China: Threat or Threatened? Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Last week I went on my first ever trip to China - just four days spent in a business conference in Shanghai.  A few simple observations before I forget them:

Sitting through presentations on China's over 100 million internet users, a number growing by 400% a year, walking through shopping districts that are every bit as bustling and diverse as those of any middle-income European-style city, hearing about the billions of dollars in advertising spending being pumped into China, it is impossible not to wonder how long the government's control over dissent will last. 

They may be barred from certain google searches, but China's fast-growing middle class can see - and write and talk - right over the fences the government has built for them.  How long can China's zero-tolerance for dissent, a policy predicated on jailing those that dare challenge authority, be enforced across a population of 1.3 billion people and exponentially more emails, text messages, cellphone calls and blog posts?  Yes, surveillance technologies are racing ahead too but a data-mining algorithm cannot find a man and jail him.

I discussed this with a leading American journalist covering the region who put it well:  the Chinese authorities are going to have to keep pedaling awfully fast - providing an ever improving standard of living, employment opportunities, and material and social goods - to stay ahead of the forces of individual autonomy and freedom that education and interconnectedness are bound to feed.  If growth slows, if a currency adjustment deals a big dislocation, if police overreact in a serious way and its caught on film, the forces unleashed could be hard to stop.

So while we worry about China pedaling fast to catch up with us, the other side is the 1.3 billion people with their feet at the wheels who - if the momentum stops - could veer off every which way never to get back on the same bike again.

More on Moussaoui Posted by Michael Signer

Two perhaps counterintuitive thoughts on the jury's decision not to give Zacharias Moussaoui the death penalty.  I sympathize -- completely -- with the 9/11 victims' families desire to put the man to death.  And I blogged here recently in a post I titled "Evil, Alive" about my feeling that Moussaoui was the sum of evil, whether banal in the Arendtian sense or not. 

But in thinking over the jury's reasoning and the result of the case over the last couple of days, I've come to a couple of additional conclusions.

Evil, Alive Posted by Michael Signer

Probably anyone in the Washington area who read the front page of their Washington Post this morning experienced the same sensation I did, reading the right-hand column over my coffee -- a queasy, flat, cold feeling of observing, at a distance, evil.  Zacarias Moussaoui, in case you missed it, testified on his own behalf yesterday, and what he said was so chilling it's just cold:

Taking the stand for the second time at his death-penalty trial, Moussaoui calmly and matter-of-factly said that the sobbing Sept. 11 survivors and family members who testified against him were "disgusting," that the testimony of one man who crawled out of his burning Pentagon office was "pathetic" and that executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was "the greatest American."

Ignoring Our Biggest Threat Posted by Bill Perkins

As headlines focus on such issues as Iraq, Iran, and India, what I believe to be the single greatest threat to our national security remains largely disregarded by both our administration and national security scholars: the environment.

As President Bush recently admitted, global warming is here. We are already feeling the effects of climate change on our budget and domestic policy.  Total federal spending on Hurricane Katrina is estimated at over $100 billion.  Although the tsunami was not triggered by global warming, the U.S. government spent almost a billion dollars on tsunami relief including the efforts of 16,000 military personnel, and millions of refugees were created by the disaster.  Imagine the cost in human and financial currency if entire American cities and island nations had to be permanently evacuated due to rising sea levels, or if Katrina-like storms became the norm rather than the exception. With a projected budget deficit of $350 billion for each of the next two years and the national debt nearing $9 trillion, these are costs that we can ill afford.

Some Specifics (Imagine!) on Immigration Posted by Michael Signer

In the hot debate about immigration we are desperately in need of cool-headed solutions -- now comes a terrific "Truman Democrat Paper" by my friend Betsy Cooper, who is another Principal of the Truman National Security Project.  The paper, titled "Reforming Immigration:  A Strong Security, Pro-Immigrant Policy for Democrats," outlines a third way on immigration for progressives, that navigates between the quickly-hardening shoals of conservative and liberal sentiment on this volatilre issue.

Betsy's proposal combines both get-tough and be-smart elements in the first truly integrated approach I've seen.  The four pillars of the proposal are:

Plagiarism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism... Posted by Heather Hurlburt

My buddy Rodger Payne over at duckofminerva.org brags on a former graduate student for his role in uncovering large-scale plagiarism in Russian President Vladimir Putin's dissertation decades ago.*  Apparently, even in Putin's Russia, it's not quite possible to bury the past.

He wrote the dissertation in the 1990s, by the way, on state management of natural resources.  Kinda makes you want to go back to the out-of-print textbook, written by two Pittsburgh professors, and see what they had to say that struck Putin -- since he has indeed done quite a job of re-centralizing state power over Russia's natural resources, and extracting rather a lot of money and power from them. 

The end of internationalism? Posted by Derek Chollet

Ok, so the header is intentionally over-the-top.  But after reflecting on the Administration’s latest PR offensive on Iraq – it seems like they roll out a new one every other week, but the polls keep slipping – and how their unrelenting happy talk veers further and further away from reality, I’m in a gloomy mood.

