Much of my life has been spent in institutions dedicated to public policy: the State Department, the Rand Corporation and the Rand Graduate School, George Mason’s School of Public Policy, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and now Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. People in these places make policy, give advice about what governments should do, or else try to equip students with high-powered techniques to achieve the same end.

As I’ve gotten older, however, I’ve come to realize that the emphasis put on public policy is mistaken, and that what we should be focusing on and teaching is basic public administration.

There, I’ve said it. Uttering the words “public administration” usually puts people into an instant stupor, or else sends them scrambling to check for messages on their iPhones. But in fact, the biggest problems we face in contemporary governance are often not related to what the government should do, but rather how to actually get the existing machinery to implement a policy that everyone can agree upon.

There are no end of examples of this. In many developing countries, before you can even address the question of the best public school curriculum, you have to solve the problem of getting teachers to show up for their classes every day. My Stanford colleague Scott Rozelle describes an initiative in rural China to get school principals to encourage anemic children to take daily vitamin tablets, the cognitive advantages of which had been proven beyond a doubt. This policy was stymied when the principals gave out eggs instead (which contain no iron), and the parents could not be persuaded to comply–and this in an authoritarian country where everyone assumes the government’s orders will be obeyed.

When it comes to the United States, we of course argue about the direction of policy–higher or lower taxes, whether to build a pipeline through the Midwest, etc. But anyone who has spent time in government realizes that the real questions that preoccupy officials have to do with implementation, or rather, the impossibility of implementing many desirable policies because of the huge number of constraints under which modern governments work. This is certainly the observation of another Stanford colleague, Jeremy Weinstein, who has just returned from Stanford after a stint on the Obama administration’s National Security Council working on democracy and development issues. Despite huge efforts to reform the civilian side of our foreign policy apparatus, aid programs in critical countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan are a mess. Poor implementation undercuts US foreign policy goals, as in the case of the botched occupation of Iraq.

Fixing the public sector therefore has got to be a top priority for anyone interested in public policy. In countries where public services work relatively efficiently, like those in Scandinavia, people are willing to tolerate high tax levels because they think they’re getting something back. In the US, however, as in Latin America, many people object to higher taxes because they are convinced that the government will simply waste their money. The inability to implement effectively affects what policies will be chosen; the Obama administration’s arguments for universal health care in the US would have been much more persuasive if people thought the government could deliver on its promises.

So: stop worrying about public policy, and go back to humbler concerns about public administration. Solve that, and you’ll rise to the top politically.

One of the most obvious policy initiatives that the United States could undertake right now is is to seriously up the amount of help being given Mexico to bolster security along the US-Mexican border and to help to reform the Mexican judicial system.  We started this process last year with the Merida Initiative, but the latter needs to be expanded and better funded right now.  This is what they call a no-brainer.

The drug war in Mexico that has been in the news recently started due to the personal commitment undertaken by Mexican President Felipe Calderόn to eliminate the influence of narco-traffickers after his election in December 2006. The war has been fought in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez right on the American border, as well as in southern states like Sinaloa and Guerrero. Since the current war began in early 2007, nearly 10,000 people have been killed, 6,286 of them in 2008 alone.

The reason that Mexico has such a big problem with narco-traffickers, aside from the existence of a huge market for drugs to the north, is the weakness of certain basic Mexican institutions, and particularly its judicial system. Mexico like the United States is a federal state, and responsibility for dealing with drug trafficking is split between federal, state, and local jurisdictions. During the years when the dominant PRI was in power, many state governors and local officials came to have cozy relationships with drug lords. Mexican police are infamous for their corruption and the degree to which they have been penetrated by drug gangs. Mexican citizens have very jaundiced views of their own police, whom they tend to regard as part of the problem. Indeed, one of the most dangerous drug gangs was recruited from among an elite anti-drug strike force. Calderόn has brought in the army in places like Ciudad Juarez to replace the local police who are either corrupt or intimidated, but this risks corrupting the military as well.

It is hard to know how much progress has actually been made in this struggle. Part of the reason for the escalation in the number of killings recently is that the early stages of the war succeeded in removing many of the top leadership layers of the drug gangs. There is now an open struggle for power going on, with heavy gang-on-gang violence.

The Mexican government has started a number of reforms and needs to enact more if it is to win this struggle. It has sought to create clear national guidelines for the recruiting and training of local police. The federal government needs much stronger police powers and the ability to deploy something like the US FBI. The court systems are clogged and weak. A number of progressive Mexican states like Nuevo Léon have undertaken judicial reform experiments in recent years; these need to be expanded and further replicated elsewhere in Mexico.

