The frustration and bitterness that fills American politics these days reflects the failure of our current social, political and economic institutions and practices to deliver the results that Americans want and expect. It’s comparable to the frustration and fear that swept through the country in the late 19th and early 20th century as the first American dream – that every family could prosper on its own farm – gradually died.

From the era of the first European settlements in North America up through World War I, the family farm was the key social, economic and even political institution in the country.  Until the 1920 census, a majority of Americans lived in rural areas and, unlike the oppressed peasants of Europe most owned and worked their own land.

The individual family farm was, in mythology and often enough in reality, prosperous and independent.  For Thomas Jefferson and a long line of ideological descendants, the family farm was the cornerstone of American democracy.  For generations, government policy sought to ease the path to cheap and — after the Homestead Act — free western land for American families.

The limits of this approach did not begin to appear until after the Civil War. As the best land was taken, the remaining land available for homesteading was increasingly marginal.  It was too cold, too dry or too remote.  The dependence of farmers on politically powerful railroad companies to ship their crops to market and the power of banks and speculators in the commodity markets put family farms at a disadvantage. The global commodity glut that developed as new techniques opened up new land not only in the American west, but also in Russia, Canada, Argentina and Australia depressed the prices farmers could get.

The last great burst of traditional American farm policy came with the Oklahoma land rush of 1889.  The federal government opened former tribal lands for homesteading, and thousands of families rushed to stake their claims on new land. Many of these families would be among the dispossessed “Okies” who fled the Dust Bowl a generation later.

The family farm and the social and political model that rested on it didn’t die easy and it didn’t die quick.  (Even today huge agribusinesses shelter their vast subsidy payments behind the public affection for the family farm.) Waves of populist protest against the decline of the original American social model roiled politics for decades. William Jennings Bryan built his political career on the economic and political frustration of millions of small farmers caught up in an inexorable and, to many, incomprehensible set of economic changes.

I’ve written in earlier posts about the shift from the first American Dream to the second: from the family farm to the suburban “homestead.” It was a profound change in American life and culture that has not yet been fully explored.  The family farm integrated production and consumption, work and leisure, family and business.  The family wasn’t just a union of sentiment: it was an element of production.  Mom and Dad worked as a team to feed, house and clothe the family, and as the kids grew up they took on greater and greater responsibilities in the common effort.  Their lives at home prepared them for the new lives they would lead on their own: the kids would grow up, marry, and start farms.

The 20th century suburban homestead was a very different place.  In the early, “pure” form, Mom and Dad were still a team, but their roles were more differentiated than on the farm.  Dad worked in the office or the factory and brought home the money; Mom organized the home and raised the kids.  The kids might do chores around the house (girls more than boys), but their lives were increasingly outside of the family circle.  They went to school full time from the age of six on, and instead of learning basic work and social skills in the family with their parents, they were taught skills and patterns of living in school to prepare them, in turn, for lives in which working life and home life were divided.

After the 1960s, Mom started working in a factory, an office or a store, and for girls as well as boys the center of gravity of their educational and social life moved away from the family circle.

Both the family farm and the “crabgrass frontier” (as Kenneth Jackson calls 20th century suburban America in a remarkable book) had their advantages and their drawbacks, and both allowed for broad prosperity and reasonable dignity and economic security for tens of millions of Americans. Generation after generation embraced both social ideals while millions of people from all over the world came to the United States, hoping to share in the American Dream.

Today the 20th century model of the American dream faces the same kind of crisis the 19th century version experienced 100 years ago.  International competition and technological advances mean that the American factory worker’s earnings and opportunities are depressed in the way farmers were going to the wall 100 years ago.  In the last twenty years, well-intentioned government efforts to put more people in owner-occupied housing led to a housing bubble and mass bankruptcies in the face of a financial panic and the ensuing recession, the worst in eighty years.

Our political battles today reflect the same kinds of frustrations we saw in the old populist era.  Many cannot fathom another and “higher” form of the American Dream beyond the old crabgrass utopia. They want to turn back the clock and restore the old system because they don’t know of anything else that will work.  The explicit political demand for this kind of restoration is usually found on the left, where it is often coupled with demands for the protection of American industries from foreign competition.  But nostalgia for the old days isn’t just a left wing emotion; a free floating anger stemming from the breakdown of a broadly accepted social model helps power political currents on both ends of the spectrum.

In the 1890s, the “restorationists” were the agrarian populists.  They wanted to protect family farmers from the forces that were undermining this hallowed way of life and they genuinely could not imagine that the end result of the shift out of agriculture could lead to richer and better lives for most Americans.  This was perfectly understandable and rational: few people in 1890 could have predicted or imagined the new social system that would emerge on the basis of mass production and mass consumption in the 20th century.

