File 031876
News Digest: Middle East Policy and International Relations (File 031876)
A compilation of June 2011 opinion articles from major publications addressing geopolitical tensions, including Saudi Arabia's criticism of U.S. Israel policy, Turkey's regional role, and Middle Eastern conflicts.
Summary
This document is a news digest from June 13-14, 2011, containing seven opinion articles examining critical international issues. The primary focus is Prince Turki al-Faisal's Washington Post column criticizing American favoritism toward Israel and threatening consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the U.S. vetoes UN recognition of Palestine. Additional articles discuss Turkey's rise as a regional power under Prime Minister Erdogan and the country's challenges in Cyprus, Armenia relations, and Israel ties. The digest reflects 2011 geopolitical tensions including the Syrian refugee crisis, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Turkey's evolving role in Middle Eastern affairs.
14 June, 2011
Article 1. The Washington PostFrom a Saudi prince, tough talk on America’s favoritism toward IsraelRichard CohenArticle 2. Boston GlobeTurkey’s new challengesStephen KinzerArticle 3. The Financial TimesWhy Syria will get away with itGideon RachmanArticle 4. The American InterestThe Conservative RevolutionaryWalter Russell MeadArticle 5. NYTIran Without NukesRoger CohenArticle 6. NATIONAL REVIEWInterview with - Francis FukuyamaMatthew ShafferArticle 7. Project SyndicateDoes Anything Matter?Peter Singer
Article 1.
The Washington Post
From a Saudi prince, tough talk on America’s favoritism toward Israel
Richard Cohen
June 13 -- As best I can recall, I first met Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki al-Faisal at a private home in Washington years ago. I found him stern and humorless, sometimes even bitter. I have seen him since at international conferences and the like — never in the mood for small talk and exhibiting, sometimes in his glorious robes, not an ounce of Bedouin charm. Still, I was unprepared for the opinion column he published in Sunday’s Post. It read like a declaration of war.
Prince Turki is not now in the government. Yet he is a member of the Saudi royal family and was once the kingdom’s intelligence chief and its former ambassador to both London and Washington. The man is solidly credentialed.
He is also angry as hell, and he lets America have it. He starts by citing what he calls President Obama’s “controversial speech last month, admonishing Arab governments to embrace democracy and provide freedom to their populations.” Saudi Arabia, he wrote, heard what Obama said and took it “seriously,” and he noted, of course, that Obama had not demanded the same rights for Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Point taken.
But the same kingdom that has taken Obama “seriously” is an absolute monarchy that, among other things, bans women from driving cars. It is also a country that offers no freedom of religion but offers, for the occasional criminal, a public beheading. Given that Turki has spent a good deal of time in the West, it’s not possible that he was unaware that commentators like me would be picky about the lack of basic freedoms. He doesn’t care.
Indeed, that was the point. Turki — and by implication all of Saudi Arabia — has had it with the United States. The kingdom will not be lectured to. It is sick and tired of American favoritism to Israel — the exuberant congressional reception for Binyamin Netanyahu, for example — and the administration’s decision to oppose any effort in the United Nations to create a Palestinian state. In this matter, America is doing what Israel wants.
“In September, the kingdom will use its considerable diplomatic might to support the Palestinians in their quest for international recognition,” Turki wrote. “American leaders have long called Israel an ‘indispensable’ ally. They will soon learn that there are other players in the region — not least the Arab street — who are as, if not more, ‘indispensable.’ The game of favoritism toward Israel has not proven wise for Washington, and soon it will be shown to be an even greater folly.”
This is not your usual diplomatic language — and even for Turki it is rough. It shows, though, a not-surprising frustration in the Arab world with American policy tethered for the moment to a quite stubborn and unimaginative Israeli policy. Both countries are suffering from a surfeit of democracy. Israel’s governing coalition is held hostage by the right; America’s governing coalition is in the same fix.
Turki does not run out of wagging fingers. He says that those who think that the United States and Israel will determine the future of Palestine are dead wrong. “There will be disastrous consequences for U.S.-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state. It would mark a nadir in the decades-long relationship as well as irrevocably damage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and America’s reputation among Arab nations. The ideological distance between the Muslim world and the West in general would widen — and opportunities for friendship and cooperation between the two could vanish.” This from our ally, not to mention friendly gas station.
The tone of the column is both remarkable and ominous. It comes, as I said, from a man of little charm, but he is nevertheless a skilled diplomat and intelligence chief. While his vexation over the Palestinian problem is well-known, rarely has it been carried to this extent — and in such a public venue.
A Post opinion column is designed to get the attention of the American government. I’m sure Prince Turki succeeded in that. But I hope he also got the attention of the Israeli government, which for some time now has enjoyed Saudi moderation on the Palestinian question. That seems about to change — not the least because the Arab street that Turki expressly mentioned is demanding it and the Saudis will, if they have to, appease the street. This is the gravamen of Prince Turki’s piece and is why he ends it so ominously for Israel: “I’d hate to be around when they face their comeuppance.”
Article 2.
Boston Globe
Turkey’s new challenges
Stephen Kinzer
June 14, 2011 -- SUNDAY’S ELECTION in Turkey was another reminder of the country’s astonishing rise, which has been one of the most dramatic geopolitical stories of the last decade. For the first 80 years of its existence as a nation, Turkey was dominated by generals and played almost no role in the world. Now it is a vibrant democracy and a major force in the Middle East, the Caucasus, North Africa, the Balkans, and beyond. The election was a triumph for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has presided over his country’s remarkable transformation. His party won more votes than all other parties combined, making him the first Turkish prime minister in more than half a century to win three consecutive terms. He will naturally be tempted to take this victory as a mandate to charge ahead with his own projects. Instead he should do the opposite: curb his divisive rhetoric, adjust his authoritarian style, and seek broad support for projects that will strengthen Turkey and help calm the world’s most volatile region.