As many observers have noted, the drug problem in Latin American countries like Mexico originates in the United States, with the high level of demand for illegal drugs on the part of American consumers. Over the past several decades, US drug policy has focused almost entirely on the supply rather than the demand side. Many economists looking at the drug problem have noted that supply side interdictions may temporarily raise the costs of illegal drugs in the US, but that markets respond by finding alternative routes and sources of supply. Cocoa eradication in Peru and Bolivia pushed the problem into Colombia; Colombian anti-drug efforts pushed the problem into Central America and Mexico. When the US closed supply routes through the Caribbean, Mexican traffickers picked up the slack, and also found alternative markets in Europe. There has been no serious diminution of either the total quantity of illegal drugs consumed, or their price (indeed, the price of cocaine has been dropping steadily in Europe since the early 1990s).

All of this suggests that without greater demand-side efforts, the United States will never make a serious dent in the drug trafficking problem. Virtually all of the social costs of the “war on drugs” is borne by producing or transshipment countries in Latin America, at the cost of political stability and economic development.¹

The most straightforward way to reduce demand, of course, would be legalization under a tightly regulated regime, much the way that alcohol and cigarettes are currently marketed.However, while legalization has been proposed by many people over the years, it has very little chance of being enacted by Congress, and therefore is not for the time being a realistic policy choice. Not only that, much of the world is locked into commitments not to legalized drugs, based on a trio of UN conventions passed with heavy support from the United States.Demand-side interventions like better drug education and treatment will not fundamentally lance the boil, but will bring demand down somewhat.

The reason why the US should undertake a comprehensive effort to improve security and bolster judicial reform in Mexico is therefore not because this will somehow “solve” America’s drug problem. Indeed, Mexico’s current war on drug gangs has already pushed a lot of their activity into smaller countries like Guatemala and El Salvador; a serious plan would have to be regional and not simply focused on Mexico.There are, instead, another set of considerations that would argue in favor of a new initiative:

Democracy and political stability in Mexico are very important to the United States. As a result of the recent drug wars, there has been a lot of loose talk about Mexico becoming a “failed state.” This rhetoric is much overblown, but it is the case that the drug trade is highly corrupting to Mexico’s basic political institutions. It will be impossible to deal with Mexico on immigration or any other problem if its government can’t govern, is pervaded by corruption, or is unable to enforce the law in border areas.

Mexico has a serious, pro-American president who has already invested a huge amount of political capital in the drug war.Felipe Calderόn of the center-right PAN nearly lost to the PRD populist Manuel Lopez Obrador in the last presidential election. Mexico’s poverty makes the populist alternative a continuing attraction for Mexican borders, and the United States needs to bolster the credibility of sensible democrats in its neighborhood. We do not need another Hugo Chávez right on our border.

Improving security against narco-traffickers is actually achievable through public policy. While beefed-up security measures cannot stop the drug trade, it is possible to defeat drug gangs and increase levels of security. The proof of this is Plan Colombia, which the Clinton administration initiated and the Bush administration continued, which has emerged as one of the most successful hemispheric initiatives of recent decades. While the effect of Plan Colombia on Colombian cocaine production may be temporary, the impact on the daily lives of citizens of that country has been enormous. Levels of everyday security in cities like Bogotá and Medellin have improved enormously over the past six years.

Under the Bush administration, the United States has launched the so-called Merida Initiative, which Congress reluctantly funded at a level of $1.4 billion. The Merida Initiative is explicitly patterned on Plan Colombia, but has not been funded at nearly as generous a level. Mexican nationalism has prevented Mexican governments from appearing to be too cooperative with the United States, but in the course of the recent drug war, 150 Mexicans have been deported for trial in the United States. Felipe Calderόn met with Barack Obama on Jan. 12 and proposed a “strategic partnership” with the United States on this issue, which the Obama administration has yet to take up. The 3½ remaining years of Pres. Calderόn’s term represent a big opportunity to move ahead with an expanded Merida Initiative.

An expanded initiative ought to focus not just on hardware and greater police cooperation, but on help to reform Mexico’s judicial system more broadly. The United States has participated in rule-of-law reform efforts in many parts of the world, and could launch similar programs in Mexico. We do not have the answers to fixing Mexico’s judicial system, but its federal structure allows for considerable experimentation.

One difficult issue will be the question of arms supply. As many recent news stories have made clear, Mexican drug gangs are able to buy assault rifles and heavy weapons in the United States, and use them to outgun the local police. Efforts to control this traffic will run afoul of guns rights advocates in the United States, but there may be ways in which we can bolster the ability to monitor the flow of arms across the border.

There are downsides of increased security cooperation with Mexico as well. Perhaps the most important is the danger that it poses to our own judicial system. The amount of money available to Mexican drug gangs is so enormous that greater involvement by US police and courts will ultimately lead to the danger of the corruption of American institutions. But there is no reason why the Mexicans alone should bear the costs and consequences of a problem that originates, after all, in the United States.