But understandable and rational is not the same thing as right; the agrarian populists were defeated as much by their inability to develop workable policies as by the arguments of their opponents. The farmers were angry at the railroads and the banks, but although these big corporations often did abuse and even cheat small interests, and although they certainly used their economic strength to get state legislators to write favorable legislation — the railroads and banks weren’t the farmers’ most formidable and destructive enemies.  Their most dangerous and implacable enemies were the laws of economics and the larger historical forces driving agriculture worldwide toward a new, large-scale, capital intensive model with which the small family farm could no longer compete.

It is, of course, a very similar situation today. The forces ripping up our old social model are too powerful to beat.  That is not because the rich bankers or global multinationals are engaged in a conscious conspiracy of rip-offs and oppression (though, frankly speaking, big business does sometimes engage in exactly that). It is because the forces ripping up the social model are deeply implanted in the nature of the economic system — and that system is a reflection of the propensities in human nature which we cannot and perhaps should not overcome.

There is another important similarity, one often overlooked in the pessimism, anger and anxiety provoked by the inexorable decline of the “blue social model” that shaped America in the 20th century — just as it was overlooked 100 years ago.

The similarity is this: the changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves.  The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation.  The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended. The industrial and scientific revolutions of the 19th century made agriculture so much more productive, and brought so many of the world’s hitherto remote and inaccessible lands into productive contact with world centers of population, that old and outmoded methods of production could no longer be sustained.

The family farm didn’t die of thirst in a desert; it drowned in a sea of abundance. 125 years ago, Americans didn’t have to organize themselves to cope with poverty and the erosion of living standards; they had to organize themselves to capture and enjoy the vastly increased prosperity and freedom which new technology made possible.

This is exactly what is happening today. Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim.  It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.

As we figure this out, and reorganize ourselves to exploit the unprecedented opportunities before us, America is most likely headed for another era of rapidly rising standards of living.

In the past, the United States prospered partly because of our (still uniquely favorable) geography and natural resource base, and partly because our culture and our institutions made us a dynamic and innovative people who somehow got to the future before anybody else. All of those advantages are still ours today; just as the United States was the first country to achieve mass prosperity based on “Fordist” mass production and consumption, we are well placed to be the first country to enjoy the full prosperity that the new technological revolutions make possible.

The challenge for America today is similar to the challenge we faced more than a century ago, even though our responses will have to be different.  Progressive society was reasonably well adapted to the conditions of its time and was able to transform a nation of family farmers into a nation of suburban homesteaders; post-progressive society will have to achieve a similar transformation in our time.

Doing this won’t be easy.  It’s going to take the political and cultural creativity of more than one generation to reformulate and rebuild the next version of the American Dream, but it can, will and must be done.  Nobody can predict where all this creativity and energy will take us, but it’s already possible to see some of the major lines along which we can advance — and to identify some of the roadblocks holding us back that will have to be cleared out of the way.

In future posts I will do my best to scout out the road ahead.  At this point, let’s just conclude by remembering the words that Arthur Hugh Clough wrote and that Winston Churchill quoted in the darkest days of World War Two, “But westward, look, the land is bright.”

Success in the past does not guarantee success in the future. But one thing does seem clear from the historical evidence: the American system, for all its often stultifying qualities, has also shown a greater capacity to adapt and recover from difficulties than many other nations, including its geopolitical competitors. This undoubtedly has something to do with the relative freedom of American society, which rewards innovators, often outside the existing power structure, for producing new ways of doing things; and with the relatively open political system of America, which allows movements to gain steam and to influence the behavior of the political establishment. The American system is slow and clunky in part because the Founders designed it that way, with a federal structure, checks and balances, and a written Constitution and Bill of Rights—but the system also possesses a remarkable ability to undertake changes just when the steam kettle looks about to blow its lid.

But the essay is significant not only for its arguments against those prophesying the end of American primacy, but for its biggest fan: President Barack Obama. Reports Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:

In an off-the-record meeting with leading news anchors, including ABC‘s George Stephanopoulos and NBC‘s Brian Williams, Obama drove home that argument [against American decline made in his State of the Union] using an article written in The New Republic by Kagan entitled “The Myth of American Decline.”

Obama liked Kagan’s article so much that he spent more than 10 minutes talking about it in the meeting, going over its arguments paragraph by paragraph, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed to The Cable.

Famously, candidate Obama hit the campaign trail with a copy of Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World in hand. More experienced and familiar with the way the world works, the President now seems to have shifted his ground.

The New York Times calls Robert Kagan a neoconservative and a Romney advisor and savors what it calls the “delicious irony” that his work can be taken as endorsing the idea that US power has waxed under President Obama.  It also notes that President Obama’s State of the Union speech was in some passages “Reaganesque,” sounding notes of optimism and hope.

