The health care win has given the President his mojo back at home, but things overseas are still looking grim.  We are neglecting or quarreling with our friends and reaching out to our enemies — but neither policy is yielding much in the way of results.

The latest case is Canada; on a visit to Ottawa to discuss Arctic policy with Canada, Russia, Denmark and Norway, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly criticized the Canadians for failing to invite all eight members of the Arctic Council to the consultation.  Iceland, Finland and Sweden were miffed at being excluded.  This was all very well and no doubt deserved; the next day, however, the Canadian Foreign Minister rejected Secretary Clinton’s pleas and announced that Canada will be ending its Afghan mission next year.

I don’t blame any American diplomat for seizing the opportunity to criticize Canada for its lack of sensitivity and inclusiveness; they do it to us all the time and I don’t see why the Canadians should have all the fun.  Let’s criticize them for riding roughshod over the rights of small countries and native peoples now and then just to let them know how pointless and infuriating that kind of self-righteous and empty posturing can be.  Even so, lecturing one day and begging in vain on the morrow isn’t the most dignified diplomatic posture an American secretary of state can assume.  And the pattern of poor relations with close allies is disturbing.  Currently embroiled in a quarrel with Israel over Jewish housing construction in East Jerusalem, the administration recently angered the EU by refusing to attend a summit in Madrid, embarrassed Britain by seeming to side with Argentina over negotiations over the Falklands Islands, canceled an invitation to Afghanistan’s President Karzai, and cheesed off Brazil when President Obama made his last minute, ill-fated dash to Copenhagen to snatch the 2016 Olympics from Rio.  And where the administration hasn’t figured out a way to insult an old ally, Congress steps in — this time by passing another version of the Armenian genocide resolution through a key House committee.

None of this has worked particularly well.  The EU powers are not exactly leaping to Washington’s support on Afghanistan.  A British parliamentary committee has just pronounced the US-UK special relationship over.  Brazil’s President Lula da Silva publicly rejected Secretary Clinton’s public request for support for a sanctions resolution at the UN.  Turkey is flirting with Iran and hanging out with Russia.  For now, at least, the Israelis are resisting Washington’s pressure for a freeze on new construction in Jerusalem.

The policy of slapping friends seems not to be working very well; the policy of kissing up to the bad guys has been even less of a success.  North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have blown off the administration’s efforts to put bilateral relationships on a friendlier basis.  Not only is President Obama back to Bush’s old policy of trying to get the UN to adopt tougher sanctions on Iran, he’s denouncing human rights crackdowns in Cuba.  The biggest success to date, getting a new missile treaty with Russia, is at lot less impressive than it looks.  Russia needs to reduce the costs of its nuclear arsenal and wants the prestige that comes from arms talks with the US just like the Soviet Union used to have.  I support the treaty and hope it gets ratified, but on the whole it’s more a favor from us to Russia than the other way round.

In many cases, the administration has good reasons for specific choices that it makes.  Russia, for example, is never going to be our best friend, but there is no point in not trying to put relations on a more businesslike basis.  Britain’s stand on the Falkland Islands, that there is ‘nothing to negotiate’ where sovereignty is concerned, is a tricky one to support.  It always looks bad to be against talks.  Given global skepticism about US intentions after the poorly handled war in Iraq, it made sense for the Obama administration to bend over backwards to show it was willing to reach a new relationship with Iran.  Pressing Karzai to clean up the abysmal corruption that wastes American money and undermines the strength of his government is certainly the right thing to do.  And by twice announcing controversial housing decisions in Jerusalem during critical talks with the United States, the Israeli government was showing enough arrogance or incompetence that the White House had to do something.

But while many of steps the administration is taking make sense on their own terms, when you look at them all together the picture isn’t pretty.  read more »

I was on a Council on Foreign Relations conference call Friday with a group of religious leaders and scholars from around the country.  The call was on the record; when it’s available I’ll provide a link for those of you who want to listen to it.  The subject was timely: what’s happening with evangelicals in politics this year.

In 2006 I published an article in Foreign Affairs that looked at this topic; “God’s Country?” was a quick and dirty survey of the politics of Protestant religion in the United States.  It made the point that the evangelicals of today are not the same as the fundamentalists of yore and that the foreign policy world should take the opportunity to engage with evangelicals: they are a vital constituency who will be shaping American public opinion on foreign affairs for a long time to come and a combination of mission, humanitarian and security issues are drawing evangelicals more closely into the foreign policy debate.

In Friday’s call I argued that the core thesis of the article — that evangelicals are emerging as the leading force in American religion — remains valid.  In fact, while the growth rate of some evangelical churches has slowed, the continuing decline of mainline Protestantism and the developing crisis in American Catholicism are making evangelicals more salient than ever.

This much, I think, is relatively uncontroversial (though if I’m wrong there will certainly be plenty of comments posted to show me up!).  What I went on to say sounded equally uncontroversial to me, but some of the call participants sounded nonplussed.  It seems to me that in 2008, evangelicals were relatively quiescent.  Then-Senator Obama took a number of steps to reach out to the evangelical audience, including  making his first joint appearance with Senator McCain be at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church.  This paid off: despite some qualms about his association with the effervescent and theologically adventurous Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama improved on Senator Kerry’s share of the evangelical vote.  There were other reasons why the evangelical vote did not help the Republicans as much as it sometimes does in 2008.  Many evangelicals were, I think, disheartened by the performance of the Bush administration, and Senator McCain is not a candidate who appeals to this audience.

But 2010 looks very different to me.  Evangelicals are likely to play a larger role in this fall’s midterms than they did in the 2008 general election, and that role will redound in most places to the benefit of Republican candidates.  Evangelicals are more energized than they were in 2008 and their energy is perhaps a bit more conservative now than it was then.

This is the part that concerned some of the call participants.  There’s a kind of cottage industry that involves looking for the emergence of a politically centrist or even liberal evangelical movement in the United States.  Jim Wallis has been beating this drum for a long time, and from time to time there are press reports about a new generation of evangelicals that is going to be more politically moderate than the last one.  There’s nothing inherently improbable about politically liberal evangelicals; William Jennings Bryan was well to the left of most Democrats today on many economic issues (though not on racial ones!) and many American evangelicals considered him the leading voice of the movement from 1896 to his death following the Scopes trial in Tennessee.  read more »

Does money buy happiness?  This is one of humanity’s most pressing questions, and for some time I’ve wanted to do an in-depth, long-term study to resolve this one way or the other.  I think the empirical method is best, and like all great scientists who are also humanitarians, I would first test it on myself.  The idea is that for the rest of my life a foundation would give me large amounts of money every year and I would monitor my mood and report for posterity on how happy the money made me each year.  (Even at the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens we could use a little extra long green; I know some of the housemaids feel overworked and there’s a spot under the colonial oak in the sculpture garden that cries out for a Henry Moore.)  I think we could learn a lot from a well organized trial; I am also recruiting members of the control group if there are any volunteers.

