Eric de Place published a fabulous post in Sightline on November 20 entitled "My Keyboard Versus the Climate". In the spirit of Think Globally, Act Locally, Eric points out that the handy little air blasters from Office Depot that we use to clean our keyboards and spray down the pants of our co-workers are miniature greenhouse gas bombs. Emptying one of the canisters onto a co-worker can release greenhouse gas equivalent to driving a smallish car across the country and halfway back again.
The fiendish chemical used in air blasters is tetrafluoroethane, a hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) developed to avoid the ozone-depleting effects of chlorofluorocarbons, the more traditional referigerant and propellant chemical compounds. So air blaster fans may notice that canisters advertise that they are "ozone safe", without equivalent disclosure that they are "greenhouse-gas castrophic". HFCs can be up to 20,000 times more powerful in their effects on global warming than a similar amount of carbon dioxide, with an atmospheric lifetime of 260 years, and have been targeted for elimination by the Kyoto Protocol.
Many economically developed nations - Australia and European nations, but not the United States or Japan - have initiated efforts to substitute use of compressed CO2 (believe it or not) for HFCs in refrigerant and propellant applications. Other Asian nations - notably Thailand - have also begun to use CO2 as refrigerant. However, China has long been gaming the carbon trading rules under the Kyoto Protocol, amassing billions of dollars of carbon credits by catching and destroying HFCs they have needlessly produced.
Greenpeace has been at the forefront of efforts to curb use of destructive refrigerant and propellant chemicals through its Greenfreeze effort. By 2004, this initiative had led some major multinational corporations, such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and Unilever, to incorporate more environmentally friendly refrigerants into their operations. However, the United States and Japan, along with China, have remained obstacles to reform. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and industry stalwarts such as Honeywell, DuPont, Ford, General Motors, Fujitsu, and Hitachi all oppose regulation.
The Alliance for Atmospheric Policy is the major trade group representing manufacturers and consumers of HFCs. Their focus is on gas containment and recovery based on voluntary industry efforts, rather than regulations limiting or banning manufacture altogether. Critics suggest that containment and recovery efforts are failing, with HFC leakage rates from automotive air conditioning approaching 30 percent.
So - throw out those cool little air blasters. In the Obama era, these will be as cool as a fist bump in Wasilla.
Since I publish for the Huffington Post, I also need to mention that huffing air blasters - which apparently some kids do - is a deadly game. Manufacturers now add a "bitterant" to discourage huffing, something Matt Drudge may consider doing to the Huffington Post.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Risking Our Best Talent? Send Them All to Double-A Birmingham!
Serial entrepreneur Penny Hersher worries about a talent-retention challenge if Wall Street eschews bonuses this year. In response to a Bloomberg article on public objections to mega-bonus payouts to Wall Street executives, Hersher says that "talent" follows money, and if the money goes, then the "talent" that financial institutions need to flourish will likewise disappear. OMG, she writes! "Our best deal-makers will go where the money is and that better be in the Untied States and at the institutions that make our financial systems work."
Excuse me? "Make our financial systems work?" The compensation structure on Wall Street is the major reason our financial systems don't work!
Hersher assumes that without proper compensation an active, dynamic, international labor market will lure away an impressive cadre of Wall Street talent that has for years juiced revenue and earnings precisely so it can inflate its year-end bonuses. But this market has collapsed. To what new suckling breast will the securitizers and traders and analysts flee as markets and banks crumble around the world? And in the new world of highly regulated bank holding companies that will emerge from this wreckage, who will want their skills, their rancid flesh aboiling with the mortal sins of gluttony, avarice, fraud, theft, and cheating.
But that labor market reality is a trifle. No one suffering in middle America - because they have lost their job, cannot afford health care for their children, cannot make payments on their homes, cannot send their children to college, or cannot pay taxes to fund public schools, pave roads, and pay for police protection - believes that our most urgent need at this moment in time (or any moment in time) is to dispense obscenely outsized bonuses to Wall Street plunderers and pirates.