Here at Via Meadia we’ve been noting for some time that as President, Barack Obama has spent a lot of time getting in touch with his inner George Bush.  Pretty much every thing he said about foreign policy prior to January 2009 has gone under the bus. Disregarding the advice of liberal Democrats like Vice President Biden, he’s killed Osama bin Laden, escalated the war in Afghanistan, kept Guantanamo open for business, and pretty much bombed everything and everyone he could. He’s adopted an Asian strategy based on increasing US influence rather than giving ground to China’s ‘inexorable’ rise. He’s toughened policy on Iran. He’s given up on a global warming treaty and on the idea that Europe can help reshape the world. He’s embraced the idea of overthrowing selected Arab governments by force in order to build a more democratic and, hopefully, ultimately, more stable Middle East. Give him a little more time in office and he might come to understand how the US-Israel relationship works, why it’s a bad idea to announce a surge and a retreat at the same time, why an extended US presence in Iraq would have served our interests better than a premature exit, why the Security Council can’t be given a veto over the American decision for peace or war, and even why young people who choose military service should be honored and well paid.

The irony that the Times is doing its best not to notice is that the Bush administration’s most bitter critic on the campaign trail became to a very large degree its loyal successor in office.

The Order of the British Empire was established by George V originally to honor Britons who contributed to the country’s victory in World War Two. The awards come in five grades, from the highest (Knight or Dame Grand Cross) down to the lowest rank of Member.  The top two tiers offer knighthoods or their female equivalent; Americans and other non-Brits are eligible for honorary memberships but don’t get to call themselves “Sir”.  (Becoming an actual knight involves swearing allegiance to the current king or queen, something we Americans swore off a long time ago.)

The awards are made by the monarch on the recommendation of the government of the day. Lewis was offered the highest non-knightly grade; had he accepted he would have been known as CS Lewis, CBE.

The documents don’t give reasons for the turn down, but a number of other literary and cultural figures over the years also declined: John Lennon accepted, but returned his to protest Britain’s pro-Nigeria stance during the Biafran war.

In keeping with custom, Lewis never revealed that he had rejected the honor, and presumably would not want this known even now. [UPDATE: As reader Will Vaus points out (see comment below), after Lewis' death, his brother included in a collection of Lewis' correspondence the letter Lewis wrote graciously declining the honor because he thought it would be misunderstood. VM does not know whether CS Lewis would have wanted the letter published.] It is receiving attention now because somebody with nothing better to do pursued a freedom of information lawsuit to get the names of everyone who ever turned a royal honor down. A good constitutional royalist, Lewis would have agreed with Walter Bagehot:

…secrecy is, however, essential to the utility of English royalty as it now is. Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it. When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants; she will become one combatant among many.

Bagehot wrote in a time when there was no freedom of information act, and royal secrets could be kept without offense.  How the British monarchy will survive in an age without secrets, in an age when laws require that all magic be bathed in full daylight remains to be seen.

Back in the stone age when I was an undergraduate major in English lit at Pundit U, we read two kinds of texts.  There were poems, which we read quite slowly and deliberately, and there were novels and plays that we read in great gulps.  In history, back in those halcyon days of yore, we also read whole books in big gulps.

The big gulp approach was one reason I liked the subjects I did. Foxes tend to like long and rambling books, and hedgehogs like denser, more compact texts as a general rule.  That’s a matter of personal preference and learning style; for vulpine readers like me, sitting down with a nice long history that will open up new vistas or give you a rich, detailed new perspective on old ones is among life’s great pleasures.  I would far rather read a book of history than a dense and compact philosophical treatise. For that matter, I spend more time reading novels than poems, and I like opera better than art songs, narratives better than lyrics.

But apart from this matter of personal learning style, what I’ve found is that many of my students don’t know what to do when confronted by a whole book.  Some try to study it as intensively as they would try to study a chapter in a work of philosophy or political theory.  They spend hours and hours on their reading, and often end up angry and unfulfilled.  They’ve spent an inordinate amount of time preparing, but they rarely feel they have mastered the text.  And when the discussion in class focuses on other aspects of the book in question, their frustration grows.

Others read through an assigned book the way they get through their casual reading.  They read at forty to sixty pages an hour, take no notes, and give little thought to the content beyond the impressions of the moment.  If they are diligent, their eyes have indeed scanned every word in the whole three hundred-page book, but anything that sticks in the student’s memory got there by chance and two days later he or she won’t be able to say anything coherent about the book’s content or point of view.

The easy thing to do for a grumpy old professor when faced with these reactions is to throw up his hands in the traditional gesture of professorial despair, and launch into one of those eloquent and ever-popular rants, ancient already in the days of Socrates, about how young people today have no attention span, don’t know anything and don’t know hard work.

It is all true, and has been true since Socrates was a sprout, but repeating traditional laments doesn’t help either students or professors wrestling with big fat books in political studies seminars.  As I’ve reflected on this problem, I’m increasingly aware that reading serious books – not textbooks and not tracts of theory or philosophy – is a skill that not everybody learns.  I’ve been reading dozens and even hundreds of books a year for so long that these reading skills are second nature to me; I don’t think about how to read serious books that aren’t textbooks anymore than I think about how to ride a bicycle.

