Policy Review - August & September 2012, No. 174

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August & September 2012, No. 174, $6.00
THE MISMEASURE OF INEQUALITY KIP HAGOPIAN & LEE E. OHANIAN OBAMA AND ROMNEY: THE PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY JON DECKER THE FOLLY OF FORGETTING THE WEST SIMON SERFATY THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS DILEMMA STEVE STEIN ALSO: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS BY JOHN ROSENTHAL, A. LAWRENCE CHICKERING & ANJULA TYAGI, PETER BERKOWITZ, WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY, HENRIK BERING
A P u b l i c at i o n o f t h e H o ov e r I n s t i t u t i o n
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POLICY Review
AUGUST & S EPTEMBER 2012, No. 174
Features
3 THE MISMEASURE OF INEQUALITY Focus on equal opportunity, not outcomes Kip Hagopian & Lee E. Ohanian 21 OBAMA AND ROMNEY: THE PATH TO THE PRESIDENCY What each candidate must do to win in November Jon Decker 35 THE FOLLY OF FORGETTING THE WEST What the talk about American and European decline misses Simon Serfaty 49 THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS DILEMMA Making the perfect the enemy of the good Steve Stein 63 AMERICA, GERMANY, AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD The contested history of a mosque in Munich John Rosenthal 79 THE GLOBAL SCHOOLGIRL How empowerment can build up society A. Lawrence Chickering & Anjula Tyagi
Books
95 THE CONSTITUTION AND GLOBALIZATION Peter Berkowitz on Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order by Julian Ku and John Yoo 100 THE GREAT WARS ECONOMIC FRONT William Anthony Hay on Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War by Nicholas A. Lambert 105 WAR PAINT Henrik Bering on The Artist and the Warrior: Military History through the Eyes of the Masters by Theodore K. Rabb
A P u b l i c at i o n o f t h e H o ov e r I n s t i t u t i o n
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POLI CY Review
Au g u s t & S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 2 , N o . 1 7 4
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The Mismeasure of Inequality

By Kip Hagopian & Lee E. Ohanian
n october 2011, the Congressional Budget Office published a report, Trends in the Distribution of Household Income between 1979 and 2007, showing that, during the period studied, aggregate income (as defined by the cbo) in the highest income quintiles grew more rapidly than income in the lower quintiles. This was particularly true for the top one percent of earners. This cbo study has been cited by the media and politicians as confirmation that income inequality has increased substantially during the period studied, and has been used to support President Obamas claim that income inequality is a serious and growing problem in the United States that must be addressed by raising taxes on the highest income earners. We will show that much of what has been reported about income inequality is misleading, factually incorrect, or of little or no consequence to our economic well-being. We will also show that middle-class incomes are not stagnating; in fact, middle-class incomes have risen significantly over the 29 years covered by the cbo study. Lastly, we will address assertions that the rich are not paying their fair share of taxes.
Kip Hagopian was a co-founder of Brentwood Associates, a California-based venture capital and private equity firm. Lee E. Ohanian is professor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at ucla , where he has taught since 1999 . He is also a senior fellow at Stanfords Hoover Institution.
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Kip Hagopian & Lee E. Ohanian

In our view, Americans should care about the well-being of the nation as a whole rather than whether some people earn more than others. To that end, the focus of public policy should not be on equality of income but on equality of economic opportunity. Policies designed to reduce income inequality inevitably involve redistribution of income through increases in transfer payments and marginal tax rates. But these policies discourage hiring and investment, which depresses economic growth and opportunity. In sharp contrast, policies designed to enhance equality of opportunity will increase economic well-being for all, most particularly those in lower income households.
Income inequality
erhaps the most important question left out of almost every discussion about income inequality is, Why should we care about it? Many of those who worry about high income inequality argue that it is an indicator of social injustice that must be remedied through redistribution of income (or wealth). Unfortunately, those who make this claim have not provided any generally accepted criteria for determining when an economic system is unjust. Nor have they provided a convincing argument that such injustice is widespread in the U.S. (In considering this issue, it is worth noting that Greece, Spain, and Italy all have substantially lower income inequality than the U.S. The same is true for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.) Measuring inequality using the Gini coefficient. There are at least five methodologies used to measure income inequality. The most commonly used is the Gini coefficient (also called the Gini index) developed by Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini coefficient is a method of measuring the statistical dispersion of (among other things) income, consumption, and wealth. The figure of merit for the Gini coefficient for income inequality ranges from zero to 1.0, where zero represents total equality (all persons have identical incomes) and 1.0 represents total inequality (one person has all of the income). By this measure, the U.S. has substantially higher income inequality than almost all other industrialized nations. In 2010, the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. Gini coefficient was .469, while the average Gini coefficient for the 27 European Union nations was .31.1 The U.S. Gini coefficient cited here comes from an annual report of the Census Bureau, which uses what it calls money income in its measurement of income inequality.2 Money income, which is the definition of income typi1. Gini coefficients cited here come from the Census Bureau report Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010, The cia World Factbook 2010, and Eurostat, the official statistical office of the European Union. 2. Money income is the first of fifteen definitions of income used by the Census Bureau. .
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cally used in public references to inequality, consists of cash income only, does not subtract taxes, and excludes the value of noncash transfer payments (such as nutritional assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, and public housing), as well as many other components of income. In addition to transfer payments, which are a substantial portion of income at the low end of the income scale, some of the other missing components of income are: employer-provided fringe benefits (primarily retirement benefits and health insurance, which can amount to as much as 30 percent of income3), capital gains, imputed rent from owner-occupied housing, and increases in the value of home equity. We believe excluding these items renders this measure of income inequality relatively meaningless. However, since this measure is so frequently cited, it is worth noting that during the 29-year period covered by the cbo study, inequality of money income (as measured by the Gini coefficient) grew only about 10 percent.4 Using a comprehensive definition of income provides a much more meaningful measure of income inequality. The Census Bureaus 15th definition5 is superior because it includes most of the income items listed above and subtracts taxes. Based on this more relevant definition, income inequality declined 1.8 percent during the sixteen-year period between 1993 and 2009, when the Gini coefficient dropped from .395 to .388. An important shortcoming in the October 2011 cbo report is its almost singular focus on income as a measure of economic well-being, when there is a clear consensus among economists that the best measure of living standards over the long term is not income, but consumption. Focusing on consumption rather than income provides a very different picture of inequality. There is a body of research indicating that consumption inequality is not only substantially lower than income inequality, but has been declining in recent years. For example, a 2006 study, Economic Inequality Through the Prisms of Income and Consumption, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls) found that in 2001, the Gini coefficient for consumption was only .280 (almost 30 percent lower than the Gini for comprehensive income, and about 40 percent lower than the Gini for money income), indicating that inequality with respect to this most meaningful measure of living standards is relatively modest. Moreover, according to the bls, during the fifteenyear period between 1986 and 2001, consumption inequality went down slightly; from a Gini of .283 to a Gini of .280.
3. Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 2010). .
5. For more, see http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/measures/rdi5.html and http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032010/rdcall/1_000.htm (these and subsequent weblinks accessed July 2, 2012).
4. The ten percent rise in income inequality is an estimate that excludes a 4.8 percent off-trend jump in the Gini coefficient between 1992 and 1993, caused primarily by a change in the way data were collected. This change in methodology biased the Gini calculation upward, leading the Census Bureau to warn that the periods before and after 1993 should not be compared.
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It is important to note that two working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research, one by Orazio Attanasio, Erik Hurst, and Luigi Pistaferri and the other by Mark Aguiar and Mark Bils, suggest that the Consumer Expenditure Survey (ces), which is the source for much of the research on consumption inequality, may have some measurement error that biases the figure downward. By contrast, a study by Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan addresses some of the measurement issues regarding the ces and in the process shows that consumption inequality is declining.6 In their study, Meyer and Sullivan construct an alternative measure of inequality to the Gini coefficient using the widely accepted 90/10 ratio, which compares the consumption of those in the 90th percentile to those in the bottom 10th percentile. They document that these measures were fairly stable in the 1990s, and then Current tended to decline after 2005. Specifically, the 90/10 methodologies ratio declines by twelve percent during the eighteenyear period between 1990 and 2008. measure only Finally, we note that consumption inequality may market be even lower than reported by any of the studies cited above. This is because current methodologies consumption measure only market consumption rather than total rather than consumption, which is the sum of both market (purtotal chased) and nonmarket (home-produced) goods. This is important because lower-income households consumption. consume a disproportionate amount of goods produced in the home (what economists call home production), including home-cooked meals, household-provided child care, and household home improvements and maintenance. Economists have estimated that home production is around one-third of gdp, yet this form of consumption is not counted in the total when measuring consumption inequality. Our conclusion from this analysis is that consumption inequality is considerably lower than income inequality. This is because consumption expenditures are made with after-tax dollars and are influenced by many factors other than money income, including transfer payments, family savings, barter, imputed rent from owner-occupied housing, income from the underground economy, and assistance from family and friends. Alternative method of measuring income inequality. Another way of measuring income inequality is to divide the population into quintiles (twenty percent of the population in each quintile) ranked according to the aggregate income in each segment. Then, by comparing the growth in real income in each quintile, we can determine whether income inequality has grown or declined. The October 2011 cbo report emphasized this methodology. The
6 . Meyer and Sullivans paper is available at http://www.nber.org/public_html/confer/2 0 1 1 / ease11/Meyer_Sullivan.pdf.
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table below shows the inflation-adjusted increase in household income7 in each quintile (with a separate breakout for the top one percent; figures for the fifth quintile are actually for the 81st to the 99th percentiles, i.e., all but the top one percent):
first 18.3% 5.1% second third 27.5% 35.2% 9.2% 14.0% fourth 43.3% 19.9% fifth top 1 % 65.0% 277.5% 35.6% 17.1%
Growth in income Share of income
The headline news from the cbo report was that the income of the top one percent of earners grew 278 percent, and that income in the higherincome quintiles grew more than income in the lower quintiles. But the study also showed that during the period reviewed, aggregate income grew 62 percent; income in the middle three quintiles grew just under 40 percent; income in the middle quintile grew 35 percent; and even the lowest quintile grew 18 percent. In our view, these growth rates are worst-case, inasmuch as we believe the cbos figures have understated real income growth during the period. Note that these data are inflation adjusted using the Consumer Price IndexUrban-Research Series (cpi-u-rs) methodology, which many economists believe overstates inflation. For two major reasons, we along with many economists consider the Personal Consumption Expenditure Deflator (pce) a more accurate measure of inflation.8 First, the cpi is based on the pricing over time of a fixed market basket of goods. It does not account for the fact that households routinely substitute out goods when their prices rise relative to other goods of comparable utility. For example, a consumer may substitute apples for bananas when the price of bananas rises relative to the price of apples. In this example, the cpi would overstate inflation because it would assume that consumers would still buy the same number of bananas at the higher price. In contrast, the pce takes these substitution effects into account. Second, the cpi measures only prices paid by urban consumers, while the pce measures the prices of all consumption goods, wherever they are purchased. Since lower-income households tend to live disproportionately in non-urban areas, the exclusion of their purchases by the cpi further biases the index toward overstating inflation and, in this case, understating income growth. Income growth using the pce is presented below along with the cbo data.
7. The CBO defines income for the October 2011 report as market income (labor income, business income, capital gains and other capital income, and retirement income received from past service), plus transfer payments, less taxes.
8.The cpi-u-rs is constructed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the pce is constructed by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and is used to measure gross domestic product. Both price indices are widely used to deflate consumption expenditures for the purpose of measuring real income (see http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=4049). We note that the Federal Reserve seems to have shifted focus from the cpi to the pce for some of the same reasons we identify (see http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/hh/2000/February/FullReport.htm).

Growth in real after-tax income from 1979 to 2007 (%)
quintiles First Second Third Fourth Fifth (81st to 99th percentile) Top 1 % Total income growth price index (%) cpi-u-rs pce deflator (source: bls) (source: bea) 18.3 25.8 27.5 35.5 35.2 43.7 43.3 52.3 65.0 75.4 277.5 301.3 62% 75%
If we are right that the pce is the more accurate measure of inflation, then real income growth during the period was significantly higher than reported by the cbo. When inflation is adjusted using the pce, real income growth in the first quintile was 40 percent higher, growth in the middle quintile was 24 percent higher, and growth in the fifth quintile was 8.6 percent higher. Thus, the cpi has not only understated real income growth but has overstated the rise in the level of income inequality. The impact of globalization on income inequality. It is noteworthy that the income growth in the U.S. during 1979 to 2007 was achieved in a time of rapid globalization and technological change in the world economy. Globalization, which effectively is a breaking down of trade barriers, has put upward pressure on income inequality in most of the industrialized nations as the production of goods and services has migrated to countries with lower labor costs. While this process has raised living standards in developing countries, it has reduced jobs or suppressed wages in many developed countries. As a result, many of these nations have experienced an increase in income inequality. A 2011 study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that from the mid-1980s to the late 2000s, income inequality increased in seventeen of the 22 oecd countries for which longterm data series are available.9 Seven of the most advanced oecd economies Canada, Finland, Germany, Israel, Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Sweden experienced greater increases in inequality than the U.S.
9. Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (oecd, 2011), 2324.
Measuring economic well-being

e believe the focus on income inequality is misguided. The most important finding of the cbo report is not that income grew more in the higher quintiles than in the lower quintiles; it
.
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is that income in all quintiles grew. And, as measured by the pce, incomes grew significantly faster than reported. Americas economy has outperformed all other industrialized nations. The vast majority of Americans have fared well over the period of the cbo study. In fact, the U.S. economy has been the best-performing large economy in the world as measured by per-capita gdp and median standard of living. According to the oecd, per-capita gdp in the U.S. in 2010 was $46,600, which is 47 percent higher than the $31,800 average per-capita gdp in the eu nations in that year. In addition to substantially higher gdp per capita, the U.S. has a significantly higher standard of living than almost all of the most advanced economies. According to The Luxembourg Wealth Study, the data source used by the oecd for international comparisons, in 2002 (the latest year for which results were available), median disposable personal income in the U.S., adjusted to reflect purchasing power parity, was 19.3 percent higher than in Canada; 68 percent higher than in Finland; 45 percent higher than in Germany; 59 percent higher than in Italy; 31 percent higher than in Norway; 73 percent higher than in Sweden; and 31 percent higher than in the United Kingdom.10 The figures for gdp per capita and median income understate Americas economic performance advantage because the median age of the U.S. population (36.8 years) is about four years lower than the average median age in the European Union and almost eight years lower than in Japan. Age, as a proxy for experience, is a significant contributor to income until individual earnings peak sometime between age 50 and 55. In addition to higher median incomes, Americans also have higher median net worth, a further contributor to the difference in standards of living. There is no question that until the recent recession, the U.S. economy performed well in the 25 years from 1983 to 2008 compared to other advanced economies. During this period, real compound annual gdp growth in the U.S. was 3.3 percent (slightly ahead of the long-term trend line), substantially greater than the growth of its g-7 counterparts, which on a weightedaverage basis grew only 2.3 percent per year. Moreover, in the recent recession, the U.S. economy contracted less than the worlds other advanced economies. Specifically, U.S. gdp shrunk 3.5 percent in 2009, which was 25 percent less than the 4.7 percent contraction experienced by the non-U.S. g7. And in 2010, the U.S. economy grew 3.0 percent, 42 percent more than the 2.1 percent growth for the non-U.S. g-7.11 While in the aggregate, the U.S. economy performed much better than the
10. Emilia Niskanen, The Luxembourg Wealth Study: Technical Report on lws Income Variables (June 2007), available at http://www.lisproject.org/lws/introduction/dec06_meeting/niskanen.pdf. The Luxembourg Wealth Study organization was founded in 1983 and is one of the few sources for international comparisons of income.
11. Data on U.S. gdp growth are from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Data on g-7 (ex-U.S.) growth are from oecd.stat.

economies of its g-7 counterparts, this was in part because the U.S. had higher population growth. The most meaningful measure of economic performance is based on per-capita statistics, which removes the effect of population growth. On a per-capita basis, the U.S. once again outperformed, albeit by a smaller margin. During the comparable period, real compound annual gdp per-capita growth in the U.S. was 2.1 percent, higher than the 1.8 percent weighted average growth of other members of the g-7. Again using per-capita numbers, in 2009 the U.S. economy contracted about 4.3 percent, which was less than the 5.1 percent contraction recorded by the other g-7 members. And in 2010, the U.S. economy grew 2.1 percent, 31 percent higher than the 1.6 percent growth of non-U.S. g-7 countries. Further evidence of the superior economic performance of the U.S. economy comes from a compariThe average son of unemployment rates. The average unemployunemployment ment rate in the United States from 1982 to 2007 was 6.0 percent, compared with 9.0 percent in rate in the U.S. France, 8.3 percent in Germany, and 7.7 percent in from 1982 to the United Kingdom. The not-stagnant middle class. As noted earlier, 2007 was the claims that incomes in the U.S. have been stag6.0 percent, nant for decades are at odds even with the compared with arguably understated income growth data from the cbo report, which show that income in the middle 8.3 percent three quintiles grew just under 40 percent. And as in Germany. we have seen, using the pce deflator, incomes in the middle three quintiles grew about 48 percent. While these growth rates are somewhat below historical averages, they are impressive inasmuch as they occurred during a period of rapid globalization and technological change. In any event, it is clearly wrong to say that middle class income growth during the period was stagnant. Americas poor: Putting poverty into perspective. Currently, about 46 million Americans live below the official federal poverty line. But the data suggest that by some measures Americas poor have a somewhat higher standard of living than is commonly believed. Based on a standard established in 1965, a family of four reporting $22,300 or less in money income in 2010 was considered poor and thus eligible for government support. By this standard, about 15 percent of Americans are currently judged to be poor, roughly the same percentage as was reported in 1965, and up from 12.5 percent before the recession. However, in his 2008 book The Poverty of The Poverty Rate, American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt makes a compelling case that the government measure for the official poverty rate is seriously flawed. His assertion is based largely on the fact that the reported income of people defined as poor has increased only about 10 percent since the standard was set, while other measures of well-being have increased substantially more.
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Most notably, consumption expenditures by the lowest-income Americans have consistently exceeded reported income, and, this difference has widened tremendously over the decades since the official poverty rate made its debut. Specifically, Eberstadt reports that according to the Department of Labor, in 196061 consumption expenditures in the lowest quartile were 112 percent of reported income, rising to 140 percent (in the lowest quintile) in 197273, and 198 percent (in the lowest quintile) in 2005. Thus, a family claiming $22,300 in income in 2005 would have reported about $44,000 in expenditures in that year. As noted earlier, the gap between reported income and consumption is filled by various categories of government transfer payments (including Medicaid, food stamps, subsidized housing, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, etc.), family savings, imputed income from ownerThe average U.S. occupied housing, barter, support from family and friends, and income from the underground economy. household lives Additional data on the discrepancy between in about 845 reported income and the actual well-being of the square feet per poor comes from research by Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield of the Heritage Foundation. In person, recent years, shortly after the release of the Census or 2.3 times the Bureaus report Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, Rector has average European issued his own report on American poverty. In the household. September 1 3 , 2 0 1 1 , report, Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts about Americas Poor, the authors examine various data on the living conditions of poor households. For example, the data show that on average Americas poor live in housing that totals 515 square feet per person, about 40 percent more per person than the living quarters of the average European household. (The average American household lives in about 845 square feet per person, or 2.3 times the average European household.) They also present data that show There is little or no evidence of poverty-induced malnutrition in the United States. And that nutrient density (amount of vitamins, minerals, and protein per kilocalorie of food) does not vary by income class. In addition to food, clothing, and shelter, some of the most meaningful indicators of well-being are the properties and amenities that make life more comfortable or enjoyable. Based on data from the 2009 American Housing Survey, Rector and Sheffield report that 42 percent of poor households own a home (median price: $100,000); 80 percent have air conditioning; 98 percent have a color tv (65 percent have two or more); 99.6 percent have a refrigerator; 98 percent have a stove and oven; 75 percent have a car or truck (31 percent have two or more); 81 percent have a microwave oven; 78 percent have a dvd or vcr; 64 percent have a satellite connection; and 25 percent have a dishwasher. Our purpose is not to make light of the deprivations the poor suffer every
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day. There is no doubt that the poorest Americans struggle mightily, and that too many Americans are poor. But these data are useful in understanding the difficulties in defining poverty, and for constructing effective policies aimed at helping those in need.
Why U.S. income inequality is higher
here does not appear to be a clear consensus among economists as to why inequality in the U.S. is higher than in other industrialized nations. There are many factors that contribute to income inequality, at least two of which are common to all countries and are unalterable. They are: differences in individual ability and preferences (defined as the capacity and desire to earn) and differences in age (this latter factor is currently in evidence in the U.S., as 80 million aging baby-boomers are passing through their peak earnings years). As discussed above, a third influence on inequality in almost all countries during the last 30 to 40 years has been globalization. In addition to these common factors, we believe there are several factors specific to America that have put upward pressure on income inequality. Some have enabled certain segments of the population to earn extraordinary incomes, and some have caused certain segments to lag behind Extraordinary incomes at the top. The most influential factors enabling the growth in incomes in the U.S. appear to be:
Greater economic freedom: Despite increasing infringements on U.S. economic freedom in recent years, Americas lower aggregate taxes, less stringent regulation, and more business-friendly economic environment have made the U.S. the most productive nation in the world and a place where more people can become rich, or even super rich, than in other countries. A highly developed entrepreneurial culture: During the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, huge waves of self-selected individualists braved enormous perils to come to America for a better life. It can be argued that entrepreneurship, if not actually in the dna of most Americans, is at a minimum a strong component of the nations cultural heritage. The electronics revolution: We believe that the invention of the integrated circuit by Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby in 1958 ignited a modern version of the 19 th century Industrial Revolution, which has been unparalleled in history. This revolution, which has given us first the microprocessor and ultimately the Internet, along with thousands of other remarkable technological advances and offshoots, has raised living standards and quality of life for much of the world population.
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This has been especially true in the U.S. A large, highly developed venture capital industry: Americas venture capital industry, which took off in the late 1960 s and is unrivaled in size and sophistication by any other countrys, has combined with Americas entrepreneurial culture and the electronics revolution to produce more innovation and higher productivity than any other country in the world.
Yes, these factors have combined to produce massive wealth for a few but have also contributed to raising incomes for most. Suppression of incomes at the low end. In addition to globalization and technology, another important factor putting downward pressure on incomes in the U.S. has been the substantial influx of low-skilled, lowincome immigrants into the U.S. workforce over the past 30 years. But as noted at the beginning of this essay, we and others believe that an even more important cause of lagging incomes in America is inequality of opportunity. There is considerable debate over what impedes equality of opportunity. Many assert that institutional racism and sexism is a major factor; others argue that the political system is rigged in favor of corporations and the rich. These explanations seem to have as many detractors as they have advocates. But one cause of lagging incomes on which there is broad agreement is Americas substandard k-12 education system. We believe that a solution to this problem would do more to reduce income inequality and increase prosperity than any other public policy fix. Have tax cuts increased inequality? A common claim is that the rate cuts for capital gains and dividends under President Clinton together with President George W. Bushs cuts in marginal rates and further cuts in capital gains and dividend rates raised income inequality. But the evidence does not support that claim, inasmuch as the Gini coefficient for comprehensive income during the period 19932009 (the period in which almost all of the Bush and Clinton tax cuts took effect) did not change. A plausible explanation for this is that the Bush tax cuts reduced taxes on people with lower incomes more than it did on people with higher incomes. For example, under Bush, the lowest marginal rate, 15 percent, was lowered to 10 percent (a 33 percent reduction), while the highest marginal rate, 39.6 percent, was lowered to 35 percent (a 12 percent reduction). In addition, under Bush, the child credit doubled and the earned-income-tax credit increased significantly, further reducing the tax obligations of lower-income earners.12 This has almost certainly contributed to the increase in workers who pay no federal income tax, which now totals about 47 percent of tax filers. Is the increase in the ranks of the super rich a problem? Much of the
12. The eitc is now the largest cash transfer program for lower-income workers. See Hilary Hoynes, The Earned Income Tax Credit, Welfare Reform, and the Employment of Low-Skilled Single Mothers (University of California Davis, 2008 ).
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concern today about income inequality is about the income levels of the highest income earners in the country, such as the top one percent or the top 0.1 percent. Critics assert that the rising share of income held by this group is a problem that public policy should address through income redistribution. We disagree. The period of rapid and substantial accumulation of wealth for some individuals has not just coincided with, but has contributed to, one of the best periods of economic growth in U.S. history. Much of the wealth created during this period was amassed by extraordinarily talented entrepreneurs who made their money by developing new technologies and products that have raised productivity and living standards for all. We can only imagine what the U.S. and the world economy would be like without: Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove (founders of Intel); Bill Gates (Microsoft); Steve Jobs (Apple); Larry Page and Sergei Brin (Google); Fred Smith (Federal Express); Larry Ellison (Oracle); Sam Walton (Wal-Mart); Bob Swanson (Genentech); George Rathman (Amgen); Howard Schultz (Starbucks); Jeff Bezos (Amazon); and the founders of hundreds of other remarkably successful companies established in the last 40 years. These multi-millionaires and billionaires started entire new industries or completely transformed old ones. In this process, they have been responsible for directly or indirectly creating tens of millions of jobs. To be sure, not all of the newly rich are creators. For example, many come from the financial sector. But the financiers, investors, and bankers are an essential part of the economic ecosystem that has made the U.S. economy superior to any other. Moreover, it is not possible, and is almost certainly counterproductive, to enact policies based on value judgments about who should be allowed to get rich and who should not. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said in his October 20, 2002, article that if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else. Is that really true? Is the U.S. economy a zero-sum game? If the above list of billionaires had not been so successful, would the rest of us be better off today? Surely not. So how should we think of these creative millionaires and billionaires: as contributors to income inequality, or as driving forces behind American prosperity? They are both. But why should we care how high their incomes are when the vast majority of us have prospered greatly from their success?
Do the rich pay their fair share?

he answer to this question should start with an agreement on an accepted definition of fair. But those who assert that the rich do not pay their fair share have not provided such a definition.13
13. See Kip Hagopian, The Inequity of the Progressive Income Tax, Policy Review 166 (April-May 2011). An unabridged version is available at www.kiphagopian.com.
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Here is how the federal income tax burden was distributed in 2009 (the most recent year for which data are available):14 Distribution of federal income taxes (2009 )
percent of income 16.9 31.7 43.2 86.5 13.5
percent of taxes paid 36.7 58.7 70.5 97.7 2.3 51*
Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 50% Bottom 50%
Percent of people who paid no federal income tax:

* This was reduced to 47 percent in 2011 due to an improving economy
The U.S. income tax system is, by any measure, quite progressive. In fact, according to a study released in 2008 by the oecd, the U.S. federal income tax system is the most progressive of any of the 24 countries in the oecd24, which includes Canada, Japan, Australia, and all of the richest European nations: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Sweden. In fact, the U.S. progressivity index is 22 percent higher than the average for the 24 countries.15 Are payroll taxes regressive? Many of those who assert that the rich dont pay their fair share contend that both the Social Security and Medicare tax systems are regressive, and that the regressiveness of these systems substantially or wholly offsets the progressiveness of the federal income tax system. But studies show that both systems are themselves progressive. Payroll taxes are collected for the express purpose of providing income supplements and medical care during retirement. In the case of Social Security, income is taxed proportionately up to a cap that is currently set at $110,100. Those who assert that the tax is regressive argue that the cap results in a decline in taxes paid as a percentage of income as income rises above the cap. But this argument omits two relevant facts: the amount of each beneficiarys Social Security income at retirement is also capped; and higher-income workers get less back as a percentage of their contributions than lower-income workers do. Moreover, Social Security income is subject
14. The data on shares of income and taxes are from Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data (The Tax Foundation, October 2011). 15. Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in oecd Countries (oecd, 2008), 106.
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to the income tax, which is taxed progressively. Thus, overall, the system is progressive, not regressive. The Social Security Administration itself has found that the tax is indeed progressive, with retirement benefits about halfway between a pure defined-contribution program and a flat dollar benefit amount. It has also analyzed progressivity for future cohorts and predicts that progressivity may stabilize around its current level. In the case of Medicare, the amount paid into the system is proportionate to income and has no cap. So a person with a lifetime income of $5 million will pay five times as much into the system as a person with a lifetime income of $1 million. Since the benefits provided by Medicare (paid health care) are on average essentially the same for each beneficiary, all other things being equal, the system is progressive. In support of this assertion, recent research by Darius N. Taxes on Lakdawalla and Jay Bhattacharya shows that, based corporate on the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, the poorest groups receive the most benefits at any dividends and given age, and that this advantage in benefits capital gains received significantly outweighs the effect of their higher death rates relative to wealthier recipients. are taxes on The result is that Medicare is a highly progressive corporate public program.16 income that has Do higher-income earners pay lower tax rates? The latest argument in favor of raising the taxes on already been higher-income earners is that the rich pay lower taxed once. average rates than lower-income earners. This claim has been given currency by the famed investor Warren Buffett, who recently announced that he paid a lower rate of tax on his income than did his secretary. Since most of Buffetts income comes from dividends and capital gains (which are taxed at the rate of fifteen percent), and assuming Buffett pays his secretary well, it is understandable that the rate shown on his tax returns would be less than the rate paid by his secretary. However, the relationship between Buffetts low tax rate and that of his secretary is a statistical outlier. According to the cbo, the rich, on average, definitely pay higher income tax rates than lower-income taxpayers (see table below). Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal among others has noted, Buffett has ignored the fact that the taxes on corporate dividends and capital gains are taxes on corporate income that has already been taxed once at rates as high as 35 percent, not including state taxes. (Thirty five percent is the statutory rate of tax on corporate income; the average rate is 25 percent.) To be fair, not all of the corporate income tax is born by shareholders. Most economists agree that a significant part of the corporate tax may be
16. Darius N. Lakdawalla and Jay Bhattacharya, Does Medicare Benefit the Poor? Journal of Public Economics 90 (2005), available at http://works.bepress.com/darius_lakdawalla/11.
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Policy Review

borne by labor or passed through to consumers. While there is no consensus on the portion borne by shareholders, we believe a reasonable estimate is that roughly 50 percent of the corporate tax burden falls on shareholders, in which case, a typical shareholder would pay a combined tax rate of 27.5 percent (if the company paid the average rate) and as much as 32.5 percent (if the company paid the statutory rate). In any event, these rates are substantially higher than the average income tax rates paid by 99 percent of taxpayers. But what if all federal taxes are considered? Do the rich enjoy lower tax rates? Again, according to the cbo, the answer is no. The combination of income taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, and shareholders share of the corporate income tax makes up about 94 percent of federal taxes on individuals. As shown in the table below, when all these taxes are included, in 2007 the top one percent paid an average tax rate of 29.5 percent, substantially higher than the rates paid by those below the 99th percentile. Average tax rates as a share of income (2007 ) income taxes 18.8 11.8 4.2 -5.6 all federal taxes 29.5 22.8 15.1 4.7
Top 1% 81st to 99th percentiles 21st to 80th percentiles Bottom 20%
In its report, the cbo makes the standard assumption that the incidence of each federal tax is entirely borne by the individual or organization reporting the income. Aconceptually superiorapproach would be to estimate how the incidence of these various federal taxes indirectly impacts different income earners beyond the direct effect reported by the cbo. For example,our view is that only about 50 percent of the corporate tax is borne bycapital, and the rest is borne by labor, consumers,and other stakeholders through lower wages and cash flows.Since there are no generally accepted estimates of tax incidence across these taxes, this adjustment is beyond the scope of this essay.Suffice it to say, we believe that the cbos basic conclusion is correct: Higher-income earners pay higher rates of tax when all federal taxes are taken into account. Taxing income from capital is both economically inefficient and inequitable. The current discussion about the Buffett Rule highlights the

fact that a considerable fraction of the income of top income earners is capital income (e.g., dividends and capital gains), and that extracting more tax revenue from top earners will require significant increases in capital-income tax rates. But doing so is at variance with the standard view in the public finance literature on the perils to economic efficiency of taxing capital income. Many studies find that in the long run capital-income tax rates should be set near zero, even if society chooses to redistribute income. Taxing capital is particularly harmful because it is supplied very elastically. This means that even small increases in taxes on capital income lead to a lower capital stock, which, relative to other forms of taxation, depresses labor productivity, wages, and living standards. In addition to economic efficiency considerations, we believe that taxing any income from savings and investment is inequitable.Heres why: Assume two people, Angelina and Brad, have exactly the same lifetime earned income, but Angelina saves ten percent of her after-tax income and Brad saves nothing. In this hypothetical, if income from savings is taxed, Angelina will pay more lifetime tax than Brad, simply because Angelina saved. We believe this is clearly inequitable. So what is a fair share? The U.S. tax system is more progressive than that of any other advanced economy. Higher-income workers already pay a substantially disproportionate amount of the income tax relative to their share of income. The top five percent pay 44 percent more in taxes than the bottom 95 percent, while 47 percent of tax filers pay no tax at all. The bottom 50 percent of filers pay only 2.3 percent of taxes, and the bottom quintile gets money back. Based on these facts, how does one make a case that the rich are not paying their fair share?
e are unaware of persuasive evidence that reducing income inequality will increase economic well-being for the majority of citizens; in fact, Americas superior standard of living and economic growth relative to other advanced economies is evidence to the contrary. For arguably the most commonly used measure of inequality and for the Census Bureaus most comprehensive definition of income, inequality has not risen since 1993. Moreover, the rise in income inequality that occurred before that year appears to have been, at least in part, a byproduct of the remarkable success of a group of entrepreneurs who in the past few decades created countless jobs and contributed substantially to the higher living standards we all currently enjoy. Increasing taxes on Americas most productive earners those who create most of the jobs in our economy will depress economic growth and reduce opportunities for the less fortunate. Rather than focusing on income
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Equality of opportunity

inequality, policymakers should address the very real impediments to achieving equality of opportunity, particularly for the youngest and least-skilled workers among us. We believe such efforts should begin with fixing our k12 education system, which is failing to train many young Americans to be competitive in todays global labor market. If we can solve this problem, we will enable future generations of young people to climb the economic ladder and achieve the economic success that has long made the United States the worlds leading economy.
19
Obama and Romney: The Path to the Presidency

By Jon Decker
ts certain to be the most expensive presidential race on record and its shaping up to be one of the closest as well. With less than three months until Election Day, the campaigns of President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, are each figuring out which path will lead them to 270 electoral votes and the keys to the White House. For Team Obama, the strategy for these last remaining months of campaigning remains unchanged: convince undecided voters that the administrations policies have helped the country make progress while simultaneously painting Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch Wall Street fat cat who will return the country to the economic policies of President George W. Bush. Unlike the Obama/McCain race four years ago, in which then-Senator Obama could run a largely positive campaign on a message of hope and change, this
Jon Decker, a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, covers the White House for Siriusxm s potus Channel. He has been a member of the White House Press Corps since 1 9 9 5 and serves as an adjunct professor of journalism at Georgetown University.
Jon Decker
campaign has been overwhelmingly negative. As a senior Obama campaign advisor told Politico in August of last year, Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney. Mitt Romneys strategy to get to 270 essentially boils down to the very effective line that Ronald Reagan used against President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential campaign: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? As a senior Romney strategist told me in mid-June, This is an election about the state of the U.S. economy. Were focused on issues relating to job creation and deficit reduction. We feel were in a strong position to make this election a referendum on the economy and how President Obama has managed it. Although there are stark differences in the way each side views the state of the U.S. economy, there are two key things that both campaigns readily acknowledge: President Obama is unlikely to expand the electoral map the way he did in 2008; and this campaign, unlike the Obama/McCain race, is going to be close and very competitive.
The mood of the electorate

n 2008, barack Obama won the White House thanks to the perfect political storm: Voters had grown tired of eight years of Republican leadership under President George W. Bush; Obama sold himself as a new kind of political leader who could unite a divided electorate; and a coalition of young voters, upscale professionals, minorities, and independents embraced his message of hope and change. For many in this coalition, 2008 was more than an election it was a movement. Four years later, much has changed. The presidents job approval ratings have fallen from 63 percent when he was inaugurated to a little less than 47 percent today, according to an average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.com. More troubling for the presidents re-election prospects is a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that shows that a majority of independents feels that President Obamas policies have made it harder for Americans to gain employment. Fifty-two percent of independents said they agreed with the idea that the president has not helped create more jobs in America. Thats an argument that taps into the central message of the Romney campaign. With job growth slowing to anemic levels and the unemployment rate stuck above eight percent (and even higher in the battleground states of Florida, Nevada, and North Carolina), its getting harder for President Obama to blame the weak recovery on the mistakes of his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. As for the presidents signature domestic achievement in his first term the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act a majority of the general public views that law as a bust. Among registered voters, 57 percent of those
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surveyed by Reuters/Ipsos said that they believe the health care overhaul has damaged the economy an argument that Mitt Romney has been making at campaign stops around the country. Advisors to Mitt Romneys presidential campaign argue that the Supreme Courts vindication of President Obamas health care law in late June while a short-term win for the president may actually benefit Romney. The reason: Republicans and independents now know that the only path to throwing out Obamacare is to elect Romney. According to this argument, the same voters that were fired up in the 2010 midterms will be energized in the November presidential election. In fact, less than 24 hours after the Courts ruling, the Romney campaign reported that it had raised $4.6 million from 47,000 online donations. The ruling also gave Romney another talking point to use out on The Affordable the campaign trail: The individual mandate contained in President Obamas health care law is, Care Act is likely indeed, a tax. to be a backUnsurprisingly, White House advisors have a different spin on the Supreme Court victory. As one burner issue. For told me on background, the ruling is not only a most voters, the morale boost to the Democratic base, it boxes economy is the Romney in on the Massachusetts health care law he championed and destroys the narrative of the presi- biggest concern. dent as an ineffectual leader. But the reality is that the Supreme Court decision, coming almost four months before Election Day, is likely to be a back-burner issue. Views about the Affordable Care Act are already settled. For most voters, the economy has been and likely will remain their biggest concern. This has clearly benefitted the campaign of Mitt Romney, who has drawn even with President Obama in most national public opinion polls by positioning himself as an economic Mr. Fix-it. And that message appears to be resonating with voters. A Fox News poll released in early June found Romney tops President Obama on economic issues by seven points 46 to 39. A recent abc News poll found similar results among independent voters, who are largely skeptical of President Obamas plans on the economy. The poll taken in mid-June found that only 38 percent of independents have a favorable impression of President Obamas economic policies, while 54 percent have an unfavorable impression a sixteen point margin. This gap has presented an opportunity for Mitt Romney to compete with President Obama not only in the traditional battleground states of Florida and Ohio, but also in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which have voted for the Democratic nominee in the past six presidential elections. Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has acknowledged both publicly and privately that the economy wont be strong by Election Day. But the presidents political team is hoping that it will be improved enough in November to make voters feel like the economy is heading in the right direcAugust & September 2012 23
Jon Decker
tion. The model for Team Obama is President Ronald Reagans reelection campaign in 1984. Like President Obama, Reagan also dealt with an economic recession and high unemployment early in his first term. But there are some major differences between the economic playing fields for both presidents. In November of 1984 the U.S. unemployment rate stood at 7.2 percent. But leading up to Election Day, voters had the sense that the economy was improving, as the jobless rate steadily fell from 10.8 percent in December 1992 and eight percent in January 1984. Additionally, in June of 1984, President Reagans approval ratings according to Gallup stood at 54 percent. Thats much higher than the 45 percent that Gallup has for President Obama at this writing. Perhaps recognizing that the economy is not the issue that is their strong suit heading into Perhaps seeing November, the White House has tried to change the that the economy subject. In a clever move that immediately put foris not a winning mer Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on the defensive and knocked him off-message, President issue, the White Obama in early June issued an executive order that allows around 800,000 illegal immigrants those House has under the age of 30 who came to the United States done its best as children, if they meet certain conditions to to change the remain in the country without fear of deportation. The temporary order also allows them to work. The subject. president in a Rose Garden address said the changes would make immigration policy more fair, more efficient and more just. But coming less than five months before the presidential election, the action reeks of politics. Not only does the temporary order reverse President Obamas previous position that he lacked the authority to effectively do a dream Act end-run around Congress, but the move was clearly aimed at consolidating Latino support in such battleground electoral states as Florida, Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, and New Mexico. Beyond the battleground states, the executive order should also help the presidents standing with the nearly 22 million Hispanics who are eligible to vote in 2012. It may also help increase Obamas share of the Hispanic vote from the 67 percent that he received in 2008. Prior to the announcement, President Obama had been criticized by Hispanic-American leaders for an overall increase in deportations of illegal aliens in recent years. But the benefits that President Obama may receive from his sudden reversal on his illegal immigration policy are likely to be short-lived. Governor Romney, in a mid-June speech to naleo, a group of Hispanic elected and appointed officials, pledged to build his own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the presidents temporary measure on illegal immigration. Further undercutting the presidents political advantage, unemployment among Hispanics is eleven percent higher than the national average.
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So while a Bloomberg poll released in mid-June showed that 64 percent of likely voters surveyed after the announcement said they agreed with the policy, voters in November are predominantly going to decide their vote on the area that is clearly President Obamas Achilles heel: the economy. Indicative of that: A May Washington Post-abc News poll, in which less than one percent of respondents named immigration as the single most important issue for them in the election. By contrast, the economy was the most important issue to 52 percent of those surveyed. Forget same-sex marriage, immigration, and health care. Once again, like the 1992 presidential election, Its the economy, stupid.
hile numerous polls indicate that the race for the White House appears very close nationally, a close examination is necessary of the electoral college, which is where a presidential race is actually decided. The 2012 electoral map is likely to be very different from the one that won President Obama the keys to the White House. Thanks to victories in Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and traditionally Republican Virginia, President Obama turned the 2008 Electoral Map into a sea of blue. The Obama/Biden ticket handily defeated McCain/Palin 365 173. Not only was it an Electoral College landslide, it was the best performance by a Democrat in a presidential election in decades. Unlike 2008, the 2012 election will likely be highly competitive. With unemployment nationally stuck above eight percent, consumer confidence continuing to decline, and the economic recovery slowed, President Obamas re-election path is much more difficult than his route four years ago. Although much can change over the next few months, its already possible to begin filling in the electoral map based on recent polls for each state, discussions with campaign advisors and state party leaders, and historical trends including how the state voted in 2008. Advisors to both campaigns have described to me the multiple pathways they see to get to the magic number of 270. Not surprisingly, Team Obama and Team Romney see the map very differently when it comes to the socalled battleground states and also as it relates to a few states that most Democratic strategists would call reliably blue. What both sides do agree on is that President Obama is unlikely to win any state that Senator John McCain won in 2008. In addition, Obama is unlikely to win again the lone congressional district in Nebraska that he added to his electoral total four years ago. Finally, because of the 2010 census numbers, states carried by President Obama in 2008 will lose a net total of six electoral votes, thus adding six votes to the McCain 2008 column. Recent polls and discussions with state party leaders also indicate that President Obama is unlikely to keep Indiana and North Carolina in his column in November. All of this
The fight for the battleground states
Jon Decker
means that Mitt Romney begins his quest for the White House with 206 electoral votes. For President Obama, his reelection battle plan starts with 201 electoral votes. But from there, getting to 270 (and beyond) appears easier than Mitt Romneys path. Still, there are 10 states representing 131 electoral votes that both sides see in the toss-up category. Both campaigns will devote a vast amount of resources to these states. What follows is an analysis of each of these battleground states, with a forecast of the likely outcome in November. Colorados nine electoral votes were firmly in Barack Obamas column four years ago, as the senator from Illinois won the state by a comfortable nine-point margin. This election cycle, President Obama will not have it so easy. As of this writing, Over the past Obama leads the former Massachusetts governor by decade, the three points according to the RealClearPolitics.com average. Although surrounded by red (except for demographics New Mexico to the south), both campaigns consider of Colorado Colorado a swing state. Since 1992, Colorado has voted for Clinton, Dole, George W. Bush twice, and have changed Barack Obama in 2008. But over the past decade dramatically. the states demographics have changed dramatically. 20.7 percent of According to 2010 Census figures, the Hispanic or Latino population in Colorado now makes up 20.7 the state is percent of the population. In addition, Colorado has Hispanic/Latino. gained almost half a million independent voters just since the 2008 elections. Because it is such a pivotal swing state, both Mitt Romney and President Obama have lavished much attention on Colorado with campaign visits and plenty of campaign ads. Although unemployment climbed to 8.1 percent in May, Obama continues to maintain a sizeable lead among Hispanics, women, independents, and young voters. So despite the fact Romney is making the state much more competitive, Obamas a favorite to win the state again in November. For Mitt Romney, Florida is critical to his path to victory. Unlike Obama, who can actually afford to lose the Sunshine State and still get to 270, Romneys path to 270 must include Florida. With its 29 electoral votes, Florida is seen by both campaigns as a pivotal battleground state. President Obama won the state in 2004 by just 2.5 percent over John McCain. But much has changed in four years: Florida has a Republican governor, a newly-elected Republican senator (who is on the short-list as Romneys vice presidential pick), and Republicans retain control of the state House and Senate. But this is by no means a solid red state. President Obama has worked assiduously over the last four years to increase his hold on Florida. His recent executive order easing U.S. deportation policy was aimed in part at widening his sizeable lead over Romney among Floridas Latino population. Still, most polls indicate this state will be a toss-up. According to a
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Quinnipiac University poll released in late June, the presidents approval ratings are slightly underwater: 47 percent give him a positive grade while 49 percent disapprove of the job he is doing. Voters are also split over whether President Obama deserves reelection: 46 percent say he does while 47 percent say he doesnt. This has created an opportunity for Mitt Romney, who has traveled to the state often (and blanketed its airwaves with ads) since wrapping up the Republican nomination. Although this is a true toss-up state, Florida leans Republican. George W. Bush carried the Sunshine State twice. And President Obama, who won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008, needs to maintain that same level of support in November to counter erosions in other parts of his base. Home foreclosures have hit Florida hard. With Floridas May unemployment figure higher than the national average at 8.6 percent, Mitt Florida is critical Romney will likely win the Sunshine State demonstrating that his Mr. Fix-it campaign strategy to Mitt Romneys is an effective one. path to victory. Iowa, with its six electoral votes (down from For Obama to seven in 2008), is a true swing state; Barack Obama, who had his candidacy ignited by Iowa caucus- win the Sunshine goers, easily defeated John McCain, 5444. In 2004, State, hell need President George W. Bush eked out a victory over John Kerry by a little over 10,000 votes (0.7 perto maintain the cent) after losing the state in 2000 by less than Hispanic vote. 5,000 votes. In the past four years, Iowa has become a very competitive state for Republicans. What seems to be hurting President Obama and helping Mitt Romney according to an nbc-Marist College Poll is a sense that the nation is on the wrong track. Fifty-four percent of Iowans surveyed in late May shared that view an unusual result considering Iowas relatively low 5.1 percent unemployment rate. In that same nbc-Marist poll, Romney and Obama were tied at 44 percent. Although registered Republicans now outnumber registered Democrats in Iowa, independents make up the states largest bloc of registered voters. As a result, winning Iowa will be about who can best appeal to undecided and middle-of the-road voters. The Obama campaign has already opened more than 40 offices across the state and in a briefing with reporters in June, a senior Obama campaign advisor confidently said that theyll pull out a victory in Iowa because of organization and turnout. However, the presidents recent endorsement of same-sex marriage will also increase turnout for Republicans particularly among social conservatives and evangelicals. Whatever unease they felt about Mitt Romney was put aside when the president reversed his position on same-sex marriage. Since November 2008, Republicans have won back the governorship and the state House, and came very close to winning back the state Senate. That recent history and Iowans concerns about increased federal spending point to a narrow victory for Romney in Iowa.
Jon Decker
Michigan hasnt voted for a Republican in a presidential election since 1988. Four years ago, John McCain effectively ceded the state to Barack Obama, who won by a comfortable 16.5 percent margin. Surprisingly, given President Obamas bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, recent polls show a very tight race between President Obama and Romney, who grew up in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills as the son of a former governor. One reason for the virtual dead heat an 8.5 percent unemployment rate and a sputtering economy. Another reason is that many independent Michigan voters who enthusiastically supported Barack Obama four years ago have soured on him. Its this group of independents who helped propel Republican Rick Snyder to victory in his run for governor just two years ago. For Team Obama, winning Michigan and its sixteen electoral votes is critical in their path to 270. Turn on the tv For Mitt Romney, its a state that the campaign views as part of a second tier of battleground states in Nevada and that even senior advisors privately acknowledge youd think would be difficult to win. Still, by campaigning in the presidential Michigan it forces President Obama and his Democratic supporters to spend valuable resources election was that they would prefer to use elsewhere. While the in three days, polls may be close in May and June, this is a state not three months. that President Obama will likely win in November. Turn on the tv in Nevada and youd think the presidential election was in three days, not three months. Nevada on the surface looks like a perfect state for the Romney campaign to turn from blue to red. With an unemployment rate of 11.6 percent in May, the nations highest home foreclosure rate, and the highest bankruptcy rate, President Obama clearly has his work cut out for him. But Team Obama is counting on support from the same impressive Democratic machine that registered 100,000 new voters in 2008 to help Obama win Nevada by 12.5 percent. That same organization also helped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid win reelection comfortably in 2010 a year when Republicans had impressive gains across the rest of the country, including Nevadas governorship. More problematic for the Romney campaign is that the state has continued to trend blue since George W. Bush won it in both 2000 and 2004. According to the Nevada secretary of states office, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 41 percent to 37 percent. Also helpful to President Obamas reelection efforts is the increasing role that Latino voters play in the state. According to the Pew Research Center, there are 224,000 eligible Hispanic voters in Nevada, comprising 13.5 percent of the electorate the sixth highest percentage in the country. This demographic more than any other was critical to helping reelect Harry Reid to the U.S. Senate in 2010 and tipping the state in favor of Barack Obama in 2008. One wildcard in the battle to win Nevadas six electoral votes is the unanimous decision in mid-July by the House Ethics
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Committee to open an investigation into whether Representative Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, who is challenging Nevada Republican Senator Dean Heller, used her office to benefit her physician husbands financial interests. Although this may affect the close contest for the U.S. Senate, in the 2012 presidential race, Latinos will likely be the difference-maker in keeping Nevada in President Obamas column. Many political watchers were surprised by the results of an nbc News/Marist poll in late June that showed President Obama and Mitt Romney tied at 4545 in New Hampshire. After all, this was a state that Barack Obama won by 9.6 percent in 2008 and currently has a 5.0 percent unemployment rate, one of the lowest in the nation. But New Hampshire is just the type of state that the Romney campaign thinks is winnable. Romney, who served as governor Ohio, with in neighboring Massachusetts and has a vacation house in Wolfeboro, is a known commodity in New eighteen Hampshire. Not only did he handily win the states electoral votes, 2012 Republican primary, he launched his candidacy is a must-win in New Hampshire and began a six-state bus tour there in early June. Although Republicans slightly for the Romney outnumber Democrats in the Granite State, nearly campaign. But 40 percent of voters are not registered with any party. It is these voters that both campaigns are tar- Obama currently geting, and the reason that so much attention and leads in the polls. money have been pouring into a state with just four electoral votes. Despite its anti-tax orthodoxy that would make it a good fit for Mitt Romneys message, he faces a steep climb in the state: President Obamas job approval rating remains slightly above 50 percent there, according to a recent University of New Hampshire poll; a Republican hasnt won the state since 2000; and the Obama campaign has been relentless in organizing the state for the November election. In a race that will likely come down to which side can better turn out its supporters, President Obama has a slight edge over Mr. Romney This may be one of the closest (and most important) races in this presidential election. Ohio, with its eighteen electoral votes, is a must-win for the Romney campaign. Its very difficult for Mr. Romney to assemble a path to 270 without the Buckeye State in his column. In 2008, Barack Obama won Ohio by four percent, the first time a Democrat had won the state since 1996. A true swing state, Ohio in recent elections has proved itself to be a remarkably good predictor of the election winner. The last time the state didnt pick a winner was in 1960. That streak will likely continue in November. The most recent RealClearPolitics.com average of presidential polls in Ohio has President Obama leading Mitt Romney by 2.6 percent. Campaign ads from both sides continue to blanket the state and both candidates are also making numerous personal appearances. By mid-July, President Obama had visited Ohio eight times, including a post-July 4th bus trip through the northern
Jon Decker
part of the state, and Mr. Romney had been to the state nine times, including his own bus trip to Brunswick, Troy, and Newark in June. Obama campaign aides are calling Ohio a toss-up acknowledging that the states 7.3 percent unemployment rate in May has made the presidents reelection message a tough sell. The close nature of the race in Ohio is one reason that Rob Portman, the states junior U.S. senator, is often mentioned as a possible running-mate to Romney. Portmans status as the most popular statewide elected official in Ohio could help tip the balance to Romney. Even without Portman on his ticket, Romneys message as an economic Mr. Fix-it should play well in this rust-belt state. Blue-collar white voters predominate in the state, and President Obama has struggled to win them over. In addition, President Obamas public approval rating dipped to 44 percent in Ohio in July according to Public Policy For Obama, Polling, a weak showing for an incumbent president getting to 270 hoping to keep Ohio blue. For President Obama, getting to 270 almost almost requires requires a win in Pennsylvania, a state he carried by a win in a comfortable 10.3 percent margin in 2008. This election cycle, Pennsylvania, which holds twenty Pennsylvania, electoral votes, will almost certainly be a lot closer. which holds Although Republicans call the Keystone State a tosstwenty electoral up, no Republican presidential candidate has won the state since 1988. However, with a Republican votes. governor and control of both the state House and Senate, the Romney campaign believes that Pennsylvania is a true swing state in 2012. The hard numbers tell a different story. Mr. Obamas lead over Mitt Romney was nearly eight percent in Pennsylvania in mid-July, according to a RealClearPolitics.com average of presidential polls in the commonwealth. A primary reason for that is Mr. Obamas sizable 12-point advantage among women voters. Mr. Romney has made numerous trips to Pennsylvania including a bus trip to the state in June. But perhaps recognizing that winning the state will be an uphill battle if not a stretch, the Romney campaign as of mid-July had not yet begun advertising in the state. While there is no great love for President Obama (his approval rating, according to a late June Quinnipiac poll, was at 45 percent), the numbers are even worse for Mitt Romney. Pennsylvania, despite a 7.3 percent June unemployment rate, will likely remain blue in November. In 2008, Barack Obama did what no Democratic Presidential candidate had done since 1964 win the Commonwealth of Virginia. His victory over John McCain by 6.3 percent was built on a coalition of college-educated whites, youth voters, Hispanics, and African Americans. That coalition, the Obama campaign concedes, has frayed a bit over the past four years. And as a result, recent polls indicate that the election in Virginia in November will be a tight one. In mid-July, President Obama led Mitt Romney in a RealClearPolitics.com average of presidential polls in Virginia
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by just three percent. Since Barack Obama won decisively in the Old Dominion four years ago, the political landscape has changed. Republicans won the governorship and three House seats in large part because they were successful in winning over affluent white-collar voters the demographic group that went overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama in 2008. The key to winning this states thirteen electoral votes for both campaigns will likely be women voters particularly in Northern Virginia. President Obama, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, held a sixteen-percentagepoint advantage over Mitt Romney among Virginias female voters, a margin that must be reduced if Romney wants to win this state. Getting to 270 will be nearly impossible for Mr. Romney if he does not win Virginia. The Romney campaign points to recent developments in Wisconsin to suggest that the state is winnable in November. The solid victory by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in the states recall election in early June (along with Ron Johnsons decisive win over Russ Feingold in the 2010 Senate race) was seen by some senior Romney campaign advisors as a clear indication that the state has undergone significant political changes since Barack Obama won by nearly fourteen percent in 2008. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, a native of Kenosha, said after Walkers win, Its a lean-red state right now. In the aftermath of that comfortable win by Walker, a Rasmussen poll showed Mr. Romney leading President Obama 4744 in Wisconsin. But this poll may be an outlier. A RealClearPolitics.com average of Wisconsin polls shows President Obama with a 4.4 percent advantage over Mr. Romney. And despite the energy boost the Walker win gave to the Republican base, the reality is that Wisconsin hasnt voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984. Furthermore, exit polls from the Wisconsin recall election showed that voters by a margin of 44 to 36 said that President Obama would do a better job of improving the economy than Mitt Romney, and by a margin of 47 to 35 said Obama would do a better job than Romney helping the middle class. Perhaps most importantly, exit polls also indicated that 53 percent of Wisconsin voters said they favored Barack Obama for president; 42 percent favored Mitt Romney. That history, along with Wisconsins relatively low May unemployment number of 6.8 percent, doesnt bode well for Romney. The former Massachusetts governor has an uphill battle in trying to turn Wisconsin and its ten electoral votes from blue to red. What all this means is that both campaigns even three months out are starting to fill in even more of the electoral map and plotting where to spend tens of millions of dollars in campaign cash. If these forecasts hold up, Obamas victories in Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, would put the president at 266 electoral votes just four short necessary for another four-year term. Wins by Mitt Romney in Florida and Iowa would take the former Massachusetts governor to 241 electoral votes leaving him 29 short of the magic number of 270. Ohio and Virginia are true toss-up states. A win by President Obama in
Jon Decker
either state puts him over the top. Should Mr. Romney go two for two in these battleground states, hed eke out a 272-266 victory, which would be one of the closest elections in U.S. history.
The perfect storm?