There is a pervasive sense of unreality in Washington about the nature and scale of the economic crisis facing the United States and the world. The Obama Administration seems to be proceeding on the assumption that the problem in the US financial sector is still one of illiquidity rather than insolvency, and that the task is to prop up US banks for the next few months until markets value their toxic assets more fairly. The growing consensus of many economists, on the other hand, is that they are insolvent. The rapid downturn in the real economy, accelerated by the financial meltdown last fall, is feeding back into the banking sector as higher quality home mortgages (like Alt-As), commercial real estate loans, and credit card debt start to go bad. It is easy to see why the administration doesn’t want to admit to itself that the banks are insolvent, because this would mean going back to Congress for another trillion or so dollars for further bailouts. It is this political logic that kept Japan from dealing with its non-performing loan problem in the 1990s, and means we may be headed down the same road.

The Republicans, for their part, are in total denial of what befell the country under their watch. Having presided over the growth of a half-trillion dollar deficit during the boom years of the 2000s, they have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of fiscal austerity at the one moment in the business cycle when deficit spending is desperately needed. In their efforts to think through what went wrong in their electoral defeat last year, many are saying that the problem was that they strayed from Reaganism. Very few Republicans have come to terms with the fact that it was some of the key tenets of Reaganism—in particular, its hostility to regulation and belief that tax cuts would be self-financing—that lie at the root of the country’s current problems. It is true that the Democrats were complicit in much of this—Bob Rubin and Larry Summers were as much believers in financial sector de-regulation as any Republican, while Congressional Democrats did a lot to protect the train wreck that was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But the fundamental ideas regarding the self-regulating capacity of the market and the deadening hand of government are Republican ones. Former Senator Phil Gramm, author of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagal Act and weakened the ability of the US to regulate derivatives, is, along with Alan Greenspan, one of the individuals most responsible for laying the intellectual groundwork of the crisis. This didn’t prevent him from writing an astonishing op-ed in the Wall Street Journallaying major blame for the meltdown on the Democrats and their support for Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie without question contributed to the crisis. But these institutions didn’t induce AIG to recklessly issue credit default swaps, or Washington Mutual to sign up borrowers with no due diligence, or Merrill Lynch to create securitized mortgages that are impossible to value, or Moody’s to give these securities Triple-A ratings. As long as Republicans don’t admit to themselves that this enormous crisis emerged as a result of factors intrinsic to Reaganism, they will never find their way out of the desert.

Both Democrats and Republicans seem to be operating under the assumption that the recession will bottom out some time later this year, and that we will see a gradual recovery starting in 2010. Certainly Obama’s medium-term budget is based on the assumption that we will be growing briskly again in a couple of years and in a position to tackle long-term problems like entitlements and the deficit. My own view is much more pessimistic, for reasons related to the global economy.

The long-term conditions for the current crisis were set in train as a result of Asian, and especially Chinese, responses to the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. As Martin Wolf of theFinancial Times pointed out in his book Fixing Global Finance, countries in the region decided to protect themselves from skittish global liquidity by reversing its flow and building up reserves of US dollars. This meant that from 2001 to 2008, more than US$ 5 trillion of foreign savings poured into the world’s richest economy, the US, fueling a credit boom and the overleveraging of both households and corporations. The level of debt that was subsequently built up was extraordinary; in contrast to the recession of the early 1980s, when US private debt was 123 percent of GDP, it had reached 290 percent by 2008. Of that, household debt moved from 48 percent to 100 percent of GDP. This is why the Fed’s efforts to flood the US with liquidity will have limited effect; households and businesses will be deleveraging for a much longer period than in earlier recessions. Americans are re-learning how to become savers; they need to do that, but their prudence leads to Keynes’ famous paradox of thrift where aggregate demand turns anemic.

There are many problems on the supply side of the economy; we have lost a lot of our manufacturing base, and the service economy that was supposed to supplant it is a mirage.Gretchen Morgenstern points out that Merrill Lynch lost more money in the past two years than it earned in the previous ten, even as its executives took home billions of dollars in pay and bonuses. At the peak of the boom, financial sector earnings were 40 percent of total US corporate profits, but we see in retrospect that these numbers didn’t reflect real value being added to the economy. When you look not just at bank balance sheets but at the negative externalities the sector imposed on the rest of the economy, the real productivity gains for the past decade are likely to be far lower than they seemed to be when the boom was still on. We didn’t recognize this at the time because it was being masked by the willingness of foreigners to hold US dollar assets.

