What the President Might have Said

My fellow Americans,

        In the past few weeks we have been shocked by the video-taped murders of American journalists by ISIL. We have also been concerned by ISIL's advance into Iraq.  While these events have not been as cataclysmic as the 9/11 attacks whose anniversary we shall celebrate tomorrow, they arouse us to the same emotions. They also tempt us to make similar mistakes.  Having come into office convinced that George W. Bush's responses to those events were mistaken, I am not going to follow in his footsteps and make the same mistakes again.

       Yes, it would be very easy to argue ISIL's fighters threaten our homeland--but such a threat is far off. In any case, we have largely been successful in stopping terrorist attacks in the United States, with the exception of the failed attack in Times Square and the successful one in Boston in 2013.  There will almost surely be other such attacks in the future, but we cannot assume that we can stop them by trying to conquer faraway parts of the world.  It has now become clear that Al Queda's real goals had very little do with the United States, and the same is probably true of ISIL.

       It would also be easy for me to argue, as George W. Bush often did, that terrorists like those of ISIL are not genuinely Islamic at all--that they are in fact betraying the religion of Islam.  That, however, is a question that must be answered by Muslims, not by a Christian President of the United States of America like myself.  We have tried telling the peoples of the Middle East what their religion compels them to do, and not do.  This tactic does not work.  It would also be easy for me to close this speech by once again asking God to bless the United States of America--but the Almighty, as Lincoln remarked at the moment of the greatest crisis in American history, has his own purposes.

      Since the controversy over the tragic deaths of American diplomats in Benghazi, a new doctrine has cropped up among us: the idea that we must use American military force to protect American diplomats abroad.  This novel doctrine is at odds with international law and international order.  The safety of American diplomats abroad is the responsibility of their host government.  If the government clearly cannot fulfill that responsibility, we have no option but to withdraw our personnel.

      Lastly, it would be easy to assume that a combination of American air strikes in Iraq and Syria and American money to train a friendly force can transform the balance of power on the ground.  Yet this is clearly a fantasy.  In Iraq, about 180,000 American troops managed to establish order for as long as they remained in the country, but despite billions of dollars and years of effort, they could not create a government or an Army that would command the support of Iraq's major ethnic groups or fight ISIL effectively.  They now have a new Prime Minister, whom we hope will do better, but he has been unable to fill the most critical positions in the government, the Ministers of the Interior and of Defense.  We hope that he will do so at once, but we cannot make political change happen in the Middle East.

       The situation in Syria is even more difficult, because we oppose not only ISIL, but President Assad, who has brutally tried to suppress a rebellion for three years.  The idea that the United States can create a "third force" of pro-American "moderate" rebels that can defeat both the main antagonists is, frankly,  preposterous.  To intervene on such a basis would be comparable to a French intervention in the American revolution against both the British and the American colonists on behalf of Indian tribes, or a foreign intervention in the ThirtyYears' War in Germany against both Catholics and Protestants, on behalf of German Jews.

        Indeed I have made a mistake to try to insist upon the deposition of President Assad, a step which may easily lead to ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and chaos such as we now see in Libya.  Tonight I am announcing that we would welcome any political settlement in Syria that would bring an end to the conflict, even if it left President Assad in power.  In any case a settlement must respect the rights of both the Sunni majority and the Shi'ite Alawite minority in Syria, in an attempt to halt the regional religious war which threatens to tear the Middle East apart for decades.

       Nor can we delude ourselves further about our ability to enlist local partners.  With few exceptions, the governments of the Middle East have not truly faced the danger of revolution and civil war which they face.  We too quickly assume, in defiance of the facts, that they share our objectives and endorse our strategies.  This is what happened under the Bush Administration with respect to Pakistan.  We gave Pakistan billions of dollars in aid to fight the Taliban and Al Queda, only to discover that the Pakistani government wanted the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan and sheltered Osama Bin Laden for many years.  Meanwhile, our air strikes in Pakistan have inevitably caused civilian casualties and alienated thousands.   Many of the governments in the Middle East are not unsympathetic to ISIL or hope to use it as an ally, and air strikes in Syria are bound to kill innocent people and have negative consequences as well.