ltimately, determining the winner of the November presidential election goes beyond projecting winners and losers among the battleground states. This election, like others over the past three decades, will be won by convincing undecided voters across the entire country that things are either moving in the right or wrong direction. In 2008, Barack Obamas victory was almost pre-ordained. The American electorate (including a large swath of Republicans) was ready for change after eight years of President George W. Bush. Senator John McCain never fully articulated his vision for the next four years and never convinced independents and undecided voters that he was an agent of change. By contrast, Barack Obama, through his soaring speeches and the historic nature of his candidacy, embodied the mood of the electorate: hope and change. It also didnt hurt that the mainstream media swooned over his candidacy. Four years later, the presidential election will turn on the state of the U.S. economy. Three years after the recession officially ended, U.S. employers continue to show reluctance to add new jobs. Only 80,000 jobs were created in June, the third straight month of weak hiring. That anemic type of job growth which has become the norm in the months leading up to election day is not nearly enough to reduce the backlog of 13 million unemployed workers. For Mitt Romney, half the battle is already won. Voter enthusiasm for President Obama particularly among young voters and white workingclass voters has diminished considerably from four years ago. According to a recent poll commissioned by The Hill, 56 percent of likely voters believe President Obamas first term has transformed the nation in a negative way. In addition, as most public opinion polls show, a majority of voters are dissatisfied with President Obamas handling of the economy. They also believe in overwhelming numbers that the country which is stuck with weak gdp growth and an unemployment rate above eight percent is moving in the wrong direction. Former President Bill Clinton told cnbc in early June that the U.S. economy is in a recession. And Vice President Joe Biden bluntly said at a campaign rally in Iowa in late June that the economy remains a depression for millions and millions of Americans. This election, even Obamas advisors readily acknowledge, will be a referendum on the economic policies of the president. Governor Romney also appears to be winning the battle for campaign cash. Republicans, in particular, sense that winning the White House is a real possibility and are opening their wallets accordingly. In July, Romney for
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President, Romney Victory, and the Republican National Committee announced fundraising totals of $106.1 million for June compared with just $71 million announced by the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Ninety-four percent of all Romney donations received in June were for $250 or less. Super pacs supporting Mitt Romney are also raising money at record levels. These remarkable fundraising numbers mean that Republicans will at the very least be playing on a level playing field against an incumbent president known for his fundraising prowess. But even that wont be enough for Romney to win over those crucial swing voters. As history has shown, beating an incumbent president is never easy. Not only must the electorate feel that the economy is dismal, they must reject the incumbent and have confidence in the alternative. They must feel strongly that Mitt Romney has a real plan to grow the economy and cut spending. They must believe that Governor Romney can get America back on the right track and the economy moving in the right direction. That is the Romney campaigns task in these final months until Election Day. If Mitt Romney puts forward a credible plan to turn things around and completes the sale to undecided voters, he will ride that perfect storm into the White House.
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The Folly of Forgetting the West

By Simon Serfaty
he idea of decline is in fashion so much so that a socalled geopolitics of emotions proposes to map the world around each regions expectations about its own future: helpless and resigned in the West but hopeful and domineering in the East, and resentful and even vengeful in the South. Yet, it should be clear that the emergence of new powers, which is real, need not be construed as the fall of others. Admittedly, a state no longer needs a Western identity to exert global influence and even seek primacy: That alone represents a compelling change. It suggests that for the first time in quite a while the West is no longer decisive and can no longer remain exclusive. But still, entering this new era, the West stays ahead of the rest because the rest cannot afford to be without the West.
Simon Serfaty is professor of U.S. foreign policy at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. The Zbigniew Brzezinski chair (emeritus) in Global Security and Geopolitics at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, he also serves as senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, D.C. Some of his most recent books include Vital Partnership (2005 ) and Architects of Delusion (2008). His next book is A World Recast (2012 ).
Simon Serfaty
This essay is, therefore, a case against the case against the West: Somewhere in the shadow of Francis Fukuyamas much-maligned forecast of the endpoint of mankinds ideological evolution there stands a Western world restored.1
Farewell to yesteryear
ntering the second decade of the 20th century one hundred years ago there were 50 countries at most; few of them were dubbed great powers, and those that qualified as world powers were mostly European states. This was a Western world whose dominance had deepened while India and China far in the East, and Turkey at the margin of the West, fell steadily behind. This was a belle poque a time when, as Simon Schama wrote, Rudyard Kiplings fantasy was potent magic that helped conquer empires in the morning and gather home for tea in the afternoon. This also looked like a good time to be alive until the summer of 1914 when a horrific and unnecessary war that was to last over three decades made it a good time to die. We were born at the beginning of the First World War, wrote Albert Camus of his generation. As adolescents we had the crisis of 1929; at twenty, Hitler. Then came the Ethiopian war, the civil war in Spain and Munich . . . Born and bred in such a world, what did we believe in? Nothing. This, feared (or hoped) the French humanist, was humanitys zero hour. That the West stayed on top nonetheless, amidst the ruins of the entire European state system, was owed to a massive investment of American power and leadership that inaugurated a post-European world around a triumphant America with the consent of its new charges. Thus told, and without imperial intent from the United States, the history of the 20th century grows out of the rise of American power but also, and especially, the collapse of everybody else. Entering the second decade of the 21st century the past looks very distant like a millennium away. It seems hard to remember, but in the previous epoch, the nation-state ruled and military force prevailed, leaving the weak at the mercy of the strong. This was an epoch of state coercion and national submission, of conquests and empires; this was an epoch, too, when time took its time, and territorial space kept its distance. In the new era, there is little time for a timeout from a world that brings ever more quickly the over there of yesteryear over here. Nation-states are fading, and institutions occasionally matter more than their members. Territorial overlaps impose additional measures of state cooperation but they also facilitate a global awakening to the better things available elsewhere and, there1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992). This essay draws on some of the themes developed in the authors A World Recast (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming in 2012).
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fore, more and more pressing bottom-up demands for instant access to them. Now, too, military force is rarely decisive. On the whole, wars are no longer in fashion and other forms of power are favored to shape the world rather than rule it.2 There are over 200 countries now, and dozens of them can claim moments of relevance during which their influence extends beyond their region and to the world at large. So many states thus featured by history above the others create an unusual condition of zero-polarity: a structure of power in which many states are necessary but none can prove sufficient, and floating transnational loyalties find their voice in multilateral groupings that pretend to be the brics of a new world order but lack a decisive steering organization or even shared goals. Across time, this moment an intermission rather than a transition is haunted by the ghosts of the previous centurys interwar years, another zero-polar moment whose ugly memories linger. The specialists and country watchers of the Cold War seem a bit lost and out of place in such a world; they were acrobats who juggled the arithmetic of weapons and other specific attributes of power. Now, their act is less in demand. Replacing them, generalists enjoy an overdue intellectual revenge; they are historical architects who mend the fragmentation of time and space. Staying out of consensual bandwagons fueled by the fashionable trend or issue of the day, they shy away from mass-induced certainties and cautiously acknowledge the unpredictability of the moment. Judges and penitents are one: Final verdicts are postponed pending the discovery of those grains of gold in the river, to which Lord Acton referred in 1895, while reflecting on the coming of a new era as well.3 Lord Acton was right to delay judgment: The 20th century had a late start, with a war that the European powers could neither avoid nor settle after it had ended, and with a revolutionary reset of neighboring Russia that its ideological masters could neither complete nor vindicate. These events, as well as the coming of age of America as a world power, proved to be the prelude for the tragedies ahead. Most likely, the same will be said about the 21st century. The years behind were mere foreplay; it is the years ahead that will be decisive. For much better or much worse, standing still is not an option.
2. Robert A. Pastor, ed., A Centurys Journey: How the Great Powers Shape the World (Basic Books, 1999), 333334. 3. As quoted by Dean Acheson in Fragments of my Fleece (W.W. Norton & Company, 1971), 82.
No time for a timeout

here are moments when the most gradual evolution of the present into the future is known to be determining. On the way to a post-Western world, this is one such moment a turning point,
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Simon Serfaty
although not a crossroads since there is no other way: To deny the unfolding reconfiguration of power and insist that there is no power to cede and no influence to share would soon lead to a sure historical dead end. At the crossing, the point of maximum pressure is not external but internal. The trip into a new, post-Western order will be more chaotic if the West loses its assurance and cohesion. On both sides of the Atlantic, such a risk is discernible and even growing. Too much doubt among Europeans about the United States, as well as about each other; and too much doubt among Americans about themselves, but also about the states of Europe, is an invitation to seek alternatives elsewhere for the United States outside Europe, and for the states of Europe beyond their union. That would be repeating in the 21st century the fatal mistake that Europe made after 1919 when it attempted to keep going on its Forget about own and without its newly rediscovered partner the so-called New across the Atlantic. Admittedly, after several decades World and bury of renewed intimacy Americans and Europeans are getting tired of each other. But alternatives to their the allegedly Old union would be worse far too demanding, much Europe: At last less rewarding, and certainly less comfortable. America can be more of a trans-Pacific power withthese clichs out turning into less of a transatlantic partner, and Europe can engage Russia or renew its Asian vocahave run their tion without turning its back on the Atlantic. course. Forget about the so-called New World, then, and bury the allegedly Old Europe: At last these clichs have run their course. In truth, America has been young for too long and a new Europe has been growing older long enough. By now, both are at the same advanced age when sulking turns into a bad habit and bonding looks like a bad instinct, when slowing down ceases to be a choice and memory lapses reflect a lack of interest and a shortage of attention when a resignation to relative decline is explained as overdue maturity and can even pass for serenity. But they have not reached retirement age, and giving up is not an option. Rather, as Americans and Europeans look back, the historical reality they uncover is that the time behind has been used well and is a powerful motivation for moving forward together. In the 2010s, the disassociation of the Euro-Atlantic alliance or the disintegration of the eu would hurt each state on both sides of the Atlantic, and would help no other state elsewhere: If not the United States with the states of Europe, with whom; if not the states of Europe as a union, how? Cynicism, wrote George Santayana, is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. At the risk of being cynical, so it is with primacy: Save it while you can until losing it when you must. The good news is that it is under conditions of existential crisis that Western societies are most capable to find the will to resist and change. Thus, the West produced all kinds of leaders during the past century. In
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1940, Winston Churchill was Britains main asset until Franklin D. Roosevelt became Churchills best asset. That produced an existential triumph. Moving into a Cold War the West did not start, the best and brightest of the postwar years showed the vision needed to force history to change its ways by keeping America engaged and Europe peaceful. Remember Harry Truman, initially miscast as ordinary and provincial but now praised for his exceptional qualities of character. What Truman and his counterparts across the Atlantic started, Reagan ended himself a reportedly relentlessly banal man who felt the issues better than he understood them. Closer to us, remember the 1970s, as another period of retrogression and gloom which ended with the election of a new wave of political leaders and made of the 1980s winning years for the West: Britains Margaret Thatcher (1979), Ronald Reagan (1980), Frances Citizens expect Franois Mitterrand (1981), Spains Felipe Gonzales (1982), and Germanys Helmut Kohl (1983) not from their to mention Pope John Paul II and others elsewhere. governments Now, a decade into this century and twenty years more of that after the Cold War, good leadership is lacking: A few leaders inspire but do not lead while others lead but which has come do not inspire, and most do neither. Competence is to define the not a prerequisite for greatness. But good leadership, which needs not be great on all accounts, needs West: affluence, some competence at least once in a while. democracy, law. Admittedly, in a period of growing complexity, it is paradoxical that simplicity meaning, the discreet fact of ignorance can be hidden as competence, while inexperience meaning, the claim of innocence can be viewed as relevant. But as the future rushes unto us, this is a moment when citizens expect nonetheless from their government more of everything that has come to define the West affluence, democratic openness, the rule of law, civil society, respect for the environment, and more. Failure to accommodate such expectations would have drastic consequences: already, there has not been as much populism in the world since the 1930s, hardly a reassuring precedent. The revolt of the masses, about which Spains Jos Ortega y Gasset wrote eloquently, finds its way into a web of spontaneous revolutions a universal awakening stimulated by excessive expectations that conditions that were endured historically, or at least for a lifetime, can be immediately removed like poverty and inequities, but also like oppression and even, why not, unhappiness if only . . . what? The removal of the tyrant is not enough, as shown, say, in the Middle East. During the Arab Spring, nearly 110 years of collective authoritarian rule in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen were ended in about 180 days with more challenged and likely to fall. Results thus far are hardly conclusive including widening concerns that the region may have been better off when it was worse off. Over the past few years Japan, on the other side of the world, has turned into a politiAugust & September 2012 39
Simon Serfaty
cal comedy litalienne but without the dolce vita, and India, increasingly dysfunctional, meanders as a heavy economic elephant moving on the delicate political legs of a panda. This is not a moment when leaders find it easy to do better; but this is a moment when citizens find it difficult to not do worse. While the West is said to be racing to the bottom, races to the top are run by the rest at the expense of the many at the bottom. In China, hundreds of millions of people have been taken out of poverty. For the most part, however, this means that they can eat now, and they can even read, write, and count some, and preferably also speak a few words of English. But they cannot grow out of their few-dollars-a-day factory jobs, which they enter at age fifteen, as a life sentence from which there will be no parole for most of them until they get too old or too sick, whichever comes first. As an aggregate, the Chinese economy is the worlds second largest with the worlds biggest consumption of Western luxury goods; for its citizens it does not rank among the top 100, with a gdp per capita about a fifth that of Greece and behind Albania still a long way from Western luxury. For India, catching up with China seems beyond reach from life expectancy and infant mortality to education and health. But for most of these basic societal indicators, how to explain Indias difficulties in keeping up with Bangladesh? Meantime, Russia is astray: historically defeated, politically recast, and geographically reconfigured since the Cold War, it is showing the dna of a failing state. This is a demandeur state, admittedly too close to be ignored and too big to be offended as a power in Europe (though not a European power), but too distinctive and insufficiently capable to be effective as a power in the world (let alone a world power).
The rest without the West

fter the unipolar moment, and past the zero-polar intermission, multipolarity is the most likely configuration of power: It is not in place yet, but its time is coming. In a multipolar configuration, any power can align with any other power. This is the theory. In practice, however, some face handicaps that reflect a states unwillingness or inability to align with one or more states which are especially hostile or whose values are especially incompatible. As a result, choices of capable allies and partners can be limited or at least get complicated. Thus, relative to the United States and the states of Europe, emerging China and India, and recast Russia, can only fake special partnerships: Too much history and not enough geography stands between them. An imperial power in remission, Russia holds no China card; a pre-imperial power on the make, China, too, has no Russia card of value; and a post-imperial construct still in search of national cohesion, India has no interest in any card with either. That alone leaves this emerging geostrategic troika behind the West as all members of
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the troika are more interested in the United States or Europe than in each other. Russia momentarily viewed the rise of China as a strategic option to unwanted partnerships with a U.S.-led nato or a Germany-led eu. Bilateral relations were historically at their best, including during the Cold War years when both states embraced the same ideology. Yet prospects of Sino-Russian strategic intimacy are dim, and neither country can credibly hope to use the other as a trump card against the West. Whether in the mid-1920s at the start of their civil war, in the early 1950s during their difficult war with the United States in Korea, or after that when they struggled to define their cultural revolution, the Chinese learned that they cannot expect much from Russia. During the past three decades, they have also learned to enjoy the benefits of normalization with For Russia, the United States and the rest of the West, including the United States but not limited to Europe. Now, Chinese collusion is a counterwith Moscow would be even less beneficial than it was during the Cold War, and collision with the weight to a rising West would occur at an even higher cost even in the Asian neighbor, absence of a highly unlikely war. For Russia, the United States is a convenient and rather than the cost-free counterweight to a rising and potentially other way domineering Asian neighbor, rather than the other way around. In the same vein, Russia can rely on around. Americas influence to keep Europe free of its former nationalist demons: The Russians may not welcome a united and strong Europe but history has taught them repeatedly to fear strong but divided European powers even more. In retrospect, the Grand Alliance with the United States was Russias best geopolitical experience in the 20th century the only time when Russia ended up on the side of the winners, unlike the all-European Triple Entente for World War I, the odious 1938 nonaggression pact with Germany before World War II, or the convenient Sino-Soviet alliance during the Cold War. Fyodor Dostoyevskys exalted idea of the holy Russian soul that defeated the realities of geography, withstood the trials of history, outlived inept governance, and denied or cleansed corrupting transplantations from the West is no longer tenable. The Indian politician Jairam Ramesh has evoked a composite Asian giant comprised of India and China, which he called Chindia. That, too, is unlikely. While maintaining a loose strategic balance, both countries hold incompatible visions of a regional order in Asia. More specifically, they perceive differently the U.S. presence as a trans-Pacific power, which India mostly favors unlike China. Nor do they have mutually acceptable views of their respective roles in a multipolar world order no more than each of them does with Russia, and all of them with other new influentials. In Asia specifically, China and India are both aware of the others hegemonic impulse, with India more affected because of Chinas arrogant tendency to
Simon Serfaty
dismiss Indias capacity to live up to its potential while relying on Pakistans potential to weaken Indias capacity further. The Indians like to be taken seriously, and President Clinton may have been the first Western leader to fully understand that need and act accordingly. The Chinese are less worried and would prefer to not be bothered so long as their trading routes remain opened and their identity respected including a territorial integrity about which they are likely to remain most intransigent. In short, keep on watching, there and elsewhere. No verdict can be expected for a while the jury is still out, and many hung juries are likely to be heard before any final judgment can be rendered on the final form of a post-Western world. This is what Dean Acheson used to call a Scottish verdict Not proven yet.
Rather the West than the rest

ood leadership in the West will make the journey into a postWestern order easier. But from within as well as relative to others, the Western position in a recast world should not be assumed or asserted with self-serving claims of philanthropic benevolence and sporadically angry bursts of misanthropic resentment. No longer can the West seriously claim, and hope to impose, a right of birth to dominate and educate the rest to lead a good and rewarding life while other states are left behind and in relative squalor until they learn how to elect good governments that respond to Western rules of political governance and economic fair play. That time is gone. This remains an American moment, as Secretary of State Clinton likes to tell her audiences at home: a moment, that is, when the world still looks to us . . . to solve problems on a global scale, in defense of our own interests but also as a force for progress. As a matter of fact, American power, as well as the legitimacy of its leadership, remains on the whole without rivals. This is also a pivotal moment, as President Obama likes to remind his audiences abroad: a moment, that is, which is expected to condition much of the century ahead. This is what happened after 1811, when four years reversed the seemingly irreversible ascent of a revolutionary Europe and restored a world that had passed for dead since 1789. That is also what happened after 1911, when the following three years determined the decades that followed; the difference in 2011 is that how soon the world was about to be redefined was not known then, but it is known now. For the West and the rest alike, it is now the Middle East that stands out as historys new geographical pivot. There more than anywhere else the past neither dies nor fades away. It just lingers, casting an ever darker shadow on the present. Conditions in that region have little to do with what is remembered of Europe after 1945; rather, this has much to do with what has been forgotten about Europe after 1919. During the Cold War, the U.S. goals for a
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region it hardly knew were relatively limited: to keep the Soviet Union out, Israel up, and oil coming. To meet these goals the United States spent an estimated $200 billion a modest expenditure relative to what was at stake. Occasional Soviet intrusions in the region were troublesome but never conclusive because not sustainable; Israel maintained superiority on its neighbors, at a deep discount after American diplomacy helped achieve a peace treaty with Egypt; and for nearly half that period, oil prices were kept profitably low, while American influence on Saudi Arabia kept them short of unreasonable highs for the rest of the time. Now, conditions have become dramatically more difficult to manage, and infinitely more expensive to assume. The end of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, Irans quest for nuclear weapons, the Palestinian bid for statehood and its conflict with Israel, the Arab Even the most Spring and its Islamist aftermath in Egypt, the risks determined of new civil wars and more failed states, the regions continued hold on the global energy market, the lin- Western skeptics gering effects of the wars that came after September agree on the 11 and the persistent threat of new acts of terror, and more much more are all issues that are reality and, to an coming to a head. It is like Theodore Whites evocation of a beautiful white whale dying on a magnifi- extent, desirability cent European beach after 1945, and threatening to of Western stink up the entire world; but there are several preeminence. whales, this time, which all lie on crowded beaches in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and are all in a terminal condition. For the necessary clean up, there like elsewhere, American power matters but it cannot suffice: More than a power-like-anyother, the United States is needed for contributions known to be indispensable. These contributions can no longer be conclusive and thus exclusive: Neither the United States without the rest of the West, nor the West without the rest, nor the rest against the West will do to give the Middle East the stability it lacks. But there will be little order for any country or region in the post-Western world without that stability either. Even the most determined American declinists and Western skeptics agree on the reality and, to an extent, desirability of continued American and Western preeminence. Significantly, U.S. leadership is most applauded in Asia. Indeed, countries that are the most confident in the United States as a trans-Pacific power are also seemingly least concerned about Chinese ascendancy like India, which expects the United States to stay ahead of China over the next decade. To the Indians, this is good news: Pro-American sentiments rose from 56 percent in 2006 to 76 percent in 2009, while proChinese sentiments fell to 46 percent, down from 56 percent in 2005. For in the end, it is in the United States that are located the best available contractors for stabilization as well as reconstruction, from the architectural blueprint to the furnishings. Who else can do any better now, and if it is not
Simon Serfaty
done now, when? If the baton of Western leadership has not been passed on yet, the way it was handed to the United States by the states of Europe several lifetimes ago, it is because no one is ready to take it. The 20th century was not only, or even primarily, about the rise of the United States and its power, but also, and arguably mainly, about the collapse of all others. Over the period, moving the power count down from many to one and now zero, has meant that even the more powerful states find it necessary to share the burdens of global responsibilities with others, preferably like-minded but most of all capable and also relevant. In a zeropolar moment there is too much to do for any state or institution to do it alone, however powerful it might be, and there is nothing that can be done alone which could not be done more effectively and at a lesser cost with others, however irresistible the temptation of unilateral action may be. The imperial use of a national we has ceased to be practical. But even the definition of what a collective we might be is questioned for its restrictions on whom is to be included: Everywhere the need for enlargement is compelling: Why include Russia in a quartet for the Middle East and not Turkey?; why single out India for a permanent seat in the Security Council of the United Nations and not Brazil?; why is there so much of Europe in the governing body of the International Monetary Fund and so little China? For all emerging powers and new influentials, exclusion is no longer acceptable.
A Sarajevo moment
hile awaiting the new multipolarity it is time for the rest of the world to get serious about America and the West, just as it is equally time for the West to get serious about the rest of the world. In this decisive period of strategic uncertainties, economic austerity, and political foolishness, that seriousness is not always apparent. The geopolitics of power may have given the West too much time for imperial control, but the geopolitics of emotions is giving the rest too much premature satisfaction. Hear one of Asias leading strategists, Kishore Mahbubani, declaring the Western era over a few years ago: Ironically, the death sentence was carried out in Libya for the intellectual smugness of the West, which, he wrote, had spent several decades working to bring down Qaddafi before coming to terms with him.4 Well, with Qaddafi gone, with a un-mandated, Western-managed, and nato-enforced send-off, who looks smug now? It is when dealing with China that the timidity of the Western powers is most troubling and comes to the edge of mendacity. Our advocacy of human rights, Vice President Biden told his Chinese hosts in the spring of 2011, or what we [Americans] refer to as human rights is at best an
4. Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East (PublicAffairs, 2008), 111.
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intrusion, and at worst an assault on your [Chinese] sovereignty. There should be limits on such timidity, not only because of what America does, which is plenty good, but also because of whom Americans are, which is also plenty good. These standards are readily outdone by other Western powers: There is no need to make a case against the rise of the rest, but there is no need to make instead a case for the demise of the West. If nothing else, the past ten years have confirmed through 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the great recession of 2008, the euro crisis of 2010, and the Arab Spring of 2011 that what is good for the West need not be good for the rest; but more decisively, the past decade has also shown that what is bad for the West is bad for others too at least equally bad and possibly worse. Entering a prolonged moment possibly an era of austerity, the U.S. temptation to stand aside is Neither the West real, as it used to do; and so is Europes urge to remain aloof, as it has learned to be. Combined, nor the rest can these two trends add up into a form of neo-isolaafford a form of tionism that neither the West nor the rest can afford. To achieve an instant retrenchment from the world neo-isolationism: its quarrels, its people, and its goods there are closing borders, temptations to close borders for protection from withdrawing unwanted consumers of scarce public goods; to withdraw troops for separation from internal strife troops, and or out of exasperation over insufficient results; and denying aid. to deny aid for lack of compassion no less than a lack of funds. The irony is for everyone to see: Globalization was mainly a Western creation, but de-globalization of the post-Western world, should it occur, will likely be initiated in the West. Yet, even this conclusion confirms that on the whole the rest is fighting to join a world made in the West, rather than to bring it down. It was at Churchills 69th birthday in Tehran that Stalin toasted America as a country of machines which he described as the most important thing in . . . war and which only Americans could produce in sufficiently large numbers to not lose this war. That was called Lend Lease then, and a full American warehouse helped Britain and Russia wage the war until the United States was literally forced to join it. That formula is now called leading from behind, and it was used in Libya in 2011. For this approach to work, however, it also will be necessary for the rest of the West to get equally serious about America and the world, beginning with the eu and its members. Regrettably, however, every concern about the United States applies to the states of Europe: the exaggerated declaratory policies relative to their execution; a pandering to China and other emerging states coupled with too much indifference to lesser and smaller or poorer states; widening gaps between capabilities, commitments, and purpose; increasingly erratic and dysfunctional forms of national and multilateral governance and more, but often worse. A Europe that learned how to speak American as the price
Simon Serfaty
for its rehabilitation as a power in the world must now learn anew how to speak European if it is to be heard as a world power. Predictably, that will demand an institutional finality without which Europe will be too weak to follow, let alone to lead, and in the absence of which the United States would have to recast the West in some other ways, outside nato and without the eu, or with other partners that might not be equally appealing and compatible. That would not be the fairytale ending that can give the post-Western world the stability it needs for the global order it seeks. Entering the 21st century, do not sell, therefore, the West short. It has adapted before from city-states to nation-states and now to member states and it can adapt some more. Adaptive capability, wrote political scientist John P. Lowell four decades ago, mean[s] those natural, material, human, and institutional The West has resources of the nation-state that comprise its potenadapted before: tial over an extended period of time for coping with from city-states present and foreseeable demands from the geopolitical environment, and for exerting a measure of conto nation-states trol over it. That is another attribute that defines the completeness of American power and the continto member ued preponderance of Western power. What is states, and it found among the emerging powers looks more like an adoptive capability, meaning the ability to adopt can adapt what is being done elsewhere. The label made in some more. China says it all, and Chinese President Hu Jintaos promise to change the label to created by China remains an empty boast. And so does, for that matter, Chinese resiliency, should the past 30 years of growing prosperity fail to be sustained or should current inequities fail to be reduced. By comparison, or for inspiration, consider Japan. As this country struggles to recover from its most devastating shock since August 1945, it is useful to remember the 1929 Kyoto earthquake, which caused a 29 percent loss of Japans nominal gdp. Less than fifteen years later this presumably crippled country invaded Manchuria and prepared for a devastating surprise attack on the United States and a war that caused a reported 86 percent level of damage, according to the Bank of Japan; yet, a generation later the new remade-in-the-usa Japan was challenging Americas economic supremacy. The capacity to adapt is also what characterizes Europe and its union. Selling it short would be a mistake as well, for this union is what emerged after all hopes had died, as we ought to remember, too. End the eu, and there will be nothing left to take its place which is why such an end, repeatedly announced as imminent, could never materialize. Over 40 years ago, in Europe: An Emerging Nation?, the German-born American political scientist Carl Friedrich was already dismissing an excess of clever talk about the end of European integration, about dead alleys, crises, and impending collapse. The story line of the skeptics tale has evolved over
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the past four decades, and yet the tale continues to be told, whether in the context of the single currency or of an elusive common defense policy. Maybe that is for the better after all: The best way to avoid the worst is to think about it during what Hannah Arendt called moments of anticipation. By comparison, Voltaires Candide was born in an age of reason that ended during an agonizing century of total wars. Machiavelli called the cultivation of the worst and the propensity for thinking tragically constructive pessimism. That is not a farewell to hope but a commitment to sustaining that hope in the face of adversity. This is not to claim that euroskeptic pundits have been the true believers in European integration, whichever planet they chose to locate it in Mars or Venus. But it is to recall that the most skeptical European leaders have often presided over the most significant advances in the European Most of the process including de Gaulle in the 1960s for the richest, takeoff phase, Thatcher in the 1980s for the preunion phase that launched the single market and its industrially currency, and now Angela Merkel, who inherited the advanced, mantle of skeptic-in-chief as her colleagues are torn between the different meanings of an impending democratically institutional finality for Europe. stable states are For all the talk about the irresistible rise of the non-Western rest of the world, and for all the aggrein, or affiliated gate data and expert analysis put forward to make it with, the West. look irreversible, the competition between the West and the rest remains a mismatch, while rivalries within the rest threaten to be less peaceful than in or with the West. Most of the richest, industrially-advanced, democratically stable states are in, or affiliated with, the Western world, where there is also the largest accumulation of hard power the world has ever seen. Much is written about economic growth in Asia, but its new wealth has been acquired in, and depends on, the West its consumers, its technologies, and its capital. Standing ahead are many years and even decades of uncertainty for the main bidders for preponderant, or at least significant, global status. As noted, inevitability has a poor record in history: History does not share its options, and when picking winners and losers, best to hedge your bets. On the whole, Asia is a continent that has not yet lived its own century of total wars. The Western hope is that it will not, and that the 21st century will extend to the rest the peaceful, affluent, and democratic space secured for half of the world in the 20th century; the fear, though, remains that such a lofty aspiration might not be fulfilled. In the meantime, two decades after the Cold War, the U.S. rise to preponderance need not be remembered with an excess of humility the wars that might have been avoided, the crises that could have been better managed, and the better world that had been hoped for quicker. For half the world at first, and more next, History was forced to change its ways: regions were
Simon Serfaty
pacified, states were recast, and people were pampered. That goes for much of Europe but also for most of Central and South America, Africa whose states gained sovereign independence if not, or not yet, affluence and dignity, and Asia where hundreds of millions of people are waking up from their Western-induced long sleep into a changed world that the Western powers helped free and which they in turn will hopefully help make whole. Were Woodrow Wilson to come back to life and cast an eye on what has become of the world since he brought America back into it, he would be on the whole rather satisfied. The tedious climb that leads to the final uplands is taking more than the one generation or two forecast by Wilson, but early in the 21st century we stand closer to those great heights where there shines unobstructed the light of the justice of God than he envisioned one century, one millennium, one epoch ago. That the uphill climb ahead will still prove Sisyphean cannot be ruled out. For a bit of the world at least, there is a temptation to return to the old ways of history to be heard or prevail. That is what makes the current moment urgent, as well as pivotal. The collapse from euphoria to hysteria, between 1911 and 1914, did not take long. Unbeknownst to all, the long peace enjoyed for 99 years since 1815 had little time left. In a sense, after another long peace, lived in anguish during the Cold War, there is also little time left for another timeout as a post-Western world is remodeled and refurbished with Western help.
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The Environmentalists Dilemma