But an equally great problem for the future is on the demand side. For all the talk of decoupling, the spread of the recession via falling US imports shows the extent to which the whole global economy was dependent on the US, and particularly US consumers, for its growth. The sharpest declines in fourth quarter 2008 GDP among industrialized countries were in Japan and Korea, not because they were fiscally imprudent like the US, but because of their high dependence on exports. China is falling off of a similar cliff, though not quite as fast. US consumers will not and should not return to their debt-driven overconsumption anytime soon; but Asia’s economies still do not promote domestic consumption. US households have seen their net worth plunge by some $11.2 trillion, or 18%, through the end of 2008, with further losses in the first quarter of 2009. The baby boomers in particular, whose net worth has fallen more dramatically because they held more assets than the general population, need to rebuild their savings for their impending retirements, and will not be reopening their wallets even if easy credit becomes available again. Asian countries recovered relatively quickly from the crisis of the late 1990s because global demand was still strong; where is it going to come from now? The only hope is public spending, like the much-reviled US stimulus bill; but outside the US there have been relatively few countries willing and able to step up to the plate.

All of this suggests a rather prolonged recession, or perhaps a prolonged period of flat to very modest growth. We may in fact be lucky to duplicate Japan’s performance of about 0-1 percent per annum growth during the 1990s.

We need to look at the crisis in a longer term perspective. The baby boom generation—of which I am a member—went through its life over-consuming and under-saving, all the while exempting themselves from taxation (except for a brief period in the Clinton years, when we succeeded in running a budget surplus). Getting out of the crisis they created will require significantly increasing the already high levels of public debt they incurred; not only will they will then pass these liabilities down to their children, but they will start incurring health care costs that will eat up a significant chunk of future GDP if not constrained.

All of this does not amount to a failure of capitalism, but to a failure of American public policy. It is inevitable, however, that the credibility of things that Americans hold near and dear—i.e., liberal democracy and a market economy—will suffer greatly as a result of the crisis. People from Latvia to Korea to Mexico are suffering from a global recession that started in the United States. It started in large measure because of the faith that Americans placed in the ability of free markets to regulate themselves, a key aspect both of Reaganism and of the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism. Alan Greenspan admitted last fall that he was astonished that the self-interest of the financial community did not prevent it from making huge mistakes. Now that the public sector is cleaning up behind them, we need to move from astonishment to a different model of capitalism if we are to fix our own economy, and regain a shred of credibility on the world stage.

It is with great sadness that I note the passing on Christmas eve of Samuel Huntington, long-time teacher, friend, and editorial board member of The American Interest.  I knew Huntington from my final year in graduate school at Harvard, when he had just returned from service in the Carter administration to the Government Department.  He kept up with his former students better than most professors through annual meetings at the Wianno Club on Cape Cod every summer, and through seminars and meetings at the Center for International Affairs which he directed for many years at Harvard.

Huntington was easily the greatest political scientist of his generation.  What was remarkable about his scholarship was the range of topics on which he wrote, and the way that each of his books became a major point of reference within each sub-field:  The Soldier and State for civil-military relations; The Common Defense for defense policy; Political Order in Changing Societies and The Third Wave for comparative poitics; The Clash of Civilizations for international relations; American Politics:  The Promise of Disharmony and Who Are We? for American politics.  Through his own scholarship and through his students he virtually created the subfield of strategic studies, an area that was not seriously researched by most universities until he came along.

Since there are likely to be many testimonials to Sam in the coming days and weeks, I thought I would concentrate on one particular aspect of his scholarship, his work on comparative politics.  Political Order in Changing Societies, first published in 1968, was perhaps the last great effort to build a general theory of political development, and left a profound mark on the entire field.  In 1997, when I was a regular book reviewer for Foreign Affairs, I nominated Political Order as one of the top five books on international politics that had been published in the past 75 years.  Perhaps as a result of this, Sam asked me to write a preface to a new reprint of paperback edition of the book which appeared in 2006.  This was a great honor that I undertook gladly.  I will simply quote from what I said in that preface:

“In order to understand [Political Order]’s intellectual significance, it is necessary to place it in the context of the ideas that were dominant in the 1950s and early 1960s.  This was the heyday of “modernization theory,” probably the most ambitious American attempt to create an integrated, empirical theory of human social change.  Modernization theory had its origins in the works of late nineteenth century European social theorists like Henry Maine, Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Max Weber.  The writings of these authors established a series of concepts (e.g., status/contract; mechanical/organic solidarity; Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft; charismatic/bureaucratic-rational authority) that sought to describe the changes in social norms and relationships that took place as human societies made the transition from agricultural to industrial production.  While based primarily on the experiences of early modernizers like Britain or the United States, they sought to draw from them general laws of social development.
“European social theory was killed, literally and figuratively, by the two world wars; the ideas it generated migrated to the United States, and were taken up by a generation of American academics after the Second World War at places like Harvard’s Department of Comparative Politics, the MIT Center for International Studies, or the Social Science Research Council’s Committee on Comparative Politics.  The Harvard department, led by Weber’s protégé Talcott Parsons, hoped to create an integrated, interdisciplinary social science that would combine economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology.

