Russia

On “Leverages”

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In a previous post, I asked a question about leverages in terms of foreign policy:

A key–an essential–question on leverages at Abu Muqawama (Dr. Andrew Exum):

Where things get tricky is when one tries to decide what to do about that. The principle problem is one that has been in my head watching more violent crackdowns in Bahrain and Egypt: the very source of U.S. leverage against the regimes in Bahrain and Egypt is that which links the United States to the abuses of the regime in the first place. So if you want to take a “moral” stand against the abuses of the regime in Bahrain and remove the Fifth Fleet, congratulations! You can feel good about yourself for about 24 hours — or until the time you realize that you have just lost the ability to schedule a same-day meeting with the Crown Prince to press him on the behavior of Bahrain’s security forces. Your leverage, such as it was, has just evaporated. The same is true in Egypt. It would feel good, amidst these violent clashes between the Army and protesters, to cut aid to the Egyptian Army. But in doing so, you also reduce your own leverage over the behavior of the Army itself.

Okay, so we have leverage with an Army cracking down on its own people, an Army fattened on US military aid and training. I thought bilateral military training was supposed to mitigate the worst instincts of some armies? Isn’t that the theory? What does it mean to have leverage? To what end? To what purpose? I don’t know the answer and I don’t think anyone does, so Dr. Exum has a point. We have no strategy (link goes to Zen) within which to place “trade offs”. Well, if we do, I can’t see it.

Greg Scoblete at The Compass (RealClearWorld) asks the question in a much better fashion (I enjoy reading that blog, whether I agree or disagree with specific points):

But all of this begs an important question – leverage for what? The idea is that the U.S. invests in places like Bahrain and Egypt because it needs or wants something in return. During the Cold War, it was keeping these states out of the Soviet orbit. In the 1990s and beyond, it was ensuring these states remained friendly with Israel and accommodative to U.S. military power in the region. Today, what? What is it that U.S. policy requires from Egypt and Bahrain that necessitates supporting these regimes during these brutal crack downs?

How should we view American policy toward the Middle East? What is the larger strategic framework within which we ought to view the various relationships? What is the optimal posture for the United States? Folks, I don’t know. I’d love to know your opinions on the subject.

In Memoriam: The Bravest of Men

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Kapler the Brave
Kapler the Brave

Alexei Kapler was the bravest of men.

How brave?

Put it this way: there are two kinds of brave:

  • Brave
  • Alexei Kapler brave.

Alexei Kapler was Alexei Kapler brave.

By profession, Kapler was a screenwriter, journalist, director, and actor. By avocation, he was an accomplished womanizer. One night, Kapler, a man of forty years, met a sixteen year old girl at a party. This young woman was intelligent, strong-willed, attractive, and sad. It was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death. No one seemed to remember. Kapler was happy to listen, comfort, sympathize, and seduce.

Since his new conquest came from a sheltered background, Kapler decided to show her the wild side of life. He lent her forbidden adult books. He took her dancing, took her to see  avaunt garde theater, and took her to meet outrageous people at outrageous parties. Kapler was a man of the world, witty, knowledgeable, a skilled raconteur. The young woman was swept off her feet by this urbane sophisticate.  There were problems though: Kepler was married. And he was having an affair with a sixteen year old girl.

Hiding the affair from her family was a must. Hiding it from the girl’s father was especially important. Kapler was a smooth enough operator that he might have kept their affair secret from the girl’s father under normal circumstances. Unfortunately for him, this girl’s father had a particularly suspicious temperament. While something like this temperament is not unusual in any father of a sixteen year old girl, this father was different:

He could have phones tapped.

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You Must Love Whittaker Chambers, But You Must Not Drink Too Deeply Of His Perfumed Pessimism; Or, Be Happy For The Struggle Will Be Dire But The Victory Will Be Sweet

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I had a chat with a friend today. He mentioned Whittaker Chambers, and that he sometimes thinks that Chambers was right, that we were on the losing side of history, and the fight itself is the only reward.

I mentioned something I believed Chambers had said, that all we could do was to preserve the “fingers bones of the saints” through the coming Dark Age. I wrote to him after I’d had a few minutes to mull our conversation, and to noodle a little on the Internet. Below, lightly edited, is what I sent.