Syrians who are racing toward Turkey in search of refuge represent Erdogan’s most immediate challenge. Turkey has become not just a safe haven, but a model for what many Arabs would like to see their countries become. This model — a government with roots in Islam but also committed to democracy, free enterprise, and good relations with Europe and the United States — represents the dream of millions of Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians, Yemenis, Syrians, Jordanians, and Palestinians.
Finding a way to stabilize the ever-more-turbulent Middle East is Turkey’s most urgent task. Erdogan is obsessed with his drive to make Turkey one of the world’s 10 biggest economies (it is now 17th). This will only be possible if the Middle East is peaceful and open for business.
Besides dealing with upheaval in the Arab world, Turkey faces three other key foreign policy challenges. First is the continuing division of Cyprus between ethnic Greek and Turkish sectors. Second is the frozen conflict with Armenia, which seemed to be on the brink of resolution until Turkish and Armenian nationalists killed a promising agreement reached by both countries two years ago. Erdogan’s new mandate gives him the power to overrule militants in his ranks. If he does, and if Armenian leaders can do the same, the entire region will benefit.
Third is to rebuild relations with Israel. Erdogan has become a hero in the Middle East for his forthright denunciations of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. Like many Turks, he is still enraged over the murder of nine Turkish civilians by Israeli commandos who stormed a freighter bearing relief supplies for Gaza last year. His anger may be justified by the facts, but he should realize that a resumption of Turkey’s good ties to Israel could be a decisive step toward Middle East peace.
Foreign policy challenges are only part of Erdogan’s post-election agenda. He also needs to deepen Turkish democracy. That would require resolving the decades-old Kurdish conflict and taking concrete steps to reassure secular Turks that their country is not moving toward religious rule.
Turkey’s grand project in the next couple of years will be writing a new constitution to replace the one imposed by generals three decades ago. Erdogan wants to replace the current parliamentary system with one built around a strong president and then run for the presidency himself. His party did not win enough seats in Parliament to impose a constitution on its own, so if he wants to make such a radical change, he will have to propose a constitution that represents a national consensus. That can only be reached if the constitution includes strong guarantees of free speech, rights for women, judicial independence, and cultural freedom for all ethnic and religious groups.
Such a constitution would embody the wishes of most Turks. It might also reinvigorate Turkey’s stalled campaign to join the European Union. If Turkey becomes an EU member by the time it celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2023, that would be Erdogan’s eternal legacy.
Turkey is poised to become one of the most successful countries of the 21st century, a model of Muslim democracy and a powerful force for regional peace. Whether it will fulfill its potential depends largely on how Erdogan handles the mandate he has just won.
Stephen Kinzer teaches international relations at Boston University and is author of “Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future.’’
Article 3.
The Financial Times
Why Syria will get away with it
Gideon Rachman
June 13 2011 -- late last week, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, launched an offensive of his own. In a speech in Brussels, he dismissed most of America’s European allies as a useless bunch of timewasters. I paraphrase but not much.
Mr Gates pointed out that while all Nato countries had voted to intervene in Libya, most had chosen not to participate in the actual fighting. Even those European countries that are taking part began to run short of munitions just 11 weeks into the fighting – forcing an exasperated America to step into the breach. More broadly, a situation in which the US accounts for 75 per cent of the military spending in Nato was “unacceptable” and unsustainable. If it is not rectified, Mr Gates predicted, Nato faces a “dismal” future.
The conjunction of the Gates speech and the Syrian civil war is very telling. It explains why a 20-year experiment with the idea that western military force can put the world to rights is coming to a close.
Just a few weeks ago, that would have seemed a surprising conclusion. Supporters of “liberal interventionism” hailed the decision to bomb Colonel Gaddafis forces in Libya as evidence of a longed-for new era, in which dictators can no longer feel free to massacre their own people.
However a western failure to intervene, as the Syrian army brutalises and kills its own citizens, is likely to be a more accurate guide to the future than the Libyan campaign. There is, of course, a direct link between the west’s reluctance to get involved in Syria and the frustrating and (so far) inconclusive nature of the Libyan intervention.
However, the Syrian conflict also needs to be seen in the context of a generation-long experiment with liberal interventionism. That era began in 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the world’s sole superpower and a swift victory in the first Gulf war restored confidence in the power and effectiveness of American military might. Since then, the debate about how and when to use military power has waxed and waned. Western governments chastised themselves over the failure to protect the Kurds and the Shia in Iraq in 1991, over the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and over the many years of dithering as lives were lost in the Balkans. But a series of apparently successful interventions – Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone – gradually strengthened the belief that western military power could be used to end conflicts and save civilians.
The bitter experiences of the Afghan and Iraq wars, however, shifted the debate on military intervention once more. Both Barack Obama in the US and David Cameron in Britain promised to be leaders who would adopt a much more cautious attitude to foreign military adventures. Then along came the Arab spring and western leaders once again found themselves committing to military action, this time in Libya – Mr Obama with evident reluctance, Mr Cameron and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France with apparent enthusiasm.
The Libyan war illustrates how unfolding events can force a political leader’s hand. That could still happen in Syria. But it seems much more likely that, this time, the west will stand aside.
In part, this is because of deadlock at the UN, where Russia and China angry about the Libyan war are blocking efforts to pass a resolution that even condemns events in Syria, let alone prepares the ground for intervention. However the broader context is the west’s diminishing ability and willingness to intervene at all.