“The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s also corresponded to the dissolution of European colonial empires and the emergence of what became known as the third or developing world, newly independent countries with great aspirations to modernize and catch up with their former colonial masters.  Scholars like Edward Shils, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, Gabriel Almond, David Apter, and Walt Whitman Rostow saw these momentous developments as a laboratory for social theory, as well as a great opportunity to help developing countries raise living standards and democratize their political systems.

“Modernization theorists placed a strong normative value on being modern, and in their view, the good things of modernity tended to go together.  Economic development, changing social relationships like urbanization and the breakdown of primary kinship groups, higher and more inclusive levels of education, normative shifts towards values like “achievement” and rationality, secularization, and the development of democratic political institutions, were all seen as an interdependent whole.  Economic development would fuel better education, which would lead to value change, which would promote modern politics, and so on in a virtuous circle.

“Political Order in Changing Societies appeared against this backdrop, and frontally challenged these assumptions.  First, Huntington argued that political decay was at least as likely as political development, and that the actual experience of newly independent countries was one of increasing social and political disorder.  Second, he suggested that the good things of modernity often operated at cross purposes.  In particular, if social mobilization outpaced the development of political institutions, there would be frustration as new social actors found themselves unable to participate in the political system.  This led to a condition he labeled praetorianism, and was the leading cause of insurgencies, military coups, and weak or disorganized governments.  Economic development and political development were not part of the same, seamless process of modernization; the latter had its own separate logic as institutions like political parties or legal systems were created or evolved into more complex forms.

“Huntington drew a practical implication from these observations, namely, that political order was a good thing in itself and would not automatically arise out of the modernization process.  Rather the contrary:  without political order, neither economic nor social development could proceed successfully.  The different components of modernization needed to be sequenced.  Premature increases in political participation – including things like early elections – could destabilize fragile political systems.  This laid the groundwork for a development strategy that came to be called the “authoritarian transition,” whereby a modernizing dictatorship provides political order, a rule of law, and the conditions for successful economic and social development.  Once these building blocks were in place, other aspects of modernity like democracy and civic participation could be added.  (Huntington’s student, Fareed Zakaria, would write a book in 2003, The Future of Freedom, making a somewhat updated variant of this argument.)

“The significance of Huntington’s book must be seen against the backdrop of what was happening in U.S. foreign policy at the time it was published.  The year 1968 marked a high water mark in the Vietnam War, when troop strength swelled to half a million and the Tet offensive undermined the U.S. public’s confidence.  Many modernization theorists hoped their academic work would have useful implications for American policy; Walt Rostow’s book The Stages of Economic Growth was a guide for the new U.S. Agency for International Development as it sought to buffer countries like South Vietnam and Indonesia against the appeals of communism.  But by the late 1960s, there were not a lot of success stories that Americans to which could point.  The competing communist and Western nation-building strategies in North and South Vietnam ended with the latter’s eventual defeat.

“Huntington suggested that there was another way forward, through modernizing authoritarianism, a point of view that brought considerable opprobrium on him in the highly polarized context of America in the late-1960s.  But is was exactly this kind of leader – Park Chung-Hee in Korea, Chiang Ching-Kuo in Taiwan, Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore, and Suharto in Indonesia – who brought about the so-called “Asian Miracle,” even as Vietnam was going communist.

“It is safe to say that Political Order finally killed off modernization theory.  It was part of a pincer attack, the other prong of which was the critique from the Left that said that modernization theorists enshrined an ethnocentric European or North American model of social development as a universal one for humanity to follow.  American social science found itself suddenly without an overarching theory, and began its subsequent slide into its current methodological Balkanization.”

Political Order in Changing Societies was one of Huntington’s earlier works, and one that established his stature as a political scientist, but it far from his last major contribution to comparative politics.  His work on democratic transition also became of a point of reference in the period after the end of the Cold War.  Ironically, this stream of writing began with a 1984 article in Political Science Quarterly entitled “Will More Countries Become Democratic?”  Surveying the situation following the Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American democratic transitions of the 1970s and early 1980s, Huntington made the case that the world was not likely to see more shifts from authoritarianism in the near future given inauspicious structural and international conditions.  This was written, of course, a mere five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  He shifted gears quickly after the collapse of communism, however, and wrote The Third Wave, a book that gave the name to the entire period.

The Third Wave’s take on democratization was, however, different from many others in the field, who focused either on agency (as in the Schmitter-O’Donnell-Whitehead series) or on structural conditions for democratic stability (as in the tradition running from Lipset through Pzreworksi).  Sam noted that the vast bulk of Third Wave transitions had occurred in culturally Christian countries, and that there was a distinct religious underpinning to the pattern of democratization in the late 20th century.  The Catholic world, in particular, was catching up to the Protestant first movers, just as Catholic societies had come late to the capitalist revolution.  The Third Wave was not, however, a manifestation of a broader cross-cultural modernization process that would eventually encompass all societies, but one rooted in a particular set of cultural values inherited from Western Christianity.