For this reason, the deep and abiding issue is whether Hersher is correct in her belief that money alone motivates talented people. Let's push her vague definition of "talent" aside for the moment so we can be very clear. There is a huge amount at stake in the validity of Hersher's belief, because the entire Wall Street economy has for years rested upon its shaky, misbegotten foundations.
There are three problems with the "talent follows money" equation. The first is the assumption that organizations are simply collections of self-seeking individuals. The second is that idea that the most talented people will invariably follow the money (as opposed to merely the greediest people). The third problem is the belief, prima facie, that because someone has been paid a lot in the past, they deserve even more in the future.
Let's attack all three problems at once by looking at everyone's favorite behavioral laboratory - major league baseball! In 1989, Michael Lewis published Liar's Poker, in which he nailed the go-go years on Wall Street in their infancy. Fifteen years later, he published Moneyball, which cracked open the science of sabermetrics, but which even more profoundly laid bare the truth about the delicate relationship between talent and money. Moneyball is a filigreed, layered sequel to Liar's Poker, justly regarded not simply as one of the better baseball books of all time, but as one of the most interesting depictions of organizational and managerial behavior ever written.
What we know about major league baseball, from watching the Yankees implode year after year, is that compensation often rewards past performance, but does not predict future performance. In 2008, with a payroll of $43 million, the Tampa Bay Rays won 97 games while the Yankees, with a payroll of $207 million, won only 89 games. The best general managers in baseball, starting with Oakland's Billy Beane, know that success is about creating highly functioning, cohesive organizations out of 25 gifted, competitive, volatile, young athletes ever at risk of being led astray - as Honest John leads Pinnochio astray - by temptation (here, substitute Scott Boras for Honest John).
What young general managers around the league have grasped, partly with the guidance of sabermetrics, but just as surely with insights about human behavior, is that talent is not static. Talent is developed. Teams take advantage of developing individual talent tactically and situationally A player who performs well in a National League park favoring left-handed hitters may lose 50 points in his average in an American League park favoring right-handed hitters.
Moreover, talent ripens like a fruit. In an expensive labor market, one wants to pay while the fruit is still green and mysterious, take advantage of its ripening, and then discard it at the peak of of its freshness, preferably for new fruit that is newly awakening to its own promise. How often have we seen players such as hypo-performing slugger Richie Sexson take advantage of favorable circumstances to post outrageous numbers, sign an equally outrageous contract on the free agent market, and then implode? Sexson received nearly $16 million from the Mariners in 2008 to bat .218 and hit 11 home runs.
In reality, the "best" players are the ones that help a team win. They may not be, and in fact likely will not be, the most expensive players on the market. They are the ones with "upside", the ones with passion, the ones who want to grow and learn, the ones who understand that if the team wins, the individual rewards will follow. The money is not unimportant to these players, but they possess the capacity to absorb the financial incentives within a larger and more complex array of motivations that are primarily non-monetary. Who, with a straight face, can claim that Wall Street plays by these rules, and that the rules by which Wall Street instead does play have truly served well both its institutions and its far-flung web of dependents?
Excuse me? "Make our financial systems work?" The compensation structure on Wall Street is the major reason our financial systems don't work!
Hersher assumes that without proper compensation an active, dynamic, international labor market will lure away an impressive cadre of Wall Street talent that has for years juiced revenue and earnings precisely so it can inflate its year-end bonuses. But this market has collapsed. To what new suckling breast will the securitizers and traders and analysts flee as markets and banks crumble around the world? And in the new world of highly regulated bank holding companies that will emerge from this wreckage, who will want their skills, their rancid flesh aboiling with the mortal sins of gluttony, avarice, fraud, theft, and cheating.