The Gates speech effectively marks the end of the American ambition to turn Nato into the global, military arm of a unified western world. The Americans have flirted with this idea, ever since the onset of the “war on terror”. But, as the Afghan war has worn on, so the military effort has become more and more heavily dependent on the US.
The fact that Europeans called for a campaign in Libya that they are incapable of conducting alone has merely re-enforced the American view that the European arm of Nato is, to varying degrees, feckless and unreliable. Disarray and recriminations within Nato hobble the single most effective potential tool for western military intervention overseas.
Even more significant in the long run is the American anxiety that budgetary constraints, which are leading to defence cuts in Europe, are beginning to be replicated in the US itself. Admiral Michael Mullen, America’s top military officer, has called the budget deficit the single biggest threat to US national security. It is also the single biggest constraint on future bouts of “liberal interventionism”.
Money is not the only problem, however. Over the past 20 years it has become apparent that swiftly agreed-upon military actions can lead to entanglements that last for many years. There is still a Nato mission in Kosovo and an EU military mission in Bosnia, more than a decade after the fighting ended in both places.
As for Afghanistan – that conflict has now lasted almost twice as long as the second world war. Western governments are also only beginning to come to terms with what may soon be required in Libya. Against this background, there are very few takers for yet another military venture – this time in Syria.
Article 4.
The American Interest
The Conservative Revolutionary
Walter Russell Mead
June 12, 2011 -- The United States is the most revolutionary power in the history of the world, but after more than 200 years of a brilliant revolutionary career we are still not very good at understanding or responding to the revolutions our example, our ideas, our economy and our technology do so much to create.
The Arab spring is the latest example of the clash between America’s revolutionary world role and our pathetic cluelessness about the forces we do so much to promote. The Arab Spring is turning into a long, hot summer. Civil wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen and the sullen silence of the Shi’a in Bahrain have baptized Arab democracy in blood. More will flow — and American foreign policy is befuddled and bemused.
None of the experts look particularly smart at the moment. The ‘realists’ who counseled President Obama to forget George W. Bush’s support of Middle Eastern democracy and cultivate our relations with regional despots like Hosni Mubarak, the Iranian mullahs and the younger Assad have been sent back to the benches in disgrace. Their counsel is now seen as both morally dubious and pragmatically unwise; the ‘realists’ would have put the US on the wrong side of history in the service of unrealistic assumptions about the stability of despotic regimes.
But the idealists who seek to replace them already have egg on their faces. “Days, not weeks” is what they promised the President when he began to bomb for democracy in Libya. The democratic revolution in Egypt is looking less democratic by the day; it looks more and more as if the Army used public unrest to block the Mubarak family’s attempt to turn Egypt into a family possession. The Army has ruled Egypt since the overthrow of King Farouk, playing liberals and religious conservatives off against each other. It looks set to go on doing that for some time to come. In Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, the counsel of the idealists seems dark and confused. US policy overall seems to have found the ‘sour spot’ that is the particular curse of the Obama administration: too friendly to the revolt to earn the trust and gratitude of the despots, too cautious and compromising to win many friends on the street.
Overall I am more cautious than optimistic about where the Arab Spring is headed. There is little prospect for the kind of rapid economic growth that could improve the prospects for young unemployed and underemployed Arabs. Foreign investment and tourism have already been badly hit by the unrest of the last six months, and the Arab regimes are turning to aid donors and organizations like the IMF and the World Bank in increasing desperation.
Culturally, many of the necessary preconditions are not in place. The poor quality of most Arab universities, the limited access to serious political history and discourse among all but a handful of Arab intellectuals, the suppression of political life under past dictatorships, the weakness of Islamic political thought in recent centuries and the absence of a robust and deeply rooted tradition of Islamic democracy all work against the rapid widespread development of stable liberal democracy in the Arab world.
Putting the dark economic outlook together with the problematic cultural and political situation makes optimism a tough position to hold. Without in any way scanting or minimizing the idealism, dedication and vision of the democrats rising in the Arab world today, they still seem a long way from winning. They remind me still of the Marquis de Lafayette during the French Revolution: they believe in all the right ideas, but their countries aren’t ready for the vision they seek to promote. They can help make a revolution but others will, for a time at least, determine the flow of events.
If true, then both the realists and the idealists are wrong about the Arab Revolution. The realists are wrong that despotic regimes can provide long term stability in the region; the idealists are wrong that the fall of the old despots will lead to liberal democratic states.
Americans have been getting foreign revolutions wrong for more than 200 years. It began with the French Revolution. Enthusiasts like Thomas Jefferson initially thought they saw France following in America’s footsteps. Then came the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, and a generation of brutal war.
Many Americans responded with the same generous enthusiasm to the South American revolutions against colonial rule. Once again, those revolutions failed to establish anything like liberal democratic rule.
The cycles of revolution — 1830, 1848, 1917-20, 1946-1960 (decolonization), 1989-91, 2003-5 and now 2011 — catch Americans flatfooted over and over again. We are surprised when they occur, and we are surprised when they fail to follow the course we expect.
Delusional Realists
The realists are half right: most revolutions will not bring about stable democratic societies. But realists get the other half wrong; revolution is a basic fact of modern life and the kind of ‘stability’ that old fashioned diplomats long for is just a mirage. American foreign policy cannot proceed on the assumption that despotic, frozen regimes will last. They won’t. Sooner or later they will come crashing down — and as the pace of technological and social change around the world continues to accelerate, such revolutionary upheavals are likely to become more frequent.
