Norquist, Ron Paul, Jeff Merkley, and a few others.  One doesn't have to agree with everything that each of these individuals believes to admire their position on this issue.   Kudos to them.

If you think today's announcement that the Israelis and Palestinians are going to resume "direct talks" is a significant breakthrough, you haven't been paying attention for the past two decades (at least). I wish I could be more optimistic about this latest development, but I see little evidence that a meaningful deal is in the offing. 

Why do I say this? Three reasons. 

1. There is no sign that the Palestinians are willing to accept less than a viable, territorially contiguous state in the West Bank (and eventually, Gaza), including a capital in East Jerusalem and some sort of political formula (i.e., fig-leaf) on the refugee issue. By the way, this outcome supposedly what the Clinton and Bush adminstrations favored, and what Obama supposedly supports as well.

2. There is no sign that Israel's government is willing to accept anything more than a symbolic Palestinian "state" consisting of a set of disconnected Bantustans, with Israel in full control of the borders, air space, water supplies, electromagnetic spectrum. etc. Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it clear that this is what he means by a "two-state solution," and he has repeatedly declared that Israel intends to keep all of Jerusalem and maybe a long-term military presence in the Jordan River valley. There are now roughly 500,000 Israeli Jews living outside the 1967 borders, and it is hard to imagine any Israeli government evacuating a significant fraction of them. Even if Netanyahu wanted to be more forthcoming, his coalition wouldn't let him make any meaningful concessions. And while the talks drag on, the illegal settlements will continue to expand.

3. There is no sign that the U.S. government is willing to put meaningful pressure on Israel. We're clearly willing to twist Mahmoud Abbas' arm to the breaking point (which is why he's agreed to talks, even as Israel continues to nibble away at the territory of the future Palestinian state), but Obama and his Middle East team have long since abandoned any pretense of bringing even modest pressure to bear on Netanyahu. Absent that, why should anyone expect Bibi to change his position?

So don't fall for the hype that this announcement constitutes some sort of meaningful advance in the "peace process." George Mitchell and his team probably believe they are getting somewhere, but they are either deluding themselves, trying to fool us, or trying to hoodwink other Arab states into believing that Obama meant what he said in Cairo. At this point, I rather doubt that anyone is buying, and the only thing that will convince onlookers that U.S. policy has changed will be tangible results. Another round of inconclusive "talks" will just reinforce the growing perception that the United States cannot deliver.

The one item in all this that does give me pause is the accompanying statement by the Middle East Quartet (the United States, Russia, the EU and the U.N.), which appears at first glance to have some modest teeth in it. Among other things, it calls explicitly for "a settlement, negotiated between the parties, that ends the occupation which began in 1967 and results in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors." It also says these talks can be completed within one year. Sounds promising, but the Quartet has issued similar proclamations before (notably the 2003 "Roadmap"), and these efforts led precisely nowhere. So maybe there's a ray of hope in there somewhere, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans here in the United States will continue to make pious statements about their commitment to a two-state solution, even as it fades further and further into the realm of impossibility. Barring a miracle, we will eventually have to recognize that "two-states for two peoples" has become a pipe-dream. At that point, U.S. leaders will face a very awkward choice: they can support a democratic Israel where Jews and Arabs have equal political rights (i.e., a one-state democracy similar to the United States, where discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity is taboo), or they can support an apartheid state whose basic institutions are fundamentally at odds with core American values.  

Equally important, an apartheid Israel will face growing international censure, and as both former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak have warned, such an outcome would place Israel's own long-term future in doubt. If that happens, all those staunch "friends of Israel" who have hamstrung U.S. diplomacy for decades can explain to their grandchildren how they let that happen.

As for the Obama administration itself, I have only one comment. If you think I'm being too gloomy, then do the world a favor and prove me wrong. If you do, I'll be the first to admit it.

One of the themes I have harped about on this blog has been the issue of opportunity costs.   When a great power gets itself over-committed in a lot of costly and time-consuming commitments (and when it mismanages its economy in various ways), then it won't have the surplus it needs when an unexpected challenge (or an unforeseen opportunity) arises. 