As I teach, though, I see that not everybody learns how to do this in high school.  Through no fault of their own, many students are raised on textbooks and treatises rather than novels and history. You aren’t born knowing how to ride a bicycle and you aren’t born knowing how to read big books effectively for seminars. On the other hand, the basic skills required, either for bike riding or book reading, aren’t all that hard to learn — and once learned, they stick.

A history book is different from a book of political theory or logical argument, and it needs to be approached in a different way.  When approaching a history book, the first thing to do is to ask the Winston Churchill question.  At a dinner, Churchill once criticized the dessert: “This pudding has no theme.”  Most puddings and books have a theme.  In the case of a book, this is a big idea or subject.  Your first job as an analytical reader is to figure out what that is: you must answer the Pudding Question.

What does the author think is the big story the book is trying to tell – and what does the author think is the point of that story?

For some readers, this is hard.  History books present a torrent of information: Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer, for instance, is a book I’ve recently taught.  This remarkable and effective book tells readers about everything from the type of boats used on the Delaware River in 1776 to the recruiting practices of Hessian mercenary regiments in 18th century Germany.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by this flow of information.  Many readers end up reading history books fairly passively, letting the narrative carry them along through a chronological story, hoping at most to remember a few facts about who did what to whom.

However, historians generally do not write books at random.  Every history book you will ever read is the product of an intense process of selection and of winnowing out extraneous material. A great many things happened in the past.  Even a subject as “narrow” as the American revolution, a relatively small war involving limited casualties in 13 colonies with a combined population of less than 4 million people, was much more complicated than any single narrative account can account for.

One of the gospel writers throws up his hands at the difficulty of getting everything written down:  “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”

Amen to that.  What is true of the life of one man is true of even the simplest historical events.

Historians select; they choose which subjects out of an almost infinite number of alternatives to write about.  They choose what kind of evidence to use and what to ignore; they decide that some details are important and others are not.  Those choices are not made at random; they reflect the historian’s beliefs about what matters.

Every history book is more than a collection of names, dates and details.  It is a philosophical and political statement about how the author thinks the world really works.

In a work of political theory or philosophy the author comes right out and tells you what he or she thinks about how the world works.  People are selfish, people are generous, chance rules, people are masters of their fate: whatever.

When historians write, these considerations aren’t usually up front.  Historians rarely come out, so to speak, on stage and lecture the audience.  They do something subtler.  They construct a picture of the past based on their assumptions about how the world works and what motivates people, and invite you to accept their presuppositions because you find their narratives effective and convincing.

Your job as an analytical reader of history is to figure out the assumptions and the ideas behind the picture the historian is painting.  In one sense, you are fighting the historian.  Instead of sitting there passively drinking it in, you are challenging and questioning.  But by reading the book in this way, you are engaging much more fully with the author than the passive reader.  You are thinking seriously and deeply about exactly the questions that the historian thinks are most important.

Getting an answer to the Pudding Question involves unpacking the argument that shapes and informs the historical narrative.  It is a bit like solving a crime: the historian rarely gives you the answer up front, and even when the historian speaks directly about his theme he doesn’t always tell the whole truth.  You have to follow clues.  Often, it is the “dog that doesn’t bark” that provides the most interesting hints – what the historian chooses to omit from the story can be even more telling than what is on the page.

Of course, the more you know about a particular historical era or person the easier it is to think about what the historian omits or highlights and compare one historian’s account of the Battle of Trenton, for example, to another story.  But even when you are reading your first book about a particular episode or era, you can interrogate the book in ways that provide some revealing answers.  (I’m told that Chuck Norris doesn’t read; he just stares at a book until it breaks down and tells him everything it knows.  Good readers know how to make books confess to more than the book intends.)

Some of the questions to ask a text like Washington’s Crossing would include the following:

Why does the author select this moment in US history?  The Battle of Saratoga is often seen as the turning point of the revolution.  Why does Fischer choose the New Jersey campaign of 1776-77?  What are the explicit arguments he makes in support of this choice?  Do we have confidence in those arguments after reading the text?

The author disaggregates the armies on both sides.  This isn’t a story about how the Americans fought the British.  It is a story about how two quite different armies, composed of very different elements, were organized.  Many histories spend less time looking at, for example, the cultural and organizational differences between Massachusetts and Maryland regiments.  Why does this book highlight these questions – on both sides of the conflict?  What light does this approach shed on the events described, and what does this choice imply about the author’s views on strategy and politics?

Additionally, the author writes in some detail about the political situation on both sides, the social position and personal backgrounds of the leading officers, and what might be called the political rather than the tactical dimension of strategy.  What is he implying about the relationship between politics, culture and war – and how does this comport with other works you have read on this subject?