I am not the only one interested in this topic.  The Gallup organization has released a new poll based on interviews with people in 155 countries.  The question? They asked people to state how well they were doing and what they expected from the future on a scale of 1 (bad) to 8.  They then divided up the respondents: if you felt that your present life rates a 7 or above and your future prospects look like an 8, Gallup describes you as “thriving.”  If your present AND your future rate only a 4 or worse, Gallup classifies you as “suffering.”  If you fall somewhere in between, you are “struggling.”

On Gallup’s data, the relationship between money and happiness seems mixed.  Regionally, Africa has the lowest percentage of people who are thriving, but the Americas (including Central and South America) are doing better than Europe by this measure.  Within the Americas, more Costa Ricans than US citizens say they are thriving (63 percent versus 57 percent), but Haiti reports the lowest scores in the Americas, with only 4 percent thriving there.  (The Haitian data dates from well before the last earthquake.)

One interesting correlation: it looks as if Communism is bad news.  The socialist paradise of Cuba has the second-lowest percentage of thriving people in the Americas.  The formerly communist countries of Europe are generally speaking less happy than the ones who never benefited from strong central governments dedicated to ensure the happiness of the workers; 20 of Europe’s bottom 21 countries formerly enjoyed the blessings of Marxist planning.  On the other hand, Venezuela (at 50 percent) edges out Columbia, where 46 percent of the respondents qualified as thriving.

The “melancholy Dane” is an endangered species; 82 percent of Danes are thriving, the highest figures anywhere in the world.  The Scandinavians are generally pretty upbeat; Finland, Norway and Sweden round out the top four countries in Europe.  At the opposite end of the scale are Cambodia where only 3 percent are thriving, the Comoros and Burundi with 2 percent in this category and Togo where only one person in 100 is doing well.

Some of the numbers aren’t surprising.  The French are relatively morose despite their high standard of living with only 35 percent thriving, lower than Italy (39 percent) and Germany (43 percent). Egyptians (10 percent) are unhappier than Saudis (27 percent).  Israelis at 63 percent are much happier than their neighbors; Syria is at 10 percent, Iraq at 11 and Jordan is at 24. read more »

The Obama administration seems to have significantly stepped up its demands on Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu.  This at least is the takeaway from a story in Ha’aretz, a moderately dovish Israeli newspaper.  The more conservative Jerusalem Post is basically saying the same thing; Washington is pressing Netanyahu for answers by Saturday to a list of demands that includes a ban on construction in East Jerusalem as well as an extension of the freeze on building settlements in the West Bank after its currently projected expiration in September.

It’s a high stakes gamble.  Earlier in the week I congratulated the administration on winning a quick and decisive victory in this dispute.  Either the Israelis backed away from the concessions they appeared to be offering over last weekend or the White House decided to push for more.  Either way, the dispute is turning into something that will be hard to settle, and the more public the White House is about its demands the more the White House needs to be seen to win.

This will not be an easy fight.  The steady expansion of Israeli settlements into the occupied territories is one of Israel’s most hated policies internationally — and one of its least understood.  The general view is that the settlement movement is simply the product of religious and nationalist zealots: people who want to expand Israel’s boundaries to the very expansive limits set forth in the Book of Joshua in the Bible.  (Basically, from the Sinai to the Euphrates including, for starters, both the West Bank and Jordan.) Israeli politicians who support or at least tolerate the expansion of the settlements are condemned in the West as pandering to the crazies.

Having visited some of these settlements myself, and especially the ones in and around Hebron, I can testify that the people there hold some pretty extreme views.  I’ve been shown maps of Israel’s ‘true’ Biblical borders that would make me a little nervous if I were an Iraqi, for example.   And I’ve been told that whatever human politicians do, the miraculous process of Jewish resettlement in the lands of the Bible will continue.  Dieu le veult, as the Crusaders used to say: God wills it.

However, I think people miss the strategic argument for the settlements; they don’t just represent a land grab.  They also represent part of Israel’s strategy for peace.

Before the lynch mobs get organized, please everybody understand that I myself don’t think that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are a good idea.  I’ve been on record against them ever since my first book was criticized for what The New York Times reviewer called my “reflexive anti-Zionism.”  The settlements undercut Israel’s security; that has been my view since I first wrote on the subject in the 1980s and it is still my view today.

But there is a serious case to be made that the settlements in the occupied territories (including East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) are an important element of Israel’s diplomatic strategy.  While I think that other considerations ultimately outweigh this case, it is a solid and thoughtful one.  Without understanding it, one can’t understand why both left- and right-wing Israeli governments have supported settlements, and why Israelis so stubbornly resist international pressure to halt the settlement activity in the occupied territories.

As I wrote yesterday, the core diplomatic problem from the Israeli point of view is that the Palestinians still don’t accept the results of the 1948 war. read more »

One of the most dangerous and most common mistakes people make about the Middle East is to believe that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is just around the corner.

This is an easy mistake to make; peace is such a good idea, who could be against it?  After all, it’s very easy to see what the only reasonable solution would be: a division that roughly corresponds to the old pre-1967 Green Line, with some land swaps for each side.  It’s also easy to see that both sides would be better off if they agreed to the compromise.  The Israelis could settle down in peace with the Palestinians and their Arab neighbors, and the Palestinians, with lots of aid from the rest of the world, could start to build their state without the effects of the Israeli occupation.

Yes, there are some tough issues.  For the Israelis, there is the question of Jerusalem and, to a lesser extent, the problem of the religious and ultra-nationalist settlers who dream of a Greater Israel that goes (at least) to the Jordan River.  For the Palestinians there is the emotional issue of the ‘right of return’, the belief that those who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948 have the right to return to their original homes in pre-1967 Israel.  There is also the problem of the radical groups who refuse to recognize Israel and believe in continuing war, whether ‘holy’ or not, against the Jewish state.