Case in point: the current floods that have ravaged Pakistan in recent weeks.  The situation is by all accounts horrific, and could have significant long-term consequences for millions of people.  It is precisely the sort of event that calls for a vigorous and generous U.S. response.

As everyone knows, the United States is widely despised among broad swathes of Pakistani society.  Some of this hostility is unmerited, but some of it is a direct result of misguided U.S. policies going back many decades.  As the U.S. experience with Indonesia following the 2004 Asian tsunami demonstrated, however, a prompt and generous relief effort could have a marked positive effects on Pakistani attitudes.  Such a shift could undermine support for extremist groups and make it easier for the Pakistani government to crack down on them later on.  It is also the right thing to do, and the U.S. military is actually pretty good at organizing such efforts.

The United States has so far pledged some $76 million dollars in relief aid, and has sent 19 helicopters to help ferry relief supplies.  That's all well and good, but notice that the U.S. government sent nearly $1 billion in aid in response to the tsunami, and we are currently spending roughly $100 billion annually trying to defeat the Taliban.  More to the point, bear in mind that the United States currently has some over 200 helicopters deployed in Afghanistan (and most reports suggest that we could actually use a lot more).  

So imagine what we might be able to do to help stranded Pakistanis if we weren't bogged down in a costly and seemingly open-ended counterinsurgency war, and didn't have all those military assets (and money) already tied up there?   It's entirely possible that we could do more to help suffering individuals, and more to advance our own interests in the region, if some of these military assets weren't already committed.   

Of course, Obama didn't know that there would be catastrophic flooding in Pakistan when he decided to escalate and prolong the Afghan campaign.  But that's just the point: when national leaders make or escalate a particular strategic commitment, they are not just determining what the country is going to do, they are also determining other things that that they won't be able to do (or at least won't be able to do as well).  

Thus, another good argument for a more restrained grand strategy is that it might free up the resources that would allow us do some real good in the world, whenever unfortunate surprises occur.   As they always will.

Apart from a brief post praising New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's forthright stance on the Muslim community center controversy, I haven't said much about this issue. I had naively assumed that Bloomberg's eloquent remarks defending the project -- and reaffirming the indispensable principle of religious freedom -- would pretty much end the controversy, but I underestimated willingness of various right-wing politicians to exploit our worst xenophobic instincts, and some key Democrats' congenital inability to fight for the principles in which they claim to believe. Silly me.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out what is going on here: All you really need to do is look at how the critics of the community center project keep describing it. In their rhetoric it is always the "Mosque at Ground Zero," a label that conjures up mental images of a soaring minaret on the site of the 9/11 attacks. Never mind that the building in question isn't primarily a mosque (it's a community center that will house an array of activities, including a gym, pool, auditorium, and oh yes, a prayer room). Never mind that it isn't at "Ground Zero": it's two blocks away and will not even be visible from the site. (And exactly why does it matter if it was?) You know that someone is engaged in demagoguery when they keep using demonstrably false but alarmist phrases over and over again. 

What I don't understand is why critics of this project don't realize where this form of intolerance can lead. As a host of commentators have already noted, critics of the project are in effect holding American Muslims -- and in this particular case, a moderate Muslim cleric who has been a noted advocate of inter-faith tolerance -- responsible for a heinous act that they did not commit and that they have repeatedly condemned. It is view of surpassing ignorance, and precisely the same sort of prejudice that was once practiced against Catholics, against Jews, and against any number of other religious minorities. Virtually all religious traditions have committed violent and unseemly acts in recent memory, and we would not hold Protestants, Catholics, or Jews responsible for the heinous acts of a few of their adherents.

And don't these critics realize that religious intolerance is a monster that, once unleashed, may be impossible to control?  If you can rally the mob against any religious minority now, then you may make it easier for someone else to rally a different mob against you should the balance of political power change at some point down the road.

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