The battle scenes are recounted in great detail, and often told from the standpoint of individual units and soldiers.  At the same time, the individual episodes are connected to a detailed analysis of the battles as a whole: we swoop from a description of a maneuver to a close up of one soldier trying to ford a creek.  These battle scenes are unusually detailed.  Clearly they make for a gripping story and give life to an account that could otherwise seem very dry.  But what does this approach to writing about combat seem to tell us about the nature of combat itself?  How does combat as it appears in Fischer relate to the ideas of, for example, Clausewitz?

Another way to interrogate a book is to put its ideas in juxtaposition with other books you have read.  Many of my students have read Machiavelli’s The Prince.  In Fischer’s book, George Washington is doing exactly what Machiavelli hoped that the ideal reader of The Prince would do: he is driving foreign enemies and armies out of the country in order to build a united republic.  The parallel between Washington and Machiavelli’s ideal ruler was striking and obvious to many of Washington’s colleagues and contemporaries in part because both Washington and Machiavelli consciously invoke the history of the Roman Republic.  If we read Washington’s Crossing as a commentary on Machiavelli, in what ways is it a critique and in what ways does it support Machiavelli’s ideas?

Readers can push their interrogation farther in space and time.  Students who know something about ancient Greek history can make interesting comparisons between Great Britain at the time of the American Revolution and the Athenian empire at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Britain was a (sort of) democratic and very maritime empire engaged in a long and bitter contest with France, a land based enemy with autocratic institutions.  The revolt of Britain’s American colonies presented it with strategic issues not entirely unlike those Athens faced.  Are there any meaningful conclusions to be drawn by thinking about the similarities and differences between their approaches to these problems?  Do British leaders like the Howe brothers resemble Pericles? Cleon? Nicias?

This kind of reading is a middle way between the page by page note-taking and the breezy once over.  I think of it as active reading: rather than sitting back and let the words flow over you, you wrestle with the book and work to see how it fits or doesn’t fit with other books you have read or experiences you have had.

It’s been my experience that students who learn to read books this way are very well prepared for seminar discussions.  They have insights and ideas into the book that will make sense no matter where the seminar discussion heads. Their ideas about the theme of the book and the world view of its author prepare them to discuss the beginning, middle or end of the book.  They will also find it much easier to translate their reading and reflection into good term papers when the time comes.

But the value of reading books like this goes far beyond the classroom.  By reading new books in the light of your knowledge of other subjects and other books, and by wrestling with each author you encounter, putting their ideas and assumptions in context and testing them against other approaches that you’ve seen at work elsewhere, you are deepening your understanding of past books you have read as well as absorbing the new one.  You are building a tapestry of learning in your mind, weaving books, ideas and historical eras together in a way that will gradually become a rich treasure for you: a source of information and insight that will be of great use in daily life as well as in your intellectual pursuits.

Very soon, this way of reading books becomes a habit — something you don’t even need to think about.  You will have trained your mind to become actively engaged with the information it takes in, and this skill will carry over into the way you ‘read’ people and situations in real life. Reading books in this way won’t just make you smart; it will help you become wise.

Learning to read actively is one of the most important things you can do; get this right and a lot of other things fall into place.

Candidate Obama made the global elimination of nuclear weapons a big campaign issue: in 2008, he promised to “lead a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons materials at vulnerable sites within four years.” He has done well on a number of fronts: The new START treaty with Russia mandates that both Washington and Moscow cooperate on reducing nuclear stockpiles and combating the spread of nuclear material and know-how. As a result of the Nuclear Security Summit, convened by Obama early in his presidency, various former Soviet states have made progress on removing nuclear weapons material from their soil.

Yet the big nuclear question—Iran—is more pressing than ever. Obama has made it clear that a military option is still on the table. Israel has similarly not backed down. To what effect? Iran, despite sanctions and increasing political isolation, is barreling ahead with its nuclear weapons ambitions, according to the IAEA. The mullahs’ getting a bomb would cast a shroud over all Obama’s proliferation accomplishments to date, and the US is closer to having to make a fateful choice between war with Iran or accepting an Iranian bomb than it was in 2008.

Would that Iran were the only nuclear-fueled headache for Washington. Pakistan keeps U.S. officials up at nights too. Its military leadership is constantly afraid that the United States will confiscate its nuclear weapons. The US, in turn, is afraid that militants or rogue elements within Pakistan’s armed forces will somehow get their hands on them. As Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder describe in a recent Atlantic article, this state of affairs prompts Pakistan’s nuclear watchmen to do extremely risky things to protect their stockpiles:

Nuclear-weapons components are sometimes moved by helicopter and sometimes moved over roads. And instead of moving nuclear material in armored, well-defended convoys, the SPD prefers to move material by subterfuge, in civilian-style vehicles without noticeable defenses, in the regular flow of traffic. According to both Pakistani and American sources, vans with a modest security profile are sometimes the preferred conveyance. And according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, the Pakistanis have begun using this low-security method to transfer not merely the “de-mated” component nuclear parts but “mated” nuclear weapons. Western nuclear experts have feared that Pakistan is building small, “tactical” nuclear weapons for quick deployment on the battlefield. In fact, not only is Pakistan building these devices, it is also now moving them over roads.