Outsiders and especially Americans look at this situation and draw what seem to be the obvious conclusions:  the ‘moderates’ on both sides need to control their ‘extremists’ so that the common sense solution can be reached.  Outside powers like the US can and should help the two sides reach the agreement, and also provide sweeteners — financial incentives, security guarantees, anything else that might be useful — to make that process easier.  To get the negotiations going, the ‘extremists’ on both sides must be prevented from acts that place obstacles in the path: The Palestinians need to give up provocative actions like terror attacks; the Israelis need to stop building settlements, and improve conditions in the occupied territories. America’s job is to get both sides to do the right thing and to empower the moderate majorities to overcome (or buy off) the radical fringe.

Many people argue that Israel is the side that most needs to crack down on its crazies right now.  The settlers’ movement, the aggressive tactics of the occupation, the brutal response to rocket attacks from Gaza have made it next to impossible, people argue, for the moderate Palestinians to participate in serious peace talks.  Worse, the continued expansion of settlements is an assault on the core concept of a compromise peace.  As Israeli settlements grow thicker and denser beyond the Green Line, it becomes less and less likely that Israel will ever withdraw.  Palestinians lose hope that the peace process will ever pan out, and the chances for peace diminish.

This belief helps explain why so many people in so many countries care so passionately about stopping Israeli settlements.  It’s not just that people perceive the Palestinians as the underdogs.  The Israeli-Palestinian dispute threatens the peace and security of the whole world, and these Israeli actions are seen as blocking a quick, fair and final resolution of the quarrel.

This picture of the Middle East peace process is partly right and partly wrong.  read more »

The blue social model posted a big win today as President Obama signed the Senate’s health care bill into law .  I think it’s a bad bill that locks the United States more tightly into a medical system that is unsustainable in the medium term, and it is grossly unfair to the young.  But extending health insurance to tens of millions of Americans is not the worst thing in the world, and while doing the right thing in the wrong way isn’t always helpful (look at George W. Bush’s efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East, for example), the bill could have been a lot worse than it is.

However, extending the old blue social model further into health care is not going to help matters.  On the contrary, it advances the very painful day of reckoning this country faces when the bill for the unsustainable promises we’ve made comes due.  Even as the House-passed health bill was making its way to the Senate, the financial system was flashing warning signs.

One was this story by Daniel and Brian Keogh on Bloomberg; Berkshire Hathaway two year debt is now paying a lower interest rate than Treasury securities of a similar maturity.  In other words, investors think that Warren Buffet is a better credit risk than Barack Obama.  Over at the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, Andrew Biggs was making the case that public employee pension funds in this country are underfunded by $3 trillion and that in order to conceal the true dimensions of the problem, the fund managers are assuming unrealistic rates of return on their portfolios.   John P. Lipsky, first managing director of the IMF, warned that the rich countries generally and the United States in particular will have to cut spending sooner rather than later.

There is more bad news.  New York State is delaying tax refund checks because of worse-than-expected cash flow problems.  Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is flirting with bankruptcy.  State budget deficits across the country are spiraling out of control.

This is not, I fear, the beginning of a new era of expansive government programs and extended benefits.  It’s the start of something darker as our dysfunctional political system grapples with unsustainable deficits.  Reading those dark financial stories made me think of something out of  Charles Baudelaire: the first stanza to Les Hiboux ( The Owls), one of the haunting sonnets in Les Fleurs du Mal.

Sous les ifs noirs qui les abritent,
Les hiboux se tiennent rangés,
Ainsi que des dieux étrangers,
Dardant leur œil rouge. Ils méditent.

It’s hard to capture the sense of massed, impending menace in translation:

Sheltered beneath the black yews,
The owls sit in rows,
Like strange gods,
Red eyes darting, they meditate.

This, I fear, is what our financial markets are up to these days.  We spend and make happy plans; they wait ranged in rows in the black yews, red eyes alert, watching, thinking.

I’m glad that President Obama had a domestic political victory this week; a loss on health care would have crippled his presidency.  The world is too dangerous and there is too much time remaining in his term for me to welcome the idea of a weak American president right now.  I’m sorry, though, that so little was done to make our health care system more sustainable even as it becomes more accessible.

It brings me back to some of my earlier posts on the collapse of the blue social model and the failure of intellectual imagination among America’s policy wonks.  There is a lot of talk about thinking ‘outside the box’; we need people who can think outside the blue.  How can we harness our society’s unprecedented technological resources to address critical social problems and needs at a radically reduced cost?

Replacing expensive skilled human labor with information technology is the key to national economic prosperity and human progress in the decades ahead.  Reconfiguring our medical, governmental, legal and university systems (to name only the largest and most obvious targets) to take full advantage of new technology and new productivity is the only way to meet our society’s rising needs for these services going forward.

Creating a marketplace that rewards innovation in these fields, funding basic research in the application of technology to social issues, and developing new ideas about how to re-engineer our society to take advantage of the immense potential coming on line: those are the primary tasks for the next generation of policy makers and creative thinkers.

If we get that stuff right our health care system will improve and access to it will grow, however we organize it financially.  If we get that stuff wrong our health care system — and these other systems as well — will founder on our inability to afford the cost of what we need no matter how cleverly we strategize about how to pay for it.

I cannot overemphasize how important this is.  Peter Hartcher has an excellent piece today that argues that America’s increasingly unsustainable debts will cripple the country’s ability to play its world role.  I don’t think we are quite there yet, but if you keep edging closer to the cliff, sooner or later you will get too close.

Seven years ago this week the first bombs were falling in Iraq and the war was breaking out, a war that caused untold suffering in Iraq, led to waves of anti-American feeling around the world, polarized politics in the United States, broke the administration of George W. Bush, and contributed to one of the most amazing political developments for many years: the election of a first-term African American senator from Illinois to the presidency of the United States.

There have been, so far, 4,703 military casualties among the coalition forces; 4,385 of those casualties were Americans. 31,616 Americans have been wounded.

Accurate counts of the number of Iraqis killed, including members of the Iraq Security Forces, resistance fighters and the much larger numbers of civilians killed either by accident or by terrorist action, are much harder to get.  Estimates range widely, but icasualties.org (my source for all the casualty numbers in this post) estimates that 9,415 members of the Iraq Security Forces have died overall, and lists 47,278 reported civilian deaths since January 2005 –warning that the real total is considerably higher.   Millions of Iraqis have fled into exile abroad or have had to flee their former homes in ethnic and sectarian violence.