By Steve Stein
bout 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, drivers on Interstate 15 reach a section of the Mojave desert called the Ivanpah Valley. For most travelers, the valley is a nondescript landscape of creosote bushes, cactus, and sand; but devotees of the desert sometimes leave the main road to see much more. The uninterrupted views of the surrounding mountains are especially crystalline on early spring mornings when unusual plant species like the Mojave Milkweed and the Desert Pincushion are in bloom. Several birds that nest in the valley, including the burrowing owl and the loggerhead shrike, have protected status under federal law, as does a reptile called gopherus agassizii, or desert tortoise. BrightSource Energy, a firm that plans to develop a 390-megawatt solar complex in the valley, has been counting the tortoises it would have to relocate in order to proceed with the project, and BrightSources census takers are finding far more than they, or anyone else, expected. Since the history of successfully relocating this tortoise is not encouraging, and since the small
Steve Stein is a writer and financial adviser in Marin County, California. He has written several articles on energy and trade policy for Policy Review.
Steve Stein
reptile has an ever-growing cohort of protectors, BrightSource is no longer as sure as it once was that this project, at the scale proposed, will be feasible. Currently, the Bureau of Land Management has about twenty solar, wind, and geothermal projects under various stages of development review in the desert Southwest Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California and two more wind projects in Oregon. All of these face varying degrees of opposition from environmental groups. Some are also being contested by Native American tribes, whose objections are both environmental and cultural, in that some of the lands are considered sacred burial grounds. For environmental advocates of renewable and sustainable energy, their colleagues objections can be both nettlesome and embarrassing. The Mojave is ideally situated for solar development; Environmental these desert lands are bombarded with more of the suns rays than almost any place on earth, and that advocates of sunshine conveniently arrives at the perfect time to renewable and be converted to electricity to meet the peak power requirements of large nearby population centers: sustainable Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, and the megalopolis energy can find that combines Riverside, Orange, and Los Angeles their colleagues counties. Since more than one million acres of the Mojave have already been excluded from such objections development by a law sponsored by U.S. Senator nettlesome and Diane Feinstein in 2009, projects like BrightSources become an even more important element in fulfilling embarrassing. Californias ambitious plan to obtain at least 30 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Feinsteins original proposal was to exclude over 2.5 million acres, but that was scaled back in the face of opposition from unions who foresaw an enormous loss of construction jobs. But the same groups that encouraged the set-aside in 2009 organizations like the Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society continue to push for further restriction of energy development on any public lands that come close to being in pristine condition. There is some irony in the fact that the main reason such lands are pristine is that they were unsuitable for any other kind of development. Except for their mostly newly discovered environmental sanctity, these desert areas would have been the cheapest land upon which to develop solar resources. In some locations, wind power can compete in the marketplace even without production tax credits, but solar still heavily relies on subsidies or renewable energy mandates to compete with fossil fuel. So, until renewables have become fully competitive in the marketplace, does the outcome of these struggles between environmental supporters and opponents of utility-scale projects really matter? The answer is surely yes. Geothermal, like wind power, is already competitive in many locations; meanwhile, solar energys costs are decreasingly fairly rapidly. The price of silicon the primary raw material in solar has
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fallen dramatically; so have engineering costs, as successful techniques are increasingly replicated and perfected. Since solar power is intermittent, there are additional expenses of integrating backup power sources, but more efficient technology is bringing those costs down as well. By some estimates most recently one from Duke University in July 2010 solar has reached the point where new construction is cheaper than the estimates for new nuclear construction in the United States. Solar facilities come nowhere close to matching the costs of existing coal-fired plants, but if new coal plants are required to capture and sequester their carbon emissions a proposal that is steadily gaining political force then solar begins to compete even with coal. The only expense for utility-scale solar that isnt falling, as BrightSource and its competitors well Some estimates know, is the cost of land acquisition and site develshow solar has opment. Endless demands for supplemental environmental reports and the constant threat of lawsuits reached the point cant stop solar development entirely, but they can where new surely slow it to a crawl. Environmental groups may construction is spend even more to fight natural gas and coal power plants, but when they oppose fossil fuels theyre tak- cheaper than the ing on mature industries that have plenty of resources to fight back. Solar is an infant industry, estimates for new and it doesnt take too much to suffocate an infant nuclear plants. in the crib. Admittedly, there is skepticism about solar energys competitiveness in any case, especially following the Solyndra fiasco. But the proximate cause of Solyndras bankruptcy was the fact that other solar technologies became so much cheaper (raising the question why the Obama administration remained so intent on subsidizing a company whose future depended on solar energy remaining expensive). Moreover, Solyndra and similar companies were geared mainly to the rooftop market, not to the large solar farms to be erected in the Mojave. Not only do small rooftop arrays tend to be costlier to install, theyre often situated in latitudes where the amount of available sunlight is as little as one fourth that of the desert. Utility-scale installations have historically been cheaper than rooftop panels because they depended upon a simpler technology. Essentially, these big desert projects employed reflective mirrors to capture enough of the suns heat to boil water, thus creating steam to drive turbines. Now, even utilityscale projects are switching to panels that create energy through a direct photovoltaic process. In fact, the developers of one very large complex, called Blythe Solar, determined that it made sense to redesign the entire project because silicon panels have become so cheap. (The new proposal would also require far less water, but the design change has led the Bureau of Land Management to withdraw the permit pending a new round of environmental studies.)
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Environmentalism against itself
hatever their misgivings, almost every major environmental organization is on record in support of almost all forms of renewable energy. The Friends of the Earth holds itself out as a particularly strong advocate of solar energy. Recently, the foe even threatened to sue the British government over planned reductions in its subsidies for rooftop solar panels. Then theres the Environmental Defense Fund, which reported with approval a 2008 Scientific American article that lays out a detailed plan for a massive switch to solar power, and notes that at least 250,000 square miles of land in the southwestern United States are suitable for solar power plants. Equally enthusiastic is the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose website says:
Massive concentrating solar-power plants will be built in the Southwest, providing clean electricity for millions of homes and businesses in the region. Californias Blythe Solar Power plant, the worlds largest, is expected to go online by 2013. According to Sandia National Labs, costs are expected to fall to about 5 cents per kilowatt-hour by 2020, a price competitive with those at new coal- or gas-fired power plants.
But on next page of that same nrdc website, doubts begin to appear. A section called Renewable Energy Meets Wildland and Wildlife Conservation says that Certain sensitive lands such as parks, monuments, and wildlife conservation areas and ecologically sensitive marine areas are not appropriate for energy development . . . nrdc does not endorse locating energy facilities or transmission lines in such areas. The oldest and possibly the most influential environmental organization is the Sierra Club. Its website also extols the virtues of wind, geothermal, and biomass, and shows particular enthusiasm for solar energy, which it describes as the cleanest, most abundant, renewable energy source available, and the U.S. has an ample and infinite supply of sun . . . Solar is not only clean, it is affordable. However, there is an ongoing dispute within the club; several of Sierras local chapters dont want large solar installations anywhere near them. Skeptical outsiders may see their environmental opposition as nimbyism in formal attire, but within the club its taken seriously. Events last year give a flavor of the controversy. In late 2010 Sierras board issued a memo declaring that After much deliberation, the Board of Directors made a difficult decision this week not to try to block BrightSource Energys Ivanpah solar project in the Mojave Desert. Then, in early 2011 Sierra filed a lawsuit against the nearby Calico Solar project. That suit eventually dismissed claimed that the developer had made insufficient efforts to mitigate damage
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to the desert tortoise, the fringe-toed lizard, the beardtongue desert wildflower, the golden eagle, and the bighorn sheep. In the words of the petition:
The need for increased renewable energy generation does not grant solar energy companies a free pass to ravage pristine desert habitat under the false claim of clean energy. There is plenty of solar potential on already-disturbed land and rooftops that can be tapped so we can save our desert ecosystems for future generations to enjoy.
Sierras former executive director, Carl Pope, had some difficulty navigating the cross currents, even though he steered a careful path on such issues during his seventeen year tenure. Perhaps the Sierra Clubs board thought it could continue to finesse the conflicts between the national policy and local chapters interests by appointing a new executive director, Michael Brune, and naming Pope as chairman. However, Pope eventually resigned the chairmanship as well. Upon departing he observed, If we dont save the planet, there wont be any tortoises left to save. One of the Sierra Clubs most difficult decisions involved not solar power, but wind turbines. The Cape Wind project, off Cape Cod near Marthas Vineyard, divided not only environmental groups, but even families. At the national level, Sierra ultimately followed the Union of Concerned Scientists in supporting Cape Wind; Michael Brune called it a huge victory for clean energy. But that decision left deep scars within the local chapter, where opposition to the project was strong. Similarly, a Pennsylvania Sierra club has bitterly opposed ridge-top wind projects in the Allegheny Mountains. Throughout the country, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and similar groups have members on both sides of particular renewable energy projects. But the ensuing conflicts reach well beyond the organizations, and catch all who seek rational energy solutions in an expensive crossfire. If science were the primary referee, such internal disputes would be mere speed bumps on the road to enlightened energy policy. Unfortunately, something deeper than scientific analysis is driving this process. What is cast as the need to protect the habitat of the desert wildflower or the views of residents of Marthas Vineyard really reflects a fundamental difference in values between two factions. Both put a high priority on the environment, but they do so in very different ways, and science may never resolve their differences. The first group is the preservationists; their godfather is the Sierra Clubs founder, John Muir, who made it his mission to remind his fellow man of the majesty of the wilderness, best exemplified by the Yosemite Valley. Some preservationists trace their roots back even further to Henry David Thoreau, whose retreat to Walden Pond to better appreciate nature in its unspoiled state is embedded in American mythology. When Thoreau emerged from his solitude, he penned lines like, We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Thoreaus words were amplified by the poetry of Ralph Waldo
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Emerson and the romantic landscapes of the artists of the Hudson River School. The second group is the conservationists. They may share Muirs and Thoreaus appreciation of nature in the wild, but see the role of man differently. Whereas preservationists see science and industry as threats to the environment, conservationists believe that scientific and industrial progress must be the environments savior. Conservationists have their own historical figureheads, chief among them Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. As director of the National Forestry Service, Pinchot convinced the federal government to protect forests from the unsustainable logging practices allowed under lax or nonexistent regulation by the states. As a member of Roosevelts administration, Pinchot strongly influPreservationists enced the presidents decision to radically expand the national park system. see science and Pinchot and Muir were once great admirers of industry as each others work, but controversy flared between them when Muir read that Pinchot favored allowing threats; but sheep to graze in forests. When the two met in a conservationists Seattle hotel lobby in 1897, Muir demanded to know if this was true. When Pinchot confirmed that see progress as it was, Muir told him that he wanted nothing more the environments to do with him. Years later, much worse was to come. Pinchot eventual savior. strongly favored the plan to create a dependable source of drinking water for San Francisco by damming the Tuolomne River and creating a huge reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. As the scheme gained momentum, Muir was beside himself. The Hetch Hetchy was as beautiful and wondrous as Yosemite, and he thought destroying it by flood was environmental sacrilege. Muir and his Sierra Club allies fought the project for years, but the OShaughnessy Dam (named for the San Francisco engineer who supervised the project) was finally completed in 1923. The Hetch Hetchy controversy continues to this day. Every few years brings a new campaign to dismantle the dam and let the valley return to its natural state. Some, including Sierras Pope, have argued that proposals to remove the dam are often politically motivated attempts to divide the environmental community. It is probably more accurate to say theyre attempts to capitalize on environmental schisms that already exist. The current proposal to restore Hetch Hetchy is spearheaded by California state Senator Dan Lungren, who previously hadnt seemed to have met a dam he didnt like. In any case, environmental groups are getting other dams decommissioned and removed, particularly in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Preservationists see dams as major assaults on nature, threatening marine species by changing rivers ecology and threatening the land by changing the rivers flow. Hydroelectric power is still by far the nations leading source of renewable energy, but if the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense
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Council, and the Wilderness Society won all their dam removal battles, this would no longer be so. In fact, if other sources of renewable power sun, wind, geothermal, and biomass were developed only at the rate that the Department of Energy currently projects, the nation would actually experience a net loss of renewable power in the next decade. Solar power is only a small part of the decades projected energy output, and without some large-scale desert projects will surely remain so. Preservationists are often accused of making the best the enemy of the good, but this argument is unlikely to reduce their zeal for protecting deserts. It is precisely within the deserts fragile ecosystems that threatened plant and animal species assume an importance that nonbelievers seldom grasp. The deserts natural state is one of deprivation, and those who revere these parched landscapes see the inhabitants that roam among scrub pines and creosote bushes as heroic survivors, constantly threatened by nature. To see those threats compounded by man becomes almost too much. The more emotion one invests in preserving desert tortoises, burrowing owls, and bighorn sheep, the more sacrilegious it seems for strangers to approach their habitat with an insouciance that sees little but empty land.
Make no big plans

n opposing large-scale renewable projects, preservationists have other allies. There are environmentalists who would not agree that every wilderness must remain untouched, but who still dont care for the big projects that threaten those areas. One strong ally is Amory Lovins, chairman of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a renewable energy consulting firm and think tank, whose clients have included bp, Dow, General Motors, Mitsubishi, and numerous electric and gas utilities. In pursuing his environmentalist agenda Lovins emphasizes science and economics, not romanticism. It was from that perspective that, in February 2009, he wrote a guest post for a New York Times blog, asking: Does a Big Economy Need Big Power Plants? Lovins compared thousand-megawatt power plants to Victorian steam locomotives: magnificent technological achievements that served us well until something better came along. He insisted that future power plants should be small-scale facilities that can be effectively networked by smart grids, thus being made safer because theyd be more diversified. Lovins had good things to say about renewable energy, but only in the form of distributed renewables, i.e., panels on rooftops, parking lot surfaces, and such. Small plants would also be easier to finance, needing smaller capital outlays that markets can more easily digest. All of this was so clear to Lovins that he concluded by asking, What part of this story does anyone who takes markets seriously not understand?
Steve Stein
Well, how about this part: Since the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesnt blow equally throughout the country, doesnt it make more sense to install large facilities where they can optimize natures beneficence? San Diego might some day be able to power itself entirely by solar panels on rooftops and parking lots, but that wont leave much power to export elsewhere. Seattle, meanwhile, wont be well placed to follow San Diegos example; its residents could use some wind power from the Columbia River Gorge. We wouldnt even save on transmission costs by distributing all power generation, since so many new lines are needed anyway especially if the smart networked grids that Lovins so admires are to become a reality. Lovinss views on centralized versus decentralized solar power may be more nuanced than his blog suggests, but he certainly reinforces his bridges to the Sierra Club, the In addition to Natural Resources Defense Council, and other powpreservationists, erful advocates of renewable energy and conservaconservationists, tion whose charters invariably favor small over big. Proposals for distributed energy, including rooftop there is another solar panels, play well to an environmental community for whom the slogan small is beautiful environmental popularized by Ernst Schumachers 1973 book of faction: the the same title still resonates. Schumachers timing was propitious. Reeling no-growth from the Western Worlds first oil shock, many were contingent. especially receptive to Schumachers indictment of capitalist excesses, which he mainly ascribed to the fact that companies, institutions, cities, and systems had grown too big. Schumachers latter-day adherents now see every supposed evil of globalization as associated with capitalistic gigantism, best countered by environmental minimalism. In fact, one group aptly called the Preservation Institute has made Schumachers book the reference point of its charter. This contrasts with prevailing views in the first half of the 20th century, when the surest way to impact policy was to promote big projects. The spirit was captured in a phrase attributed to Chicago architect Daniel Burnham: Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir mens blood. That early 20th-century philosophy was later taken to absurd extremes by the city planner that environmentalists love to hate: New York City Parks Commissioner and power broker Robert Moses. During Mosess tenure, more freeways were built, more urban renewal projects undertaken, and more old neighborhoods demolished in New York City than at anytime before or since. By the 1950s, reaction had already begun. As anti-freeway revolts worked their way into the dna of environmental organizations, projects that disturbed large parts of the built environment drew greater opposition. So large proposals to disturb the unbuilt environment were destined to be even more controversial. Urban sprawl has now become a fighting phrase, and a few
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years ago the Nature Conservancy coined a related term energy sprawl subtly conveying the notion that large solar-farms or wind-farms enable the same kind of careless land grabbing as does freeway construction. Nevertheless, in the field of solar power, some very big plans still show up in places that demand serious attention. In the January 2008 Scientific American magazines cover story the one so admired by the Environmental Defense Fund Ken Zweibel and two other engineers detailed a Grand Plan for converting the entire electric grid of the United States to solar energy by 2050. It called for no miraculous technological breakthroughs but plenty of new solar farms, power lines, and compressedair storage facilities. Also, the plan would require 46,000 (noncontiguous) square miles. Although thats less than five percent of the total area of seven southwestern states, a considerable portion would no doubt have used state or federally owned land. The plans price tag was estimated at $420 billion. Clearly the authors of the article and the editors of the magazine were seeking Burnhams magic that stirs the blood. Engineering professors Mark Jacobson of Stanford and Mark Delucchi of the University of California at Davis would go even further. In their own Scientific American cover story (November 2009) the professors proposed perhaps more as a thought experiment than a concrete plan that a combination of energy from wind, water, and sunlight could provide all of the worlds energy by 2030. Which brings us back to companies like BrightSource and Blythe Solar, which need many square miles of land to build solar plants to power thousands of homes. BrightSource understands that the desert tortoise and other threatened species are far from the only obstacle. The companies must also win over skeptics who now see big solar as a further manifestation of giant corporatism. (Never mind that no current solar plant or wind farm comes anywhere close to the output of large coal, natural gas, or nuclear plants. Those conventional facilities are already up and running, so have achieved a certain threshold level of acceptance.)
Cheap energy and its discontents
n addition to preservationists and minimalists, yet another environmental faction has curbed its enthusiasm for renewable energy. This is the no-growth contingent, who see population growth and resource development as weaknesses of the capitalist system. One surprising name that shows up here is Amory Lovins. He surely wasnt speaking for his corporate clients when he wrote in a 1977 article in Mother Jones:
If you ask me, itd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our
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needs, but that wont give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other.
Lovins wrote those words only two years after Paul Ehrlich made the point even more harshly: Giving society cheap energy at this point would be equivalent to giving an idiot child a machine gun. Ehrlich, best known as the author of the 1968 book The Population Bomb, had been touring the country heralding the twin dangers of population growth and nuclear energy. While Lovinss views may have moderated somewhat since the 1970s, there is little evidence that Ehrlichs have. Ehrlichs bte noire at the time was nuclear energy, but no source of energy that enabled rapid population expansion was any better. Indeed, he saw mass starvation on the horizon. Today, there are environmentalists for whom Ehrlichs pessimistic predictions havent been proven wrong, only delayed. Richard Heinberg, in a 2011 book, The End of Growth, writes that resumption of conventional economic growth [is] a near-impossibility. This is not a temporary condition; it is essentially permanent (Heinbergs emphasis). He lists the factors that make this so: resource depletion, negative environmental impacts, and continued financial disruptions. In an earlier book, Powerdown, Heinberg explains how this relates to the false promise of cheap energy, renewable or otherwise:
Every time we humans have found a way to harvest a dramatically increased amount of food or fuel from the environment, we have been presented with a quantity of energy that is, if not entirely free, at least cheap and abundant relative to what we had previously. Each time we have responded by increasing our population, and correspondingly, the load on the environmental systems that sustain us. Each time we have ended up degrading the environment and creating the conditions for a crash.
Would environmental organizations that follow the Ehrlich-Heinberg philosophy ever support a Scientific American plan to develop an entirely solarpowered electrical system by 2050? Hardly. The anti-growth contingent is inclined to raise increasingly novel objections to any massive plan for a lasting source of cheap energy. Their goal is less energy, not cheaper; and the way to ensure less energy is by making it more dear.
Energy efficiency: Trump card or wild card?
hen environmental groups oppose large solar- or windenergy projects, they sometimes offer vague suggestions for alternative locations. But since that approach leaves environ58 Policy Review

