Blogs

Will Colin Powell support Mitt Romney? Powell, who has just published his latest memoir It Worked For Me isn't saying if Romney will work for him. On National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" he stuck to his message that it's too early to tell: "I'm not prepared to say," the General announced.

Is this Powell's vaunted exit strategy? After endorsing Barack Obama in 2008 is Powell having second, or even third, thoughts? Or is he simply waiting to see if Romney can recapture the moderate Republican mojo that George H.W. Bush personified and that the dauphin Bush willfully flung aside, embroiling America in two wars seemingly without end, exhausting the national treasury, and stirring up a lot of bad feelings around the globe, not to mention inveigling Powell into putting his credibility behind a bogus appearance at the United Nations alleging that Saddam Hussein was in possession of a treasure chest of weapons of mass destruction that American had no choice but to destroy, only to discover, upon invading Iraq, that they never existed in the first place, despite all the administration's rodomonate about doomsday lurking in the sands of Baghdad?

A major story coming out of China in recent weeks—partly as a by-product of the story of fallen princeling Bo Xilai and his wife—has been the extent to which family members of Chinese leaders exploit their privileged positions for personal and professional gain. The offspring of senior leaders are way ahead of their countrymen in attending the best private universities in the West. Family members get installed in executive positions in state-owned enterprises, or in other business endeavors dependent on actions of the state, where they can enrich themselves. These reports suggest a sharp socio-economic stratification and class structure in which political power and economic privilege go hand-in-hand. This raises many questions about social strains, political tensions and possible future political evolution inside China. But it also figures into the global competition for influence between China and other major powers, and that bears directly on U.S. interests.

Leon Wieseltier’s latest column in the New Republic aims to expose the hollowness of Washington’s current policy regarding the ongoing violence in Syria. In reality, his piece does more to demonstrate the weakness of his own case for intervention.

Wieseltier’s principal target is the appeal to “complexity” as a justification for staying out of the fight. He says that realists and others have simply dismissed the prospect of intervention by saying that the situation in Syria “is complicated.” His response is that every significant public-policy issue is complicated, and that therefore “the appeal to complexity is almost always selective.” He terms this “the paralyzing effect of nuance,” contending that those who raise the issue of complexity are exploiting it “as a warrant for passivity.”

Wieseltier never defines exactly who is making this argument or quotes anyone directly. Small wonder, since he is attacking a total straw man. No one has simply said, “The situation in Syria is complicated, therefore we should stay out—end of story.” Rather, the case against intervention more often goes something like this: “There are no plausible policy options right now that present a good probability of achieving the desired outcome (removing Bashar al-Assad from power) at an acceptable cost.” Nothing in Wieseltier’s piece gives us any reason to doubt that this is true. He says he wants the United States to “take decisive action” but never defines what he means by that.

On May 23, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) will enter into talks with the Iranian leadership about the latter’s nuclear program. The Baghdad talks come after talks last month in Istanbul. A number of observers have raised expectations for the talks in Baghdad. The latest hopeful development is IAEA chief Yukiya Amano’s declaration, on the heels of his visit to Tehran, that he expects a structured agreement for inspections to be signed “quite soon.” Any progress toward a diplomatic solution would be preferable to backsliding or a collapse. Unfortunately, the talks are unlikely to live up to the high expectations.

Beyond Amano’s visit to Tehran, the big change since last month’s talks is French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s loss to the socialist François Hollande, who appears less truculent on Iran than was Sarkozy. Previously, Sarkozy was the hardest-driving member of the P5+1, so Hollande’s victory is likely to bring the P5+1 into closer harmony. More broadly, the considerable anxiety over the prospect of an outright collapse of the euro is likely to diminish European interest in focusing too much attention overseas.

Let’s stipulate that there’s no political advantage in Republicans resurrecting the question of the true nature of President Obama’s twenty-year relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whatever it was before the Illinois senator left Wright’s church during the 2008 presidential campaign. And let’s accept that whatever there is to be said about that relationship probably has already been said.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker seems to agree with those stipulations. Yet she raises disturbing questions in response to reports that a GOP political strategist and billionaire donor contemplated raising the issue again in an effort to defeat Obama’s reelection bid. The reaction was so swift and severe that they quickly abandoned the idea.

Parker asks the question of just how close Obama was to the fiery Chicago preacher, whose fulminations could be called anti-white racism. As Parker notes, Wright inspired the title of one of Obama’s books. He conducted the Obamas’ wedding ceremony and baptized the Obama girls. He led the family prayer when Obama announced his first presidential run. That seems like a pretty close relationship, and it begs the question of what Obama really thought about Wright’s persistent anti-white rhetoric.

And yet she notes: “Four years later, the mere mention of Wright by political opponents is considered racist.” She raises questions of political equity when the putative Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, is forced on the defensive by such an independent ad proposal, which was leaked to The New York Times and appeared on the paper’s front page.

“Romney is nothing like a racist,” writes Parker, “yet suddenly he is forced to distance himself from ads about which he knew nothing.”