Today, the war seems to be winding down, though serious risks remain.  The Iraqi government has expanded its authority; the resistance has faltered.  Despite ongoing violence and the potential for more, Iraq seems to be stabilizing to the point where American forces can continue to withdraw without the country returning to civil war.  Meanwhile, if the political situation continues to stabilize, the economic future looks bright.  Iraqis now believe that they will be able to increase their oil production from the current rate of 2.5 million barrels a day to levels that could make it the largest oil producer in the world by 2020. We shall see; optimistic predictions have failed before in Iraq, but it does appear that the country’s resources are significantly greater than previously believed.

I supported the US invasion.  I supported it originally because I believed Secretary of State Colin Powell’s assertion that Iraq had an active WMD program.  (I felt that some of the Bush appointees were capable of stretching the evidence, but Powell over the years had convinced me that he was a sober and serious person on whose judgment it was safe to rely.)  I supported it because I believed that the current policy of containing Saddam Hussein was fanning the growth of Al Qaeda and related forces in Saudi Arabia because of the presence of US forces in large numbers on Saudi soil.  I supported it because I believed that the UN sanctions program was falling apart as the UN system grew more corrupt and less efficient, and as political support for the sanctions continued to weaken at the Security Council.

I believed that the invasion was legal because the United States was not at peace with Iraq.  Our relations were defined by the cease-fire agreement that ended the first Gulf War.  Iraq was in flagrant violation of that cease-fire; the United States was under no obligation to respect a cease-fire once the other side had broken it.

Finally, I believed that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the better course on humanitarian grounds.  The regime had been so murderous, and the sanctions regime was taking such a toll on the population, that a continuation of the status quo was likely to lead in the long run to more death and suffering than a war.

Looking back, it now seems to me that I was wrong on two points.  read more »

This week I’ve been re-reading William R. Hutchison’s Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions.  It’s a great book about a vital subject that too many people know nothing about.

Americans, even many American historians, don’t generally know very much about the history of our country.  This is partly because we’ve stopped teaching much history in our schools and colleges.  It’s partly because so much of the history we do teach rests on conceptually weak ideas about what is important.  And, to be fair, it’s partly because American history is so rich, so diverse and it moves so fast that it’s not all that easy to understand.

In particular, we have a weak grasp on the history of the ways Americans have understood their identity and, closely related to that, their world mission.  Reading Errand to the World is a little like turning on the light in a dark room; suddenly, a lot of things start to make sense.

The American missionaries of the 19th century are the kind of people who make our skin crawl today.  They were utterly confident in the belief that western civilization was in every way superior to the dark barbarism of the rest of the world.  They went boldly out into the world, setting up hospitals, churches and schools in Burma, the outposts of the Ottoman and Persian empires, the Pacific islands, in ‘darkest Africa’ and all over China.  They translated the Bible into hundreds of new languages, taught English, introduced modern methods of agriculture, and established colleges and universities throughout what today we know as the ‘developing world’.  By 1900 more than half the American missionaries serving abroad were women. They were, mostly, serenely and perfectly confident that Protestant Christianity as understood in 19th century America was the one true faith, that the superiority of American civil institutions to all other forms of government and social organization was due to American Protestantism, and that it was the plain duty of the American people to spread both their enlightened social ideas and the religion which made them possible to the rest of the world as quickly as possible.

At first glance, this cast of mind is so different from ours that it is hard for us to understand today.  Once we begin to understand it, however, we realize that it is so exactly similar to ideas that we still hold today that we are appalled, embarrassed and stunned into rethinking some of our most basic ideas about the world.

Hutchison’s book is mostly about the period before the modernist-fundamentalist split.  (A good concise introduction to this subject is George Marsden’s Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism.)  In those days, the ‘high end’ churches like the Episcopalians and the Congregationalists were theologically more conservative and culturally more disposed to accepting Biblical authority than they are now; more conservative varieties of Christianity did not feel the depth of alienation from mainstream culture that they did later.  American Protestantism today has rival mainline and evangelical groups of leaders and institutions; in those days a single Protestant establishment was home to various conflicting tendencies.

But the missionary movement in those days came predominantly from what would later be the mainline churches.  As Hutchison says, the missionaries were “the Peace Corps before the Peace Corps.”  They were often graduates of elite universities, and the vision that moved them had strong elements of secular developmentalism as well as of religious fervor.  Over time, the secular side of the mission project seemed to gain ground.  This was partly because the secular programs of uplift — founding schools and hospitals, for example — seemed to do more good and make more progress than efforts to convert individuals to Christianity.  By the eve of World War I, with a handful of exceptions like the Hawaiian islands, the missionaries had made few converts, but their educational and medical work was changing the world.

These missionaries in other words were more the spiritual ancestors of contemporary secular ‘missionaries’ like Jeffrey Sachs and Human Rights Watch than of evangelists like Billy Graham.  By 1910 the American missionary movement was largely centered around what today we would call development activities, and this is where the shock of recognition comes in.  Our secular missionaries of democracy and development today seem to be as utterly and serenely convinced about the superiority of various western and American ways over those in the Third World as were their predecessors one hundred years ago.  We like to think today that we are infinitely more sophisticated and intercultural than our predecessors; after reading Hutchison, I’m not so sure that we are.  We are as confident as they were that American society was ‘advanced’ and had many things to teach the rest of the world; and while we express ourselves more tactfully and work harder to disguise our inbuilt sense of cultural superiority from ourselves than our predecessors did, we still basically believe that Americans have a mission to transform the world.

It’s even more interesting to see that the missionaries struggled with so many of the questions that we wrestle with today.  In 1850, as much as today, there were thoughtful Americans who realized that there were problems with sense of national mission.  What portion of our ‘message’ to the world is really about universal values, and what is culturally specific to our society?  How do we help a country like, for example, Haiti?  How much of their indigenous culture is valuable and needs to be protected and celebrated?  What elements of their culture should they change (with our encouragement and support) in order to prosper?  Should we step up our involvement and leadership in countries like Haiti, or should we step back so that Haitians can make their own decisions and develop their own leadership potential — even if this means that they make serious mistakes?  Then as now we writhed on the horns of a dilemma; on the one hand, it’s obvious that something has gone badly wrong in Haiti.  On the other hand, we are not without guilt in Haitian history and in any case how confident can we be that our answers are the right ones for them?

I find it fascinating and depressing that we are still debating these issues and in such similar ways after so long.  More than that, I’m astonished that we are so little aware of how much continuity there is in our debates.  Normally we take it for granted that we are much more enlightened and understanding than our racist and imperialist forebears.  It’s surprising to find 19th century missionary figures who in some ways were more seriously committed to models of development that stressed local dignity and autonomy than some of our most ‘advanced’ thinkers today.