        I certainly cannot promise you that the restraint I intend to show in the face of this crisis will have rapid, beneficial results.  The political crisis that has engulfed the Middle East will last for many years.  It will not be solved without bloodshed, but it must be solved by the people of the region themselves.   All parties to the conflict will resent our intervention and our advice.  I call tonight for internal peace and peace among nations in the Middle East--a goal every nation should be able to endorse.  This is the only hope for the peoples of this troubled region. The United States has already done too much to increase disruption and chaos in that area.

         We like to think of ourselves as the world's policeman, or perhaps the world's doctor.  Yet as policemen, we have neither the authority nor the capability to make the peoples of the Middle East behave in any particular way.  And as doctors, we must return to the first rule of the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.

          Thank you, and good night.

President Obama's Problems

The alternatives to a second Obama term are so frightening that one hesitates to find fault with him unduly, but this is becoming harder and harder. It became quite clear after the passage of the health care plan that Barack Obama's career as a transformational President was over and that he had no wish to resume it. I began suggesting around that time that he seemed at least as likely to become the Herbert Hoover of our present crisis as our FDR. He is clearly, I regret to say, a creature of the Establishment in a way that Roosevelt and even Kennedy were not. Academia treated him very well in his youth, and evidently earned his confidence. He has relied on conventional economic thinkers with results that are likely to be disastrous. But something else has emerged over the past few years, something which I am not nearly close enough to the situation fully to understand, but which emerges clearly from a growing body of data. In the midst of an economic crisis and an increasingly chaotic world, Barack Obama is not, it would seem, a very rewarding President to work for.

The contrast with other Presidents, and particularly with FDR, is noteworthy. Judge Samuel Rosenman was Roosevelt's principal speech drafter for the whole of this thirteen years in office. His cabinet members showed extraordinary loyalty. Secretary of State Hull, never a Roosevelt intimate, served for 11 years; Treasury Secretary Morgenthau served for the last 11; Interior Secretary Ickes and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins served for the full twelve. Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace were close collaborators in several different capacities for the whole FDR Presidency. So did Admiral William Leahy. There were more changes within the White House, but staffers Steve Early and Pa Watson were also in attendance for a very long time. There were many reasons for this. Roosevelt spent time with all these men and women and encouraged them to compete for his favor; but more importantly, they knew they were part of a great crusade to remake America, and, then, the world. The private sector clearly offered no opportunities of comparable interest. Roosevelt's Administration included very few members of the GI (or "greatest") generation, as far as I can see, but it inspired many of them to behave similarly under Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara and Rusk stayed at their posts for seven and eight years; so did Orville Freeman at Agriculture and Stewart Udall at Interior. There were very few changes in either man's White House staff.

Barack Obama has now been President for two and a half years. He has already had two Chiefs of Staff; two press secretaries; and two National Security Advisers. In the midst of the worst long-term economic crisis in eighty years, one chairman of his Economic Council (Larry Summers) and two heads of the Council of Economic Advisers (Christina Romer and Austen Goolsbee) have left their posts. Having already changed National Security Advisers, he has now changed both the head of the CIA and the Secretary of Defense, losing Robert Gates, whose appointment was nearly the only bipartisan gesture that he managed to make work. And now rumors have surfaced that Hillary Clinton may follow in the footsteps of Robert McNamara and Paul Wolfowitz and go to the World Bank.

What this means, among other things, is that with the possible exception of Treasury Secretary Geithner (who is emerging as a major policy and public relations liability), no one has been allowed to emerge as a political force and a popular figure in his own right. Roosevelt in particular did not make that mistake. Ickes, Hopkins, Wallace, and, during the war, Secretary of War Stimson were massive public presences in their own right, inspirations to New Deal voters and lightning rods for opposition. Rumsfeld and Cheney played similar roles under Bush II. Hillary Clinton certainly might have played a similar role, but the Administration's foreign policy has been so lacking in innovation or initiative that she really has not had a chance to.

Why has all this happened, or not happened? To begin with, the President has made it clear that he would rather preside over the Eisenhower Administration than the Roosevelt one. One major reform--Health Care--and one anti-depression initiative, the stimulus, was enough for him--even though it hasn't worked. Roosevelt gave his subordinates responsibility and new worlds to conquer; Obama is fighting a largely unsuccessful battle simply to keep a federal government in place at all. Yet that cannot be the whole story. The President has always seemed to be a man of intelligence and charm, and he is legendary for never losing his temper; but sadly, he seems to lack Roosevelt's and Kennedy's knack for inspiring loyalty. Interestingly enough, while most of the men and women I mentioned above entered the national government for the first time under FDR, Obama has recruited an astonishing number of veterans of the Clinton Administration. While no adviser has betrayed, they have found it all to easy to end their relationship. There must be some reason for this, and eventually we will find out what it is.