A non-democratic, anti-American country whose leaders have close ties with terrorists and a habit of defying international authorities on the sale of nuclear materials: this is our worst proliferation nightmare and it is angry and it is real. The Obama administration has been no more successful than its predecessor in dealing with a problem that gets worse over time.

Proliferation is about more than just weapons of mass destruction. Small arms and small conflicts can be almost as devastating over the long haul. For one, small arms and explosives are more available and more prevalent in conflict areas than ever before. Worse, they’re durable, able to last through the ages. Functioning WWI-era Lee-Enfield rifles have been uncovered in Taliban weapons caches in Afghanistan. Properly maintained, these weapons are just as deadly as they were in 1915.

The NATO intervention in Libya sparked fears about the security of Qaddafi’s weapons stockpiles. The Great Loon certainly did have a serious arsenal, including chemical weapons. Much of that has been secured, but, worryingly, weapons like portable surface-to-air missile launchers and rocket launchers have gone missing. While in many cases these pose no serious threat to a modern fighter jet, they could easily bring down a passenger airliner. Not surprisingly, al-Qaeda and their comrades in arms swarmed to the mayhem of post-Qaddafi Libya, on the lookout for all sorts of bargains and freebees. Keeping Qaddafi’s stockpiles under lock and key in the now-chaotic Libya will be costly. Since toppling the Great Loon, Libya’s tribes and factions are starting to turn on each other. If the violence spirals out of control, no one will have to go far to find guns and ammo.

Proliferation is just as frightening an issue today as it was in January 2010. Via Meadia doesn’t think that will change anytime soon. The dream of nuclear disarmament is just that: a dream. On the proliferation issue, expect to whimper as we keep hearing more bangs.

[T]here is no evidence of significant disagreement inside the ruling elite in regard to any issue…

In any case, the notion that army generals or any other important faction would object to Kim Jong-un’s takeover was an improbable one to begin with; no North Korean could oppose the hereditary succession without being opposed to the state itself. Such an attitude is unlikely to be held by anyone in the ruling elite.

What outsiders often don’t get about North Korea (the DPRK in dipspeak, for the “Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea”) is the graft of modern totalitarianism onto very traditional Korean roots that shapes the way the rulers and their lieutenants see their task.

Historically, Korea had three characteristics still on view in the North.  It was legitimist: before the Kim family popped up, there had been only three ruling dynasties in two thousand of years of Korean history.  Few cultures have shown this kind of attachment to their rulers; it is not all that surprising that the North Korean elite likes to rally around the ruling house.

Second, Korean regimes have been ideological.  In some ways traditional Korean rulers were more Confucian than the Chinese.  Often, Korean Confucian ideas were more rigid and more highly developed than in China; as Kim Il Sung became more rigidly Red than either the Soviets or the Chinese, he was following a well trodden path in Korean cultural history.

Third, Korean history has often been marked by suspicion of the outside world.  Known as the “Hermit Kingdom” because of its reclusiveness in the 19th century, Korea opened late to trade and ideas from abroad, and was almost immediately dragged into the Japanese Empire.  The experiences of the twentieth century — Japanese occupation and devastating warfare — probably confirmed many North Koreans in their desire to keep the external world at bay and strengthened the desire of the elite to secure a nuclear deterrent.

One useful way to understand the DPRK is to see how the Kim dynasty is using the tools of modern totalitarian technology to enforce a distorted version of a very traditional Korean reality on its society.  Tales of supernatural wonders and preternatural powers in the ruling house also fit the traditional bill. This cocktail of moral philosophy bound with dynastic rule is strong.

I make no predictions about the future of North Korea.  But those who don’t look at the present in the context of Korean history may overestimate the fragility of the regime. Like its predecessors the Silla (57BC-c 918 AD), Koryo (918-1392) and Joseon (1392-1910) dynasties, the Kim dynasty (1945-??) lives on.

Whatever challenges we face in the UK, the British Government’s commitment to the security and prosperity of the overseas territories, including the Falklands, remains undiminished.

”So let me be absolutely clear. We will always maintain our commitment to you on any question of sovereignty. Your right to self-determination is the cornerstone of our policy.

We will never negotiate on the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands unless you, the Falkland Islanders, so wish. No democracy could ever do otherwise.