There is another problem with realism. Like it or not, the United States is a revolutionary power. Whether our government is trying to overthrow foreign dictators is almost irrelevant; American society is the most revolutionary force on the planet. The Internet is more subversive than the CIA in its prime. The dynamism of American society is constantly creating new businesses, new technologies, new ideas and new social models. These innovations travel, and they make trouble when they do. Saudi conservatives know that whatever geopolitical arrangements the Saudi princes make with the American government, the American people are busily undermining the core principles of Saudi society. It’s not just our NGOs educating Saudi women and civil society activists; it’s not just the impact of American college life on the rising generation of the Saudi elite. We change the world even when we aren’t thinking anything about global revolution — when Hollywood and rap musicians are just trying to make a buck, they are stoking the fires of change around the world.
A revolutionary nation cannot make a conservative foreign policy work for long. In the 1820s and 1830s Washington tried to reassure the Mexican government that it had no hostile designs against Mexican territory. But the American people were moving into Texas and the US government couldn’t stop that movement or blunt the threat to Mexico if it tried. In the same way today, the economic and political activity of individual Americans and American companies is changing the world in ways that make life much harder for governments in countries like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. We can press all the reset buttons with Russia that we want, but the Russian government will still notice that both US society and sometimes the government are actively working to help foreign subversives overthrow repressive regimes.
Feckless Idealists
If the desire of our realists to conduct foreign policy with foreign despots as if unprincipled cooperation with the bad guys could build a stable world is unrealistic, the idealism of our enthusiasts that every new foreign revolution will bring a millennium of democratic peace is absurd.
American foreign policy cannot expect that revolutions in foreign countries will rescue us from the painful dilemmas our foreign policy often confronts. Revolution is not the deus ex machina that will make the world peaceful; it is a tsunami that sweeps everything before it, and often leaves the world messier and more dangerous.
Modern history teaches two great lessons about revolution: that revolutions are inevitable, and that a large majority of revolutions either fail or go bad. Americans almost instinctively look at revolutions in terms of our own past: the 1688 Glorious Revolution that made Parliament more powerful than the King in England, and the American Revolution that led in relatively short order to the establishment of a stable and constitutional government.
Most revolutions don’t work like this at all. Many of them fail, with the old despots crushing dissent or making only cosmetic changes to the old system. (This happened in Austria in 1848 and something very like it may be happening in Egypt today.) Others move into radicalism, terror and mob rule before a new despot comes along to bring order — at least until the next futile and bloody revolutionary spasm. That was France’s history for almost 100 years after the storming of the Bastille. China, Russia and Iran all saw revolutions like this in the 20th century.
The revolutions that ‘work’ are the exceptions, not the rule. The peaceful revolutions in the Central European countries as Soviet power melted in 1989-1990 are a unique exception to the rule that most revolutions either turn nasty or fail. When many American idealists think about revolution today, they have Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in mind.
Few assumptions can lead you into as much trouble this quickly. Even in 1989-90, those countries were the exception and not the rule. Think Ukraine, Belarus, Yugoslavia, Romania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and of course Russia itself. More people live in countries where the 1989-90 revolutionary wave failed to establish secure constitutional democracy than live in those where it succeeded.
More, the countries that had ‘velvet’ revolutions shared a number of important characteristics. They had or longed to have close political and cultural ties to the West. They wanted to join NATO and the EU, and had a reasonable confidence of doing so sooner rather than later. They could expect enormous amounts of aid and foreign direct investment if they continued along the path of democratic reform. They lay on the ‘western’ side of the ancient division of Europe between the Orthodox east and the Catholic/Protestant homeland of the modern liberal tradition.
No Arab country looks anything like this. Indeed, most seem closer to Yugoslavia and Belarus or, at best, Ukraine. We, and they, may get lucky, and the revolutions in the Arab world may lead to something that looks more like Central Europe than like Central Asia. That would be a nice surprise, but we should not be placing large bets that this will actually happen.
China, by the way, does not look very much like the Czech Republic. Revolution there is very unlikely to produce a US or European style democracy anytime soon.
If realists ignore the inevitability of revolution, idealists close their eyes to the problems of revolutionary upheavals in societies that have difficult histories, deep social divisions, and poor short term economic prospects. Unfortunately the countries most likely to experience revolutions are usually the countries that lack the preconditions for Anglo-American style relatively peaceful revolutions that end with the establishment of stable constitutional order. If things were going well in those countries, they would not be having revolutions.
Historically, revolutions in foreign countries are both necessary for their political development and inevitable. They often tend to make American foreign policy more difficult — and the world more dangerous. On the evidence so far, this is the pattern we are seeing in the Middle East today.
Revolutionary Realism?
The difficulty American policymakers have in coming to grips with the recurring phenomenon of foreign revolutions is rooted in America’s paradoxical world role. We are not just the world’s leading revolutionary nation; we are also the chief custodian of the international status quo. We are upholding the existing balance of power and the international system of finance and trade with one hand, but the American agenda in the world ultimately aims to transform rather than to defend.
It is harder to be an effective revolutionary power than to be a conservative one — and it is harder still to combine the two roles.
A traditional conservative power knows what it wants. Revolutionary powers have a tougher job; building the future is harder work than holding on to the past. This is particularly true in the American case; the global transformation we seek is unparalleled for depth, complexity and scale.
We are not sure how this revolutionary transformation works. We know that it involves liberal political change: governments of law rather than of men and legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed as measured in regular and free elections. We also know that involves intellectual and social change: traditional religious ideas must make room for the equality of the sexes and the rights of religious minorities. Property rights must be rooted in law and protected by an independent judicial system. While governments have a role in the economy, the mechanisms of the market must ultimately be allowed to work their way.