Our crisis may be about to become much worse. Natural economic forces are not coming to our assistance, and the Republicans, it seems, may actually want to bring about a government default in the belief that any ensuing chaos will rebound to their benefit. The President has about six months to get on top of events. It is not clear that he has the necessary men and women around him to help him do so.

p.s. I of course had no idea when I did this post that the President, just a few days later, would tell the American people that he sometimes feels as if one term in office would be enough One reason people enjoyed working with FDR and JFK so much was that they couldn't wait to get to work every day. In any organization, the man or woman at the top sets the tone.

Israel, Palestine and the U.S.

When I began writing these posts I was determined to take on the toughest issues of the day, and one of those is certainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do not know what a possible solution is at this point--indeed I would be flabbergasted to see anything like real peace in my lifetime--but I do think that it behooves us all to look at some key historical facts and, above all, to try to find some intellectual framework for a solution. The recent speeches by President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, alas, fail to do either, and thus require some comment.

The paradox underlying the problem is the most fundamental paradox of international relations. For centuries after the Treaty of Westphalia, western civilization tried to impose a legal framework on international relations, even though it has never made a serious attempt (and, in my opinion, should not) to create a world government. When the United Nations was created in 1945 the foundation of its legal framework was the respect for frontiers. That, it seems to me, is the only lasting basis for an international legal order, but unfortunately, no one has found a way to make governments last forever, much less to make people stay in one place. It is probably fair to say that every nation on earth was built originally by conquest. The human past includes no age of pristine innocence. Present-day historians like to picture pre-Colombian America as some kind of bucolic paradise, but in fact, its tribes made cruel war upon one another, apparently exterminated whole civilizations in their midst (the mound builders, for instance), and, in some places, at one another. And whether or not one believes that the creation of ancient Israel was divinely ordained, which I do not, it was undoubtedly bloody, sometimes mercilessly so. The history of Europe is largely a history of warfare. We must keep all this in mind when we turn to this history of a small territory on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent Palestine mandate must be seen in this broader context. The British, who in 1917 had no rights in the region other than rights of conquest, declared that the Jewish people should be able to create a "homeland" in Palestine without prejudice to the rights of the existing populations there. That, of course, was a contradiction in terms from the beginning, and the Arab populations realized it. After the war the League of Nations gave the British a mandate--that is, sovereignty--over Palestine, and they continued to allow some Jewish immigration while eventually concluding that it would have to be severely limited. British troops had to prevent civil war in the region during the 1920s and 1930s. American Jews in this period were highly ambivalent, to put it mildly, about the whole project. The Jewish masses of Poland and Russia (by then the Soviet Union) had never been full citizens of their countries before 1919 or so, and man wanted a new homeland. American Jews had chosen a different solution: settlement in a country that recognized no religious distinctions among its citizens. Although they faced social prejudice in the first half of the twentieth century and their opportunities at the highest levels of American society remained in many ways limited, they felt well off indeed. Phillip Roth in one of his recent books suggests that American Jews around 1940 were the most loyal of all American immigrant groups, precisely because they had no loyalty to any mother country.

Now contrary to myth, Holocaust survivors did not found Israel. The founders of Israel were Zionists settlers, most of them from further east, who had been living in Palestine for decades. They were also largely secularists and socialists. When the war came to an end, they carried on a political and military campaign against British occupation, including acts of terrorism, while also trying to bring as many Holocaust survivors to Israel as possible. Those who had survived the war and the death camps in Eastern Europe were now living in displaced persons camps, and nearly all of them ruled out returning to their former homes. The United States, alas, would not welcome them. The tough immigration laws passed in 1924 were still in effect, and there was no political will to make an exception for hundreds of thousands of Jews from eastern Europe. That, as an American of half-Jewish ancestry, is my greatest regret about the whole story. When Ernest Bevin, the anti-Zionist British foreign secretary, said that the United States wanted the Jews to go to Palestine because they did not want them to go to New York, he was, sadly, speaking the truth.