Though it may not have been obvious at the time, The Third Wave anticipated by this argument many of the themes that would be reprised in much greater detail in The Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We?, as well as in the volume that he and Larry Harrison edited entitled Culture Matters.  In perhaps an even deeper rebuff to modernization theory than the one made famous in Political Order, Huntington believed deeply in the durability of cultural values and the primacy of religion as a shaper of both national political development and international relations.  In the face of this, globalization was a superficial force that created the thinnest veneer of cosmopolitan “Davos men,” and would not in the end guarantee peace or prosperity.  And the United States did not represent the vanguard of a universalizing democratic movement; rather, it was successful due to its origins as an “Anglo-Protestant” society.  His last scholarly efforts prior to his passing focused on the impact of religion on world politics.

I disagreed with Sam on many of these issues.  While I fully appreciate the power and durability of culture, and the way that modern liberal democracy was rooted in Christian cultural values, it has always seemed to me that culture was more useful in explaining the provenance than the durability of democracy as a political system.  Sam, in my view, underrated the universalism of the appeal of living in modern, free societies with accountable governments.  His argument rests heavily on the view that modernization and Westernization are two completely separate processes, something which I rather doubt.  The gloomy picture he paints of a world riven by cultural conflict is one favored by the Islamists and Russian nationalists, but is less helpful in explaining contemporary China or India, or indeed in explaining the motives of people in the Muslim world or Russia who are not Islamists or nationalists.  Nation-states and not civilizations remain the primary actors in world politics, and they are motivated by a host of interests and incentives that often override inherited cultural predispositions.

Be that as it may, Sam’s arguments were always made with great force, erudition, and persuasiveness.  Even if one disagreed with him, it was impossible to not take his arguments with the greatest seriousness.  They provided vocabulary and structure to all subsequent discussions of the topic, whether latter was American politics, defense policy, democratic transition, or American identity.  In addition to his written work, he was a great teacher, and produced an entire generation of students who have reshaped virtually all of the sub-fields of political science.  From his earliest writings to his last works, he has drawn vociferous critics, but that is the mark of a scholar who has important and fundamental things to say.  It is a safe bet that we won’t see his like for some time to come.

Obama’s election last Tuesday marks an enormous opportunity for the United States to redefine itself, both with respect to its economic and social model, and in how it relates to the outside world. It is in this capacity for periodic reinvention that America’s greatness lies. The chief task of the president-elect is not merely to make use of the huge shift in political power that has occurred, but to reformulate what America stands for in the realm of ideas, as Franklin Roosevelt did after 1932 or Ronald Reagan after 1980.

Indeed, this task is made extremely urgent by the evident failure of many of the ideas of the period just past, that is, of the Reagan era. The Reagan revolution when it first occurred was an important and broadly beneficial development. In the year 1980, there had been a steady increase in the power and scope of modern states ever since the Great Depression, whose most extreme expression were the communist countries then populating the world. But in developed democratic countries as well, excessive government regulation and bloated state sectors were holding back growth and creating a crisis of stagflation. After the deep recession of the early 1980s, the United States and the global economy have experienced a remarkable three decades of virtually uninterrupted economic growth—until now.

There are three core Reaganite ideas that need to be reformulated or discarded altogether if the United States is to navigate the current crisis and restore its credibility in the new era. The first has to do with deregulation and the role of the government in the economy more broadly. The Wall Street collapse and the big recession we are heading into occurred for reasons intrinsic to the Reagan model, that is, because the government had permitted the emergence of an enormous, wholly unregulated shadow finance sector under the belief that this sector would be self-correcting. Financial market liberalization had proven highly dangerous in any number of earlier cases, most notably the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98 and the Swedish banking collapse of the early 1990s, but these warning signs were not heeded and no one imagined that this could happen to the United States itself. In this the Democrats were fully complicit, not just in their support for loan expansion by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but in Clinton Treasury Secretaries who pushed financial market liberalization on the developing world. The current crisis of course has many other causes, such as the more than $5 trillion of excess savings pouring into the country from China and other Asian countries after 2002, but the idea that history was on the side of ever-expanding deregulation was ultimately an important cause of the collapse. The Reagan-era joke, “Hi, I’m from the government and I want to help” doesn’t sound so ironic in light of the Fed and Treasury’s heroic efforts to keep the economy from walking further off a cliff.

The trick in redefining the model is not to overdo it on the regulatory side. The financial sector is very different from other parts of the economy because failure there imposes enormous spillover costs on everyone else, and is why Congress ended up having to vote for the $700 billion bank bailout in September. Labor market deregulation, by contrast, has had very beneficial effects in driving down unemployment rates and permitting much more rapid adjustment to changing conditions. American income distribution has gotten excessively skewed towards the wealthy, but we don’t want to fix that problem by returning to a trade union dominated labor market.