We do not agree among ourselves about the proper sequence of these changes. We know that in the short run, democratic voting procedures may not produce liberal governments. We know that demagogues and aspiring despots can use the language and even the mechanisms of democracy to build personal dictatorships (Napoleon III and Hugo Chavez, for example). We know that popular opinion is sometimes more nationalistic than elite opinion and that gains for democracy do not always lead to more foreign policy cooperation. In most cases, progress toward stable and peaceful democratic government comes slowly if it comes at all; even if you believe in ‘democratic peace theory, hoping that the democratization of other countries will solve American foreign policy problems is a fool’s game.
Yet we also know — or at least we believe — that in the long run a more democratic world is a better if not always a safer world, and that it would be immoral as well as impractical to stand in the way of the changes that need to come.
If we add the conservative mission of the United States to the revolutionary agenda, the problems of American foreign policy become more complex still. We are trying to carry out a vast reordering of global society even as we preserve the stability of the international political order: we are trying to walk blindfolded on a tightrope across Niagara Falls — while changing our clothes.
The uncertainties and risks that surround us should not be underestimated. There has never been a worldwide revolution of this kind before; nobody knows for sure how best to speed the plow. Nobody has ever had to balance transformational and conservative roles on a global scale before.
From an American point of view, the Arab Spring is just another complication of this global task — a sudden thunderstorm with flashes of lightening, driving rain and unpredictable gusts of wind as we hop one-legged on the tightrope changing our pants. The Islamic world is entering new territory as it struggles to integrate religious and liberal political values; as the United States tries to juggle its geopolitical interests with its values at a volatile moment in world history, we are almost certain to get the balance wrong much of the time.
Here, however, history offers some hope. As I wrote at the beginning of this post, the United States has been doing two things for more than 200 years: getting foreign revolutions wrong, but somehow still pushing its global revolution forward. America’s success as a conservative revolutionary power on a global scale depends less on the clever policies of our presidents and our secretaries of state, and more on the creativity and dynamism of American society as a whole.
It is power of a free people more than the brilliance of our intellectual and social establishment that has brought the United States this far; in that truth lies the secret of our revolution and of our success.
Article 5.
NYT
Iran Without Nukes
Roger Cohen
June 13, 2011 — Remember Iran?
I do. It’s been two years since the Iranian people rose up to protest a stolen election with a bravery that stirred the world and presented Americans with a truer image of a young and highly educated nation than the old specter of the bearded Islamic zealot. The Green Movement was suppressed through barbaric violence but its example helped kindle the Arab Spring.
As Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University wrote in July, 2009: “Tehran, I believe, is ground zero of a civil rights movement that will leave no Muslim or Arab country, or even Israel, untouched.” He added, “The moving pictures of Iranians flooding colorfully into the streets have forever altered the visual vocabulary of the global perception of ‘the Middle East.”’
Seldom were there more prescient words.
They were quoted by Nader Hashemi of the University of Denver in a recent talk on Iran, in which he noted shared Iranian and Arab aims: “Democracy and dignity, the rule of law and respect for basic human rights, political transparency and an end to corruption.”
That urge is still powerful in Iran beneath the opaque, directionless apparatus of the Islamic Republic. Iran is weak now, its ideology as tired as Osama Bin Laden’s, as marginal to peoples questing to reconcile their Muslim faith and modernity in new ways.
I would probe this weakness through new approaches. But we are stuck still with the world’s most paranoid relationship: the American-Iranian relationship. That’s largely because there’s another way to remember Iran — as the Godot of nuclear threats, the country always on the verge of producing a nuclear weapon or acquiring the “breakout capacity” to make one, but never, despite the dire warning of Israeli leaders dating back to the 1990s, doing either, preferring to dwell in the Islamic Republic’s favored zones: ambivalence and inertia. As one awaits this tortuous Godot, one might recall a forecast of a bomb by 1999 (Shimon Peres) or 2004 (Ehud Barak), or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s talk of “a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” or my friend Jeffrey Goldberg’s allusion in The Atlantic last year to a “consensus” that there is “a better than 50 percent chance that Israel will launch a strike by next July.” That would be next month.
It might also be worth recalling that Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, declared last month that attacking Iran would be “a stupid idea.” He suggested his main worry was not Iran itself but Netanyahu’s susceptibility to “dangerous adventure.”
Dagan’s concerns have surfaced as Seymour Hersh concludes in a New Yorker article this month that, as he put it in one interview, “There’s just no serious evidence inside that Iran is actually doing anything to make a nuclear weapon.”
His reporting reveals that the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (N.I.E.) of 2007 — which concluded “with high confidence” that Iran had halted a nuclear-weapons program in 2003 — still pertains in the classified N.I.E. of 2011. As a retired senior intelligence official put it to Hersh, there’s nothing “substantially new” that “leads to a bomb.”
In other words, Iran, epicenter of inefficiency, unable to produce a kilowatt of electricity through its Bushehr nuclear reactor despite decades of effort, is still doing its old brinkmanship number.
Remember, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is the guardian of the revolution. That is a conservative business. Breakout, let alone a bomb, is a bridge too far if the Islamic Republic is what you’ve vowed to preserve. Much better to gain leverage by producing low-enriched uranium — far from weapons grade — under International Atomic Energy Agency inspection and allow rumors to swirl.
So Iran, long at the top of the Washington agenda, has slid down. It’s partly the Arab Spring. It’s partly that you can’t keep saying the same thing. People do begin to remember the refrain, although nobody in the large Iran-the-clear-and-present-danger school ever seems to get called to account. They should be. The nuclear bogeyman obsession has been a distraction from the need to try to tease out a relationship with Tehran, see Iran as it is. Only the most flimsy efforts have been made, insufficient to test the waters.
Those waters are troubled. The Islamic Republic has not recovered from its convulsion of 2009. It is sickly, consumed by hypocrisy as it cheers on some brave Arabs (but not those in Syria) while brutalizing its own seekers of the freedom promised in 1979. Arabs aren’t buying Iranian hypocrisy. Only Iran’s command of Revolutionary Guard force and the opposition’s lack of a shared goal salvage it.