In 1947, the British, weary of their imperial burden turned the mandate back to the new United Nations. The UN sent a commission of westerners to investigate the situation, including some Americans, who returned home very sympathetic to the Jewish cause, largely because the Jews were obviously so much more westernized than the Arabs. The Arabs at that moment lacked effective political leadership, in large part because their leaders had been jailed or exiled by the British during an Arab revolt in the late 1930s. The UN eventually recommended a partition of the territory, one that would have given the Jews significantly less than what became their border after 1949. The Zionists, as authors such as Conor Cruise O'Brien and the Israeli Benny Morris have pointed out, always took the practical position that any territory was better than none, since it would provide a basis for further expansion. The Arabs did not and refused to accept the partition plan at all. In all honesty, while the Jews were surely wiser, it seems to me one can sympathize with both sides here. In the wake of the Second World War Jews naturally did not trust the protection of any non-Jewish state, with the possible exceptions of Britain and the United States, where they could not go. On the other hand, the Arabs saw no reason--and still don't--why Christians at the distant United Nations should have been able to award a large part of territory in their midst to people whose only claim was that their ancestors had lived there thousands of years ago. We obviously cannot as a general rule start redistributing territory around the world on that basis--it would be a recipe for endless war.

To secure their state the Israelis had to defeat the Palestinians within the territory allotted them, and also to hold off the neighboring Arab states who intervened, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, on the Palestinians' side. The first task was relatively easy: the Palestinians were out-organized and out-gunned. The second was harder but the Israelis, who proclaimed their state in the spring of 1948, managed it, and even moved well beyond the borders specified by the UN resolution. Most of the Arab population of the new Israel fled--a good deal of it, we know now, was forcibly ejected. In 1949 the UN negotiated an armistice between Israel and its neighbors, temporarily depriving the Palestinian Arabs of any recognition whatever while leaving most of them under Jordanian control. But the Israelis, led by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, were not satisfied. They regarded the new lines as only the beginning. Some hoped to go all the way to the Jordan River; others, like former terrorist Menachem Begin, wanted to go further. Noting that the old testament God had promised the Jews the East Bank, as well as the West Bank, of the Jordan River, Begin in his party newspaper wrote articles in the early 1950s with titles such as "Amman too shall be ours." (I owe that deal to Ezer Weizmann, the former Israeli Defense Minister and President who helped negotiate the 1979 peace deal with Egypt.)

The Israelis got two chances to expand those frontiers over the next 20 years. In 1956 they signed on to an Anglo-French attempt to overthrow Gamel Abdul Nasser and seized the Sinai peninsula. During the next year President Eisenhower forced them to give these gains up, partly by threatening to end the tax deduction for contributions to Israel for American citizens--no idle threat in an era of 91% marginal tax rates. In 1967, it is now generally agreed, the Arabs did not want war, but Nasser, like Khrushchev in Cuba five years earlier, allowed a game of brinkmanship to go to far. The United States was too pre-occupied with Vietnam to head off the crisis, and the Israelis decided to attack. This time they occupied the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. In response, the Arabs recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people, and eight years later Yasir Arafat addressed the UN. Four years after that Israel withdrew from the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt, and in the 1990s Israel made peace with Jordan, whose population is now more than half Palestinian. But attempts at peace between Israel and the Palestinians have failed.

Why?

I am sure politicians and historians will still be arguing about that for at least a century; I can only give my opinion. Neither side, in my opinion, has ever established a consensus that would moderate is claims to the extent that real peace would be possible. On the one hand, the Palestinians still claim a right of return for the families of those who left in 1948-9, and many will not formally accept Israel's acceptance at all. On the other hand, Israel has tens of thousands of settlers and some politicians, certainly including its current Foreign Minister and very possibly its current Prime Minister as well, who have not given up on establishing an almost completely Jewish state in all the territory west of the Jordan at all. That is why no Israeli government has dared put a halt to settlements. At the end of the Clinton Administration Ehud Barak seemed ready to concede nearly all the territory outside the 1949-67 border, and to compensate the Palestinians for any territory Israel retained, but because of Arafat's intransigence, we never found out whether he could have sold that deal to the Israeli people. Since then the Israeli political spectrum has moved drastically rightward.