At the same time, Britain has joined the United States and other European and Arab countries in rattling sabers in the general direction of Iran.  These are some large commitments from a country that ranks toward the bottom of the top tier of European economies, and which faces stringent military spending cuts in a series of austerity budgets expected to last through the life of Cameron’s government.  With a secessionist party in power in the Scottish parliament promoting a referendum of Scottish independence, Britain could face yet another jolting moment of national decline.  Would England be willing or able to honor the promises Britain made?  (And would England alone be able to hold onto its permanent seat on the Security Council for long?)

Fortunately for Britain, Argentina is not a rising military power and in any case President Fernandez seems more interested in distracting the voters’ attention from a faltering economic program than in starting a shooting war she would be very unlikely to win.

Nevertheless, Britain must make some hard choices moving forward.  It remains a trading nation with global interests, and the re-emergence of the City as a global financial center has brought the UK back into the center of world affairs.  Russian oligarchs, Arab sheiks, Chinese and Thai businessmen, American investment bankers and African political and economic magnates continue to flock to London, bringing plenty of money with them.  More than the memories of a long vanished empire, it is the global range of the interests concentrated in Britain that drives British prime ministers towards ambitious foreign policy goals despite the limits of British power.

It can be an uncomfortable role, both for the country and for the politicians.  Tony Blair’s high profile support of the invasion of Iraq cut short his time in office.  Gordon Brown’s effort to orchestrate a global economic response to the financial crisis through the G-20 exposed the limits of his and Britain’s influence. Britain’s failure to carve out the kind of role that it seeks in the European Union has weakened a series of British governments, including Mr. Cameron’s.

Although it is passing through a rough patch, Britain seems to have brighter prospects in the 21st century than some of its EU partners.  Its population is growing; it has reinvented itself as a global investment hub; and it avoided the euro.  Despite tensions, it manages to integrate immigrants with considerably more success than some of its neighbors. If it plays its cards well it may yet emerge from the current European turmoil in good shape.

One of the central dynamics that made Britain great for so long still seems to be working.  Financial and economic crises recur in healthy capitalist economies.  When these crises come, some countries that have only reluctantly embraced a capitalist system (and usually done so poorly and half heartedly), see the crisis as proof that capitalism is a flop, and lurch toward “alternative models” that generally lead to stagnation and the capture of the state by rent-seeking elites spouting empty populist slogans.  Think Argentina.  Think Greece.

Britain is one of the countries that historically responds to crises of capitalism by doubling down: seeking reforms that make capitalism work more effectively rather than trying to hobble and block it.  Between World War Two and Maggie Thatcher Britain lost its way, bumbling through decades of decline and well intentioned but hopeless efforts to find some other way to grow.

Whatever ones views of specific steps the Cameron-Clegg coalition has taken along the way, the overall thrust of this government is clearly to facilitate rather than hobble capitalist development.  History suggests that some of the government’s policies will work, some won’t, and some won’t make a difference either way.  The specific outcomes are important, but they matter less in the long run than the continued commitment of the British to the core values of a liberal, capitalist society.  If the government can hold onto the Union, manage the relationship with Europe, and create the conditions for a new era of growth as this crisis like all previous crises is overcome, then Britain will continue to recover and, among other things, the kelpies in the Falklands can sleep soundly at night.

Italian government scientists have claimed to have discovered evidence that a supernatural event formed the image on the Turin Shroud, believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

After years of work trying to replicate the colouring on the shroud, a similar image has been created by the scientists.

However, they only managed the effect by scorching equivalent linen material with high-intensity ultra violet lasers, undermining the arguments of other research, they say, which claims the Turin Shroud is a medieval hoax.

Such technology, say researchers from the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (Enea), was far beyond the capability of medieval forgers, whom most experts have credited with making the famous relic.

Here at Via Meadia we aren’t holding our breath for this one to be resolved.  The investigation of the origins of the Shroud of Turin has been going on for much longer than the study of the earth’s climate, and the consensus on how the shroud was made continues to shift over time.  (Reminder to climate dogmatists: this is how science works, and it doesn’t always give us the neat and unambiguous answers we want.)

The search for scientific “proof” of miraculous Biblical events strikes us as a diversion rather than as a serious pursuit.  No investigation into the Shroud will bring the world’s atheists to their knees.  No report by any group of Italian scientists would have converted Christopher Hitchens.

There are four “proofs” of God’s existence that speak to most Christian believers.  First and foremost, there is the evidence of his presence and work in our lives and the lives around us: the miracles, meaning and love that surround, sustain and astonish us through all the travails and disappointments of life.  Second, there is the continued existence of the Christian faith dating back to the time when the early Christians knew from their own experience who Jesus was and what happened after his crucifixion.  Third, there is the continued existence against all odds of the Jews, a people God promised in the Bible to preserve as a testimony to his existence and faithfulness through all the generations of the world.  And finally there is the magnificent universe in which we live, that grand immensity with wonders and mysteries that we are only now beginning to grasp.