Khamenei is at loggerheads with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who got into such a sulk recently that he took 11 days off work, infuriating everybody. The Majlis, or parliament, is investigating Ahmadinejad for various alleged frauds including, of all things, vote-buying in 2009! Ahmadinejad was booed during his June 3 speech commemorating Ayatollah Khomeini’s death. Iran is characterized by what Farideh Farhi of the University of Hawaii recently termed “administrative chaos.”
That’s not how you make a nuke. When remembering Iran — and it must be remembered — call the fear-mongers to account.
Article 6.
NATIONAL REVIEW
Interview with - Francis Fukuyama: The Difficulty of Political Order
Matthew Shaffer
June 13, 2011 -- It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call Francis Fukuyama one of the most important thinkers in America. He’s a rare triple threat in public-intellectual life — maintaining high appointments in academe, producing popular books and magazine writing consumed by the chattering classes, and advising American presidents and foreign leaders directly. He combines expertise and influence with breadth: He’s worked on questions as imperial as American grand strategy and as delicate and abstract as bioethics. He’s most famous for The End of History and the Last Man, whose perennially misunderstood title is often jeered, but which defined a decade’s thinking about the post–Cold War world order and globalization. His latest book is Origins of Political Order, which traces a single story through several millennia and dozens of different cultures, empires, and societies — the story of how man emerged from tribal structures into a modern state. Fukuyama talks with NRO’s Matthew Shaffer, about the book and how his thinking about world order and America’s place in it has changed over the last 20 years.
MATTHEW SHAFFER: Origins is a historical work, as opposed to previous works, such as The End of History, and Our Posthuman Future, which were more theoretical. What, for you, is the prescriptive value of history?
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: This really started with a practical concern I had after dealing with failed states and nation-building issues in the wake of September 11 and our nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seemed to me that the United States in particular didn’t appreciate the difficulty of this kind of activity, because we didn’t adequately understand how hard it was to establish institutions. When I was at Johns Hopkins at SAIS [School of Advanced International Studies] I ran an international-development program, focusing on issues of anti-corruption and improving governance. And a lot of it seemed premised on an overly optimistic faith in the ability of outsiders to effect desired outcomes. So I decided to write a book about where institutions came from in countries that had them and could take them for granted. We’ve forgotten a lot of that history and how we’ve gotten to the present. Along the way it was also a means of revisiting a lot of The End of History 20 years later.
SHAFFER: Some theorists, like Hegel, think that history doesn’t just tell us what is stable, or what works, but actually points us toward moral progress. Do you believe that?
FUKUYAMA: Fundamentally, I believe in liberal democracy, that it’s the best form of government, and that the world has made moral progress. But that’s a separate question from whether the development of democratic institutions is inevitable and driven by an underlying historical force. I’ve become more skeptical of that latter belief over the years as I’ve become more attentive to the role of accident and contingency. And my current book is about a lot of that. For example: The reason we got to democracy in Europe is the almost accidental survival of a feudal institution — the English parliament — into the modern period. That’s something that didn’t happen in other European countries, and which we therefore can’t take for granted. So, as you see, the normative concern is separate from the empirical question of whether democracy is inevitable.
SHAFFER: Origins incorporates economics, anthropology, philosophy, and social psychology, for lessons about political order. Is that kind of study too rare today?
FUKUYAMA: This is partly the fault of the structure of academia. There’s such a premium placed on specialization and narrowness that it’s very hard to think more broadly and to cross disciplinary boundaries. I work at Stanford in an interdisciplinary institute, and I’ve been associated with these kinds of outfits for most of my years. And those are where the most interesting research gets done.
SHAFFER: What field outside of political science has the most important insights for understanding political order?
FUKUYAMA: That’s hard to say. I don’t know if there is one. Part of the problem is economics — it’s a very important discipline, but in a way it’s colonized the rest of the social sciences. A lot of political analysis in academia is driven by this model of everybody being a rational decision maker driven by more or less material interests. There’s obviously something to that, but it’s a very limited way of looking about politics, which is about dignity and values and ideas that can’t be explained in material terms. Other disciplines — sociology and anthropology — have gotten at those things better than economics has.
SHAFFER: Your chapter “How Christianity Undermines the Family” is provocatively titled and sort of microcosmic for your whole thesis. Can you tell us about it?
FUKUYAMA: You can’t have modern politics if society is based on the biological principles of supporting friends and family. That’s the natural mode of human sociability. We’re naturally inclined to take care of family and exchange favors with friends. Human beings will interact in that manner without anyone telling them to behave that way because it’s biologically grounded.
In all human societies, social order at one stage depended on extended kinship — people living in tribes where people traced ancestry to a common ancestor that may be three, four, or five generations dead. This was no less true of Europeans than it was of the Chinese, or Arabs, or Africans, or anyone else in the world. All the Germanic barbarians organized themselves tribally after overrunning the Roman Empire.
One of the broad questions I’ve addressed in the book is how did these different societies make an exit out of kinship-based social organization into a modern-based state, with impersonal, centralized administration? Europe in that respect was quite exceptional, because that happened early, and it happened through the agency of the Catholic Church, which changed the rules of inheritance for kin-groups. It forbade divorce, it forbade concubinage, and it forbade cousin marriages within three or four degrees of relatedness. All of these were practices in tribal societies that kept property within an extended kin-group. In the Arab world in many places they still encourage cross-cousin marriage, where you marry your first cousin and the two families get to keep property within this narrow circle.