******

I recalled the Chambers quote incorrectly.  He did not say “finger bones of the saints” as I have been misquoting him for years now.

Here is the passage which I remembered erroneously:

That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.

(From William F. Buckley’s memoir of Chambers, here.)

Damn, that is beautiful.

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A New Doctrine?

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Carter Doctrine:”The Carter Doctrine was a policy proclaimed by President of the United States Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, which stated that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf region. The doctrine was a response to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, and was intended to deter the Soviet Union—the Cold War adversary of the United States—from seeking hegemony in the Gulf. After stating that Soviet troops in Afghanistan posed “a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil,” Carter proclaimed:….”

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, as we remember the fallen and the many members of the armed services of the United States who have served for ten years of war, heroically, at great sacrifice and seldom with complaint, we also need to recall that we should not move through history as sleepwalkers. We owe it to our veterans and to ourselves not to continue to blindly walk the path of the trajectory of 9/11, but to pause and reflect on what changes in the last ten years have been for the good and which require reassessment. Or repeal. To reassert ourselves, as Americans, as masters of our own destiny rather than reacting blindly to events while carelessly ceding more and more control over our lives and our livelihoods to the whims of others and a theatric quest for perfect security. America needs to regain the initiative, remember our strengths and do a much better job of minding the store at home.

– Zenpundit, The Nine-Eleven Century

1. Canada and oil sands: “Bituminous sands, colloquially known as oil sands or tar sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit. The sands contain naturally occurring mixtures of sand, clay, water, and a dense and extremely viscous form of petroleum technically referred to as bitumen (or colloquially “tar” due to its similar appearance, odour, and colour). Oil sands are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.[1]”

2. Israel and Natural Gas: “In recent years, Israel has found and begun developing massive natural gas deposits in the Mediterranean Sea. There is much more wealth underwater– the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Levant Basin contains as much as 122 trillion cubic meters of recoverable gas — and all countries around the basin want a piece of the action.”

3. Russian state oil and American oil companies: “America’s largest oil company last week reached an historic agreement with Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft. ExxonMobil now will take the place of BP (British Petroleum), whose dealings with Rosneft collapsed earlier this year.”

4. Dakotas and oil reserves: “America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.”

5. Bloom boxes: “One example to illustrate why the future is proving elusive in the USA: There is a stand-alone electricity providing unit called the Bloom Energy Server or “Bloom Box” — small, simple to use — which can power any home or commercial building. The wondrous box has already been test-driven; Google, eBay and a number of other Fortune 500 companies have a few Bloom Boxes and they’re saving fortunes in electrical bills.

In other words, the Bloom Box can make America’s electricity grid obsolete. There are only two things holding the box back from being installed in every residential, commercial and government space in the USA:

a) Bloom Energy, the company that makes the box, doesn’t have large manufacturing capacity.

b) The U.S. energy industry doesn’t want to be shoved around by a box. (The same for much of the ‘Green Jobs’ sector that the federal government has been pushing hard. The Bloom Box technology makes windmill and solar panel technologies obsolete.”

The GOP debates have been intellectually vapid and the fault does not lie entirely with our lightweight media moderators. Ladies and gentlemen, you are “auditioning” for the toughest job in the world. Ladies and gentlemen, you are genuinely interesting and accomplished people. Be leaders. Hire some decent speech coaches, do a little background wonky reading and show us your vision for the future.

Update: I made a few edits for clarity. Thanks for the comments, everyone. I don’t know squat about this topic. Carl from Chicago is definitely the “go to” guy on energy topics around here but I’ve been bored with the debates and wanted to blog about that for some time now. Also, I don’t know what the whole “ladies and gentlemen” thing is about. It’s kinda affected. Incorrect, too. Only one lady has been involved in the formal debates….so far….

Palin v. Crony Capitalism

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I have long believed that the biggest problem we have in this country is that the government and the businesses that have captured the regulatory state have become one seamless monstrosity.

A lot of people have had a hard time getting their heads around this.

Lefties like to think that “business” is evil but that “government” regulates it to protect the people from pollution and defective products, etc.