I’m going to keep reading mission history.  It’s an important part of one of the biggest stories in world history: the Great Encounter between the west and the rest that has done so much to shape the last 500 years.  Today in particular as Protestant Christianity in forms recognizably related to specifically American forms of spirituality is making waves from Brazil and Nigeria to China and Korea, understanding the role of missionaries in building our world order and world consciousness is one of the most vital tasks for the next generation of scholars.

As some have noticed, blogging has been slow here at the stately Mead manor the last few days.  I got in late yesterday from Lithuania, and today I somehow just didn’t have much to say.  Tonight was also a culture night; I had tickets to Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera. The singing was fantastic; the plot was insubstantial even by operatic standards.  Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most depressing and least plausible plays.  As Wendy pointed out in Peter Pan, they all die.  Laertes dies, Ophelia dies, Claudius dies, Gertrude dies, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern die, Polonius dies, Hamlet dies.  The death rate in the opera was a little lower; Polonius and Gertrude were still standing at the final curtain.  But trimming the plot highlights the drama’s inconsistencies and some of the set pieces like Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be” soliloquy and the “alas, poor Yorick” graveyard scene don’t work very well.

There’s a lot more opera to come before the Met season ends in May.  I’ve got tickets to Attila, Tosca, Traviata and Armida.  Expect at least one opera blog before it’s all done.

Regular blogging should shortly resume.  I’m working on a post looking back on the Iraq War which started seven long years ago this weekend.  There are a few more posts in the planning stage.  I haven’t quite finished my posts on the mess in the Middle East and I’ve been thinking about the ways in which good people with good hearts so often make such dreadful foreign policy. “Goo-Goo Genocidaires: The Blood is Dripping From Their Hands” is my working title; let’s hope I find something a little less confrontational before posting.

We are nearing some mileposts here at the blog.  The end of March will mark six months of blogging.  At our present pace, we’ll reach 500,000 hits sometime before then.  That’s a much greater response than I ever expected.  Thanks to all those who have linked to my posts or checked in from time to time.  And finally, very soon the comments on the blog will outnumber the posts by a factor of ten to one.  That means a lot to me.  It means that readers are finding this an interesting place and a useful service.  Even when the comments are critical of yours truly, I appreciate that you take the time to make them.  And to those of you who send encouragement and support, thanks!  It means more than you know.

As I wrote in the beginning, blogging is a relatively new literary form and I am still a very new blogger.  This blog has already changed from its earliest days and will no doubt continue to evolve.  If you have any thoughts or observations about how it’s changing or maybe some suggestions about how it should change going forward, please feel free to share them below.  Blogs change the relationship between writers and readers; that’s one of the reasons I find this form so interesting.  Your comments and responses help me figure out what the blog needs to do; keep them coming.

North Korea, the world’s only country-sized prison camp, has just executed Pak Nam Gi for the crime of ‘deliberately harming’ the country’s economy.  I personally don’t think economic sabotage ought to be a capital crime, but if it is, the firing squads of North Korea have a lot of work ahead of them.  Pak  was the designated scapegoat for the latest blunder by one of the worst regimes the world has ever seen; by rights virtually the entire leadership elite of the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” should have been by his side.

In other developments from the front lines of global progress, the Cuban government arrested a group of dissidents protesting the recent death of Orlando Zapato Tamayo after an 85 day hunger strike.  The increasingly eccentric president of Brazil, whose tender sensibilities and high toned moral standards prevented him from visiting the grave of Theodor Herzl in Jerusalem, has defended the Cuban government against the scurrilous rumors that somehow the hunger striker was a victim of political persecution.

One of the two greatest moral and political evils in human history is slowly guttering out, but even in what one hopes are its last throes, communism is still lashing out, still torturing and brutalizing where it can, still counting on ‘progressives’ to look the other way.

It’s corny and unfashionable to write about the evils of communism, but here in Vilnius it’s hard not to think about the suffering and ruin Stalin and his heirs left here.

Not that the city is particularly unpleasant or gloomy; while it’s snowed every day since I arrived on Sunday, the people are friendly and the food is hearty and warm — lots of tasty soups and mushroom casseroles.

But yesterday I had some time off after my lecture at the university and went down to see the building used by the KGB and the Gestapo as a prison and torture chamber from 1939 through Lithuanian independence twenty years ago.  They’ve turned it into a memorial and a museum; on the walls they’ve chiseled the names of some of the victims.

Vilnius is one of those European cities that shifts from country to country as great powers rise and fall.  Part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth until Russia snapped it up in the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, Vilnius was on Napoleon’s line of march; I passed a house where the novelist Stendhal stayed while serving in the Grande Armée.  After Napoleon, the city returned to Mother Russia — more slatternly and abusive stepmother, actually.  The university was closed in 1832 following the failed Lithuanian and Polish revolution against Russian rule, and in the 1860s, after the failure of another revolt, the use of the Lithuanian language in Roman letters was forbidden.  Books were published abroad and smuggled in.  Children were taught Lithuanian in secret schools.

Lithuania managed to free itself from the ruins of the Russian empire after World War I, but the Poles snatched Vilnius in the general post-war confusion and Vilnius was part of Poland until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact divided the region between the Nazis and the Reds.  Until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Lithuania was left to Stalin’s tender mercies.  American Communists applauded as a reported 99.1 percent of Lithuanian voters enthusiastically supported the single legal party in the country and their new assembly requested to join the socialist fatherland as a the latest republic of the USSR.  18,000 people were arrested and deported in four days in June of 1941; like the hunger strikers and marchers in Havana, they were constitutionally incapable of appreciating the joys of scientific socialist rule.

Despite Stalin’s frantic efforts to appease them, the Nazis came in 1941 and things got worse.  Quickly moving into the former KGB headquarters, the Gestapo and its colleagues set to work with a will.  Pre-war Vilnius was about one third Jewish and it had long been a center of Jewish scholarship and life; it had been the most vibrant center of Zionism in the Russian empire.  Roughly two hundred thousand Jews perished in the next four years.  They were driven out of town and shot in rows in the fields; they were clubbed down in the streets and burned alive in buildings; they were tortured and murdered in the old KGB prison; they were deported and gassed.  The diminishing band of Jewish survivors huddled together in the ghetto did their best to keep their culture and their traditions alive; they organized a lending library which celebrated a milestone in December 1942 when the 100,000th book was checked out.  Ethnic Lithuanians and Poles sometimes participated in the massacres, either out of generalized anti-Semitism, the hope of ingratiating themselves with the Germans, or revenge against an ethnic group they believed had welcomed and supported the Reds.  Perhaps another 30,000 to 40,000 ethnic Lithuanians were killed by the Germans during the war.