But that labor market reality is a trifle. No one suffering in middle America - because they have lost their job, cannot afford health care for their children, cannot make payments on their homes, cannot send their children to college, or cannot pay taxes to fund public schools, pave roads, and pay for police protection - believes that our most urgent need at this moment in time (or any moment in time) is to dispense obscenely outsized bonuses to Wall Street plunderers and pirates.
For this reason, the deep and abiding issue is whether Hersher is correct in her belief that money alone motivates talented people. Let's push her vague definition of "talent" aside for the moment so we can be very clear. There is a huge amount at stake in the validity of Hersher's belief, because the entire Wall Street economy has for years rested upon its shaky, misbegotten foundations.
There are three problems with the "talent follows money" equation. The first is the assumption that organizations are simply collections of self-seeking individuals. The second is that idea that the most talented people will invariably follow the money (as opposed to merely the greediest people). The third problem is the belief, prima facie, that because someone has been paid a lot in the past, they deserve even more in the future.
Let's attack all three problems at once by looking at everyone's favorite behavioral laboratory - major league baseball! In 1989, Michael Lewis published Liar's Poker, in which he nailed the go-go years on Wall Street in their infancy. Fifteen years later, he published Moneyball, which cracked open the science of sabermetrics, but which even more profoundly laid bare the truth about the delicate relationship between talent and money. Moneyball is a filigreed, layered sequel to Liar's Poker, justly regarded not simply as one of the better baseball books of all time, but as one of the most interesting depictions of organizational and managerial behavior ever written.
What we know about major league baseball, from watching the Yankees implode year after year, is that compensation often rewards past performance, but does not predict future performance. In 2008, with a payroll of $43 million, the Tampa Bay Rays won 97 games while the Yankees, with a payroll of $207 million, won only 89 games. The best general managers in baseball, starting with Oakland's Billy Beane, know that success is about creating highly functioning, cohesive organizations out of 25 gifted, competitive, volatile, young athletes ever at risk of being led astray - as Honest John leads Pinnochio astray - by temptation (here, substitute Scott Boras for Honest John).
What young general managers around the league have grasped, partly with the guidance of sabermetrics, but just as surely with insights about human behavior, is that talent is not static. Talent is developed. Teams take advantage of developing individual talent tactically and situationally A player who performs well in a National League park favoring left-handed hitters may lose 50 points in his average in an American League park favoring right-handed hitters.
Moreover, talent ripens like a fruit. In an expensive labor market, one wants to pay while the fruit is still green and mysterious, take advantage of its ripening, and then discard it at the peak of of its freshness, preferably for new fruit that is newly awakening to its own promise. How often have we seen players such as hypo-performing slugger Richie Sexson take advantage of favorable circumstances to post outrageous numbers, sign an equally outrageous contract on the free agent market, and then implode? Sexson received nearly $16 million from the Mariners in 2008 to bat .218 and hit 11 home runs.
In reality, the "best" players are the ones that help a team win. They may not be, and in fact likely will not be, the most expensive players on the market. They are the ones with "upside", the ones with passion, the ones who want to grow and learn, the ones who understand that if the team wins, the individual rewards will follow. The money is not unimportant to these players, but they possess the capacity to absorb the financial incentives within a larger and more complex array of motivations that are primarily non-monetary. Who, with a straight face, can claim that Wall Street plays by these rules, and that the rules by which Wall Street instead does play have truly served well both its institutions and its far-flung web of dependents?
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Why I Don't Like Economists
Actually, I do like economists. One of my long-time friends is Jeff Frankel, who teaches economics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and who served on President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. I rented a room at Jeff's house in Berkeley 25 years ago, when he was a young professor and I was an even younger graduate student. There I was able to meet many famous economists, including future Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers and future Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof.
At Knowledge Mosaic, one of my jobs is to publish the Securities Mosaic Blogwatch, which includes licensed content from more than 25 of the leading legal and financial bloggers in the country. Among them, I count a number of professors from the Law and Economics movement, lawyers with a background in economics (some, such as Josh Wright, a rising star at George Mason University, have both a law degree and a PhD in economics).