mentalists vulnerable to the charge of nimbyism, the preferred argument is to avoid using resources to develop new energy sources, renewable or otherwise, and instead become more energy efficient. The Sierra Clubs national Energy Resources Policy puts it this way:
Energy efficiency using improved technology and operations to deliver the same energy services with less fuel is the foundation on which all of our other recommendations are based . . . Clean Efficient Vehicles . . . More Efficient Transportation Modes . . . More Efficient Communities . . . Building and Appliance Efficiency Standards . . . Clean Energy Funding . . . Distributed Generation
So when Southern California Edison wanted to construct power lines through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park to bring renewable geothermal power into San Diego, a big part of the local Sierra Club chapters opposition involved calculating the energy San Diego could save through conservation measures. When NextEra, a Florida-based utility company that is currently the nations largest wind-farm developer, proposed a modest installation in Marin County, California, local conservation groups strenuously objected to wind turbines in a sensitive coastal habitat, capping their argument with multiple illustrations of how Marin residents could easily save more energy than would be produced by such a large-scale utility project. Californians do take energy conservation and efficiency seriously. While the nations and Californias per capita energy consumption were nearly the same in 1975, the national average has since risen about 80 percent, while Californias has remained nearly flat. Two factors remove a little luster from that statistic: 1) During those 43 years, California lost most of its energyintensive manufacturing industry, and 2) a greater percentage of the states population has clustered in its most temperate climate zones. Nevertheless, the California legislature and Public Utilities Commission have devised some effective incentives for encouraging energy efficiency. The effectiveness of conservation and efficiency can, however, be exaggerated. Several years ago, Dian Grueneich, a California puc member, said:
Energy conservation has to be the highest priority of all our energy needs . . . The payback is phenomenal. For every dollar that our utilities spend on energy conservation they save two dollars. The other dollar is available to reinvest. We do not need 2,000 new power plants as Dick Cheney called for. Through our investment in energy efficiency we will not need any new power plants. We will just replace old ones as needed.
Not any new power plants? California may take some pride in its per capita energy use, but its total consumption has climbed at quite a rapid rate, as has its population. There are still zero-population-growth advocates, who would like to see immigration, legal or otherwise, slow to a trickle. But few environmental groups are in that camp. In June 2009, the Federation for Immigration Reform surveyed 25 major environmental groups and found
Steve Stein
that only three took a stance on immigration reduction, even though nineteen agreed that population growth was a problem. After bitter debate, the Sierra Club decided to remain among the neutrals. Even if population growth did somehow slow dramatically, the relation between energy efficiency and reduced consumption is problematic. Occasionally the correlation is direct, as in the United States between 1975 and 1980 when the first mandate of automobile fuel-efficiency standards and a general decline in the economy occurred simultaneously. Usually the situation is different. As efficiency helps make energy cheaper in terms of the useful work that it can do, demand rises. This phenomenon was observed as long ago as 1865 by William Jevons, an English economist who studied the effect of coal usage, noting that James Watts engine was so much more efficient that William Newcomens. Did coal consumption decrease? Of course not. Its use spread widely and continued to spread even as further efficiencies were implemented. As Jevons put it, It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. These days, Jevonss paradox is often referred to as the rebound effect. As efficient methods drive down the price per unit of output, industry after industry, and society after society, have found ever more extensive uses for energy. Some environmental groups who want to believe otherwise still dispute the evidence. A thoughtful article by David Owen in the December 20, 2010, New Yorker magazine, which brought data on the Jevons effect up to date, was met with objection by Amory Lovins and scorn by David Goldstein, a blogger for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Lovins harked back to the success of the fuel standards in the 1970s, and Goldstein used Californias recent history, notwithstanding that Californias energy use continues to expand, and its per capita consumption has ceased to decline. Energy efficiency is an important element of a sound energy policy, but it isnt a substitute for new power plants. Driving up the cost of new solar- and wind-power facilities wont spur energy efficiency; it will reinforce reliance on fossil fuels.
Unholy alliances
n their laser-like focus on exotic subspecies and unspoiled vistas, preservationists have provided unintentional aid and comfort to unexpected quarters. Energy sprawl has become a popular term among environmentalists who want to keep the desert and other wilderness areas pristine, but the term has also become useful for proponents of nuclear energy. For example, in 2009 Robert McDonald of the Nature Conservancy published an academic paper measuring the projected land-use requirements of various fuel sources. McDonald compared the number of square kilometers
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needed to produce a terawatt hour of energy each year. (One terawatt is equal to one trillion watts.) By far the most economical is nuclear power at 2.4 square kilometers. Coal requires about ten, and natural gas about eighteen. Solar photovoltaic comes in at about 37 (which makes it less than half as intensive as wind power, and a whopping ten times less intensive than corn ethanol. Biomass and cellulosic ethanol require even more land). McDonald wrote his study while congressional cap-and-trade legislation was still very much alive. He wanted to call Congresss attention to the amount of land needed if the legislations goals were to be attained, and to the location where the greatest land impacts would occur under various energy development scenarios. He titled the paper Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America. Shortly after the study was published, U.S. Energy sprawl Senator Lamar Alexander, a longtime advocate of has become a nuclear energy, wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall popular term for Street Journal that cited McDonalds report extensively and concluded that Renewable energy is not environmentalists, a free lunch. It is an unprecedented assault on the but it has also American landscape. Before we find ourselves become useful engulfed in energy sprawl, its imperative we take a close look at nuclear power. for proponents McDonald quickly responded in a Nature Conservancy blog that his study does not mean of nuclear power. that The Nature Conservancy is somehow against renewable energy generation . . . the energy sprawl report should not be taken as an endorsement of nuclear power by The Nature Conservancy. Maybe so, but McDonalds report did include statements like this: Third, our results suggest that energy sprawl is less severe when the cap-and-trade bill is more flexible, allowing for ccs [carbon capture and storage], new nuclear plants, and international offsets. Beyond the question of nuclear power, the need to utter disclaimers about sequestering the co2 emissions from coal can really give environmentalists heartburn. Burning coal without emitting carbon dioxide is seen by the coal lobbyists as the industrys redemption. As they remind legislators, coal is still Americas most plentiful fossil fuel. Coal will never be clean, but it can be scrubbed of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, and coal ash can be disposed of with a high degree of safety. The one thing that no one has yet found a way to do economically is to capture and store coals carbon emissions. That isnt for lack of trying. Both in the United States and in China, Herculean efforts are underway to make carbon-free coal a realistic possibility in the market. For that to occur, two things must happen to change the industrys economics: 1) Carbon emissions must become expensive, either through cap-and-trade or taxation, and 2) competing carbonless energy forms must also be very expensive. At the moment, Congress is quiescent on
Steve Stein
the issue of carbon emissions, but the Environmental Protection Agency is working hard to create such regulations on its own. As to the price of competing carbonless energy including nuclear, solar, and wind that variable is increasingly in the hands of environmental organizations that can drive up permitting costs and land costs, even as the cost of materials and engineering are coming down. Making low-carbon-emission coal (or nuclear) more economically attractive on a relative basis may not be an outcome the Sierra Club or many other national environmental groups seek, but their search for perfection can lead there. If mainstream environmental groups take on large-scale solar, wind, and geothermal with the same mindset theyve had toward the nuclear industry for the last 40 years, they might achieve a similar result. The countrys last nuclear plant was approved in 1977 and finally built in 1996. There are several plants now in various stage of planning and preliminary construction, but costs have risen so dramatically that it isnt even certain these will ever be built. Meanwhile other newly proposed plants have already been dropped. Since the de facto moratorium on new nuclear development is almost entirely the result of lobbying and litigation by environmental groups, it is ironic that the nuclear industry is now using more recent environmentalist arguments to claw its way back into the game. As for the current contest against large-scale renewable power, the outcome is still in the balance. Solar power is not nuclear power (unless you call the sun a huge nuclear-fusion reactor), and solar certainly doesnt have the huge catastrophic possibilities that nuclear fission has. But if the solar industry has to run a gauntlet of lawsuits over every other acre upon which panels and transmission lines can be laid out, very little solar development will happen, at least in America. At some level, environmental groups understand how much of this issue is in their hands. How will they use their power?
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America, Germany, and the Muslim Brotherhood

By John Rosenthal
he so-called arab Spring has ushered in many surprising changes, not the least of which is an apparent sea change in American foreign policy. The Muslim Brotherhood hitherto regarded as the principal ideological incubator of Islamic extremism and shunned accordingly has been rehabilitated by the present American administration. Long before the Brotherhoods Mohamed Morsi was elected Egyptian president in June, the administration was openly courting the organization. The first sign of the change came in the form of what seemed initially to be a bizarre gaffe. Speaking at congressional hearings in February 2011, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper incongruously described the Brotherhood as largely secular. But the gaffe soon proved to have been a harbinger of policy. Within a year, the American ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, John Kerry, were meeting
John Rosenthal writes on European politics and transatlantic security issues. His e-book The Islamist Plot: The Untold Story of the Libyan Rebellion is forthcoming from Encounter Books. You can follow his work at www.trans-int.com.
John Rosenthal
with Brotherhood officials in Cairo. The contacts, in both Cairo and Washington, have gone on ever since. In this context, it is hardly surprising that many observers and especially those wary of the administration reset with the Brotherhood would regard a recent book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ian Johnson as, in effect, the book of the hour. Bearing the sensational title A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the cia, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), Johnsons volume contains an even more sensational thesis: namely, that the U.S. had already gotten involved with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and that the Brotherhoods leading representative in Europe at the time, Said Ramadan, was even a cia asset! On Johnsons account, the cia helped Ramadan to seize control of the mosque in Munich of the books title. The claim is all the more sensational inasmuch as the mosque or rather the Islamic association that sponsored its construction would in the aftermath of 9/11 come to be linked to al Qaeda. It is not difficult to understand, then, why Johnsons book has been hailed as a cautionary tale. And this it would be, were it not for the fact that the tale Johnson tells is not supported by the evidence. The whole basis of Johnsons narrative of American collusion as he put it in the Fall 2011 Middle East Quarterly with Ramadan and the Brotherhood is circumstantial evidence and conjecture. Unnervingly, once introduced into the narrative, the conjecture is then elevated to the status of established fact. This procedure allows Johnson, for instance, to refer repeatedly to an American plan to install Ramadan as the head of the Munich mosque project, even though he has offered no proof that such a plan ever existed.
Dangerous liaisons or casual contacts?

ore problematically still, most of the circumstantial evidence points precisely to American disdain for Ramadan, not the mutual attraction that Johnson essentially conjures out of thin air. Take, for instance, Ramadans now famous September 1953 visit to the White House. A photograph documenting the visit is reproduced in a February 3, 2011, post by Johnson on the blog of the New York Review of Books. The picture shows a group of more than twenty Muslim dignitaries crowded around President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Oval Office among them, the then merely 27-year-old Muslim Brother Said Ramadan. The occasion for the photo-op was an international Colloquium on Islamic Culture, which was co-sponsored by Princeton University and the Library of Congress. The U.S. Information Agency and the State Departments International Information Agency were also involved. The apparently scholarly conference thus enjoyed U.S. government sponsorship. Johnson makes much of this fact, quoting darkly from a State
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Department memo that admits to ulterior motives. A passage from the same memo that is quoted by another source (to which we will come momentarily) specifies the ulterior motives in question: namely, to create good will and to contribute to greater mutual understanding between the Muslim peoples and the United States.1 In other words, for the U.S. government the colloquium represented an exercise in what would today be called public diplomacy. Johnson does not mention the good will/mutual understanding passage. The cia was also present at the colloquium, taking the opportunity to form assessments of the Muslim notables gathered in Princeton and Washington. There is no reason to assume that the agencys analysts knew much about the young Muslim Brotherhood official Said Ramadan. Indeed, one cannot assume either The cia was that they had particularly clear ideas about the Muslim Brotherhood as such. To do otherwise is to harsh in its engage in an anachronism. This was not America assessment of after 9 / 1 1 . Titled Facts about the Muslim Brotherhood, Ramadans own contribution to the Ramadan, finding colloquium was obviously designed to address this him the most relative information gap. Ramadan also gave an interview on the subject to the journal Middle East difficult element Report. present at the The cias assessment of Ramadan was harshly colloquium. negative. Ramadan was invited at the urging of the Egyptian embassy, a cia report cited by Johnson notes. He was the most difficult element at the colloquium as he was concerned with political pressure rather than with cultural problems. The allusion to the role of the Egyptian embassy is interesting in itself. It indicates that Ramadans presence was not a product of American scheming, but a function rather of the contemporary vagaries of Egyptian politics. Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Free Officers had carried out a successful coup against King Farouk barely one year earlier, and the countrys new leadership was still attempting to establish a modus vivendi with the Brotherhood. The conclusion of the author of the cia report leaves no room for ambiguity: I felt that Ramadan was a political reactionary, a Phalangist or Fascist type. This hardly sounds like the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Nonetheless, Johnson relativizes the importance of the cia assessment, suggesting that it merely shows that Americas alleged ally was not going to be an easy one. The more straightforward interpretation is that the cia analysts simply did not regard Ramadan as an ally at all. In an even greater feat of legerdemain, in his post for the New York Review of Books Johnson goes so far as to cite the cia assessment as evi1. Quoted in Stefan Meining, Eine Moschee in Deutschland: Nazis, Geheimdienste und der Aufstieg des politischen Islam im Westen (C.H. Beck, 2011), 132. (Re-translated from German.)
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dence of the Eisenhower administrations Machiavellianism. Eisenhower officials knew what they were doing, he writes,
Central Intelligence Agency analyses of Said Ramadan were quite blunt, calling him a Phalangist and a fascist . . . But the White House went ahead and invited him anyway.
But, as Johnsons own book makes clear, the cia analysts only came to these conclusions at the colloquium, not before. In fact, virtually all of the few and fleeting contacts between Ramadan and American officials that Johnson cites suggest aversion, not attraction. But in Johnsons account, all the manifest disaccord is trumped by a supposed American interest in recruiting Ramadans services in the fight against communism. This motive is, however, simply imputed by Johnson to American authorities. It is nowhere documented. Thus, Johnson notes that in 1956 Ramadan met with American officials in Rabat, pressing home his demand that Jews be expelled from Palestine. These views made it impossible for Ramadan and the United States to cement a formal alliance, Johnson dryly concedes, before quickly adding, But the mutual attraction to fighting communism was obvious. This grammatically slippery affirmation is, however, also a pure non sequitur. Moreover, Johnson himself mentions clearly conflicting evidence. Thus, German foreign office archives contain a report that Ramadan sought financial backing for the mosque project from a Soviet Muslim functionary. Instead of admitting the difficulties that the report poses for his thesis, however, Johnson again merely puts it down to the difficulties of Ramadans personality. German foreign office records cited elsewhere2 suggest that Ramadan had much more contact with the Soviet mufti than Johnson acknowledges. A seemingly more promising overture from Ramadan occurred in March 1960, when he wrote to the editor of a magazine titled the Arabic Review, saying how much he enjoyed the magazine and offering to distribute it throughout the Arab-speaking world. The Arabic Review was published by a Munich-based, anti-Communist organization that was covertly funded by the cia. Johnson describes the organization as a cia front and describes Ramadans letter as evidence of his ideological sympathy with the American position. Whether the letter is really that and not just evidence of a polite effort at networking is not clear. As we discover only in the back matter of Johnsons book, the editor of the magazine was Ali Kantemir: another key player in the Munich mosque project and someone with whom Ramadan would have been in contact in any case. But even assuming Ramadans letter is evidence of his eagerness to cooperate with the cia, its existence in fact poses an obvious problem for Johnsons thesis or rather it poses a problem especially on this assump2. Meining, Eine Moschee in Deutschland, 130. .
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tion. For by 1960 Ramadan is supposed, on Johnsons account, already to have been working closely with the cia. More specifically, Johnson insists that he was working with the cia-sponsored American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, or amcomlib for short. The front organization that published the Arabic Review was none other than amcomlib. (In the above-cited passage, Johnson refers to the Institute for the Study of the ussr. But the institute was an amcomlib project and elsewhere Johnson describes the magazine as simply Amcomlibs Arabic Review.) If Ramadan was already working closely with amcomlib and amcomlib was backing Ramadan, as Johnson repeatedly asserts, why would he have had to flag his interest in a letter to one of the committees publications? Adding to the opacity of the episode, although employed by amcomlib, Kantemir in fact Almost all the had close ties to German intelligence and was part of the German-sponsored group that launched the contacts between mosque project. Indeed, as will be seen below, he Ramadan and would soon figure as Ramadans rival in the struggle American to control the project. Fortunately, there is another book available that officials suggest tells the story of the same Munich mosque and is aversion, not largely based on the same archival materials as those attraction. consulted by Johnson. Unfortunately, it is only available in German. Even the title of the volume, by German journalist Stefan Meining, is remarkably similar to that of Johnsons book: A Mosque in Germany: Nazis, Intelligence Services, and the Rise of Political Islam in the West. This should not, however, lead one to doubt the originality of Meinings contribution. It was Meinings 2006 German television documentary Between the Crescent and the Swastika that first called attention to the significance of the Munich mosque project. Johnson and Meining clearly compared notes during the writing of their books, and each receives warm thanks from the other in their respective acknowledgements. But the style of the two books could hardly be more different. Meining is careful to affirm only what the archival evidence warrants and no more. His claims are methodically documented in the books nearly nine hundred endnotes. By contrast, the problems engendered by Johnsons tendency to play fast and loose with evidence are compounded by the lack of any note numbers in the text proper. This leaves the reader having to guess when a given claim might be supported by sources cited in the back matter. The effort is sometimes rewarded and sometimes not; and when it is, the actual sources frequently turn out to be interviews of dubious probative value. Meining also touches upon the sketchy evidence of contacts between Ramadan and American officials. His conclusions regarding them are, however, decidedly less sensational than Johnsons. As to whether Ramadan was somehow working with American authorities, Meining writes, Up to now,
John Rosenthal
no documents have been released or discovered in the American archives that answer this question. Indeed, given that none of the available American evidence suggests that he was, a possible collaboration might as well have been a nonissue were it not for the worries of a German intelligence operative by the name of Gerhard von Mende.
A dubious star witness

on mendes papers are in fact the ultimate source for Johnsons conjectures. Indeed, Johnsons whole narrative of alleged collusion between Ramadan and the cia is, in effect, told from von Mendes perspective. This is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that von Mende was a former high-ranking official of the Third Reich with a long record of commitment and service to the Nazi cause. The virtual entirety of his intelligence network consisted of former Nazis or Nazi collaborators. The members of the von Mende network are the Nazis mentioned in the title of Johnsons book. It might come as a surprise to those who have not actually read the book that they figure as the good guys in the story Johnson tells. Johnson even dedicates his book to the Nazi collaborators. The latter were Muslim natives of Central Asia and the Caucasus who were recruited by the Germans to fight against the Soviet Union and who found exile in West Germany after the War. In an unfortunate historical howler, Johnson claims that the Nazis were attracted to the Caucasus region, since it was the mythic home of the Caucasian people, important in Nazi lore. In fact, unlike Aryans, Caucasians played no particular role in Nazi lore and the attitude of the Nazis to them was, if anything, contemptuous. This is reflected, for instance, in Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenbergs notorious racist tract The Myth of the 20 th Century. Caucasians are mentioned only once in The Myth and in a clearly pejorative context. Alluding to a situation of race chaos in Russia, Rosenberg sarcastically observes that it is no accident that Tatar-Kalmyks like Lenin, Jews like Trotsky, and Caucasians like Stalin alternately come to power here. In July 1941, one month after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler appointed Rosenberg as Reich minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. One of the key officials working under Rosenbergs command was a certain Gerhard von Mende. As recounted by Meining, von Mende was in charge of the foreign peoples desk in the ministry. The designation referred to the non-Russian minorities whom the Nazis hoped to win to their cause. This was not a matter of sentimental attachment to Caucasians or any of the other peoples in question, but rather of military need. In keeping with the racial or ethnic-national (vlkisch) fundament of the Nazi worldview, the foreign Wehrmacht recruits were organized along ethnic lines. For von Mende and his colleagues in the Eastern Ministry, Islam played only a subordinate role.
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Before the war, von Mende had made an academic career as a specialist in the Soviet Unions national minorities. Passages from his pre-War monograph The Peoples of the Soviet Union leave no doubt about the virulence of his anti-Semitism. Both Meining and Johnson cite such passages, but Johnson dismisses them and many other compromising details of von Mendes biography as merely an expression of political expediency. Meining notes that propaganda material prepared under von Mendes direction for the foreign Wehrmacht recruits was likewise rife with antiSemitic incitement. Now it is over for the Jews in Europe, one such article exulted, Germany is fighting a hard war against the Jews and will triumph. But Russia is still in the hands of the Hebrews. As Meining also notes, in January 1942, just nine days after the infamous Wannsee Conference, von Johnsons Mende took part in a follow-up meeting in Berlin that had been called to establish the operational defwhole story of inition of Jewishness to be applied in the occupied collusion territories of the Soviet Union. Over two million Soviet Jews would be massacred by the invading between the cia German forces and their foreign helpers in accorand Ramadan dance with this definition. is told from In a rare misstep, Meining attempts somewhat to lessen von Mendes war guilt by suggesting that he von Mendes at least acted to save the members of an obscure perspective. Crimean Jewish community known as the Karaites or mountain Jews. But there is no reason to suppose anything other than that von Mende truly believed that, according to the Nazis preferred racial criteria, the so-called mountain Jews were not in fact Jews. After the war, von Mende would gather around him in Germany many of the leading Central Asian collaborators from his days in the Eastern Ministry. Under his guidance, the old soldiers, as Johnson romantically dubs them, would form the original core of the Munich mosque project. They were not necessarily any less tainted by their involvement in the German war effort than their mentor. One of them, Nurredin Namangani, had been the imam of an Eastern Muslim ss-regiment that took part in the brutal suppression of the summer 1944 Warsaw uprising against the German occupation. Thirteen years later, on von Mendes suggestion, Namangani was officially named the Head Imam of the Muslim refugees in West Germany. The point of reviewing some of the details of von Mendes career in the Third Reich is not merely to call into question the moral standing of Johnsons star witness. Von Mendes past is also of intrinsic significance. For if anti-Semitism was, of course, a salient feature of Nazi ideology from the start, anti-Americanism came to play an increasingly important role as Nazi Germanys European and global ambitions brought it into conflict with
John Rosenthal
the established world powers. After the war, in those parts of Germany that had been conquered by American troops and placed under occupation, the old Nazis traditional hostility toward America was, needless to say, now combined with a heavy dose of resentment. This was, for instance, clearly the case for von Mende and the German government officials with whom he launched the project of creating an association of Muslim refugees under Namanganis leadership. The German government sponsor of the project was the minister for Expellees and Refugees, Theodor Oberlnder. Oberlnder had been a longtime Nazi Party member and an officer in the Wehrmacht. As an official of the so-called Association of Germans Abroad, he had been a vigorous exponent of pan-Germanic ethnic chauvinism.3 (Contrary to the impression created by Johnson, he was by no means the only nor In the parts of even the most prominent former Nazi in the West Germany German government of the time.) As Meining notes, Oberlnder made little secret of his hostility toward conquered by the victorious Allied powers and his revanchist politAmerican troops, ical agenda. A German government memorandum cited by old hostilities Meining but not mentioned by Johnson makes were now clear that the very founding of the Muslim association was driven by hostility and mistrust toward the combined with American presence in Germany. The memorandum resentment. summarizes the results of an April 1957 meeting at Oberlnders ministry in Bonn. Both von Mende and his protg Namangani took part. Oberlnder was represented by Gerhard Wolfrum, a former officer in the ss. Another Muslim Wehrmacht veteran by the name of Ibrahim Gacaoglu had already founded an Islamic religious community in Munich four years earlier. On Meinings account, Gacaoglu was completely apolitical. He had, however, had contacts with amcomlib. For von Mende and his associates in the German government, there was the rub. The point of sponsoring a new Islamic association under Namanganis leadership was to sideline Gacaoglu and his real or imagined American backers. The April 1957 memorandum states: Herr Namangani has been given the mission of gathering the stateless Muslim foreigners and non-German refugees into a religious community, in order then, in the first place, to eliminate the undesirable American influence, which can become harmful to the Federal Republic . . . . It was this new Muslim association or Spiritual Administration that would give rise to the Munich mosque project. Given the context, it is not surprising that when an outsider, in the person of Said Ramadan, soon
3. The details of Oberlnders career in the Third Reich are documented in W. von Goldendach and H.R. Minow, Deutschtum Erwache! Aus dem Innenleben des staatlichen Pangermanismus (Dietz Verlag, 1994).
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emerged to challenge the leadership of his old soldiers, von Mende might suspect American meddling. Ramadans local constituency consisted of young Arabs who had come to study in Germany. Meining cites evidence suggesting that the Arab students may in fact have been members of a Muslim Brotherhood cell. Initially, the Central Asian war veterans appear to have had no particular objections to Ramadan. It undoubtedly helped that, as a prominent and well-connected Muslim internationalist, he clearly had money to throw around. As Meining recounts, upon being named an honorary member of the committee charged with developing the mosque project, Ramadan promptly made a 1,000 Deutschmark donation to the project on behalf of the Jerusalem-based Muslim World Congress. (Johnson says that he made the contribution before Despite his bnd being elected to the position.) This occurred in December 1958. A little over one year later, in contacts stirring March 1960, Namangani, Ramadan, and a handful the pot, von of partners founded a so-called Mosque Mende himself Construction Commission. Said Ramadan was wasnt convinced named the chairmen of the new organization. For von Mende, it was enough that Ramadan had that Ramadan had contacts with amcomlib to set off warning bells. The fact that an amcomlib official suggested was cooperating he speak to Ramadan only exacerbated his misgivwith the cia . ings. There it was again, von Mendes old aversion to the Americans, Meining writes in commenting on the earliest expressions of von Mendes suspicions. The bulk of the record of von Mendes ruminations on the subject of Ramadan is contained in his correspondence with the then newly formed West German foreign intelligence service, the bnd. If von Mende was not himself a bnd agent, it is clear that his intelligence network was, as Meining says, closely integrated with the bnd. But, on Meinings account, the von Mende-bnd correspondence contains at most vague and contradictory hints about Ramadans relations with American officials nothing like the smoking gun proof of collusion that Johnson claims he has found. Indeed, despite his bnd contacts stirring the pot, not even von Mende himself was convinced that Ramadan was cooperating with American authorities. Thus, after being told, seemingly unequivocally, by the bnd that Ramadan had enjoyed American backing, von Mende responded skeptically, noting that it was not clear for which American agency Ramadan could be working. Johnson spins the remark as confirmation that some such collaboration did exist: notably, per the narrative he tells, via amcomlib. But Meining reveals that in the very same letter von Mende insisted that amcomlibs attitude toward Ramadan had been one of complete rejection (absolut abweisend). Von Mende was in a position to know. As detailed by Meining, he had several loyal informants working as amcomlib employees.
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Germany and the Muslim Brotherhood