Righties like to think that “business” = free enterprise, menaced by the evil “government” that is driving it to extinction.

Both are mostly wrong.

The government has turned into an amalgamation of iron triangles — regulators, legislators (or actually their staffs) and industries that are regulated. These work in tandem to their mutual advantage at the expense of the taxpayer and of truly entrepreneurial and innovative businesses. It is in the joint interest of this business/government crony capitalist complex to crush out potential rivals and created government sponsored, protected and subsidized monopolists.

This is precisely the hazard the USA was founded to fight against. The American Revolution was provoked by British monopolists authorized by the Crown — crony capitalism, 18th Century style. The founding generation was acutely aware of this problem. Further the major thinkers influencing 19th Century liberal thought in the USA, Canada and Britain were all focused on this problem: Jefferson, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. (See the brilliant book The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone by Robert Kelley, which explains this now-forgotten history.)

The greatest threat to our liberty is the uniting of government power and private greed, and that is exactly what we are facing now.

The creation of a regulatory state meant its inevitable capture by the industries it supposedly regulated. I remember having a life-changing intellectual moment when I read The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson as an undergrad at the University of Chicago. (If you have not read this, you must do so. Really.) George Stigler’s analysis of the regulatory state was consistent with this picture. (See, e.g. The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation.) Once you see how this works, it is obvious that this process is inevitable.

The political class that services this machine has come to be known in Chicago as The Combine. Both parties service the machine, with no substantial difference between them. The Democrats tend to have more of what our co-blogger Carl from Chicago, in an excellent and prescient post, called stone-cold redistributionists, but neither party has any interest in making any basic changes in these arrangements. Mr. Bush, with the bank bailouts, then Mr. Obama, with Solyndra being just one of many egregious examples from him, has taken this process to a new level.

During the Cold War, people would argue that the United States and the Soviet Union were “converging.” The argument went that the Soviet Union would liberalize and become more humane, while the USA would become more socialistic, and we would all end up looking something like a utopian notion of Sweden. This did not happen. The Soviet Union fell apart. Mr. Fukuyama famously asserted that liberal democracy had “won” and that the ideological struggles of modernity were over, and history had ended.

But what if the final state is not democratic capitalism? What if convergence is right after all? What if Soviet communism fell apart and turned into a mafia state run by an alliance of government and favored businesses, which control the country by corruption and intimidation, a nomenklatura that strips out all the value in the country on behalf of a well-connected elite, immiserating everyone else. This amoral, vicious, greed-driven, undemocratic dystopia is what we are now converging toward. It is an Orwellian future, with an Inner Party of senior politicians and business executives, an Outer Party of government employees and business managers, and a vast, despoiled, proletariat with no opportunities, or assets or future. It sounds like the world Mr. Obama is brazenly pushing us toward. It also sounds like a future that no Republican has so far dared to point to, to name, to denounce and to oppose — because they would prefer to be in on the game than take the risks inherent in opposing it.

So, Fukuyama was right: We are approaching a single form of governance around the world. Unfortunately, it turns out, it’s fascism.

Until Gov. Palin’s speech on September 4, 2011, in Indianola, Iowa.

… there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

Please listen to this speech, or read it, if you have not done so already.

Today, Instapundit linked to a Facebook post entitled “Crony Capitalism on Steroids.”

She is pounding the same drum.

She is apparently going to make this theme the main focus of a Presidential campaign.

Say what you like about Mrs. Palin. She is the only person in public life who has successfully identified the threat, named it, shone a spotlight on it, denounced it, and begun to threaten it.

This is the first faint flicker of hope I have seen that our political order can be reformed democratically without a massive, system-wide failure happening first. Maybe the other candidates will be forced to respond to these denunciations, maybe there will be a populist response to this challenge raised by Gov. Palin. I hope so.

We do live in interesting times, and they just got a lot more interesting.

UPDATE: Paul Ryan had this excellent speech linked on Instapundit. Here’s an excerpt:

… if we surrender more control over our economy to the governing class then life in America will become defined by a new kind of class warfare: A class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society at the expense of working Americans, entrepreneurs, and the small businesswoman who has the gall to take on the corporate chieftain.

My highlighting. Sounds familiar.

More of this, please. Faster, please.