Joseph Addison described how the universe demonstrated the existence of God from a believer’s point of view in this 1712 meditation on and paraphrase of the first part of Psalm 19:

The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame
Their great Original proclaim.
Th’unwearied sun, from day to day,
Does his Creator’s powers display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty Hand.

Soon as the evening shades prevail
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
While all the stars that round her burn
And all the planets in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.

What though in solemn silence all
Move round the dark terrestrial ball?
What though no real voice nor sound
Amid the radiant orbs be found?
In reason’s ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine,
“The hand that made us is divine.”

Compared to all this, the Shroud of Turin, be it pious forgery or be it holy relic, is very small beer.

Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

That’s how an old missionary hymn begins, and it turns out the missionaries were right.  In the last 100 years Christianity became the most diverse and global religion ever, with Christians from the Global South now outnumbering those from the Global North, and forming a majority in 158 of more than 200 countries and territories surveyed.

A new report from the invaluable Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the most important source for information on religion in today’s world, will make a lot of people unhappy.  The report looks at religious belief worldwide and finds that Christianity in the last one hundred years grew to become the world’s most widespread and diverse religion as well as the largest.  Roughly one third of the world’s almost seven billion people are (or at least say they are) Christian.  The second largest religion, Islam, claims about one fourth of the world’s population.

The most dramatic change in the last 100 years is Christianity’s global surge.  In 1910, there were about 9 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, the Pew survey reports.  Today there are more than half a billion.  This fact is of interest to geopoliticians as much as to believers: sub-Saharan Africa remains the scene of intense Christian-Muslim competition, a competition that frequently breaks out into violence.  The Christians appear to be winning the “race for Africa” at least for now as more than 60 percent of sub-Saharan Africans look to the Cross rather than to the Crescent.  As the US increases its presence in Africa, the common religious orientation will likely make for better and deeper ties.

In another major development, Christianity has achieved a significant presence on the mainland of Asia.  One hundred years ago despite intense missionary effort, Christianity had a negligible presence in China; today China, where an estimated 5 percent of the population (about 67 million people) professes the Christian faith, has one of the ten largest populations of Christians in the world.  In South Korea the rate of growth has been even faster.  Overall, the proportion of Christians in the Asia Pacific region rose only slightly in the last 100 years: from 4 percent in 1910 to 7 percent in 2010.  That growth seems to have accelerated significantly in the last half of the last century; the future of Christianity as a global faith will likely depend on what happens in countries in East, South and Southeast Asia.

Globally, the Catholic Church continues to be the largest single religious organization in the world; slightly more than half of the world’s Christians are in communion with the Bishop of Rome.  The Pentecostal and charismatic movements, which are only about a century old, are the most quickly growing Christian movements, growing from zero to almost 600 million adherents in the last 100 years.

Religious demography has many problems, but the Pew survey is the best information available today.  The entire report can be downloaded; go see the summary and access the download here.  A familiarity with religious history, religious culture and religious demography is essential for anybody who aspires to be a serious student of world affairs; this Pew report is not to be missed.

One interesting speculation: the push toward democracy in many countries has been led by Christian laypeople and religious organizations.  (That was not true 100 years ago; outside the English speaking world at that time many Christian churches and movements were closely tied to premodern, anti-democratic or anti-republican ideas.)  From South Korea to Poland to South Africa by way of Egypt, Christians have been key players in both successful and unsuccessful democracy building movements.  Will the rise of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa promote better, more democratic government there as Christian ideas sink in more deeply among the citizens and leaders of those countries?

That was part of the missionary dream: that the spread of Christianity would lead to the spread of freer, better government.  The reign of Christ would liberate mankind, they hoped, or as the hymn put it:

Blessings abound where e’er he reigns:
The prisoner leaps to lose his chains,
The weary find eternal rest,
And all the sons of want are blest.

We shall see.  Stranger things have happened.   

In fact, according this Bloomberg report, China currently has 60 percent of its global sovereign investment portfolio in US assets.

Interesting, to say the least, that a country widely believed to be in terminal decline, its best days behind it, paralyzed by dysfunction and generally ready for the glue factory remains the obvious investment choice for the country that supposedly will bury it.

This fact also points to something that many commentators forget.  For all the tension and rivalry in the relationship, the US and China have a great many interests in common.  We are joined at the hip.

Building and deepening these mutual dependencies is an important element of American foreign policy.  We want China so bonded to us and to the international system that it will never do what Stalin, Hitler and Tojo tried and seek its destruction.

America’s goal is not to defeat or frustrate China but to entice, inveigle and charm it into becoming a pillar of an international system that supports peace, prosperity and ultimately liberty for all.  That goal may not be reached, but we are doing much better at this than most people realize, and these investment figures underscore the degree to which the smart money in China understands that the brightest possible future is one that the US and China build together.