They're all great guys, smart and amusing and passionate about their work. So what's not to like about economists? In a word, hubris. Economists fly too close to the sun of science. Their wings melt.
Consider Greg Mankiw, the famed Harvard economist and CEA chair under President G.W. Bush, now author of a popular blog. On November 5, he printed a table ranking GRE scores by graduate field, with graduate students in physics, mathematics, and computer science alone ranking higher than economics. Political science, sociology, and psychology trailed far behind, in 17th, 23rd, and 24th place, respectively.
Mankiw titled this post, "Larry, Vindicated," a reference to a conversation in which then-Harvard president Larry Summers asked Peter Ellison, a professor of biological anthropology, whether he didn't "agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?” In his subsequent recommendation that Summer resign, Ellison condemned the "intellectual arrogance" of Summers' question and emphasized the generally polarizing and demoralizing impact of his attitudes on the Harvard faculty.
For now, let's not even consider that Mankiw's post, with its sneer of "neener-neener", is remarkably juvenile and significantly beneath his professional station. The underlying logic of the post itself - that economists are "smarter" and therefore more "worthy" than other social scientists - is silly. Mankiw adopts a similarly patronizing (and silly) tone in his November 8 "Memo to the POTUS-Elect," which tosses out recommendations that Obama listen to his economists on various and sundry matters, like garnishes upon a wilted bed of lettuce.
The contempt of economists for other social science disciplines is legendary, associated with their view that economists practice "real" science while political scientists and sociologists and psychologists practice, at best, a kind of crude guessing game. As someone who holds a PhD in political science, far be it from me to defend that discipline, or to claim that it in any way resembles the natural science disciplines. I plead guilty to the crude guessing game charge.
The problem with economists is that they possess no similarly ironic distance from their own discipline. The mathematical orientation of modern economics is the foundation of the view within the discipline that they practice real science. In truth, this resemblance constitutes a false positive (reinforced by the false Nobel Prize the Bank of Sweden awards to an economist each year).
In the GRE table, economists rank 8th in quantitative skills and 4th in analytical reasoning. However, mathematical, logical, and reasoning aptitudes alone do not translate into wisdom, judgment, or intelligence. Financial engineering systems failed to successfully model risk, for example, because they did not accurately assess the behavioral dimension of risk, the "hierarchies of belief" that underpin human preference-ranking and decision-making.
In retrospect, of course, many economists have analyzed and criticized the failure of these models, and more specifically, the failure of the analysts who misused these models. Some have belatedly acquired the religion of regulation. Save James Galbraith, however (who believes the financial meltdown constitutes "an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession"), economists themselves, have not used this misapplication of mathematical modeling as a teaching opportunity for their own discipline.
By the way, if one looks more closely once more at the scores in the GRE table, economics ranks only 10th in the verbal component, behind philosophy, English language and literature, history, religion and theology, art history, anthropology and archeology, physics, political science, and earth sciences. Neener-neener, indeed.
At Knowledge Mosaic, one of my jobs is to publish the Securities Mosaic Blogwatch, which includes licensed content from more than 25 of the leading legal and financial bloggers in the country. Among them, I count a number of professors from the Law and Economics movement, lawyers with a background in economics (some, such as Josh Wright, a rising star at George Mason University, have both a law degree and a PhD in economics).
They're all great guys, smart and amusing and passionate about their work. So what's not to like about economists? In a word, hubris. Economists fly too close to the sun of science. Their wings melt.
Consider Greg Mankiw, the famed Harvard economist and CEA chair under President G.W. Bush, now author of a popular blog. On November 5, he printed a table ranking GRE scores by graduate field, with graduate students in physics, mathematics, and computer science alone ranking higher than economics. Political science, sociology, and psychology trailed far behind, in 17th, 23rd, and 24th place, respectively.