einings book, moreover, at least cautiously broaches an obvious question that is simply ignored by Johnson: To what extent were German authorities and, in particular, the bnd cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood? Might it not have been the Germans themselves who facilitated Ramadans takeover of the Munich mosque project? Given that we are, after all, talking about events that occurred on German soil and given that the project was, as Meining shows, closely managed by German authorities throughout, this is prima facie a far more plausible scenario than American responsibility. By strangely opposing good Nazis to allegedly American-sponsored Islamists, however, the very narrative structure of Johnsons account makes the more plausible scenario seem implausible. But the Nazis in fact had a history of close cooperation with Islamists. This was not necessarily the case for von Mende. Von Mende and his comrades in the Eastern Ministry were true to National Socialisms ethnicnational roots. In their eyes, the Muslim soldiers from Central Asia were, above all, ethnic freedom fighters. As both Meining and Johnson make clear, von Mendes old soldiers were not even particularly religious as a rule. This would put them at a disadvantage to the pious Muslim Brother, Said Ramadan, in the struggle over the mosque project. But not all Nazis were such ideological purists. As Meining recounts, by 1943, ss chief Heinrich Himmler had come around to the idea of organizing special Muslim ss divisions and was actively opposing the approach taken to the Central Asian recruits by von Mende. In his efforts to use Islam as such to win Muslims to the Nazi cause, Himmler received crucial support from the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. By far the most famous or infamous Islamist collaborator of the Nazis, al-Husseini had already taken refuge in Berlin in 1941. In his The Mufti of Jerusalem and the National Socialists, German historian Klaus Gensicke describes how Himmler and the Mufti agreed on a program of ideological education for the Muslim ss recruits. The program fused National Socialism and Islam, while emphasizing the common enemies (Jewry, Anglo-Americanism, Communism, Freemasonry, Catholicism).4 As Gensickes research makes clear, although he may have been unhappy about the Muftis influence, even von Mende conferred with him. After the War, al-Husseini would abscond to Egypt, where he joined forces with the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna. Al4 . Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 115. Gensickes book is now also available in English as The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis (Vallentine Mitchell, 2011).
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Banna even named al-Husseini as his personal representative to Palestine, where the Brotherhood was at the time opening local branches. The measure was largely symbolic, since the Mufti was banned by the British from actually returning to the region. As Abd al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi has shown in his The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question, the task of developing the Brotherhoods Palestinian operations on the ground was undertaken rather by a youthful follower of al-Banna: a certain Said Ramadan. Al-Banna instructed Ramadan to consult with al-Husseini, in order that no disagreement would arise. Starting in 1949 and for several years thereafter, al-Husseini would preside over the World Islamic Congress in Karachi, Pakistan. One of the leading lights among the relatively small circle of delegates to the congress was none other than Said Why did Said Ramadan. (Ramadans involvement in the World Ramadan turn Islamic Congress is detailed in Reinhard Schulzes Islamischer Internationalismus im 20 . Jahrhundert. up out of the The organization is not to be confused with the blue in Germany Muslim World Congress that was later founded in Jerusalem.) in the mid-1950 s? Why did Said Ramadan turn up seemingly out of For a dissertation the blue in Germany in the mid-1950s? Having been project? stripped of his Egyptian citizenship, he was by this time living in exile in Geneva. The ostensible reason for his coming to Germany was a dissertation project on Islamic law. He would submit the thesis to the University of Cologne in 1958. But Ramadan spoke no German and he appears never to have established residency in Germany. The thesis was written in English. During its composition, Ramadan would communicate with his thesis director by mail from various far-flung locations in the Middle East and Europe. Along the line, he managed also to pick up a diplomatic credential as cultural attach to the Jordanian embassy in Bonn. If not von Mende, who made no secret of his hostility, did other German officials sponsor Ramadans leadership over the mosque project? A curious detail that Johnson mentions, but treats as yet another anomaly, suggests that the answer is yes. By early 1961, the war veterans had grown tired of Ramadan and were plotting to dislodge him from the chairmanship of the Mosque Construction Commission. The plan was to replace him with Ali Kantemir. At a meeting of the commission in November, the veterans efforts appeared to have borne fruit when Ramadan was compelled to tender his resignation and then face off against Kantemir in an election. Kantemir won by two votes. Ramadan was reportedly irate, but appeared to have no recourse until, that is, a sharp-eyed German bureaucrat, as Johnson puts it, brought to his attention that the chairman had to be elected by a two-thirds majority, not a simple one.
John Rosenthal
German officialdom had saved Ramadan. The very fact that German officials were monitoring the proceedings of the commission and could indeed affect them in the way described provides an index of just how thoroughly the mosque project was subjected to German control. It would be interesting to know more about the origins of the odd two-thirds rule. Given that membership of the commission was by design evenly split between Central Asian veterans and Arab students, it essentially meant the former would never be able to oust Ramadan from the chairmanship. The arrangement is all the more curious, given that Ramadan appears to have been appointed to the position without any vote. In early 1962, recognizing their defeat, the war veterans resigned from the commission en masse. Under Ramadans guidance, the organization would thereafter be transformed Might German from a mere building commission into a full-fledged holdovers from Islamic association in its own right. Reflecting this change, in 1 9 6 3 it was renamed the Islamic Himmlers and Community in Southern Germany. In the 1980s, it would become the Islamic Community in Germany al-Husseinis tout court, by which time it enjoyed tax-exempt staNazi-Islamist tus as a charitable organization. As Meining alliance have shows, despite the name, it would remain an excluaided Ramadan? sive organization with highly restricted membership. Might German holdovers from Himmlers and alHusseinis Nazi-Islamist alliance have aided Ramadans transformation of the commission into a vector of political Islam? Meining suggests that there were none around to do so. On the German side, no notable representative of this pan-Islamist strategy survived the War and returned to politics, he writes. Meining alludes to the fact that the Allies had declared the ss as such to be a criminal organization, as if this would have constituted a hindrance. But his observation is overly sanguine. His own account of the Munich mosque project is liberally populated with former ss officers who made political careers in West Germany after the War. Moreover, since the publication of Meinings book, new information has emerged that clearly disproves the claim. In September of last year, it was revealed that no less an ss criminal than Walther Rauff was employed as a bnd agent from 1958 to 1962 as it so happens, the very period in which the main action of the Munich mosque drama was being played out. Rauff is known, above all, for having supervised the development and deployment of the so-called mobile gas chambers: converted vans in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime in the early stages of the Holocaust. More to the point, Rauff was also very much a key figure in Himmlers Arab-Islamist strategy. As has been documented by German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cppers in their book Nazi Palestine,
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it was none other than Rauff who was selected to head the so-called Commando Group Egypt: an ss kill squad that was specially formed in order to implement the Final Solution in the Middle East. The defeat of Rommels forces at El Alamein prevented Rauffs commando from ever fulfilling its brief. After the War, Rauff fled to Syria and then to Latin America. He was living in Chile when employed by the bnd. But he is known to have made at least two trips to West Germany during this time. But that is not all. The bnd agent who recommended Rauff to the agency, Wilhelm Beisner, was also a former member of the ss and he had, if anything, played an even more important role in the Arab-Islamist policy of the Third Reich. Beisner was one of Rauffs lieutenants in the Commando Group Egypt. Whereas, however, As was only Rauff had presumably been chosen for the job on the basis of his track record in killing Jews, Beisner, recently revealed, as Mallmann and Cppers have shown, was in 2007 the bnd assigned to the commando on account of his destroyed some proven expertise on the Middle East. Prior to receiving the assignment, he had been the head of 250 personnel the Special Section Arabia in the Reich Main Security Office (a subdivision of the ss). Beisners files relating to a deputy, Hans-Joachim Weise, served as the offices period under liaison to Haj Amin al-Husseini and was responsible investigation. for the Muftis security. We will almost surely never know just how many former ss officers were employed by the bnd nor more importantly, for present purposes just who they were. In what is becoming something of a tradition in Germany, last year the bnd itself set up a so-called Independent Commission to study its early history and links to the Third Reich. As was only recently revealed, however, in 2007 the agency destroyed some 250 personnel files relating to the period in question. The destruction of the files was only admitted by the agency after members of the historical commission discovered that records were missing. According to German press reports, among the files known to have been destroyed are those of persons who held significant positions in the Third Reich, including in the ss and the Gestapo. Johnson repeatedly makes coy allusion to still classified cia files and confirmation of American collusion with Ramadan and the Brotherhood that may be lurking in them. He shows no such curiosity regarding bnd archives. Nonetheless, on Meinings count, the authors had access to many hundreds of pertinent cia files. They appear to have consulted no bnd files whatsoever. This is hardly surprising given Germanys notoriously arbitrary and restrictive practice of declassification of government records. The cia files consulted by Meining and Johnson were made available following a request
John Rosenthal
under the Freedom of Information Act. As historian Michael Wildt of Berlins Humboldt University has pointed out in criticizing the bnds handling of historical records, there is no German equivalent of the act. In 2008, the German Interior Ministry suspended the application of an administrative order that had aimed to liberalize the declassification of government records more than 30 years old. The move prompted the German Historians Association to accuse the government of falling behind international standards and failing to uphold practices that should be self-evident in a democratic society. The scattered traces of bnd involvement that turn up in Johnsons telling of the Munich mosque story all come from the correspondence contained in von Mendes papers. Meining, however, has been more enterprising. While the bnds archives are closely guarded, the same is not, of course, the case for those of its since-dissolved East German rival, the Ministry for State Security or Stasi. The Stasi, moreover, appears to have been quite adept at obtaining classified West German materials. In the Stasi archives, Meining has discovered evidence that by the early 1980s there indeed existed an alliance between West German intelligence agencies and the Muslim Brotherhood. Meining emphasizes that the evidence in the East German archives needs to be corroborated through consultation of the corresponding West German records. The latter, however, remain classified. Although Meining mentions Afghanistan in this connection, the bulk of the specific information that he cites concerns rather Syria. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad was facing a Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamist insurrection bearing striking similarities to the current insurrection against the rule of his son Bashir. Syrian authorities evidently suspected Syrian exiles in Germany of fomenting the unrest and West German officials of helping them. A captured member of the Syrian branch of the Brotherhood even accused West Germany of financing the organization. The Syrians were particularly concerned about the activities of a certain Issam El-Attar: an Aachen-based political refugee whom Germanys own domestic intelligence identified as the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. El-Attar was a member of the tightly-knit Islamic Community founded by Said Ramadan. Meining calls the question of possible collaboration between West German intelligence and the Brotherhood explosive. It is all the more so given the remarkable number of major Islamic terror attacks that have been linked to Germany. These include not only the 9/11 attacks, but also the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 2002 Djerba synagogue bombing, the 2002 Bali bombings, and the 2004 Madrid train bombings.5
5. For relevant details, see John Rosenthal, Kid-Gloves Antiterrorism, Policy Review 156 (AugustSeptember 2009); and John Rosenthal, Germanys War on the War on Terror, Weekly Standard (March 29, 2010).
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In touching briefly upon the case of the Hamburg resident and reputed al Qaeda financier Mamoun Darkazanli, Johnson downplays Darkazanlis terror ties, noting that he has never faced prosecution. He fails to mention that this is only because Germany has refused to extradite him. Darkazanli is the object of a 2005 Spanish indictment that identifies him as the permanent interlocutor and assistant of Osama bin Laden in Germany. Indeed, German prosecutors have themselves found that Darkazanli served as an agent for al Qaeda, but they have somehow concluded that this is not sufficient grounds for bringing charges against him. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Johnson, incidentally, suggests that the current American rapprochement with the Brotherhood began in fact already under the Bush administration. His evidence for this claim is as tenuous as his evidence To provide a for Americas alleged collusion with the Brotherhood 50 years ago. It includes two unpub- balanced account, lished cia reports whose titles suggest nothing more an American than the sort of assessments cia analysts are, after all, paid to do. The most recent of the reports, for publisher would instance, is titled Muslim Brotherhood Rhetoric in do well to bring Europe: Deception, Division, or Confusion? out an English The most well-known and obvious countervailing evidence is, of course, the Bush administrations edition of highly publicized refusal to grant a visa to the Brotherhood-linked Muslim intellectual Tariq Meinings book. Ramadan. Tariq is Said Ramadans son. As with so much else that does not fit his narrative, Johnson dismisses this refusal as an anomaly or, as he puts it, largely a rearguard action. Despite being roundly criticized for years by self-styled civil libertarians, the administration persisted in this supposed rearguard action until the very end. The Obama administration overturned the policy. In order to provide English-speakers a more complete and balanced account of the Munich mosque project and its ramifications, an American publisher would do well to bring out an English edition of Meinings volume. Another significant aspect of the story that is obscured by Johnsons American plot narrative is the leading role played by a whole series of German Muslim converts in the history of the Islamic Community. The converts and their biographies receive detailed attention in Meinings treatment. They include, for instance, Fatima Grimm, who, beginning in 1971, served as the secretary of the Islamic Communitys board of directors. A prolific writer on Islamic issues, in her pamphlet on The Education of Our Children, Grimm encouraged Muslim mothers to overcome their maternal instincts and be prepared to sacrifice their children in the service of jihad. Fatima Grimm, ne Helga Lili Wolff, is the daughter of none other than ss General Karl Wolff, who served for many years as Himmlers chief of staff. Mallmann and Cppers have shown that Wolff was involved in the decision
John Rosenthal
to deploy Walther Rauffs Middle East kill squad, the Commando Group Egypt. After the war, Wolff was found guilty by a German court of complicity in the murder of some 300,000 Jews. Despite the conviction, he served barely four years in prison. Meining notes that shortly before his death in 1984, he followed the example of his daughter and converted to Islam. We will undoubtedly not know the full story of the Munich mosque project and the creation of a German base for Islamic extremism until all the relevant German government records are made available, including those of the bnd. But that is not likely to happen anytime soon, if indeed ever.
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Policy Review
The Global Schoolgirl

By A. Lawrence Chickering & Anjula Tyagi
he challenges of poverty and development have long been regarded in terms of transitive relationships, in which the rich help the poor because the poor are not seen as able to help themselves. This view of the poor assumes they have mainly needs and no assets. With so many people believing this view it isnt surprising that the poor themselves share the assumption that they cant play any significant role in improving their own condition. Belief in the powerlessness of the poor cripples not simply the poor, but both the left and the right, with each looking to the mechanistic solutions of government or market. Neither has an active strategy for empowering the poor themselves to play significant roles in promoting change. When viewed in distributional terms the left in terms of equality, the right in terms of mobility justice is impossible, because equality is itself
A. Lawrence Chickering is founder and president of Educate Girls Globally. He is coauthor of Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security (2006 ) and Voice of the People: The Transpartisan Imperative in American Life (2008 ). Anjula Tyagi is executive director of Educate Girls Globally and directed eggs first project in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.
A. Lawrence Chickering & Anjula Tyagi

impossible and because when some get ahead, others are left behind. When justice is understood, however, in terms of empowerment, it becomes possible for everyone. With empowerment, the case for compulsion to achieve equality disappears, and no one needs to be left behind. With empowerment, the distributional focus disappears in favor of values higher than the accumulation of wealth as the defining quality, in public policy, of peoples lives. Observing empowerment may be easiest in the traditional and tribal societies that have become the new priority concerns of U.S. foreign and security policy. In traditional and tribal societies people live with preconscious concepts of self and live through roles prescribed by tradition, with few or no chances to break free in search of a better life. Because tradition dominates everything people do, these societies are passive, fatalistic, and disempowered in their nature. The issues become clear in specific examples. In the very tribal state of Rajasthan in India, traditional roles define all perceptions for many people. In a recent survey, therefore, tribal girls had no trouble giving strong answers to objective questions such as Did you have a bath today? but had more trouble with more subjective questions, which require strong opinions. As an example, when tribal girls are asked, Do you think Nabile, who steals from you, is your friend? they give much weaker answers than on the objective questions. Their subservient, role-defined answers highlight their overwhelmingly powerless and subservient roles. An experiment underway for almost a decade in two states of India is producing powerful evidence that the poor can be empowered to move outside and beyond their traditional roles. They can start to pursue individual aspirations and dreams while also reaching out to each other, in connection, as citizens. These results in India are encouraging indicators that may begin to change how we think and talk about poverty and development, and hopefully about other, larger issues, including the promotion of change in tribal societies and even the reform of governments.
mpowerment at different times has been prominent in the ideas of both left and right about how to help the poor. In the mid-1960s the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo), which became the central instrument of the War on Poverty, was the lefts major instrument of empowerment, giving maximum feasible participation to the poor in decision-making of Community Action Programs (caps). For the right, empowerment has emphasized getting government off peoples backs including proposals to give people alternatives to failing government institutions e.g., school vouchers and charter schools. For example, Empower America, an organization led by Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett,
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Empowerment, left and right

focused most of its energy on fighting big government. But OEO lasted less than a decade, and while some caps persisted, showing the potential of empowerment with good leadership and community support, most did too little empowering and too little integrating of the poor into the mainstream society. Empower America has also disappeared. Both sides have traditionally seen problems in terms of governmental action public-policy problems with almost no role for private, nongovernmental action. This is a serious shortcoming because real empowerment, especially for the poor, cannot be accomplished by governments alone. Private civil-society organizations (csos) have important roles to play on these issues. Although public-private partnerships (ppps) are now celebrated in many places, most real experiences with them are about increasing the efficiency of traditional governThe debate on ment programs rather than empowering the poor. To encourage real change, more effective partnerships empowerment between government and the private sector need to has made real receive much greater priority in the public debate. advances and is The debate on empowerment has made significant advances in the past two decades. The issue is now a major today an important part of the theory of developcomponent of ment. It is also the animating theme of many practical experiences on different issues (education, health) the theory of in many countries, with experiments funded by the development. World Bank and by donor agencies. While results are promising in some places, they are disappointing in many others. Education systems as a whole have not yet started to benefit from these experiments. Government schools in many countries are still so bad that many quite poor people are making sacrifices to send their children to nongovernmental schools. To expand the role of csos, the political debate needs to include a prominent role for them and expand the concept of public policy. One of the most difficult challenges of transferring lessons from the new empowerment experiments to mainstream government school systems is integrating the role that civil society needs to play in the new empowerment models. Many political leaders and philanthropists believe that the poor have only needs and few assets. At a recent meeting of philanthropists, someone captured this idea perfectly when she divided the world into people who have versus people who need. The common model of the poor as victims continues to dominate discourse, while influencing the poors own self-concept and sense of possibility. This is a tragic circumstance. What is the point of trying, when you are either the victim of vast social forces or of government policies that are intractably unreformable? To understand how governments and csos can help empower the poor we must be clear about the role of the poor themselves. Robert Hawkins has argued that outside agencies, including governments and csos, cannot

empower the poor. They can create enabling conditions, which, in Hawkinss words, awaken and encourage development of natural capacities of people to govern their own lives. Helping, by providing services, retards and often aborts these natural capacities. When the focus is on services provided to the poor, he argues, the poor become consumers (passive), while for real empowerment they need to become producers (active). Among these enabling conditions, the most important are ownership and leadership: The poor must have a stake, which means real authority in designing and implementing plans for change. Ownership can be either formal, as in formal property rights, or informal, as in a self-governing government school. csos can play an important role especially where ownership is informal. Leadership follows the principles of ownership avoiding authoritarian leadership and enabling people to fulfill their natural instincts to be self-governing.
Civil society and empowerment
mpowerment can be manifest in both public and private spaces. The economist Hernando de Soto has promoted powerful, visible empowerment in private spaces through property rights. Although property rights are widely used in developed countries, many people in developing countries have no property rights. In Egypt, for example, about 90 percent of the people have no formal rights even though they have informal rights recognized by local communities. We are focused on another form of empowerment, in public spaces (government schools). Educate Girls Globally (egg), following csos in other difficult places, is accomplishing extraordinary results by empowering poor, rural communities to take ownership of government schools and reform them in two states of India. It is an issue that has proven difficult to reform. Local csos, mobilizing citizens to promote change, play an important role in eggs model.
Private rights in public spaces

ducate girls globally was founded by one of us in 1999 to promote education for girls by reforming government schools. Community ownership is common in many schools in developing countries, but mostly in nongovernmental schools. eggs program was modeled on similar programs in Upper Egypt, Pakistan, and southern India. Focusing on reforming operating government schools and partnering with ministries of education, it combines a variety of different components. Early returns suggest it is achieving extraordinary results in promoting change at large scales and low costs. Working in Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand) and
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Rajasthan, eggs model includes noteworthy features of cost, scale, and additional outputs (community projects) that, taken together, may play an important role in nation-building. Community mobilization and ownership are central features in eggs model, working in governmental schools, as in nongovernmental schools. One of its unusual features, however, working in government schools, is that the model is actively supported by three major political constituencies of the left: government itself, important leaders in Indias powerful teachers unions, and leaders of civil society. Leveraging off government investments in schools, egg works at large scales and low costs. While traditional school-reform programs regard 1,000 schools (or even 300) as very large scale, after six years in Rajasthan eggs model was in 4,500 schools serving almost 600,000 children. Plans are in place to expand to 10,000 schools and more, serving more than a million children. The marginal cost of the program is less than three dollars per child per year for the two-year program compared to other school-reform models costing $100 per child per year and more. The government not only feels no threat from this empowerment program, but the state ministry in Rajasthan is currently financing about 40 percent of the program budget, and negotiations in another state will soon focus on governments paying the entire in-country costs. egg developed a powerful operational model starting in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand and then expanding to Rajasthan, the most tribal state in the country. eggs work in these states was undertaken in partnerships with the state ministries of education and with the World Economic Forum in Rajasthan and with independent partners in both states. While it is too early to assert the full implications of eggs experience, it may ultimately encourage both analysts and policymakers to rethink some of their basic assumptions about social policy and even security policy.
Reforming government schools in tribal India
he basic model for egg was borrowed and adapted from ngos in the most difficult environments in Upper Egypt and Pakistan. The specific community mobilization model comes from a nonprofit organization called maya, which promotes reform of government schools in the Indian state of Karnataka. Thus was created the most important difference between eggs program and many other community-based education models. Most csos avoid working in government schools, which they believe cannot be reformed. They are also afraid rampant government corruption will contaminate their work. eggs initial work in Uttarakhand experimented with a very light foot83

print meaning a single village meeting. It was soon obvious that more intensive engagement was necessary for impact and sustainability. egg itself then took over management of the program, signed a new memorandum of understanding with the ministry, and intensified the programs engagement in 1,400 schools, serving nearly 100,000 children. The first third-party evaluation, funded by the Ford Foundation and carried out by the International Center for Research on Women (icrw), highlighted the models potential significance:
This model appears to accomplish a cultural shift in traditional communities, shifting them away from fatalistic passivity that promotes only a continuation of habits away from doing things merely because thats the way we have always done them to a more active, conscious, creative frame of mind that sees possibilities and especially sees opportunities of people to take control of their lives and improve them.
Focusing on enrollment of girls, the program started to address larger issues of equity and quality, and introduced creative learning in enrollment camps for dropout girls. (The introduction of creative learning in regular primary schools came later, in Rajasthan.) Rajasthan is the most male-dominated, tribal state in India. In September 2005 the state ministry of education signed an agreement with egg to replicate eggs model and develop new strategies for general education reform. Even then, policymakers were aware of the potential for large-scale impacts: If egg could show results, it would be building a model for reform of every school in Rajasthan (78,000 schools serving eight million children). At the time, the government of India was expanding investments in primary education dramatically and exploring ways of improving effectiveness and efficiency by mobilizing communities to work more closely with schools and help hold schools accountable. This larger initiative was an important reason for the Indian governments interest in egg.
Toward community ownership of schools

n traditional programs, experts help people who need. There is no place for empowerment. Believing the poor have only needs and no assets, service providers are locked into a supposedly benign hierarchy in which their help often encourages dependency. Part of the dependency problem is in relation to maintenance of aid. Throughout the developing world and in the developed countries, too; witness public housing projects in the U.S. wells and schools and housing projects, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, fall apart for want of maintenance. People, when helped, get no ownership. Ownership comes with and promotes empowerment, and with ownership comes the sense of active caring that encourages maintenance and sustainability.
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While many programs work only in schools that want them, egg must work in every single school in a jurisdiction. While various factors dictate different timetables for change, the model is successful in every single school. egg focuses on empowering parents, teachers, girls, and even government officials to come together as citizens in communities of practice and in an organic process to reform government schools. Robert Hawkins believes the process needs to start in communities, encouraging community members, teachers, and girls to imagine a real and better future. Imagining a better, common future includes imagining that people, working together, can create such a future. Fatalism and its companion, passivity have no sense of a future, or that people can influence it. Imagining a future and then developing plans to create one is the starting place for everything In traditional else in eggs model. eggs relationship with government officials is a programs, the powerful partnership that includes staff structures experts help that imitate each other, active government help in hiring egg field staff, and (perhaps most important) people who monthly dinners between eggs local program need. And directors and their government counterparts and empowerment their families. If there is magic in this program, the monthly dinners are a symbol of it. has no place. eggs approach offers, in the words of one expert, potential even in the toughest circumstances to transform public education on a shoestring budget. The program transforms traditional communities, empowers women and girls, promotes extraordinary increases in learning even among tribal girls, and encourages social entrepreneurship and implementation of community projects. One observer calls it ptas on steroids. Promoting private rights in public spaces, egg, like many empowerment programs, brings capitalism into the heart of socialist institutions. But in public spaces like government schools, capitalist self-interest means community and connection, combining with self-reliance and social entrepreneurship, to produce extraordinary gains for the common good. India has a well-deserved reputation for being overly centralized and bureaucratic. Education, however, is a state responsibility, and at all governmental levels, the desire is strong to decentralize the schools. Within this policy perspective, eggs approach actually works. The results are extraordinary in education, increasing learning significantly; in social entrepreneurship, promoting community projects without egg funding; and even in psychology, increasing the self-confidence of tribal girls beaten down by cultural antagonism. Through an organic, grassroots process, eggs model focuses all major stakeholders in schools on accomplishing what they agree about. Thus, the process generates very little conflict. While the approach is happening below

the radar in many places, egg projects work in plain view, in active partnership with the government, in every school in jurisdictions assigned to egg. While significant work remains to validate the model as well as adapt it for other issues such as health the early evidence from these two Indian states points toward significant (and perhaps seismic) shifts in how we think about social policy.
ggs program begins with a government endorsement and formal agreement, which incorporates the model into the ministrys formal education program. In every community egg starts working with established leaders, including politically elected village heads, teachers, and religious leaders. Since leadership is an important component, priority is given to looking beyond traditional leaders to natural leaders in a new, entrepreneurial society. In cultures with some social development, such as many in Uttarakhand, these natural leaders will make themselves known and get involved early in the process. When they do, the central part of the program can begin. In Rajasthan, which is much more traditional and tribal, it often takes longer for these leaders to appear up to a year and longer with resulting delays in introducing the central program. Early in the program egg staff conduct community-wide surveys of each school and community, including the name of every girl who has dropped out. egg has learned that real impact does not happen with mere involvement. Real impact occurs with community ownership, followed by action for change. egg serves as a catalyst for empowering communities, helping to build their capacity to assume active roles, promoting change. Establishing community ownership requires that the program is about them rather than about egg. Community surveys often reveal basic problems such as teacher absenteeism, lack of clean water, lack of bathroom facilities for girls, and so on. The surveys provide the background for community-wide meetings, discussing why educating girls is important, empowering the School Management Committees (smcs), planning Action Projects, and creating girls parliaments (bal sabhas), which promote girls as leaders. The girls not only become role models as leaders and achievers for girls who need both, but also powerful change agents through the work they organize. The first community meeting launches the program, when the survey results are used to assess problems and develop solutions. Discussions consider a variety of issues, especially how to return girls to school, as well as action plans for clean drinking water and girls latrines. Action Committees then assume responsibility for implementing projects. The girls parliaments mobilize girls as active agents of change, going house to house, searching for dropout girls and encouraging parents to let them return to school, implementing hygiene and health education pro86 Policy Review
How eggs program works

grams, and implementing life-skills training for girls. During the program both smc members and girls participating in the girls parliaments receive special leadership training. Working with unicef and several Indian ngos, teachers are trained in Creative Learning, activity-based learning, and other innovative teaching techniques, all of which are important in promoting learning gains.
Producing measurable results