Once the Germans were driven out, things got worse (for everyone except the handful of surviving Jews).  While partisans — hoping for help from the West — fought a guerrilla campaign against the Soviets, the KGB undertook a ruthless and savage repression in Lithuania.  The old Gestapo prison came in handy; the communists tortured and murdered thousands of Lithuanians in padded, soundproofed cells just a few blocks from the city’s cathedral. read more »

Last week the Israelis handed the Obama administration an important advantage in the continuing struggle between the US and Israel over policy towards the Palestinians.  By announcing a decision to move forward with 1600 housing units in East Jerusalem, the Israelis embarrassed the administration in a way that created problems for Prime Minister Netanyahu and gave Washington an opportunity to push back.  But by going public with a set of tough demands without securing its domestic support, the Obama administration may lose the advantage it gained.

With Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu scheduled to address AIPAC’s annual meeting next weekend in Washington, the stage is set for high drama.  The greatest danger at this point is that one or both sides may misjudge the state of American public opinion.  Israel’s political support in the United States is ultimately based much less in the highly visible network of organizations like AIPAC than it is in the strong support for Israel well beyond the Beltway.  I’ve been writing a series of posts over the last week about this; it is the gentile supporters of Israel, not American Jews, who ultimately define the boundaries of American foreign policy on this issue, and the Obama administration’s ability to put pressure on its most important Middle Eastern ally ultimately depends on the reaction of American gentile supporters of Israel to administration policy. The administration may be in danger of overestimating its support in a drawn out debate.

The politics of American support for Israel can be hard to read.  For the last generation, Israel has been losing popularity and support among some groups of Americans.  The shift in sentiment is particularly notable among Democrats, among some of the more liberal mainline churches, among African-Americans and among people with graduate and professional degrees.

Despite these losses, overall public support for Israel in the United States has been rising, not falling, for most of the last generation.  9/11, which galvanized many American liberals to think harder than ever about the desirability of distancing the United States from Israel, immeasurably deepened the determination of a large number of their fellow citizens to stand by Israel no matter what.  Just as Israel was seen as America’s most reliable and important Middle Eastern ally during the Cold War by these people, it now looked like a country whose survival depended on the defeat of America’s enemies in the war on terror.  That today Israel is engaged in a confrontation with Iran, a country which poll after poll shows that Americans think of as their most dangerous adversary, only deepens this bond.

During most of the twentieth century, politically active American gentile supporters of Zionism were most visible on the left.  Solidarity with Jews, the desire to offer Jews a refuge while keeping them out of the United States, a generalized concern for the rights and security of minority groups, and the traditional liberal sympathy towards Jews based on common attitudes toward historic forms of illiberal European oppression were all factors.

Liberal Zionism peaked in many ways during the Truman administration.  The Communist Party, which still enjoyed some moral prestige and organizational strength in parts of the left, obediently fell in line with Stalin’s support for the Zionist objectives in Palestine.  African-Americans, whose sympathy for European Jews had grown during the imposition of Nazi discrimination similar to Jim Crow laws in the United States, forged an alliance with American Jews based on common support for the growing civil rights movement.  The UN’s endorsement of the Partition of Palestine in 1947, accepted by Palestinian Jews and rejected by the Arabs, led many supporters of the UN to support the Jewish position on Partition so that the UN’s first high profile international decision would not fall flat.

During the era of liberal Zionism, the State of Israel–weak and poor, secular and socialist–was seen as a client rather than a strategic asset or ally.  While many conservative Protestants in the United States supported the return of the Jews to the Holy Land on both humanitarian and religious grounds (and perhaps in some cases also in gratitude that those destitute Jews were not coming to the United States), conservative political activism at this time was much more focused on the domestic and international fight against communism.  Socialist Israel, whose independence had been supported by Stalin at the UN, was not seen as part of this fight.

Since 1967, liberal gentile Zionism has been on the wane both in the United States and in Europe.  Israeli politics have moved to the right.  Moreover the aggressive rise of religious parties, the settlement movement, and the drift in Israel away from the ‘European’ norms of the state’s early years to a more ‘eastern’ culture and political system (as Jews of Middle Eastern and ex-Soviet origin have gained demographic and political power) make Israel less attractive to the western left.  Additionally, as Israel’s regional position shifted from embattled refuge to occupying power, it seemed equally less necessary and less moral among liberals to support the Jewish state. In the years since 1967 the western left has also reflected more deeply on the shortcomings of past western treatment of other parts of the world, including the Middle East.  The Arab argument that Israel was a colonial imposition like French Algeria or white South Africa gained plausibility with many people.

As a result, in both Europe and the United States, liberal gentile Zionism has been slowly fading away.  In the United States, this process not only moved more slowly than in Europe, it was countered by something else which, until recently, was almost unknown in the old world: rising populist  support for the Jewish state on the right.  I think we will see more of this in the future in Europe, where pro-Israel sentiment is likely to appeal to movements and people who fear and resent the impact in Europe of immigration from the Middle East.  For now, though, this is mostly an American phenomenon.

In America, the strong upsurge in Jacksonian Zionism begins with the same event and same changes that contributed to the decline of liberal Zionism. read more »

The war of words between the Obama administration and the Israeli government continues to heat up.  “This was an affront, it was an insult, but most importantly, it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region,” White House senior adviser David Axelrod told the world on NBC yesterday. Axelrod of course was referring to the decision by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee to move ahead with permission for the construction of 1600 units of housing in East Jerusalem.  Continued Axelrod: “For this announcement to come at that time was very, very destructive.”

Axelrod’s comments followed Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s angry 43 minute telephone call to Prime Minister Netanyahu on Saturday, and her call was a follow up to Vice President Biden’s sharp rebuke on his visit.

This is the most sustained reaction of the Obama administration to any action by any foreign government during its first year in office.  In an administration which prides itself on a disciplined, unflappable approach to international affairs, the decision to emphasize the depth of its anger was clearly a deliberate step.  The emotions are hot, but the decision to make these feelings public and in such a pointed fashion was deliberate and cool.