In today’s New York Times, Anthony Cordesman, Washington’s straightest shooting military analyst, nails it.  "The problem with the [Bush] speeches [on Iraq] is they get gradually more realistic, but they are still exercises in spin…They don't outline the risks. They don't create a climate where people trust what's being said."

I very much agree with Heather’s thoughts below that many Americans are simply, in her word, “done” with Iraq, and that this fact makes our realistic options rather limited.  Most things in foreign policy always seem to fall into one of three categories – breakdown, breakthrough, or muddle through, and Iraq is clearly a muddle.

As if the news of the day weren’t depressing enough, what is just as concerning over the long term is the last point Cordesman raises: the erosion of trust that Americans have in their government -- and both the Bush Administration and the Democratic opposition -- when it comes to national security.

Dealing with Evil to End Evil Posted by Derek Chollet

The death of Slobodan Milosevic has sparked loads of commentary, looking both forward and back: about the future of Serbia and international war crimes tribunals, whether reconciliation in the Balkans will ever be possible, and the West’s failures in that region during the 1990s.

But when thinking about the practice of American foreign policy, Milosevic’s ugly legacy -- and the ways we used him to end the war he had started in Bosnia -- illustrates one of the greater challenges of statecraft.  Throughout the Dayton negotiations in 1995 and far into implementation, American diplomats bargained with--and to a great extent relied upon--individuals like Milosevic, who bore direct responsibility for the worst crimes against humanity in Europe since the end of World War II.  While Milosevic would not be indicted for war crimes until 1999, the Americans knew at the time that his hands were dirty, placing them in the moral dilemma of dealing with evil to end evil.

Such dilemmas were hardly new to international diplomacy or unique to the Balkans.  The architect of America’s Balkan policy during the 1990s, Richard Holbrooke, often cites the example of Raoul Wallenberg and Folke Bernadotte, two Swedish leaders who negotiated with two of the most notorious Nazis, Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler, during World War II to save thousands of Jews.  For years, American diplomats also negotiated with figures like Yasir Arafat, or even once worked with and supported dictators like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein against mutual enemies like Iran.

Yet these precedents did not make the dilemma any less troubling – then or now. 

Rogue Identities Posted by Michael Signer

A very interesting post by John Ikenberry is up at TPMCafe about two books on identity, and why people seem so willing to create chaos, and kill themselves, for the sake of claims that (to the rest of us) subvert the very reasonable goal of a calm and peaceful world order.  The two books are Cosmopolitanism by Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton, and Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen.

Ikenberry writes:

So Appiah and Sen are worrying about the same danger – the solitarist belittling of human identity. They have a similar vision of a proper functioning and enlightened human society. It is a world were people are complexly integrated into various realms of political and social life. Overlapping and multiple identities reinforce restraint and toleration....

It seems to me that what these two intellectuals are searching for is really some sort of perfected global version of Western liberal society. After all, Europe and the West has been here before, starting perhaps with the religious wars of the early modern era. Western societies entered the modern democratic age when they succeeded in pushing ethnic and religious identities down into civil society. They semi-privatized these identities and created different layers and venues for the expression of social, political, and religious identities and affiliations.

To me, the crowning irony of the advanced capitalist, globalizing world is that local navel-gazing fractures become increasingly more important because they pose a threat to the very self-evidentness of the new world order -- and I wonder whether "identity" can explain it all.  The problem with those who attack the modern world is something like the modern/primeval distinction that was being floated a lot to explain Al Qaeda's actions on 9/11, but is something deeper, more primordial, and more intractable -- a weave of geography, history, ethnicity, nation, language, and cultural sense of embattlement. 

Some sectors of the world have a deep, blood-line urge to retreat and consolidate -- to become "rogues."  Iran has had this tendency since well before the White Revolution, and we see it resurging today.  North Korea has essentially decided to reject the modern world.  Whereas India seeks to become as cosmopolitan and integrationist as it can.

Why?  Why do certain countries (or sectors) decide to reject the world, whereas others join it?  No deep answers, only questions -- curious what those of you who have read either or both of these books think... or if, like me, you've read neither what you think anyway...

Port Security and Stereotyping Posted by Spencer Boyer

Guest Blogger: Spencer P. Boyer, Security and Peace Initiative Fellow

As Suzanne, Lorelei, and others have correctly pointed out recently, much of the outrage over a company based in the United Arab Emirates having control over several ports in the United States is misplaced.   Yes, the administration completely botched this issue politically by continuing with the “just trust us” policy, and not properly consulting with relevant members of Congress, governors, and port city mayors.  As noted, however, the real concern should be over whether we have the ideas and resources in place to move towards a comprehensive port security strategy that secures supply chains and provides adequate inspection of goods bound for American cities.  But perhaps we should be equally concerned about what the reaction to the deal says about the state of mind of the American people post-9/11.