The Palestinian people have become more militant as well. Hamas won an election in 2003 and now rules the Gaza strip. Essentially American and Israeli strategy beginning with the Bush Administration--which specifically disavowed Yasser Arafat--has been to build up a Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas that would rule Palestine with due regard to Israeli sensibilities--that is, he would renounce any right to an Army, accept the permanence of some large Israeli settlement blocs and the loss of all Jerusalem, and allow Israel to station troops on his country's eastern border. (As Hanan Ashwari, for some time in the 1990s the chief Palestinian negotiator and their international public face, put it, "To the Israelis the only acceptable Palestinian is a Zionist, one who accepts the existence of Israel and renounces the right of return." Most Palestinians are not ready to do either.) In my opinion President Obama's speech two weeks ago was designed to save this policy. He offered (to the extent that he can) the Palestinians the 1967 borders with agreed mutual adjustments--but in return, Abbas had to end his new alliance with Hamas. Abbas, I suspect, created that alliance because he could see that the current Israeli government had now intention either of returning to the 1967 borders or even of halting settlements (and thus further expansion of Israeli territory) now. He was right. And Netanyahu's reception before Congress--a bipartisan reception an American President would not even dare dream of--was proof that Obama will never be able to do what Eisenhower did and apply effective pressure on the Israeli government to bring about a deal that it does not want. Netanyahu, meanwhile, is furious because Obama repudiated Bush's public pledge that Israel would simply keep large settlement blocs in any new agreement--forgetting that what one President can promise, another can take away. AIPAC is indeed one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, however, and I would not be surprised if Congress passes a resolution repudiating what President Obama has said. (For an earlier discussion of AIPAC's power, see the post of May 20, 2006, here.)

While the Israeli government does not formally base its claims today on any donation for a higher power, it does, it seems to me, maintain in effect that Israeli needs are paramount. Israelis have a right to live within any borders they deem necessary; Palestinians have only such rights as the Israelis are willing to let them have. Even the state which Netanyahu claims to offer them will lack many attributes of sovereignty. I can't help believing that that's why he claims to favor talks at all--he knows the Palestinians will never accept that status. Meanwhile, it certainly is not clear that conflict and terrorism would stop even in the entirely hypothetical case that the Palestinians were given the right to a state east of the 1949-67 border.

Ironically, Abbas is now going to return to where the conflict in its present form began, the General Assembly of the United Nations. It endorsed partition in 1948 and he wants it to do the same thing now, giving the Palestinians less than they would have received then but far more than Israel is willing to give them. The United States government, ironically, is proclaiming that the United Nations cannot recognize states. (The situation is of course different now because in 1948 Britain had formally turned sovereignty over to the UN.) The European states have been relatively pro-Palestinian for decades now, and many of them may go along with this. That will take the situation, to a certain extent, out of Washington's hands.

The only possible deal, it seems to me, at this point, and for decades to come, is some kind of a truce. That is how the Christian and Muslim worlds co-existed for long periods from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries on the frontiers of Eastern Europe. That is how peace was maintained in Western Europe during the Cold War, when the West German government never completely accepted the sovereignty of East Germany (while recognizing its authority beginning in 1972.) But neither side wants a truce.

I see only one piece of good news in all this. Like the Austro-Serbian conflict before 1914, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the kind of issue that in earlier days would have divided the great powers and perhaps led to a continental or world war. As the events in the Balkans in the 1990s showed, we have moved beyond those times. A UN resolution on Palestinian independence may divide Washington from some of its European allies, from Russia and from China, but it will not lead to great-power war. The advanced countries have uncoupled third world conflicts from issues of their own basic security. That is a huge advance for civilization, and one for which we should all be grateful.

Bin Laden's death

Debate still rages among enthusiasts of generational theory over when the current great crisis began. Was it in 2001, on 9/11, or was it much later, perhaps in 2007 when the markets began to crash? As I made clear last July 4 in one of my most important posts, I am inclined at this point to think that 9/11 was indeed the beginning. That once again raises the question of whether Osama Bin Laden's death marks the beginning of the end.

There is no question but that George W. Bush leapt into the role of crisis leader on several levels. He declared war not only on Islamic terrorist, led by Bin Laden, but on regimes that had harbored or tolerated them. He invaded two countries, involving the United States in occupations that have lasted nearly a decade. He talked about a new spirit in the country, and he suspended, in effect, various provisions of the laws and the Constitution of the United States. But he did not mobilize the countries' resources. Instead of increasing taxes like Lincoln and FDR, he cut them. He relied on a volunteer army with a huge auxiliary force of contractors. And, sadly, he embarked upon wars whose outcome has been dubious at best. Yet he had a profound long-term impact on the country, crippling the finances of the federal government, involving us indefinitely in the Middle East, and establishing what looks like a small but permanent gulag at Guantanamo. He also mobilized new Republican constituencies, although even his re-election victory was very narrow.