When the Catholic Church [forbade cousin marriage] in the eighth century, it wasn’t thinking about the effect on kinship. It was acting in a self-interested way, because by cutting off these ways of kin-groups’ keeping property, the Church ended up being the beneficiary. So if a woman didn’t marry and didn’t have children but had a big estate, she tended to donate it to the Church. So the Church helped effect in Europe the breakdown of extended kinship very, very early. Even in the beginning of the Middle Ages, people owned property as individuals. Women could hold property — they could sell it, alienate it, in ways that they still can’t in parts of the Arab world. And this meant that individualism became very deeply rooted in European society. So some individualism was already established by the time Europe got to feudalism. And feudalism is basically a contract — it’s one that is very hierarchical, between a stronger and weaker person, but it is a contract between two people.
So the idea of exchange and private property dates way, way back, hundreds of years before the Enlightenment, Reformation, etc. So I think that the basis for European modernization traces all the way back to developments like that. In China, in India, the exit out of kinship was accomplished through political power, via a state that tried to create impersonal government layered on top of a kin-based society. And those kin-groups really never went away. Even in contemporary China and India, in certain parts there are still kin-groups that influence politics.
SHAFFER: But China had an impersonal government — a meritocratic bureaucracy — without Christianity, and long before the West did, yes?
FUKUYAMA: So you have to understand what that means. China didn’t create the first state, it created the first modern state, meaning a state which recruited people into a centralized bureaucracy based on talent and merit, essentially, and not based on family relations, or connections to the household of the emperor, or something of that sort. So it had a modern form of public administration. And this was all consolidated by the third century B.C. But what the country never got to was the rule of law. Up to the modern day, the concept of a sovereign being limited by the rule of law never existed. So what that meant is that at a very early period in their history, the Chinese perfected strong, absolutist government. And that’s been a consistent pattern — high-quality, authoritarian government. And I think that continues up to the present.
SHAFFER: Could we trace Western ascendance to that one factor, the rule of law?
FUKUYAMA: That’s what’s interesting about the present period. A lot of economic theory says you can’t have modern economic growth without Western-style rule of law. Economists who believe this are thinking about two critical things — property rights and contract enforcement. And there’s a lot of theory and a lot of empirical evidence that show that these are in fact important. The problem with that theory is that it doesn’t really square with the facts in contemporary China. As everybody knows, for the past three decades, China has been growing at double-digit rates and they don’t have Western rule of law.
I think you can rescue the theory in the long run, because without rule of law they can’t keep this up. In a way the challenge that contemporary China poses it that they are doing well, and in the short run they’re doing better than the United States without having these Western institutions. The real challenge is the long-run sustainability of that system, or of the two systems. And looking at that in the long-run, I would still bet on the West, with its rule of law and systems of checks and balances on authority.
SHAFFER: You’ve probably heard a lot of phony rebuttals based on misreading of The End of History. So, I won’t attempt one — but you’ve made oblique references to your own revisions and criticisms. How does the rise of China and the current Arab unrest, for example, fit into the end of history?
FUKUYAMA: If you understand the original thesis correctly, what I was saying is that there was a theory of history among progressive intellectuals for most of the 20th century. That theory of history was Marxism. And according to the Marxists, the end of history was a communist utopia. My observation in the late 1980s is that we weren’t going to get there. Liberal democracies seemed to be the highest stage of political development, and I didn’t see any real alternatives. If you understand the thesis that way, I still believe that. Nothing that’s happened in the last 20 years has convinced me that there’s a higher form of government. Certainly not 9/11 — I don’t think anybody wants to live in a place like Iran and Afghanistan, so I don’t think that’s a serious competitor. China is a more plausible alternative. But I don’t think that anybody who’s not culturally Chinese would duplicate their system, and the Chinese are not really proselytizing their system. So I still think liberal democracy is the default form of government.
What’s changed for me are a couple of things: One is the idea of political decay. It wasn’t an important part of the End of History. But I do think that all political systems, including liberal democracies, can decay over time. They can get too rigid, they can fail to adapt, and if they do, then they’re going to get into trouble, just like authoritarian systems. The other issue, which we’ve already touched on, is contingency in history. So the route to getting into modernity is, I now think, full of a lot of accident, and so it’s not as if there’s this inevitable historical process that driving us toward the present. I think it should make us both more appreciative of the fact that we’ve gotten to the present and also more aware of the fragility of modern institutions.
SHAFFER: A lot of people have related that — your focus on the contingency of political order, and our ability to construct democracies — to your “falling-out” with neoconservatism. Was that “falling out” just local to some of the failures and disappointments of the Bush years or was it a break with the intellectual project as a whole?
FUKUYAMA: It was more a practical dispute over methods. I didn’t think U.S. hard power was an effective method [for advancing liberal democracy], and the Bush administration hadn’t really thought through the implications of invading Iraq. I still think there are ways that the United States can help promote democracy, but it’s a slow and long-term process. For example, I’m on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy, which had an important role in supporting solidarity in Poland in the 1980s, and in Serbia, and the Orange Coalition in Ukraine. So there are ways in which we’ve encouraged democratic forces around the world. I still believe in that mission and project. But I don’t think the Bush administration actually invaded Iraq to promote democracy. They had security objectives in mind, and they added the democracy argument as an afterthought, and that’s what stuck in people’s minds. That was a mistake, because it kind of undermined the notion of democracy promotion, simply because it was connected to a very unpopular intervention.
SHAFFER: Taking lessons from that, what can we do to promote democracy in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring”?
FUKUYAMA: We already are doing a lot. We’ve got organizations like the National Democratic Institute, or the International Republican Institute, that are all over Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, and other places, trying to help them organize political parties, trade unions, civil-society organizations, that hopefully will allow the more Western-oriented democrats in those Arab countries to actually contest in the elections. As we move toward votes in Tunisia and Egypt we want to have some alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood and the military. So we’re giving them that kind of assistance right now. That’s difficult, because they haven’t had experience with democracy previously.