Muammar Qaddafi and Hafez al-Assad, 1971The death of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi in Libya means the departure of a living link to an era of terrorism that was much different from what we see today. The 1980s was the peak of modern state-fomented international terrorism. The decade began with American diplomats being held hostage in Tehran. The next few years saw lethal terrorism carried out directly by several states. Iran conducted a sustained campaign of assassination of exiled Iranian dissidents. Syria attempted to blow up Israeli airliners. North Korea blew up a South Korean airliner and conducted a bombing in Burma intended to kill the visiting South Korean president. The Libyan regime of Muammar Qaddafi was active in terrorism on multiple fronts, including the bombing of a night club in Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen. And it was Qaddafi's regime that killed 270 people by bombing Pan Am flight 103 in 1988—a crime for which Megrahi was the only person ever convicted.

The Eurozone has so far lasted 13 years. But Rome's single currency lasted for 400 years, as Gilles Bransbourg, a researcher at New York University pointed out this week on the public radio show The World.

How was an ancient world power able to achieve this kind of economic unity over such a large and diverse area? According to Bransbourg, the Romans didn't demand uniformity: They let conquered peoples keep their local currencies in use alongside Roman denominations.

This was all part of a larger strategy of the Romans, who realized in keeping a far-flung empire together it helped to "leave as much as possible to local authorities." (This sounds like the modern principle of subsidiarity, to which EU officials have often payed lip service, but in practice ignored.)

Bransbourg speculates that "If the euro had been devised not as a monopolistic currency," but instead as an additional means of exchange, then Greece and other troubled economies would not have been given perverse incentives—low interest rates enabled by the European Central Bank—to borrow too much. Prior to the euro, many nations participated in an arrangement called the European Currency Unit (ECU), an artificial basket of currencies of member states. Bransbourg suggests that the EU might want to back away from a single currency and reestablish something like the ECU.

If you’re curious about Michele Bachmann’s recent foray into Swiss citizenship or outraged over Eduardo Saverin’s decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship and run off to Singapore with his Facebook winnings, Jacqueline Stevens has a way to slake such curiosity and assuage such outrage: Abolish the United States.

Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, hates nationalism so much that she wants to rid the world of nations. As she puts it, writing in The New York Times: “We need governments, but we don’t need nations.”

The good professor thinks it’s ridiculous for countries to convey citizenship on the basis of territorial birth. Why not let people just wander the globe looking for the best place to live, and then everyone can be the citizen of whatever country in which he or she happens to alight? She explains, “People should be free to move across borders; they should be citizens of the states where they happen to reside—period.”

I like that “period.” It denotes the finality of her argument and its presumed impregnability from silly nationalists such as myself.

But if I may, Professor, how do you figure that this approach would, as you say, “help end inequality among countries, by letting people move for greater opportunity”?

In fact, as anyone with half a brain knows, such a global practice, even if practicable, wouldn’t end inequality among countries at all. It would instead create chaos and poverty, as rich countries would be brought down by an inundation of teeming—and unabsorbable—masses desperate to better their station while poor countries would deteriorate into ghost countries.

The focus of the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago will be Afghanistan. President Obama is expected to speak of the need for solidarity from the international community. His only major success will be a pledge from NATO members to commit funds to Afghanistan well beyond 2014. Difficult questions surrounding the mission’s long-term sustainability will remain unanswered. But any long-term plan for stabilization must put Afghans in the lead. That is the country’s true path to self-sufficiency.

The estimated cost of paying for the 230,000-350,000-strong Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) hovers between $4-6 billion, annually. The President will seek $1.3 billion from allies, which in an age of austerity will be difficult for NATO partners, leaving the United States to foot much of the bill.

Although it is cheaper to fund Afghan forces than deploy foreign troops, long-term operations, maintenance, and sustainment costs for the ANSF may continue through 2025. Building security and governance to the point where locals can stand on their own is an indefinite commitment, not an exit strategy.

The real story of the summit is that Untied States and NATO officials plan to extend their financial support to Afghanistan in the face of war-weary publics at home, brazen insurgent attacks in the capital, and a string of scandals involving coalition forces and their Afghan counterparts. Lingering issues that will go unresolved include the quality of the ANSF, the seemingly indefatigable insurgency, and the long-talked about negotiated peace settlement with extremists and regional powers.

We know a round of nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 is imminent when we hear an upsurge in not only straightforward analysis of the issues but also proactive efforts to spin whatever the talks may yield. Much of the straightforward analysis has a tone of optimism, against the background of a positive tone in the previous meeting between the parties last month in Istanbul. The spinning is coming from various quarters but most conspicuously from those having an interest in the failure of negotiations with Iran. The pro-failure interests include the government of Israel and those who follow its lead, for whom indefinite persistence of the idea that Iran and its nuclear program pose the greatest threat to peace and stability in the Middle East provides the ideal diversion of attention from other, genuinely destabilizing matters they would prefer the world to overlook.