Mankiw titled this post, "Larry, Vindicated," a reference to a conversation in which then-Harvard president Larry Summers asked Peter Ellison, a professor of biological anthropology, whether he didn't "agree that, in general, economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists?” In his subsequent recommendation that Summer resign, Ellison condemned the "intellectual arrogance" of Summers' question and emphasized the generally polarizing and demoralizing impact of his attitudes on the Harvard faculty.
For now, let's not even consider that Mankiw's post, with its sneer of "neener-neener", is remarkably juvenile and significantly beneath his professional station. The underlying logic of the post itself - that economists are "smarter" and therefore more "worthy" than other social scientists - is silly. Mankiw adopts a similarly patronizing (and silly) tone in his November 8 "Memo to the POTUS-Elect," which tosses out recommendations that Obama listen to his economists on various and sundry matters, like garnishes upon a wilted bed of lettuce.
The contempt of economists for other social science disciplines is legendary, associated with their view that economists practice "real" science while political scientists and sociologists and psychologists practice, at best, a kind of crude guessing game. As someone who holds a PhD in political science, far be it from me to defend that discipline, or to claim that it in any way resembles the natural science disciplines. I plead guilty to the crude guessing game charge.
The problem with economists is that they possess no similarly ironic distance from their own discipline. The mathematical orientation of modern economics is the foundation of the view within the discipline that they practice real science. In truth, this resemblance constitutes a false positive (reinforced by the false Nobel Prize the Bank of Sweden awards to an economist each year).
In the GRE table, economists rank 8th in quantitative skills and 4th in analytical reasoning. However, mathematical, logical, and reasoning aptitudes alone do not translate into wisdom, judgment, or intelligence. Financial engineering systems failed to successfully model risk, for example, because they did not accurately assess the behavioral dimension of risk, the "hierarchies of belief" that underpin human preference-ranking and decision-making.
In retrospect, of course, many economists have analyzed and criticized the failure of these models, and more specifically, the failure of the analysts who misused these models. Some have belatedly acquired the religion of regulation. Save James Galbraith, however (who believes the financial meltdown constitutes "an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession"), economists themselves, have not used this misapplication of mathematical modeling as a teaching opportunity for their own discipline.
By the way, if one looks more closely once more at the scores in the GRE table, economics ranks only 10th in the verbal component, behind philosophy, English language and literature, history, religion and theology, art history, anthropology and archeology, physics, political science, and earth sciences. Neener-neener, indeed.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Obama's Biggest Challenge: Foreign Policy Revanchism
I run a small technology company in Seattle, and will normally focus my HuffPosts on business, culture, and technology. As we absorb the meaning of Barack Obama's election, however, I cannot help but launch my inaugural post with some thoughts on his biggest challenge as president: which will be facing down the coming assault from the revanchist, hard-right base of the Republican Party.
Swept from power and nursing deep wounds, loosened from the responsibility of governing and free to attack without any consideration for coalition-building or compromise, the surviving Republican members of Congress, in alliance with their media allies and their geographically insulated bases of support in the nether regions of the nation, will do their best to make Obama's life miserable. And let's not fool ourselves. The politics of falsely righteous Republican anger and contempt we witnessed throughout the presidential campaign will increase in intensity in 2009.
The Republican base is like a three-legged stool, drawing support from social (values-driven) conservatives; economic (free-market) libertarians; and militaristic (nationalistic) neoconservatives. Let's focus on the foreign policy neocons, those who led us down the bloody road to Iraq and who, like Sauron separated from his ring of power, will seek with great urgency to undermine and weaken those who stand between them and a return to the uniliteralism of a hegemonic power.
Obama's foreign policy will begin with the assumption of a multilateral global arena in which the United States plays a leadership role based on alliances and diplomacy. Hardened, cynical views of international relationships - in China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, to name four examples - will challenge Obama's commitment to multilateral diplomacy. Nonetheless, in dealing with foreign leaders, Obama will have two assets on which to draw: his personal charm - which is so important in cultivating trusted relationships among leaders - and a willingness to leverage the influence of other countries, in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, in achieving tangible policy victories with respect to nuclear proliferation, global warming, and Islamic radicalism.