It’s a long-term struggle, and I think we’ll be disappointed in the short run. I don’t think the more pro-Western forces are the ones that will end up on top in the short-run. But we’ve got to start somewhere.
SHAFFER: Is the spread of liberal democracy dependent upon persisting American hegemony?
FUKUYAMA: It’s been helpful. The U.S. obviously plays a big role in maintaining a liberal, open world order, through its alliances and the influence it projects. And American ideas have been very dominant in the world especially in the last two decades. A lot of that is shifting now because of the rise of other powers and other ideas. But the idea of liberal democracy — the U.S. is not the only exemplar of liberal democracy — [remains]. It’s a powerful idea that would exist independently of whether the U.S. is hegemonic or not.
I’m not as scared of a world without American hegemony as some people are. We went through the whole Cold War period in which the U.S. was one of two superpowers. A return to a more multi-polar world in certain ways induces a fair amount of moderation among big players in the system, because people know they can’t get their way unilaterally. And in the more multi-polar world we’d probably think twice about doing things like Iraq. The more important question is: In the global marketplace of ideas, how dominant will American ideas about freedom and rule of law and democracy and our economic model be? Our ideas will obviously be challenged; and it’s important for the U.S. to put its own house in order, both politically and economically, because that’s the most important way we exercise influence around the world: The model we set.
SHAFFER: To revisit Our Posthuman Future, are there any developments in bio-technologies in the past nine years that you find particularly disturbing?
FUKUYAMA: Yes. The whole rise of synthetic biology, where we’ve had new forms of life, and the ability to do new forms of life is proceeding extremely rapidly. The creation of an artificial bacteria itself is not immediately threatening, but it’s part of a long-term process by which we’ll uncover the technologies for manufacturing life, in ways that could have very serious security and moral implications.
SHAFFER: Don’t bioethics pose a challenge to the idea that the best society is the most successful society? You argue in Our Posthuman Future that a society that genetically engineered its children to be more intelligent might be more productive and successful but wouldn’t be moral.
FUKUYAMA: I’ve got a simpler concern in my current book. It’s just that liberal democracy is not something you can take for granted, or that democracies will find a way to solve their problems. I think we’ve got a number of long-term problems in the United States that don’t seem to be getting addressed with the current political system.
Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute
Article 7.
Project Syndicate
Does Anything Matter?
Peter Singer
2011-06-13 – Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.
Among philosophers, the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930’s, when logical positivists asserted that, because there seems to be no way of verifying the truth of moral judgments, they cannot be anything other than expressions of our feelings or attitudes. So, for example, when we say, “You ought not to hit that child,” all we are really doing is expressing our disapproval of your hitting the child, or encouraging you to stop hitting the child. There is no truth to the matter of whether or not it is wrong for you to hit the child.
Although this view of ethics has often been challenged, many of the objections have come from religious thinkers who appealed to God’s commands. Such arguments have limited appeal in the largely secular world of Western philosophy. Other defenses of objective truth in ethics made no appeal to religion, but could make little headway against the prevailing philosophical mood.
Last month, however, saw a major philosophical event: the publication of Derek Parfit’s long-awaited book On What Matters. Until now, Parfit, who is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had written only one book, Reasons and Persons, which appeared in 1984, to great acclaim. Parfit’s entirely secular arguments, and the comprehensive way in which he tackles alternative positions, have, for the first time in decades, put those who reject objectivism in ethics on the defensive.
On What Matters is a book of daunting length: two large volumes, totaling more than 1,400 pages, of densely argued text. But the core of the argument comes in the first 400 pages, which is not an insurmountable challenge for the intellectually curious – particularly given that Parfit, in the best tradition of English-language philosophy, always strives for lucidity, never using obscure words where simple ones will do. Each sentence is straightforward, the argument is clear, and Parfit often uses vivid examples to make his points. Thus, the book is an intellectual treat for anyone who wants to understand not so much “what matters” as whether anything really can matter, in an objective sense.
Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1 + 1 = 2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit’s defense of objectivity in ethics.
One major argument against objectivism in ethics is that people disagree deeply about right and wrong, and this disagreement extends to philosophers who cannot be accused of being ignorant or confused. If great thinkers like Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham disagree about what we ought to do, can there really be an objectively true answer to that question?
Parfit’s response to this line of argument leads him to make a claim that is perhaps even bolder than his defense of objectivism in ethics. He considers three leading theories about what we ought to do – one deriving from Kant, one from the social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and the contemporary philosophers John Rawls and T.M. Scanlon, and one from Bentham’s utilitarianism – and argues that the Kantian and social-contract theories must be revised in order to be defensible.
Then he argues that these revised theories coincide with a particular form of consequentialism, which is a theory in the same broad family as utilitarianism. If Parfit is right, there is much less disagreement between apparently conflicting moral theories than we all thought. The defenders of each of these theories are, in Parfit’s vivid phrase, “climbing the same mountain on different sides.”
Readers who go to On What Matters seeking an answer to the question posed by its title might be disappointed. Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.
When Parfit does come to the question of “what matters,” his answer might seem surprisingly obvious. He tells us, for example, that what matters most now is that “we rich people give up some of our luxuries, ceasing to overheat the Earth’s atmosphere, and taking care of this planet in other ways, so that it continues to support intelligent life.”
Many of us had already reached that conclusion. What we gain from Parfit’s work is the possibility of defending these and other moral claims as objective truths.
Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. Revised editions of his books Practical Ethics and The Expanding Circle have just been published.
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