The second big Reaganite idea that needs to be rethought concerns taxes and spending—i.e., fiscal policy. Reagan introduced the notion that tax cuts would be self-financing because all taxes smothered growth; he was also responsible for promoting the idea that virtually all new government spending outside of defense would necessarily be wasteful. While there is some rate of taxation for which this is true, the actual tax cuts enacted both in the 1980s and in the early 21^st century have simply served to deepen fiscal deficits and further skew income distribution to the wealthy. The impact of these deficits was for many years masked, however, by the fact that foreigners were wanted to hold their ever-mounting reserves in dollars, a phenomenon that put off the final reckoning but ensured that the fiscal crisis would be much more severe when it finally arrived.

This attitude towards taxes and spending has rendered the American political system incapable of confronting, first, the huge looming entitlement crisis over social security and Medicare, and second, energy. The single best thing we could have done for ourselves in the past generation was to impose a stiff carbon tax in periods when energy prices were relatively low; it was also something that no politician had the courage to take on. No one is going to be talking about increasing taxes until we are out from under the current recession, but in the long run Americans will have to learn to pay their own way.

Reaganism reinforced American exceptionalism in many respects. The United States is the only developed democracy in which a proposal to slightly increase the progressivity of an already progressive income tax, as Obama suggested, can be denounced as “socialism,” or where a proposal to force all Americans into a common health insurance pool, as we already do with regard to automobile insurance, can be attacked as “socialized medicine.”

The third Reaganite idea that needs rethinking has do to with foreign policy and the uses of American power. Reagan’s foreign policy was based on a big conventional military buildup and sharper “moral clarity” in the ideological struggle between democracies and dictatorships. This was the right policy for the time, and Reagan was extraordinarily lucky in that the Soviet empire unexpectedly and peacefully collapsed shortly after the end of this watch.

To this day many conservatives assert that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the Reagan posture, an attribution of causality that was at best only partially true. The neoconservatives in particular hoped that this chain of events—i.e., overwhelming US military dominance followed by the total collapse of America’s enemies—could be replicated in other parts of the world. George W. Bush’s great tragedy was to be persuaded that, after September 11, he could be Churchill standing up to Hitler or Reagan at the Berlin Wall by using American military power in the Middle East. He gravely overestimated the threat facing the United States, and in the process took actions that made all of the actual threats of nuclear proliferation and terrorism worse than before. In the process, he undermined America’s moral authority, which in the long run is one of our most enduring sources of power.

In addition, modern American conservatism is built around a prickly defense of sovereignty and distrust of international institutions. Only a country that thinks it is hegemonic can try to get away with this. But that hegemony was always an illusion—witness our inability to pacify Afghanistan without help from allies—and in non-security spheres was nonsense from the start. We have created a globalized world that produces a huge demand for global public goods like macroeconomic coordination, security, dealing with failed states, health and safety standards, disease control, carbon abatement, and the like. But far from investing in institutions to manage these problems, the United States has been busy eroding existing international structures for its own short-term foreign policy goals, from the undermining of the ABM treaty to the nuclear deal with India to foot-dragging on global warming.

One of the big unanswered questions is whether the November 4 election constitutes a “realignment” of the American electorate that will lead to a prolonged ideological shift that will last a generation or two, as did the 1932 and 1980 elections. Conservative commentators like Karl Rove have asserted that the United States remains a “center-right” country and point out that in the end 46 percent of voters voted for John McCain.

Whether this realignment materializes will depend on at least three things. First is the depth of the emerging recession. If, as seems likely, it proves to be at least as deep as the one that began in 1981, Americans will remain focused on economic issues and their solutions for a long time to come.

Second, Obama must been seen as effective in dealing with the economic crisis and foreign policy in the early months, avoiding a prolonged transition and putting into place strong policies that restore confidence at home and abroad. The extraordinary skill with which he organized his campaign bodes well for an equally effective early start to the administration (and suggests that being a community organizer may be a good qualification for being president after all). But we will have to see.

The third factor will be whether Obama can clearly articulate the broad ideas that will define the new age, ideas that will become the consensus points of reference in the coming years. The Clinton administration never did this, accepting instead most of the core ideas of Reaganism and simply shifting policies somewhat to the left. In fifty years, no one will refer back to the “Clinton era,” but they may talk about the “Obama era” superseding the “Reagan era” if the new president can formulate a clear definition of what the United States stands for domestically and in foreign policy. In the realm of ideas, things are up for grabs in a way they haven’t been for several decades now. That is what makes the present both an anxious and an exhilarating time.