n uttarakhand, community meetings led to increased enrollment of girls and plans for school infrastructure improvement, and also promoted debate about the economic and social factors undermining girls education. Initial evaluations strengthened eggs belief that communities can produce sustainable change if truly empowered through accountable ownership and decentralized governance. The two-year program became operational in hundreds of schools, increasing enrollment of girls and improving infrastructure. When communities raised concerns over quality, egg introduced creative learning in residential summer camps for older girls who had dropped out of school. icrws evaluation of eggs project in Uttarakhand focused on 60 schools in the impoverished district of Tehri Garhwal, where male literacy greatly exceeds female literacy (86 percent to 50 percent, according to the 2001 census). The icrw study reported that the program, which was active in Uttarakhand from 2002 to 2008, increased community awareness, status of women, and girls enrollment and attendance. In concluding the model might be an inexpensive and scalable approach to reforming education, the evaluation made two principal recommendations: strengthen the relationship with the government, and intensify engagement with communities. After its initial work in 1,000 schools, the program, starting in 2004, deepened its engagement in 1,400 additional schools. Its objectives were to establish strong, community-based governance structures, increase the status of women and girls, promote understanding of why educating girls is important, install training programs for employment, and promote development of community projects (mostly improving infrastructure). The icrw evaluation noted the strength of the smcs, holding meetings and forming action plans for community projects. Teachers reported increased attendance and performance by girls in the schools, including improved performance in classrooms. In some ways the most important product of the project in Uttarakhand was development of a group of master trainers who moved to Rajasthan, brought different components of the program there, trained the Rajasthan staff, and provided important leadership for the work there. The last of these master trainers left Rajasthan in 2008. The team is now available to bring the program back to Uttarakhand and to travel to other countries to train

the field staff needed to launch new projects. The program in Uttarakhand featured important limitations. Some related to programs (focusing on community mobilization), and some related to evaluation (the icrw study was limited to a small, new sample of 60 schools and lasted only fifteen months). In Rajasthan, egg began work under an agreement with the state ministry of education and the World Economic Forum. In December 2007 it completed a two-year pilot project in 50 schools in two of the states most impoverished districts, Jalore and Pali. Expansion followed in 500 schools in Pali, serving 70,000 children. In December 2009 egg completed this secondstage expansion. egg added important new components to its model in Rajasthan, especially during the second-stage expansion. These included a Creative Learning Program (clp) and life-skills training in primary schools, and also more rigorous evaluation. Results on learning measured the impacts of the clp, which was introduced in fall 2009 in 53 schools. After only three months, and with the overall program costing only two percent of the governments budget for the schools, students registered the following gains:
Hindi reading (full paragraphs) increased from 42% to 59% (a 40% gain)
English reading (full paragraphs) increased from 15% to 43% (a 185% gain) Math understanding (up to two digits of addition and subtraction) increased from 26% to 57% (a 119% gain)
The evaluation also addressed enrollment, attendance, and other school improvements; community projects; and life skills, including leadership, conflict management, and psychological strengthening (self-confidence and selfesteem). During the two-year period in 500 schools, the percentage of enrolled girls increased from 90 to 99.5, while the percentage of students who attend class on any given day, a more important figure, increased from 67 to 82. Without any funding from egg (but often with funding from other sources), communities showed extraordinary social entrepreneurship, initiating a variety of projects. Of these, two really stand out: the percentage of schools with clean drinking water increased from 46 to 82; and the percentage of schools with separate toilet facilities increased from 44 to 71. One significant barrier to opportunity for girls is low self-esteem and the reluctance to assert strong opinions or speak up in front of boys. To address this problem, which affects every aspect of girls lives including learning, egg has partnered with unicef and introduced powerful life-skills and leadership training. The evaluation of this program produced the anecdote, noted earlier, about different responses toward objective issues such as having a bath versus statements requiring more subjective and judgmental answers.
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The evaluation, which was conducted six months after the life-skill training, was based on seventeen questions, both subjective and objective, and showed powerful impacts in promoting self-esteem and the confidence to speak up. Answers in schools that were especially low pre-test increased substantially post-test. Leadership begins with self-confidence, and the life-skills training provides a powerful foundation for promoting development of leaders. The bal sabhas give girls a chance to develop leadership skills and participate meaningfully in school and community affairs. A government evaluation after the pilot project observed that the girls were arriving at school with improved personal hygiene: hair was clean and combed, fingernails were trimmed, and clothes were clean. These small signs of improvement provide hopeful clues about the potential of Independence eggs program to affect issues beyond basic educaalso serves the tion, starting with health. objective of Leadership training is given for the girls parliaments and also for members of the smcs. Some sustainability, 6,500 girls out of about 35,000 received this instrucwhich is a tion in the 500 schools, and the same number of adults (6,500) received this training during the twomajor element year program period. in measuring These results are based on 500 schools. As eggs Indian partner, Educate Girls (eg), became indepenresults. dent and expanded beyond 500 schools, problems started to appear in data collection and analysis. Some indications suggest similar results as the program expanded to the whole of Pali District (2,342 schools), but the data are not adequate to reach a final conclusion, and it is too early to have results from the further expansion to Jalore District. Despite this problem of cooperation, egg supports and even celebrates its Indian partners independence, which serves eggs longstanding support of decentralizing fundraising and operations, maximizing local support for the program. Radical decentralization imitates the self-governing essence of the program in every community and would multiply implicit partners, implementing the model in many countries, all self-governing and self-motivated. Promoting development of independent and successful partners is the ultimate testament to the power of eggs model. Independence also serves the objective of sustainability, which is an important element in measuring results, powerfully affecting the programs cost. The operational question is: What level of presence is necessary to sustain the results to benefit future generations of children? egg still needs to answer that question. The answer to the problem of sustainability and also to the challenge of expanded scaling is training the ministry staff for both. This was a powerful innovation in eggs 2006 understanding with the state ministry of education in Uttarakhand, which featured training for ministry staff as a major priority

in eggs responsibilities. Given the funds they are contributing to the program, it is obvious that governments have powerful incentives to ensure sustainability and provide for expansion beyond eggs own capacity to promote it. Unfortunately, by 2006 egg was shifting its attention to Rajasthan, and all of its most experienced master trainers moved there. As a result, the program in Uttarakhand was deemphasized and terminated in 2008.
The role of leadership

mpowering the poor presents challenges for leadership both in the initiating csos (here egg) and in the local csos. In creating an enabling environment, the outside cso needs to provide structure and a convincing vision that energizes potential leaders (says Hawkins). Then it needs to recognize when local (natural) leaders are ready to assume their leadership roles, at which point it needs to start withdrawing. As noted elsewhere, that will happen when social development (or social trust) has catalyzed the multiple factors that are determining. In some very traditional communities, it can take a year or longer to reach that point which delays the initiation of the core program. eggs experience provides some other interesting lessons on local leadership. One of eggs central objectives is to empower leaders for a new, entrepreneurial culture. In traditional, habitual cultures, tribal and religious leaders exercise leadership through the habits and roles defined by the tradition. With social development, increasing trust, and a new and active environment, people see possibilities for collective action that are concealed in traditional cultures. These new possibilities bring forth new leaders. Traditional leaders cannot compete in the new, active, conscious environment; they continue in their largely symbolic, traditional roles, while the new, natural leaders assert their leadership in the new entrepreneurial environment without any conflict between them. In decentralized organizations everyone is empowered, and leaders appear everywhere. This happens in eggs model in various aspects of the Creative Learning Program, in community projects, and especially in the girls parliaments, which administer the life-skills trainings and play major leadership roles in implementing action plans. eggs model is holistic engaging leaders throughout the organization and creating multiple inputs in all programs, but especially in creative learning. One reason eggs program achieves the results it does in learning is that it avoids specialized inputs that put all focus on individual factors (e.g., teacher training) and instead creates spaces for multiple inputs creative learning, community and family support for education, and programs to increase self-esteem all of which motivate children to learn. Children in many countries do poorly on standardized tests because their schooling is based on rote memorization, which does not prepare them to
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understand basic principles applied in different ways. While rote learning does not conflict with traditional, habitual societies, it is useless in creative, entrepreneurial communities. As peoples concept of self becomes more individualistic, creative learning becomes increasingly important. It is hard to increase learning without at the same time promoting a more individualistic culture and concept of self which empowerment models such as eggs do. Motivation is influenced by social influences, and also by teaching models. When a teacher simply talks at children they often get bored and learn little. Models of teaching that engage students increase interest and learning. The creative learning program used in Rajasthan was developed by serve, in West Bengal, reflecting principles in widespread use. eggs community mobilization model promotes education for communities, families, and children each reinforcing the other, while changing the culture of each community and school. The girls parliaments are especially important, taking the lead in life-skills training and bringing dropout girls back into school. Self-esteem is also important for motivation, especially for girls in cultures that keep them down. Training in life-skills and promoting self-confidence strengthens girls ability to learn, especially their confidence that they can learn. This training, which the girls parliaments organize, occurs after school, and draws great interest because the training, done with cards, is fun. Leadership training for the girls parliaments is also important, training girls as role models who are leaders and achievers. And finally, community pride can be an important motivating force as communities implement successful initiatives, showing they can achieve what they commit to do. One such initiative was successful lobbying for special school programs for girls. A final point on motivation and desire relates to the teaching model. Two elements in eggs Creative Learning Program engage and motivate children. First is a program, also in widespread use, that breaks classes up into groups and encourages children to teach each other, overseen by the regular teacher. When children become teachers, it often motivates them to learn. Second: the use of games to make learning fun. Both features free the learning process and avoid total dependence on teachers, who, in many rural schools, are often not very good.
Larger implications
mpowerment programs such as eggs have great potential significance for policy on issues ranging from education reform and health care to womens rights and counterinsurgency warfare. Robert Hawkinss observation that the poor are consumers (passive) in traditional social services, while they become producers (active) in empowered, self-governing communities has powerful implications for both development and security. Energizing the recipients of social services as co-deliverers of service

and the populations of countries as powerful activists in fighting insurgencies highlights the potential of the poor to contribute to virtually all major social and political objectives. Hawkins also emphasizes the importance of these issues in promoting a strong concept of citizenship in place of the weak concept one finds today in both developed and developing countries. eggs emphasis on nonmaterial incentives such as empowerment and connection (i.e., community) highlights their value as economic incentives that could be and should be studied by economists. In making this point, we do not mean to argue that monetary incentives are not important only that, if possible, empowerment should precede or at least accompany monetary incentives. egg provides no funding for community projects such as clean water. Communities take the initiative and find other funding, from both public and private sources. The importance of private property rights in private space is widely understood; eggs experience shows that private ownership of public space can also play an important role in public policy, motivating private action. eggs experience raises important theoretical issues, especially having to do with subjective versus objective incentives in policy, and it questions the traditional, rigid separation between government and the private sector. When an initiative is organized around citizens, both inside and outside the government, new possibilities appear in many forms. An important idea here is to transform formal elements of government responsibility into integrated (public-private) projects, while also transferring the spirit of private engagement into government institutions. A final remark here needs to focus on what eggs experience reveals about the nature of empowerment. We think that many past efforts to empower the poor have failed because they are focused on single objectives often on protesting. Protesting is about trying to get others to change. Empowerment, on the other hand in the sense we have been discussing it focuses on strengthening the poor themselves, and this requires combining two complementary objectives. First is individualism and self-reliance. By itself, however, it is not enough. For real empowerment, individualism needs to be combined with bringing people together for collective efforts to serve the common good. These two elements, which represent the two great values in all modern societies freedom and order, or rights and responsibilities are also embodied in the term self-governing: with self representing the individual or individuated value, and governing representing the community or connected value. Individuals feel stronger when they are part of strong communities, and people can achieve more when they work together. ollowing long-established practice in health programs, civil society organizations in all regions of the world have used community mobilization as the central operating principle in their education-reform programs. The failure of many governments to incorporate this
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concept into their plans for education reform is a major reason why independent and informal schools are the choice of many people who cannot afford them in developing countries. While many governments intend to decentralize their education systems and move to community-based schools, they almost invariably fail because they fail to provide a strong role for local civil-society organizations integrating them into their reform strategies, to connect schools and communities. Part of the problem has to do with language: reforming government schools concerns public policy, and public policy is widely assumed to be about government action alone. Building strong smcs and community-based schools cannot be accomplished by mechanistic governmental action, as the past has shown. The challenge of empowering communities, working through smcs, is essentially a human challenge, which cannot be accomplished by commands. In tribal societies, Governments, in their traditional roles established in subgroup loyalties constitutions and laws, have shown little capacity to are stronger than perform the essential, enabling roles that are necesloyalties to any sary for empowerment. These roles center on human engagement, connecting people across the subgroup government. loyalties that divide tribal societies and make nationMoving beyond building so challenging for them. In tribal societies, subgroup loyalties are stronger these loyalties is a than loyalties to any government. Moving beyond these loyalties is a challenge of trust, a challenge challenge of trust. solved by promoting communication and engagement across loyalties. The first challenge of trust, however, is not between tribes; it is within them encouraging people to step outside their traditional roles (to which they owe their first loyalty) and engage each other in active, conscious relationships. In eggs model, this happens around common concern about schools. As trust grows, natural leaders emerge and start to play a crucial role, bringing parents, teachers, community members, and girls together to accomplish multiple changes in schools. As the community pulls together and starts to work together, egg and its partners provide training to strengthen capacities in life skills and learning producing multiple outputs of school reform and community development. csos play an important role in this process both at eggs level, creating the enabling environment, and (ultimately more importantly) at the community level with local civil-society organizations representing the community. We believe that government officials can be trained to play eggs role and they need to be for both scale and sustainability but not the communitys role. The latter is for the community alone. Personal engagement is the key to this process, and csos have well-developed methods for promoting that engagement in independent schools. The great need, however, is to reform government schools, which serve most kids.

Some cso community-based-reform models, such as the unicef schools in Upper Egypt, have been very successful, working in some government schools. egg has developed another model, working in all government schools. Although problems remain to be solved (especially ensuring sustainability), and more and better evaluations need to be implemented, eggs results in Uttarakhand and Rajasthan are encouraging. Empowerment models, eggs and others, deserve experimentation in different countries, with different political systems and cultures and with other applications, starting with health. The issue of ownership is obvious in these programs, especially in meeting the challenge of sustainability of assistance. In all global regions aid projects in the form of schools and wells are falling apart because people have no stake in them. eggs model, like de Sotos, shows the extraordinary resources that the poorest people have when they are empowered rather than helped. Empowered communities that own a school or a well will protect them against terrorists and insurgents, and maintain them for sustainability. eggs experience suggests three important things about scale. First, the poor themselves need to play an active role in reforming schools and in promoting other forms of economic and social change. Second, government officials need to become active in sustaining impacts of the model and in expanding it. And finally, as in Uttarakhand and Rajasthan for the egg model, governments need to start paying for reform programs. One can imagine the time when governments pay the entire costs of programs that can achieve impacts such as eggs. These issues are especially important in relation to women and girls. When educated, women and girls are the most powerful agents of social change in most countries. Without education, they remain greatly underutilized resources for reducing poverty and promoting development. In fact, all of the major stakeholders in education, including government officials, are underutilized resources in reforming the schools. Empowering all of them is the key to reform education, reduce poverty, promote health, and accomplish many other social objectives. Empowerment is the key to bringing everyone together in these efforts and to ending much of the ideological conflict that is paralyzing political systems everywhere.
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Books The Constitution and Globalization
By Peter Berkowitz
Julian Ku and John Yoo. Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order. Oxford University Press. 272 Pages. $35.00 ne spectacular achievement of postWorld War II conservatism in America has been to renew the debate about the moral and political significance of enduring constitutional principles. Conservatives did this by recovering the understanding of those principles held by those who enshrined them in the Constitution in the summer of 1787; clarified them in the Federalist and the writings of the
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where he chairs the task force on national security and law. His writings are posted at www.PeterBerkowitz.com.
Anti-Federalists and elsewhere during the ratifying debates of 1787 and 1788; and interpreted their scope and translated them into practice while serving in high office in the early years of the republic. The American political tradition is in part constituted by a continuing debate about constitutional principles. But with the consolidation of the New Deal in the 1940s and 1950s and the entrenchment of left-liberalism in the universities and the press in the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed to many particularly in the universities and in the press that the debate had come to an end. Progressivism had triumphed, and anything in the Constitution contrary to its tenets deserved to be scorned or disregarded. Scorn there still is, but the conservative return to the Constitution including Buckley and National Review, Goldwater and Reagan, the Public Interest and Commentary, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages and scholars of the political thought of the founding, the Federalist Society and the Tea Party, to name a few individuals, publications, and organizations has made it increasingly difficult for progressives to disregard the case for the continuing salience of constitutional principles. To be sure, holdouts, some in high places, remain. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi could still respond in October 2009 to a question about specific constitutional authority for enacting an individual mandate to purchase health insurance with an incredulous, Are you serious? Are you serious? And only a few months ago online at the New York Times, University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson could denounce the
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Constitution as imbecilic and blame it rather than, say, reasoned opposition to his policy preferences or failure of his party to form a strong and enduring majority for the failure to enact a more progressive agenda. But increasingly common over the last fifteen years or so is the work of prominent progressive thinkers such as New York University professor of law Ronald Dworkin, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin. They seek to show in various ways that the Constitution embodies progressive values, and in hard cases concerning, for example, abortion, affirmative action, same-sex marriage, regulation of political speech, and health care dictates progressive outcomes. In fact, they read much more into the Constitution than they take from it. Yet the obligation they recognize to show that their political and legal doctrines are grounded in the Constitution notwithstanding, or even more so because of, the twisting and stretching, the additions and omissions, the devaluations and revaluations that they are forced to perform is testimony to the success of the conservative countermovement in making fidelity to the Constitution a touchstone of legal and political legitimacy. The impact of the post-World War II conservative countermovement has largely been felt in the realm of domestic affairs. Certainly the scope of presidential power in foreign affairs and war has been an abiding concern for conservatives over the last 60 years. Nevertheless, American conservatives have most effectively invoked constitutional principles particularly the principles of limited government and
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individual liberty to oppose the steady growth of the welfare and regulatory state. The September 11 attacks compelled conservatives to grapple with the implications of constitutional principles in regard to the interpretation and enforcement of the international laws of war. The detention, interrogation, and prosecution of al Qaeda fighters and affiliates raised novel and difficult legal questions connected to the international laws of war because the terrorists were not lawful combatants entitled to all the protections conferred on pows by the Geneva Conventions; at the same time, unlike criminals, who receive distinctive rights under domestic criminal law, the terrorists had demonstrated the intention and capacity to undertake armed attacks on the United States and inflict massive loss of life and enormous damage to civilian and military infrastructure. Progressives charged that the legal policies for the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of terrorists put in place by the Bush administration violated international law and shredded the Constitution. In fact, both Bush administration legal advisers who argued for extremely broad conceptions of presidential power and conservative critics of the Bush administration who argued for a larger role for Congress in crafting a legal regime to govern terrorist detainees drew on founding-era understandings of fundamental constitutional principles for legal guidance. The continuing controversy over the international laws of war has been a particularly prominent and urgent instance of the host of legal issues generated by globalization, or the process
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by which the affairs political, economic, social, and cultural of all states have increasingly become dependent on developments beyond their borders. In their excellent book, Julian Ku, professor of law at Hofstra University School of Law, and John Yoo, professor of law at the University of California-Berkeleys Boalt Hall School of Law, maintain that just as the New Deal nationalization of regulatory and welfare responsibilities created severe tensions with and within constitutional law, so too has the internationalization of power. In the spirit of the conservative countermovement, the authors contend the United States can best respect the claims of democracy and liberty in responding to the variety of daunting challenges to American constitutional government presented by globalization by recurring to fundamental constitutional principles. Ku and Yoo begin from common observations about globalizations reach and impact:
As never before, the U.S. economy depends on international trade, the free flow of capital, and integration into the world financial system. International events affect domestic markets and institutions more than ever. Roughly one-third of all American economic activity is related to either imports or exports. Advances in communications, transportation, and the Internet have brought great benefits to the United States. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, revealed the negative effects of globalization. Counterterrorism, immigration, the environment, drugs, crime, and even mundane issues such as traffic
flow depend on the same channels of globalization as the world economy.
And they promptly proceed to an uncommon observation: Despite the abundant interest in globalization among scholars from many different fields and angles, few have examined its impact on the American constitutional order, or given much thought to the guidance that reflection on constitutional principle can yield in dealing with globalizations impact. The authors write neither as critics of nor cheerleaders for globalization, but as sober observers who appreciate its inevitability and the need to design laws to reduce costs and increase benefits from the new forms of international cooperation and global governance that globalization has spawned. They recognize that we are not living through the first revolution in communications and transportation to have made the world smaller and to have knitted the international order together more tightly. But because globalization has to an unprecedented degree accelerated the pace of integration and mutual dependence among states, it demands unprecedented levels of international cooperation and in many areas, including protection of the environment, regulation of the flow of capital, and prevention of the trafficking of drugs and other criminal activities. The intensified demands for international cooperation give rise in the United States to hard constitutional questions about the distribution of political authority among branches of the federal government and between the federal government and the states:
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To what extent do international court judgments have force in American law, invalidating otherwise valid judgments by domestic courts? Can the President and the Senate together sign an international treaty that binds the United States to either legalize or criminalize abortion, or are issues of family law reserved as a matter of American law for the states? Should international and foreign laws be used to interpret the U.S. Constitution? May Congress and the President delegate federal authority to international organizations to regulate domestic conduct, for instance, in arms control or carbon emissions?
It is to answering these hard questions that Ku and Yoo devote the bulk of their book. But first they lay out the most pertinent constitutional principles, beginning with the idea of popular sovereignty, which inspired the American Revolution, was resoundingly affirmed in the Declaration of Independence, and was crystalized in the Constitution. It holds that all legitimate political power is derived from the consent of the governed and so views the people as the ultimate sovereign authority. Accordingly, political institutions and office holders in America are agents of the people whose powers are delegated to them by the people through the Constitution. Ku and Yoo also stress two critical structural principles embodied in the Constitution: the separation of powers and federalism. The separation of powers refers to the division of the federal government into the legislative, execu98
tive, and judicial branches and the system of checks and balances that allows the branches to cooperate with and constrain each other. Federalism involves the distribution of power and responsibilities between the federal government and the many state governments. In stressing the importance of respecting popular sovereignty, the separation of powers, and federalism in responding to the opportunities and pressures of globalization, Ku and Yoo oppose the scholarly consensus. The question of how to harmonize international law and foreign affairs with the American political and legal system has largely been neglected by professors of constitutional law, and even more so by professors of political science specializing in American politics. Instead, it has been mainly pursued by international law scholars. The dominant school of international law scholarship is internationalism. Internationalists typically accord great authority to international law and international organizations; believe that treaties (signed by the president and approved by two-thirds of the Senate) are self-executing, or not in need of implementing legislation (passed by Congress and signed into law by the president) to be enforceable in courts; contend that international law, including treaties and the judgments of international courts, may automatically supersede state law in many areas in which states have been traditionally responsible, such as crime, the family, and education; consider domestic courts the sole arbiter of the legal effect of treaties and international institutions; and maintain that domestic courts face no particular obstacles in
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incorporating customary international law and the laws of other nations into domestic American law. Transnationalists including the Obama administrations former head of the State Departments Policy Planning Staff, Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, and the Obama administrations legal adviser to the State Department, Yale Law School professor Harold Koh go further. They maintain that globalization has accelerated the disaggregation of the nationstate, creating informal and independent but legitimate sources of international authority and lawmaking, such as international organizations, networks of ngos, and the worldwide community of judges. Law emanating from these sources, the transnationalists argue, may supersede or determine domestic law. A few revisionists have emerged in recent years including University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis, and George Mason University law professors Ilya Somin and Jeremy Rabkin. The revisionists argue that the views espoused by the internationalists and the transnationalists warp moral and political problems between states; instead of allowing them to be dealt with by politicians and diplomats, the transnationlists turn them into legal problems to be solved by international lawyers. The revisionists also contend that the internationalists and transnationalists attribute a domestic force to international law that lacks democratic legitimacy and erodes national sovereignty. In significant measure, and by design, Ku and Yoo avoid the controversies in which the revisionists are
enmeshed. Rather than focus on theoretical questions about the status of international law, their inquiry is a practical one that explores how the United States should incorporate into domestic law the international law standards that it chooses to follow. Ku and Yoo, moreover, do not proceed on the so-called originalist grounds that characterize much conservative jurisprudence. That is, they do not contend that the Framers intentions concerning, say, the scope of international law or how treaties should be handled resolve todays controversies. Rather, acknowledging that globalization presents many stubborn dilemmas the Constitutions framers could not have foreseen, the authors maintain that we should be guided today by the whole American constitutional tradition, which accords high importance to constitutional principles but also embraces the development of American politics and law, with careful attention given to Supreme Court decisions. Fidelity to the underlying principles of this tradition, they believe, can tame globalization by rendering the process by which international law and obligations acquire the force of law in the United States more transparent, more responsive to the will of the people, and more consistent with the requirements of individual liberty. The authors offer three doctrines grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty and reflecting the imperatives of the separation of powers and federalism to harmonize the demands of globalization with constitutional law and guide the incorporation of international law into domestic law. First, treaties should be presumed non-self-executing: Once a treaty has been signed by the president
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and approved by the Senate, it should require implementing legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president to give it the force of law in domestic affairs. Second, the president rather than the courts should take the lead role in the interpretation of customary international law, or that part of international law that arises through the longstanding practice of states. This division of labor is appropriate because a heavy admixture of policy considerations goes into the determination and application of customary international law, and the executive branch is designed to handle and possesses greater competence in foreign affairs. As a corollary, the authors would require congressional legislation to give any particular aspect of customary international law the force of binding domestic law. And, third, an independent, if limited role, should be carved out for states in matters of international law and foreign affairs that touch on traditional areas of state law, and particularly in trade, culture, and education. This, Ku and Yoo maintain, would better respect state sovereignty and take fuller advantage of state governments knowledge of local conditions. Through detailed examination of a variety of constitutional cases and controversies, the authors show the United States should adopt these three doctrines because they are prudent, making it more likely that the country will benefit from international cooperation, in war and peace, while preserving democratic accountability and individual liberty. Ku and Yoo have written a scholarly book that deserves to be read widely and debated vigorously. In a domain where the Constitution has continued
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to be scorned and disregarded, they have demonstrated that constitutional principles form a sturdy and flexible framework within which to deal with the challenges of a globalized 21st century world.
By William Anthony Hay