Obama's major challenges therefore will not come from abroad, but from home, where a steady drumbeat of revanchist criticism from the right, and blasted through media organs such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as from Congressional firebrands in the Republican Party, will make his path from a military-first doctrine to a diplomacy-first approach like dancing across a bed of hot coals.
For now, Obama can bask in the glow of admiration from right-wing pundits such as William Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer who respect his intelligence and political skills. For a sample of the savaging he can expect to receive in the days following his inauguration, we might do better to sample Daniel Henninger in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, Oliver North on Fox News, and John Bolton at the American Enterprise Institute.
Neoconservatives voice an ideology based on two self-reinforcing principles. The first is their belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is not "like" other nations, that we are superior by virtue of our history and our values. The second is that with the end of the Cold War, the world will plunge into chaos without strong, active directives from the United States. Let's be clear. Directives are not leadership. They are more like military orders, in this case supported by the global projection of American military power throughout the world.
As Chalmers Johnson observed presciently in Blowback, first published in 2000, the territorial projection of US military power - with more than 700 US military installations housing nearly one million troops, dependants, contractors, spies, in more than 130 other nations around the world - creates local resentments and reinforces the self-fulfilling prophecy of "enemies at our doorstep." The obvious costs of these deployments aside - both financial and political - we are dancing with the the Devil for more troubling reasons that Obama may only with difficulty be able to address.
The policy of force projection and maintenance of a global military infrastructure depends upon: 1) a web of payments and quid pro quos with non-elected leaders of other nations; 2) a commitment to secrecy and the absence of meaningful oversight and transparency; and 3) a reliance upon covert activity, spying, secret missions, and subterfuge (note revelations of the order permitting secret raids on Al-Qaeda around the globe, in nations such as Pakistan, Syria, and Somalia).
We need a foreign policy for the 21st century. Obama's success in transforming US foreign policy into a tool of constructive, meaningful engagement with other nations depends upon his ability to rebuild shattered relationships upon a new foundation of open communication, outreach, trust, and accountability. To build a foreign policy for the 21st century, Obama can draw upon the success and methods of his own political campaign, which used new technologies and means of communication already widespread around the world to reach and speak directly to individual Americans.
The problem Obama will face is in dismantling the structural outposts of our dated 20th century foreign policy driven by the strategy of force projection and a global military infrastructure. Our economy in great measure depend on this stimulus - let's call it "military welfare". Our concept of national security - both psychological and physical - also depends upon this policy, with its insinuating values of strength and of a proactive, global state of military readiness to address threats that by definition this policy frames as "us" against "them".
Let's be absolutely clear. Obama will need to draw upon all the reassuring calm he inspires to shift our sense of the world from one in which threat predominates to one in which opportunities for constructive relationships abound. He must adopt his superhero identity of Ocalma and resist what will surely be a strong impulse from White House advisers and Congressional allies to not appear "weak" when tested, not simply by foreign foes but by shrieking adversaries from the Republican right. Above all, he must work, slowly perhaps, but also steadily and with determination, to dismantle the global military web of bases and policies that have themselves been the source of anger and resentment contributing to our national insecurity.
Swept from power and nursing deep wounds, loosened from the responsibility of governing and free to attack without any consideration for coalition-building or compromise, the surviving Republican members of Congress, in alliance with their media allies and their geographically insulated bases of support in the nether regions of the nation, will do their best to make Obama's life miserable. And let's not fool ourselves. The politics of falsely righteous Republican anger and contempt we witnessed throughout the presidential campaign will increase in intensity in 2009.