Watching Vice President Cheney in Tbilisi today pledging US support for Georgia’s territorial integrity, it is impossible not to fear that the United States is, with total recklessness, repeating the same tragic mistake that it made with regard to Hungary in 1956. As Charles Gati pointed out in his recent book Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, the Eisenhower administration gave strong encouragement to anti-Soviet revolutionaries prior to the Hungarian uprising, suggesting through radio broadcasting and other means that the United States would come to their support by military means should the Soviets use force against them. The Hungarians staged a hopeless revolt; many young freedom fighters were killed, and a brutal dictatorship was re-imposed on the country. It was a shameful episode in American foreign policy, one that has unfortunately been repeated on numerous other occasions (e.g., the Kurds, Iraqi Shia, and other groups unlucky enough to believe in facile US promises).

Cheney has a reputation for being hawkish and tough on the Russians, a mantle eagerly worn by John McCain with his declaration that “we are all Georgians.” But telling the Georgians we will get them into NATO at some future date and pledging a billion dollars to help reconstruct their country is a cheap cop-out. Everyone knows that Georgia has no chance of getting into NATO for the foreseeable future given the strong opposition of France, Germany, and Spain. Future membership is thus an easy promise to make.

If Cheney and McCain were really serious about protecting Georgia’s territorial integrity, why wait for NATO? We protect plenty of countries like Korea and Japan through bilateral arrangements, and could decide to deploy a battalion or two of American ground forces, or some squadrons of F-16s, to Georgia tomorrow.

The Bush administration has not moved forthrightly to do this, and indeed has denied that it is contemplating such a move, because everyone knows that we cannot militarily protect a small, landlocked country on Russia’s borders many thousands of miles away from the United States. Quite apart from the political repercussions direct intervention would have with Moscow, we face insuperable operational constraints. During the Cold War we stationed a whole brigade in West Berlin, knowing full well that it would be overwhelmed in a war. We used that brigade as a tripwire that would trigger nuclear escalation, and in any event had much larger conventional forces deployed not far away along the inter-German border. In Georgia, no such supporting structures exist.

Indeed, we wouldn’t even get to first base if we tried to do such a thing. The moment it was announced that US or other foreign forces were to be deployed to Georgia, the Russians would simply occupy the whole of the country to forestall our move. Or at least, that’s what I would do if I were a leader with a tenth of Putin’s ruthlessness. (Indeed, I would expect nothing less of an American president if the Russians were to deploy forces to a country bordering the United States.)

The same considerations would apply should Georgia by some miracle be admitted to NATO next week. The protection that alliance membership would afford Georgia would be symbolic and not military—that is, we would hope that the Russians would blink when confronted with the prospect of violating the territorial integrity of a country under NATO Article V security guarantees. But supposing they called our bluff? NATO would stamp its feet in protest, but would be left with the same range of diplomatic, economic, and political sanctions that are available to us today.

Defending Ukraine from Russian attack is equally problematic. Only a minority of Ukrainians support NATO membership, and its large Russian-speaking population is much more sympathetic to Moscow than it is to the United States or the European Union. Ukraine is also host to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, which has already been a flash point since the Georgian intervention.

Unfortunately, NATO has long since ceased to be a serious military alliance in the eyes of the United States and its older members, and has been transformed imperceptibly into a kind of democratic political club. When Poland and the Baltic states were admitted in the 1990s, the Clinton administration promised to Congress that NATO expansion would not lead to any further budget outlays, much less American soldiers getting killed to protect them. The new members, by contrast, think that NATO membership will provide them with precisely that kind of costly military support if push comes to shove. It was possible for the United States to make these commitments back in the 1990s when Russia was weak and the prospect of Russian aggression minimal. But those chickens are now coming home to roost.

Instead of talking about NATO enlargement, we need to talk about how to defend the existing new members of NATO, particularly Poland and the Baltic states, from Russian aggression. NATO has not done military contingency planning since the early 1990s. Estonia, a stone’s throw from St. Petersburg, would be particularly difficult to defend, and it too has a sizeable Russian minority. One way of protecting the Baltics would be to secure NATO’s northern flank by admitting Finland and Sweden into the alliance. All of Russia’s near neighbors have been traumatized by the Georgian intervention, and a re-foundation of NATO as a serious European security alliance would show Moscow that its behavior has had real consequences.

While it is easy to blast Cheney and McCain for faux-hawkishness, the same illusions are held across the aisle. Joe Biden has rushed off to Tbilisi to show support for Georgia, and Obama is similarly committed to NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. All supporters of NATO membership for Georgia should be forced to answer the following questions: if Georgia gets into NATO, what should the American president be willing to do to protect its physical security? And if the answer involves the use of US forces, then answer the further question, why you aren’t willing to do that now? (It would be amusing to hear Cheney argue that it would be legitimate to deploy US forces only in a multilateral framework.) And if the answer about protecting Georgia involves only military assistance, then all of the advocates of early membership should be asked how this differs from US efforts to arm the Hungarian freedom fighters with small arms in 1956.