It was also the right thing to do.  This decision by a relatively low-level Israeli body (more like the Chicago zoning commission than the Department of State) may, as Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli officials insist, have taken them by surprise.  But the timing could not have been more destructive and insulting if it had been deliberately planned.  New York Times columnist Tom Friedman thinks that Vice President Biden should just gotten in his plane and flown home; that was my reaction as well.  The Obama administration had no choice but to respond strongly; otherwise the administration would have looked weak and irresolute and the repercussions throughout the world could well have been grave.

The President of the United States cannot afford to look like a patsy; for Israel’s sake as well as for the many others who depend on American support for their security around the world, any American president needs to be seen as a figure who commands respect.  Israel’s actions left the Obama administration looking foolish and weak; like it or not, Israel must now do more than say it is sorry.  It must help fix the damage it caused.

Things are not, quite, as bad as they look.  Approving new housing projects in Jerusalem, as in any municipality, is a long and complex process and there are many decision points along the way.   Construction won’t start tomorrow, and this particular decision isn’t the end of the road.  There are opportunities for face-saving compromises here — if the Israelis are willing to make them.

The administration wants more.  Israeli ineptitude (to put the kindest interpretation on what happened) put the United States in an impossible position; out of sheer self respect the Obama administration will need concrete signs from Israel that demonstrate Israel’s understanding that the president of the United States cannot be treated in this way.  For the sake of the bilateral relationship, for the sake of Israel’s own security, this moment needs to be marked.  The White House will not be happy with an outcome that Prime Minister Netanyahu can paint as a political success back home.

This latest dispute is the second serious breach between Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government and the Obama administration.  The first came last year when Washington demanded a complete halt on all construction in all settlements, including East Jerusalem.  This was asking something that the Israeli government could not do — and it was a demand that Washington could not enforce.  The Obama administration paid a price for its overreach and its miscalculation, and Israelis were not slow to press their advantage home.

Last week it was the Israelis who stepped over the line, and it is the Israeli side that needs to figure out how to get the relationship back on track.  But the Obama administration will need to play its cards carefully; if it pushes too hard it could lose the moral and political upper hand once again.  We will see how this works out.  Neither country and neither government will benefit from a long, bitter and inconclusive public spat.  The administration’s goal should be to get the peace process on track, not to score points.

Unfortunately, the US-Israel relationship isn’t the only important international relationship the Netanyahu government has flubbed.  read more »

The fundamentalist-modernist split in American Protestantism is roughly one hundred years old.  It has been an unmitigated disaster and the cost of this division is growing.

The problem is not so much with fundamentalists and fundamentalist-aligned Pentecostals.  These churches and congregations are doing what they always have done: meeting the spiritual needs of the marginalized, the alienated, and others drawn by the combination of spiritual excitement, personal engagement and eschatological hope that their teaching provides.  These churches are likely to flourish as long as they are needed, and they will be needed as long as the hard edges of our society and radical uncertainties of our times persist.

What worries me is the missing keystone of the arch of American religion: a vibrant Protestant witness that offers a spiritually compelling, ethically challenging and intellectually serious form of Christian faith and community life in the heart of American culture today.

I think of this missing church as ‘mainlinegelical’: a church that somehow unites the kind of faith and passion mostly found among evangelicals today with the historical and institutional sense of responsibility and stewardship that characterized the mainline churches at their best — and can still be found among them here and there today.

At their best, institutions like Wheaton College and religious figures like Rick Warren and Tim Keller (in their very different ways) are reaching out from the evangelical current in American religion to try to erect this kind of religious presence.  To some degree the evangelical movement as a whole represents a realization by some of the heirs of the original fundamentalist movement that engagement with society is an essential element of real Christian witness.

I wish I could say I saw the same kind of outreach from the mainline side of the chasm.  Unfortunately even as these churches shrink and decline there seems to be little interest in taking a hard look at what has gone wrong.

In a sense, the mainline churches today suffer because they never took stock of the costs of modernism in quite the same way that evangelicals came to terms with some of the shortcomings and one-sided characteristics of the fundamentalist movement.  Beginning really with Billy Graham’s pilgrimage, for two generations evangelicals have been working to free themselves of cultural detritus (culturally determined views on race and on the place of women in society, for example) while holding on to the vital principles of the fundamentalist core — doctrines like original sin, the atonement, and a strong belief that God, however mysteriously, acts in history.

The heirs of the modernists, I fear, have not really had this ‘second stage’ movement.  If anything, the most noticeable trend in many mainline denominations has been to go farther down the road of the modernists.  Reinhold Niebuhr, a figure who in many ways came closer than any other to the kind of review and renewal that mainline Protestantism needs, would be politically and theologically isolated in the mainline churches today.  His stance suggested a rigorous and critical approach to the limits of liberal theology, but that side of his legacy has been largely ignored.

Niebuhr in a sense has had no heirs.  His effort to synthesize the core vision of historic Protestantism with a contemporary sensibility did not capture the imagination of subsequent generations of mainline church leaders.  The mainline churches seemed to feel that little of value was really lost when the fundamentalists left.  The modernists won the fight with the fundamentalists, after all.  They ended up with the big buildings, the prestigious and academically well respected theological schools, the patronage of the social elite, the bully pulpits that commanded attention and respect, the control of the denominational machinery.  Why look for anything more?

In truth, the split impoverished the mainline churches as much as it did the fundamentalists.  read more »

I am leaving the paneled halls of the stately Mead manor today to spend a week giving lectures on American foreign policy in Lithuania.  This is a kind of trip I’ve been making for the State Department since the Clinton administration, and it’s taught me a lot.  During the Bush years I traveled pretty intensively in the Muslim world and especially in the Arab countries.  Dedicated readers of this blog will have read my post on my last visit to Pakistan; that was also a State Department trip.

The State Department doesn’t put any restrictions on what you say when you appear as part of these speaker programs, and as blog readers know, I’m not shy about sharing my personal opinions.  However, over the years I’ve learned that foreign audiences are usually more curious about learning how this crazy American system works and why we do the things we do than they are in listening to personal opinions about what the United States should or should not do next.  What I’ve found to be most useful is to help people see how our history helps shape the debates we are having now — and I do my best to be fair to all sides as I try to put our current debates in a historical context.

I’ll do some blogging from Lithuania if I get the time; the redoubtable Sam has set me up with a digital camera and cable;  I’ll see if I can manage to upload pictures to the blog. I’ve also prepared a couple of posts in advance to prevent any outbreaks of SMWS out there (Sudden Mead Withdrawal Syndrome).