The Republican base is like a three-legged stool, drawing support from social (values-driven) conservatives; economic (free-market) libertarians; and militaristic (nationalistic) neoconservatives. Let's focus on the foreign policy neocons, those who led us down the bloody road to Iraq and who, like Sauron separated from his ring of power, will seek with great urgency to undermine and weaken those who stand between them and a return to the uniliteralism of a hegemonic power.
Obama's foreign policy will begin with the assumption of a multilateral global arena in which the United States plays a leadership role based on alliances and diplomacy. Hardened, cynical views of international relationships - in China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, to name four examples - will challenge Obama's commitment to multilateral diplomacy. Nonetheless, in dealing with foreign leaders, Obama will have two assets on which to draw: his personal charm - which is so important in cultivating trusted relationships among leaders - and a willingness to leverage the influence of other countries, in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, in achieving tangible policy victories with respect to nuclear proliferation, global warming, and Islamic radicalism.
Obama's major challenges therefore will not come from abroad, but from home, where a steady drumbeat of revanchist criticism from the right, and blasted through media organs such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as from Congressional firebrands in the Republican Party, will make his path from a military-first doctrine to a diplomacy-first approach like dancing across a bed of hot coals.
For now, Obama can bask in the glow of admiration from right-wing pundits such as William Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer who respect his intelligence and political skills. For a sample of the savaging he can expect to receive in the days following his inauguration, we might do better to sample Daniel Henninger in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, Oliver North on Fox News, and John Bolton at the American Enterprise Institute.
Neoconservatives voice an ideology based on two self-reinforcing principles. The first is their belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is not "like" other nations, that we are superior by virtue of our history and our values. The second is that with the end of the Cold War, the world will plunge into chaos without strong, active directives from the United States. Let's be clear. Directives are not leadership. They are more like military orders, in this case supported by the global projection of American military power throughout the world.
As Chalmers Johnson observed presciently in Blowback, first published in 2000, the territorial projection of US military power - with more than 700 US military installations housing nearly one million troops, dependants, contractors, spies, in more than 130 other nations around the world - creates local resentments and reinforces the self-fulfilling prophecy of "enemies at our doorstep." The obvious costs of these deployments aside - both financial and political - we are dancing with the the Devil for more troubling reasons that Obama may only with difficulty be able to address.
The policy of force projection and maintenance of a global military infrastructure depends upon: 1) a web of payments and quid pro quos with non-elected leaders of other nations; 2) a commitment to secrecy and the absence of meaningful oversight and transparency; and 3) a reliance upon covert activity, spying, secret missions, and subterfuge (note revelations of the order permitting secret raids on Al-Qaeda around the globe, in nations such as Pakistan, Syria, and Somalia).
We need a foreign policy for the 21st century. Obama's success in transforming US foreign policy into a tool of constructive, meaningful engagement with other nations depends upon his ability to rebuild shattered relationships upon a new foundation of open communication, outreach, trust, and accountability. To build a foreign policy for the 21st century, Obama can draw upon the success and methods of his own political campaign, which used new technologies and means of communication already widespread around the world to reach and speak directly to individual Americans.
The problem Obama will face is in dismantling the structural outposts of our dated 20th century foreign policy driven by the strategy of force projection and a global military infrastructure. Our economy in great measure depend on this stimulus - let's call it "military welfare". Our concept of national security - both psychological and physical - also depends upon this policy, with its insinuating values of strength and of a proactive, global state of military readiness to address threats that by definition this policy frames as "us" against "them".
Let's be absolutely clear. Obama will need to draw upon all the reassuring calm he inspires to shift our sense of the world from one in which threat predominates to one in which opportunities for constructive relationships abound. He must adopt his superhero identity of Ocalma and resist what will surely be a strong impulse from White House advisers and Congressional allies to not appear "weak" when tested, not simply by foreign foes but by shrieking adversaries from the Republican right. Above all, he must work, slowly perhaps, but also steadily and with determination, to dismantle the global military web of bases and policies that have themselves been the source of anger and resentment contributing to our national insecurity.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)