N i c h o l as A . L a m b e rt . Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War. H a rva r d U n i v e rs i t y P r e s s . 6 6 2 Pages. $45.00. ealth may provide the sinews of war, but policymakers have also asked whether economic power itself can be harnessed as an offensive weapon. Since victory means imposing ones will upon an adversary and not merely winning battles, economic power should provide valuable leverage. Indeed, it
The Great Wars Economic Front
William Anthony Hay, a historian at Mississippi State University and author of The Whig Revival, 18081830 (Palgrave, 2005 ), is writing a life of the second Earl of Liverpool, British prime minister from 1812 to 1827 .
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might even preclude the need to fight. Blockades long played an important part in war, and sanctions became a common diplomatic tool in the 20th century. Unfortunately, such measures provide a blunt instrument. Or, to vary the metaphor, economic pressure can be a double-edged sword as ready to cut the power wielding it as the opponent at which it is aimed. Can it force an opponent to concede? Does it risk collateral damage, either by injuring the country attempting economic war or by provoking others to intervene? Recent economic sanctions have proven hard to enforce. Governments imposing them face the burden of keeping them in place over time against growing resistance, and countries neighboring target states often demand exemptions to spare their economies the fallout or facilitate evasion. Wartime blockades involved higher stakes and consequently brought greater risk. Although Britain claimed a legal right to interdict trade from the mid-18th century, its efforts during the American War of Independence brought the Dutch Republic into the conflict and prompted other maritime states to form a Russian-led league of armed neutrality. The same pattern during Britains wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France expanded the conflict by forcing neutral states to take sides. Napoleon invaded Spain, Portugal, and Russia partly to enforce his own system of trade war against Britain, while the British attacked Denmark to keep it from siding with France. The United States responded to being caught in the middle by first imposing an embargo on exports, which mainly hurt its own citizens, and then fighting the War of
1812 against Britain. Economic warfare during the Napoleonic era gave later strategists a case study even as technology changed the application of sea power. Woodrow Wilson went further in remarking during Americas neutrality early in World War I that the circumstances of the war of 1812 and now run parallel. Yet they diverged enough to prevent another war between the United States and Britain. The story of how tensions during World War I took a different course from the Napoleonic era illuminates economic warfares limitations with broader lessons for what it can and cannot accomplish. In Planning Armageddon, Nicholas Lambert meticulously reconstructs the process by which Britain developed and then implemented plans for economic warfare against Germany. His well-written, though detailed, account provides a revisionist interpretation of British strategy which calls into question received opinion on how the Royal Navy aimed to fight a European war. Studies of war plans before 1914 highlight discussions about bringing the war to Germany by inshore operations and amphibious landings along the coast that fit the Royal Navys traditional strategy and cultural emphasis on the offensive. When geographical constraints and weapons technology precluded such measures, Britain engaged Germanys army alongside its French ally in what became a terrible war of attrition. The navy accordingly took a supportive role convoying men and material to France while denying Germany access to the sea. Documents give credence to this conventional account, which makes sense against the course of World War
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I, but Lambert uncovers another set of ideas from the deliberations among naval planners that formed the cornerstone of British grand strategy by 1914. International law and technologies including the mine and torpedo made impractical the kind of blockade the Royal Navy had traditionally employed to interdict enemy trade completely, but an alternative strategy leveraged Britains control over the infrastructure of global trade to coerce Germany. Planners saw that denying Germany access to the shipping, communications, and financial services that Britain dominated would impose unbearable economic costs without interdicting cargoes. Their approach to economic warfare extended beyond a blockade to involve all necessary steps for disrupting an already strained enemy economy. Sufficient disruption would compel Germany to accept peace on British terms as effectively as battlefield victory. British officials, including the Admiralty, always had been preoccupied with the task of protecting the global trading system from serious disruption in wartime for their own defense. Now the impact of disruption offered a potent weapon against Germany, especially if Britain fought as part of a coalition whose assistance would help isolate its economy. Germany depended upon imports to feed its population and sustain industrial production. Losing access to foreign export markets had a further impact by reducing foreign earnings. Blockades imposed such constraints by interdicting maritime commerce, but economic warfare reached further in disrupting trade at various choke points. The fact that British merchant ships carried German trade insured by British com102
panies and financed by British banks pointed to other ways of disrupting vital trade. Germany relied on credit floated in London to handle foreign transactions short-term bills readily sold there offered an easy means of payment and as a source of working capital for enterprises. Neutral countries lacked sufficient merchant tonnage to make up for the denial of British ships. Even without physically interdicting goods, Britain could inflict tremendous damage on a German economy that already would be reeling from the dislocations brought by a panic at the declaration of war. The Admiralty believed pushing Germany into unemployment, distress, and eventually bankruptcy would cripple its war effort while sparking social discord with serious political consequences. Economic warfare played to British strengths, while other possibilities exposed limits. Lambert describes the oft-cited plans for amphibious landings as a secondary option rather than the basis of strategy. Sir John Fisher, head of the British Admiralty, tempered his earlier support for such operations given the risk to capital ships from torpedoes and mines. He took an even stronger line against sending British troops to the continent because that would enable Germany to strike a blow against Britain by focusing overwhelming force against an army that could not be replaced. He thus concluded the best assistance Britain could provide France would be to impose such economic pressure on Germany that it could not continue the war.
mplementing economic warfare, however, required cooperation from other departments,

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particularly the Treasury and the Board of Trade, which had their own agendas. The strategy required an unprecedented degree of government intervention across a range of activities from banking and shipping to censorship of cable communications. A prewar committee on trading with the enemy looked into regulating Britains merchant fleet, imposing controls over the financial services industry, and censoring belligerent communications through the cable networks which ran through Britain. Simply gathering information to deliberate on these points required help from the Foreign Office, War Office, and the Board of Trade, along with civilian experts. Actually setting and implementing policies would mean working together more closely than seemed likely. The Admiralty, Lambert notes, kept back the specifics on its plans for a distant blockade as part of economic warfare, while other departments questioned the practicability of various measures or opposed them outright. Prewar deliberations showed the difficulty of forging a consensus on economic warfare and the measures it involved. Resistance went beyond the bureaucratic politics sparked by departmental rivalries. The emerging strategy gave the British government an unprecedented role in managing trade, which itself raised concerns. Generations after 1914 did not appreciate the prewar commitment to laissez-faire and minimal state economic oversight. Plans to disrupt German trade by withholding access to British merchant shipping, finance, or commercial services forced officials to think beyond the assumptions of the day. Cutting further against the political grain was the idea to delegate
authority before war broke out so that measures could be set in train immediately. Lambert notes that although economic warfare had become the cornerstone of British strategy against Germany, plans for waging it had not been worked out in detail. Key questions thus remained open when war began in August 1914. The drama of the military crisis as fighting escalated overshadows in public memory the economic shockwaves war brought. Admiralty planners had anticipated disruption and their strategy aimed to capitalize on it, but the consequences raised problems which disrupted their plans. Trade dropped amidst uncertainty. The cabinet deliberated in August on how aggressively to prosecute economic war. Restricting neutral trade that gave Germany a windpipe to the global economy divided ministers, and the cabinet retreated from a strict ban. Limiting British and imperial exports also sparked opposition, and the eventual order clarifying policy on economic warfare left great discretion to individual departments. Cabinet unity in early weeks came at the expense of effective policy. The political commitment to economic warfare crumbled, as Lambert writes, over fears about Britains capacity to weather the storm and resistance from interest groups hurt by the crisis. Herbert Asquiths decision to set political considerations first highlights the fragile basis on which prewar decisions rested, and expectations of a short war made it easy to relax controversial measures. The repercussions for neutral powers of Britains economic war were among the many concerns. Geography placed the Netherlands, and to a lesser
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degree Scandinavia, on the front lines, but the United States presented a much greater difficulty given the size of its economy and its dependence on exports. The impact of restricting trade brought protests from the start, and attempts to evade British measures became a high-stakes game. Economic disruption at the outbreak of war hit the United States hard. Washington already had exchange rate problems from the August crisis, when European investors liquidated American securities and converted dollars into gold. Trade restrictions precluded the obvious correction of earning foreign currency through exports. The collapse of cotton exports had a cascading effect on the domestic economy in the South, with obvious political consequences. Not only did the United States require export earnings to stabilize its economy, the whole question of blockade aroused memories of the War of 1812. British officials soon faced a choice between quarreling with Washington and keeping Germany from drawing overseas supplies. When the Royal Navy forced German ships into neutral ports, their owners tried to cut their financial losses by selling the ships, and many found American buyers. Congress passed legislation to facilitate the transfer, and American companies hoped to use ships they had acquired to transport their goods to Europe. The United States also took steps to acquire vessels the federal government would own and operate. Doing so knocked a hole in British efforts to block trade with Germany by denying access to shipping. Although international law subjected vessels reflagged during wartime to seizure, the British risked
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confrontation with Washington and, accordingly, backed away from enforcement. The issue set the British Foreign Office and Admiralty at odds, and contributed to Anglo-American tensions along with conflicts within the government. Betting on a short war, the British first relaxed and then effectively suspended economic warfare by October 1914. When the reality of a protracted war became clear, however, the moment to score a decisive blow by imposing a sudden economic stranglehold on Germany had passed. The British government then improvised a new approach, known as blockade, which promised less effect on Germany while demanding more coordination among government departments to control trade. Unlike a traditional blockade, the system required more than commanding the sea and sought to manage the shipment of strategic materials, which included food. Restricting European demand rather than interdicting overseas trade limited open confrontation with the United States, but it had its own problems: e.g., Dutch and Scandinavian merchants often collaborated with American producers to ship food products to Germany. Britains desire for strategic imports from those smaller neutrals limited the leverage it could apply. Countries demanded return cargoes of British coal for their own shipping. Thus did various little compromises and the difficulty of waging economic war gradually lead the British government to give up its prewar strategy for a less effective system of blockade that created fewer problems. Lambert argues that the British never actually implemented the ecoPolicy Review
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nomic warfare of the prewar naval planners. Rather than being tried and found wanting, Asquiths cabinet feared the plan would itself be trying and, accordingly, did not want to pursue the strategy aggressively. Lambert underlines the point by asking whether the strategy could have worked had the British fully implemented it. Would the collapse of Germanys finances have had a decisive political effect? What measures would Germany have taken to counter a more robust economic war? The lack of data makes any effort at answering the questions speculative, and such answers are beyond the scope of Lamberts book. His project analyzes how naval strategists tried to solve a problem based on the economic realities of their day. The story Lambert recounts frames not only the development of British strategy but also the way Britain waged war from 1914. What broader lessons about economic warfare does Lamberts Planning Armageddon offer? The strategy he describes reflects Britains uniquely dominant position in the early-20thcentury global economy as a center of finance, shipping, and communication. Other countries before and since have lacked that degree of leverage one that allows for going beyond simply restricting maritime trade to attempt to disrupt, systematically, an enemys internal economy. A few points, however, seem relevant today. Every nations economy has key choke points whether access to finance, transport, strategic materials, or even vital export markets that offer adversaries leverage. Imposing pressure can inflict significant strain, even if that damage falls short of Armageddon. Any measures to disrupt trade beyond a naval blockade
require a coordinated effort among government agencies and private sector groups, along with their foreign counterparts, which means considerable political friction. Collateral damage to domestic or allied interest groups imposes costs, but the real danger lies in antagonizing neutral parties, whose trade suffers. The hopes among those early-20th-century British planners of inflicting a knockout blow by economic means notwithstanding, the more realistic approach is to apply slow pressure that erodes the enemys capacity to wage war or compels it to abandon an objectionable policy. Costs have to be measured against the benefits. Indeed, economic warfare works most effectively as a supplement to other military or political measures rather than as a substitute for them. Policymakers take note.
Theodore K. Rabb. The Artist and the Warrior: Military History through the Eyes of the Masters. Ya l e University Press. 288 Pages. $45. ar brings out the best and the very worst in man: Heroism, self-sacrifice, and endurance among the virtues; cruelty, cowardice, and treachery among the vices. Add color and spectacle and it is little wonder that war has inspired artists throughout history.
By Henrik Bering
War Paint
Henrik Bering is a writer and critic.
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When it comes to heroics, JacquesLouis Davids colossal canvas Bonaparte Crossing the St. Bernard Pass delivers, and then some: In his portrait, which was ordered by the king of Spain, David shows Napoleon as the warrior superhero, astride a rearing stallion, his windswept cloak clinging to his body, and with the names of his predecessors Hannibal and Charlemagne carved in the rock face. Never mind that in reality, Napoleon had to resort to a lowly but surefooted mule for the descent, and, losing patience, at one point even got off to slide on his rear. Early in the year 1800, Napoleons career was in urgent need of repair: As a result of Nelsons destruction of the French fleet, Napoleons expeditionary force was still stuck in the sands of Egypt, where shamefully he had abandoned it. The Austrians were on the move in Italy. But with his surprise move across the Alps, ending in his victory over Baron Melas, the Austrian commander, at Marengo, he was back in business. To celebrate this feat, David was forced to work from a dummy, as Napoleon had proved unwilling to pose, but understandably, when Napoleon saw the finished work, he promptly requested three copies for himself. At the other end of the spectrum we find Francisco Goyas 82 prints, titled Disasters of War, from the Peninsula War: In 1 8 0 7 , the French and the Spaniards had invaded Portugal to eject the Brits, but it did not take long for Napoleon to betray his Spanish allies and become an occupier. His troops were living off the land, which makes sense when you have a huge army to feed, but does not endear you to the
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locals. The Spaniards responded by waging guerrilla war, little war, the origin of that term. The attacks triggered savage reprisals from the French troops, and Goyas prints show the sufferings of the civilian population. They feature nameless victims, priests being murdered, women being raped, people dying of famine or facing execution. Thus plate 37, This Is Worse, shows a mutilated body, its arms missing, impaled on a tree trunk; the figure brings to mind a classical marble torso and indeed Goya partly relied on a sketch of the Belvedere torso in Rome except this version is flesh and blood. A few prints show French soldiers being hacked to death. The message is that war is hell: Though Goyas sympathy lies with his countrymen, heinous deeds are committed by both sides. The contrasting ways of representing war, as highlighted by the examples above, are examined in Theodore K. Rabbs crisp The Artist and the Warrior: Military History through the Eyes of the Masters. Originally, the two protagonists in the books title coexisted peacefully, with the artist celebrating the deeds of the soldier, but over the centuries the relationship has developed into one of skepticism and even antagonism on the artists part, which Rabb, perhaps a little too readily, accepts as the natural relationship between these two very different occupations. As he makes clear in the foreword, owing to the fluctuating quality of the works that various wars have inspired, he bases his selections on artistic merit and concentrates on the masterpieces, rather than taking his point of departure in the historical event itself. This
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means that just because a historical event is important, say Trafalgar or Waterloo, this does not automatically ensure its inclusion, as Napoleon no doubt would be relieved to hear. he roman artists certainly knew how to honor military heroes, including one not their own, Alexander the Great, who defeated the Scythians and the Parthians and went all the way to India, and who all subsequent military men strove to emulate. The Alexander Mosaic, found in Pompeii and now housed in the Museum of Naples, shows Alexander in full attack while a wild-eyed king Darius is in frantic flight looking back over his shoulder. Though parts are missing, with its forward sweep, the mosaic conveys the idea of Alexander as an irresistible force, scything everything in his path. Among emperors of the homegrown variety, Rabb chooses the six-foot marble statue of Augustus found in 1883 in the ruins of his wife Livias villa in Prima Porta, outside Rome, which has Augustus dressed in military garb and with arm outstretched, in the act of addressing his troops. Rabb notes the calm and relaxed pose of the figure: The statue oozes self confidence. Augustuss breast plate features two sphinxes, referring to his victory over Mark Antony in the battle of Actium. His consular baton symbolizes the legitimacy of his power, and his bare feet underscore his divine status: He is the embodiment of the authority of the Rome. The model for all later man-onhorseback statues is also found in Rome: the eleven-foot bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius, most of whose reign
was taken up battling the Germanic tribes. Though not in military garb, his gesture is still that of the conqueror, notes Rabb, and the artist has deliberately made him bigger than his horse proportionally. Quite a lot bigger, actually one step further and the effect would have been comic, like Clint Eastwood on his mule in A Fistful of Dollars. As it is, this is one emperor unlikely ever to be thrown by his horse. Of monuments marking Roman victories, the Titus and Constantine triumphal arches speak for themselves, but the most impressive architectural feat is still Trajans column, constructed from twenty drums of marble, which immortalizes his two wars against the Dacians. What is fascinating about it, notes Rabb, is that it combines celebration with reportage and includes every aspect of the warfare, including the digging of moats and building of fortified encampments, the crossing of the Danube by a bridge constructed by boats, and the performance of religious sacrifices. The emperor himself is shown in a wide variety of situations addressing his troops, interrogating a prisoner, and receiving the severed heads of Dacian warriors while the defeated king Decebalus is about to commit suicide by slitting his throat. It is safe to say that the Romans werent big on compassion: Vanquished barbarian enemies were taken in triumph, sold as slaves, trained as gladiators, or put to work in the mines. That was only their just desserts for having opposed the might of Rome.
rawing on ancient classical models and adding some touches of its own, the
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Renaissance produced its share of impressive warrior images, many of them inspired by the wars between the Italian city-states. Of all the equestrian statues in the world, Rabb singles out Andrea del Verrocchios monument to Colleoni as the most impressive in its portrayal of naked power. Colleoni was a soldier of fortune who became captain-general of Venice: The statue, placed outside the church of Santi Giovanni Paolo, shows him tall in the saddle, single-minded and unshakable in his purpose. One almost senses the peasants bowing their heads in submission as he passes. At this point Rabb registers a slight shift, as additional attributes show up in the portrayal of the warrior. The duke of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro, who in one of his campaigns had been up against Colleoni, certainly had the battle scars to prove his valor, including a lost eye. But Montefeltro was no mere soldier. He had an impressive library and was a patron of the arts. An early Renaissance portrait by Pedro Berruguete shows Montefeltro absorbed in a book while Piero della Francesca, in an altarpiece, shows him deep in prayer. Montefeltro is the scholar- soldier, proving that that guts and brains are perfectly compatible. The same aspects are stressed in Donatellos bronze statue of David in Florence, which turns the Old Testament story into a contemporary comment on the Medicis struggle with the Viscontis of Milan: As Robb notes, the Visconti emblem featured a crown with feathered wings, and Goliaths winged helmet clearly makes him a Visconti warrior. But David is no triumphalist victor thumping his chest.
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With his foot resting on Goliaths severed head, he is lost in thought, and again conveys the Renaissance ideal of mind and muscle combined. But according to Rabb, the truly revolutionary change occurs in the 16th and 17th centuries, when gunpowder is transforming warfare, making it less a test of individual bravery and skill, and hence a less ennobling affair and one less worthy of the artists admiration. War was becoming impersonal, and death random. Religious wars and civil wars are considered the most ferocious: The Thirty Years War devastated whole regions of Europe, with Germany losing as much as one third of its population, and split apart the long tradition of unstinting praise for the warrior, writes Rabb. From now on, the focus increasingly centers on the inhumanity of war, and on its victims, be they innocent civilians or crippled soldiers. Rabb sees Pieter Breughel as the prophet of this new vision with his painting The Massacre of the Innocents, in which the biblical scene has been transferred to Europe. It shows Spanish troops, tasked with suppressing the Dutch protestant revolt, entering a Flemish village and killing Flemish children with ruthless abandon on a winters day. As Rabb notes, a version of the painting was later bought by Rudolf II, the Habsburg emperor who was Philip IIs nephew and an admirer of Breughel. However, as he found Breughels motif a little too critical of his uncle, he had the children painted out and animals put in instead, turning it into a mere scene of plunder, a kind of Massacre of the Innocents-lite. While Titian would still do his Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto celePolicy Review
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brating Philip IIs victory over the Turks, with a chained and sorry looking Turkish prisoner at Philips feet, Diego Velazquez, some 60 years later in his Surrender of Breda, shows himself subtly in tune with the new spirit. His depiction of the Spanish commanderin-chief Ambrogio Spinola presents him accepting the surrender of the Dutch leaders. But significantly, the latter are not treated like the vanquished Roman foes on Trajans column or like the unhappy, hog-tied Turk in Titians painting; rather, they are accorded courtesy and respect. The emphasis here, Rabb notes, is on gentleness and reconciliation. More direct is Horrors of War by Peter Paul Rubens, who in the past had not shown himself averse to portraying martial glory, but here, in a commission by the grand duke of Tuscany, paints Mars ready to go on a rampage as he tears himself loose from the embrace of Venus and is dragged along by Fury. Pestilence and Famine join the party. At the bottom, a terrified mother clutches a child; an architect, compass in hand, has been knocked over; and under Marss feet lies a trampled book, proof that war is the destroyer of art and architecture, of civilization itself, as Rubens carefully explained in a letter. u t as p e r h a p s the most intriguing proponent of the changed view Rabb picks Jacques Callot, the baroque printmaker and draftsman from the independent Duchy of Lorraine, which was invaded by Louis XIIIs troops during the Thirty Years War. At first glance, Callots series of seventeen etchings The Miseries of War, measuring only 8 to 9 centimeters by eighteen to nineteen cenAugust & September 2012 109
timeters, seem rather innocuous in their elegant workmanship. Then you take a closer look. Carrying titles like Pillage of a Cloister and Plunder of a Village, they record the misdeeds of a group of marauders terrorizing the countryside; they engage in an orgy of rape and murder until finally being brought to justice. Number 11, The Hanging, is the most horrific: It shows a tree full of looters strung up for their misdeeds, with the army looking on. On the side, a condemned man is given the final blessing by a monk, on the other side two thieves play dice on a drum to decide who is next for the hangmans rope. Underneath is a text written in French: In the end, these infamous and lost thieves hanging like evil fruit from the tree, prove that the crime, terrible and dark as it is, is also the instrument of shame and revenge, and that it is the destiny of evil men to incur, sooner or later, the justice of the heavens. As art historian Diane Wolfthal has pointed out, it is not so much war as such that Callot opposes but its abuses: In Callots day, looting was deemed acceptable, but in certain cases exceptions could be made: Clergy, travelers, women, and children were not to be harassed and these are the very ones who appear in Callots prints being brutalized by the marauders. By contrast, the virtuous soldiers are shown being rewarded by the king. The shock effect deriving from the contrast between detached style and violent content in Callots prints brings to mind the 2000 installation Hell, by the British Chapman Brothers, consisting of nine model landscapes with some 5,000 miniature toy soldiers. Normally toy soldiers are associated with child-
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hood innocence, but here the tableaux formed a swastika and were peopled by Nazi troops torturing and butchering Russian soldiers, operating gas ovens, and crucifying prisoners. When destroyed by warehouse fire in 2004, the installation was reconstructed as F-g Hell, and has by now multiplied into 30,000 tiny creatures of evil. ccording to rabb, in the period 16401800, warfare became more restrained and drill and discipline were stricter signs of the militarys greater integration in the state. We must be most careful to leave the peasants with enough grain not only to live, but to sow their ground for another harvest, particularly if we have reason to think that the next campaign will be waged in the same area, wrote French cavalry Brigadier Turpin de Crisse in 1754, displaying enlightened self-interest. Much energy was spent on what Rabb terms territorial jockeying. During this period painters of course would still paint battles and successful commanders, but in muted form, and often displaying documentary instinct rather than the passion Rabb requires from a masterpiece; they therefore get short shrift. A little too short, perhaps: Whats wrong with Benjamin Wests Death of General Wolfe? But passion returned with a vengeance with Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution, which saw the emergence of revolutionary nationalism and huge armies. As the chief proponent of revolutionary ardor, David started out by painting ancient Roman and Greek heroes from the days of the republic to serve as the model for the revolution. He became its
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chief choreographer, creating spectacle and costumes and he backed it in its most virulent form, portraying Marat, the nastiest of its pamphleteers, as a murdered martyr in his bathtub, complete with religious iconography. When the revolution had devoured its own, David switched to glorifying Napoleon, the Hitler of his day, but according to Rabb, his portrait of Bonaparte traversing the Alps represents the final flourish in a long heroic tradition. Not that there havent been plenty of men on horseback since, both paintings and statues, but, says Rabb, they appear tame by comparison. From this point on, the victim takes center stage: The future (at least in the creation of masterpieces) was to belong to the Goyas, not the Davids, Rabb writes. Goya is believed to have based his Disasters of War on Callots Miseries, but, as Wolfthal has noted, they are more direct in their effects, employing as they do fierce clashes of light and darkness, distortion and close-ups. They were not, however, published until the 1860s, more than three decades after his death in 1828, perhaps because Goya did not want to alienate his establishment customers in the Bourbon dynasty. Of Goyas oils, the most revolutionary is The Third of May 1808 , a night scene in which French soldiers by lantern light execute Spanish rebels. The central prisoner, dressed in a white shirt, his arms outstretched, strikes a Christ-like pose, and Rabb sees the painting as representing the the beginning of modern art. Thus Goyas influence is immediately apparent in Manets portrayal of the execution of Emperor Maximilian, where street urchins on top of the wall watch the
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scene in amusement like spectators at a puppet theatre, while behind the firing squad, the sergeant in charge fiddles with his rifle, displaying an attitude of massive unconcern. n the 20th century, the horrors on the battlefield reached new heights. During World War I, John Singer Sargent, otherwise known for his elegant society portraits, was asked by the British government to visit the front and record his impressions. Rabb highlights Gassed as the true masterpiece of that war. Recalling Breughels rendering of the biblical parable in his painting The Blind Leading the Blind, Gassed shows a line of nine soldiers, all blinded, each with the hand on the shoulder of the one before him, and guided along by a corporal. In the foreground the wounded are strewn, and to the left another line of blinded soldiers arrives. From the same war, Rapp mentions C.R.W. Nevinsons Paths of Glory the title a reference to Thomas Grays Elegy in a Country Churchyard, where the paths of glory lead but to the grave which shows two lifeless Tommys before the German barbed wire, and which was banned by the censors. On the German side, Rabb selects George Groszs savage caricature The Card Players of maimed veterans at the gambling table with various body parts missing. A fitting memorial to the carnage of World War I is found in Sir Edward Lutyenss austere red brick Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, which has turned the triumphal arch into a monument of sorrow. Rabb ends his book with Picassos Guernica from the Spanish Civil War:
Movies have now taken over as the chief renderer of war, and he singles out Stanley Kubricks Paths of Glory, which centers on the mutiny of French soldiers in 1917 and the execution of three of them, as the cinematic successor to Goyas Disasters of War. nvariably, in any book of this kind, one may quibble with some of the authors omissions. Davids younger contemporary Theodore Gericaults first major effort, The Charging Chasseur, from 1812, comes to mind: The painting features an officer of the Imperial Guards on a wildly rearing gray steed with a magnificent leopard saddle blanket, twisted in the saddle to fend off of some unseen enemy surely the ultimate rendering of the white-hot passion of battle. But Gericault merits only a single sentence in the book, his art dismissed as done in an elegiac mood, lamenting the end of Napoleonic glory. Among the pacifist efforts, one misses Otto Dixs World War I triptych War, with the main panel showing a rotting landscape over which a decomposed body in a shredded uniform hovers like some hideous angel of death, pointing the way to hell. More generally, since Rabb has made plain his approach from the beginning, one cannot blame him for sticking to it. But the flip side of restricting yourself to masterpieces is that the selections become a little too predictable, and, as Rabb himself freely acknowledges, leave out whole swathes of military history. In addition to the 16401800 period mentioned above, there is nothing from the British Empire during the Victorian period, a not unimportant period in world histo-
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ry, but unfortunately not one distinguished by great art. But the question one would have liked the book to probe more critically is where the artists by now reflexive concern for victims has led him indeed, how well qualified the artist has shown himself to be when it comes to weighing matters of war and peace. Though routinely ascribed godlike gifts of intuition and insight, there are, after all, plenty of artists whose grasp of reality has been tenuous at best, and who have displayed double standards to an alarming degree. Just as one would hate to take ones political guidance from the heroic efforts produced from David, magnificent though they are, so one would decline to be led by Pablo Picasso, recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, who passionately condemned fascist crimes in Spain but was perfectly happy to lend his name to the communist cause until his death in 1973. This issue becomes especially important in a democratic age: Surely, there is a difference between the wars of the past, where autocratic rulers fought it out among themselves with little consideration for those paying the price, and todays wars, where democracies take up arms against dictatorships or religious fanatics. Which again leads one to question how natural or appropriate the adversarial relationship between the artist and the warrior really is in our own age. In the post-World War II era, focusing single-mindedly on civilian suffering to the exclusion of every other consideration all too often seems to provide the artist with a convenient excuse for engaging in facile pacifism occasionally to the point of actively supporting the other side out of some misguided sympathy for the underdog. Such mindless pacifism seems a copout, moral cowardice masquerading as high principle. Only a fool would glorify war, but ultimately it is the warrior who guarantees the artists right to paint or sculpt or the filmmakers right make films as he pleases. And in doing so, the warrior still performs acts of courage and self-sacrifice which merit the artists appreciation. The Iwo Jima Memorial proves that it is possible to hit the right note: It does not glorify war, but it portrays the Marines grim determination in the cause of freedom. It is the perfect tribute to the democratic warrior.
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The Mismeasure of Inequality

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