But while James is revving up the Bentley and Jeeves is calling one of the footmen to take the luggage, I’ll just share a few thoughts with you about the western literary canon and how a knowledge of it could have helped James Cameron make Avatar a better movie.

Avatar is about losers; that’s not a bad thing from an art point of view.  Avatar has taken the losers of modern history and put them on another planet, where it replays the encounter of advanced technological cultures with complex but not very technological societies.

So far, so good.  This is mainstream western art.  Our culture revolves around losers.  It starts with the Iliad; the Trojans are much more interesting and sympathetic than the Greeks.  Greek tragedy still moves us today, and even Thucydides’ history of the war between Athens and Sparta is told from the point of view of the losing side.

The Romans, devoted to the cult of mastery and victory as much as anybody ever was, traced their state back to defeated Trojans fleeing from the ruins.  Virgil’s Aeneid is the story of refugees, driven by fate and storms across a hostile world (depicted above).  The Carthaginian queen Aeneas dumps is a much more fascinating character than the lifeless Lavinia he marries in Italy.

This isn’t just true for classical times — though it’s interesting that there aren’t any books on the rise of Roman power that have captured the imagination of the modern world like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

The pattern continues through medieval and modern times.  Malory’s book is about the failure of King Arthur; Roland blows his horn and dies.  Dante’s hell is more interesting than his heaven; Milton’s Satan is more interesting than his God.  The Alamo gets more attention than any of Texas’ military victories in its revolution against Mexico; General Lee is more interesting than General Grant.  Wagner’s Valhalla burns and the gods go down.

A lot of this probably stems from our own awareness of oncoming death.  In the end we all lose, and art offers us a way to process that information while keeping it at a distance.

So when Avatar, itself something of a loser at the Academy Awards if not at the box office, celebrates losers, it is right in the mainstream.  The Na’avi, modeled after the innocent native Americans and others who were mowed down by the aggressive forces of advancing capitalist civilization over the centuries, live at peace with nature and all those wonderful things that we horrible industrial and urban people don’t understand.

Many critics have noted that by now this is hardly a fresh or courageous take — the noble savage is one of the stock figures of our time and we are all in awe of the simple wisdom of unspoiled humanity living as one in the mighty forests.   Others have noted with even less approval that the Na’avi are helpless until one of the earthlings takes their side and gives them leadership.

This is historically defensible if politically incorrect.  For centuries in North American history both men and women from the English speaking settler societies chose to join with the tribes.  Because they understood the settler culture and its strengths and weaknesses better than their new associates, the English speakers and their mixed race children often played an important role in helping organize tribal resistance and strategies.

But my quarrel with Avatar isn’t about its uncritical and hackneyed portrayal of the noble savages on Pandora. read more »

The American relationship with Israel is both a political and an intellectual challenge for some students of foreign affairs.  Convinced that US national interests would be best served by distancing ourselves from the Jewish state, scholars try to figure out why our country behaves in this seemingly self-defeating way.

The problem is particularly tough for hard core realists who believe that the behavior of every state is determined by the nature of the international system.  For these thinkers, domestic politics don’t matter; states do what they must. States are like billiard balls; they move when struck.  It doesn’t matter what the billiard ball thinks; it rolls where it’s pushed.

So what about the red, white and blue ball on the pool table that keeps cozying the blue and white ball with the Star of David no matter where you push it?  Why does it behave so strangely?

The scholars seek a theoretical explanation which can accommodate this peculiar case, but they are looking for a small explanation — one that reaffirms the general theory of billiard ball realism even as it explains the exceptional case of the United States.

The simplest, most elegant answer to this problem to say that the Israel lobby is different from all other lobbies.  It is the one and only exception to the rule that domestic politics don’t matter:  The Jews are so rich, so focused and so good at what they do that they have built a lobby that is unique in the world.

There are only two problems with this approach.  The first is that the idea of a uniquely powerful Jewish lobby is catnip for anti-Semites.  As I’ve repeatedly said, you don’t need to be an anti-Semite to hold this view, but this idea (that the Jews have a wealthy, well connected and ruthless power lobby that is like no other and that this cabal manipulates the political system the way that a puppeteer dangles marionettes) draws angry loners and anti-Semites like ants to a jelly jar.

Hint to the youth: Anytime a young intellectual is trapped in a nasty spot like this, squatting in a foxhole with anti-Semites and assorted tinfoil hatters, your first thought should be, “Where did I go wrong?”

The quest for truth leads us all on some strange journeys, but the ‘discovery’ that a Jewish conspiracy explains some otherwise inexplicable historical development is one of the great dead ends of all times. It provides a faux eureka moment, the illusion of earthshaking discovery just as you fall into the pit. August Bebel called anti-Semitism the ‘socialism of fools’; he could have gone further.  It’s the economics of fools, the sociology of fools, the theology of fools, the history of fools and, sadly, the geopolitics of fools as well.

But the second problem with this approach is that the Jewish conspiracy theory is as wrong in this case as it is in all the others.  I wrote about this in yesterday’s post; the power of the Israel lobby in American politics stems from its relationship to gentile public opinion.  The lobby facilitates a foreign policy that public opinion broadly supports; it has no special powers of its own and if gentile opinion about Israel were to change, policy would change whatever the lobby did.

For billiard ball realists, this is a problem.  It means that the Israel lobby isn’t a special case, but that domestic political forces are constantly engaged in shaping foreign policy.  This is, I think, messy but correct.  I’ve written a book that looks at how domestic political forces, through their competition and interaction, can over time respond to external forces and realities. The pressures and realities of international life make themselves felt within a society through the interplay of interests and ideas,and to understand how a particular society will respond to changing international conditions, it’s necessary to study the politics, the culture and the economy of the society in question.

Engaging in this type of inquiry is a lot more work than watching billiard balls click across the pool table, but it gets you out of the foxhole with all those creeps.

Rule to live by, folks: when your theory of how the world works starts sounding like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it’s time to recheck those assumptions.

In any case, America’s treatment of Israel is not and never has been as exceptional as some think.  Like so much else in the American relationship with the Jewish national movement before and after Israel’s independence, our treatment of the Jewish state has reflected broad trends in America’s engagement with the world.  Rather than following an ‘exceptional’ policy toward Israel, Americans have applied the normal approaches of their foreign policy to the exceptional case of the Jewish people.  In American politics, the demand that Jews (or anybody else) should get special treatment usually falls on deaf ears. read more »