Unfortunately Bush lacked the vision to turn the country's energies into productive channels, or even, it seems,to evaluate what we faced in southwest Asia. He does not seem to have been very interested in apprehending Osama Bin Laden, although it will be decades, if not longer, before we know what kind of discussions took place between the White House and the CIA about Bin Laden's whereabouts. Instead he wanted to establish the US in the heart of the Middle East in Iraq. And he seems to have accepted the fiction that Pakistan was our ally against terror, in spite of overwhelming evidence that the Pakistanis had always supported the Taliban in Afghanistan and were sheltering Bin Laden on their own soil. Bush intervened in Pakistani politics, encouraging the resignation of Pervez Musharraf and thus the election of Benazir Bhutto, who was promptly assassinated. But he refused to face these elemental facts.

The killing of Bin Laden is welcome evidence that the United States can in fact carry out a major operation. I have felt both astonished and a bit humiliated, as an American, that a man who purposely killed 3000 random Americans has remained at large for so long. Capturing him would have been disastrous. Right wingers would have called for his torture to find out what he knew. (That is not a fantasy. No less a figure than Michael Scheuer, the retired former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit under Clinton and Bush, violently attacked President Obama for outlawing torture because it would, he thought, cripple us if Bin Laden were apprehended.) Terrorists around the world would have planned attacks to try to secure his release. Controversies would have erupted over a possible trial. I am opposed to capital punishment in domestic law, but Bin Laden had started a war with the US, and had to be killed. The outcome may even buy us some respect in the honor-based societies of the Middle East. (On the other hand, the immediate release of fragmentary information from his computer hard drive is extremely irresponsible.)

But what now? President Obama's next move will determine whether this marks the end of an era or not.

Voices on both sides of the aisle are now being raised calling for a withdrawal from Afghanistan. The circumstances of his capture vindicate the arguments of many long-standing opponents of our surge there, including myself. Al Queda has not been living in Afghanistan; its leaders, including its founder, have been sheltered by nuclear-armed Pakistan. It is impossible to believe that elements of the Pakistani Army and government did not know where Bin Laden was hiding. As long as they can stay where they are, the Al Queda leaders will not be tempted to leave. And we have shown that we can find them and kill them in Pakistan--even in the interior of the country.

The question hanging over the affair is whether, in fact, Bin Laden's death resulted from some kind of US-Pakistani deal. I am not saying that it did; it is pure speculation on my part, prompted in part, I admit, by my own long-standing advocacy of such a deal. Pakistanis and at least one blogger for Le Monde have suggested that the US has promised to withdraw from Afghanistan in return for being tipped off as to Bin Laden's whereabouts. Of course both Americans and Pakistanis are denying any such thing, but that is what one would have to expect. In any case, with or without a deal, withdrawal would make sense. Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain all have more strategic importance than Afghanistan--and they are now in flames. I am not suggesting that our troops should be redeployed into any of those countries. They must work out their own problems and the US must be prepared to live with any outcome. But these revolutions, to paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, give Afghanistan a chance to return to the obscurity it so richly deserves. Ambassador Ikenberry warned the Obama Administration in late 2009 that success would depend upon the performance of the Afghan government, which he did not trust. Everything that has happened since has vindicated his judgment. Even Mohammed Karzai himself is calling for fewer American troops and less American influence, just as Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu did in 1963. This time we should let the host government have its way.

President Obama could announce that we have discovered a successful counter-terrorism recipe, involving the use of intelligence and special operations. The next target should be the American-born Imam Anwar al Awlaki, said to be living in Yemen, who has directly inspired the Nigerian shoe-bomber, the Pakistani-American who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, and Major Nidal Hassan, who shot up his own Army base in Texas. Such operations are much more cost-effective than attempts to remake Islamic societies with the help of tens or hundreds of thousands of American troops. Once again the President has the chance to put a key aspect of the Bush era to an end. But will he take it?

I do not know, but one another straw in the wind suggests that he might. General David Petraeus is the face of the American Army's involvement in the Middle East. He took over the Iraq effort in 2007 because he was the only general who truly believed in it, and he scored a partial success. That earned him the CENTCOM command and then the command in Afghanistan. Now he is on his way to the CIA--and many senior army officers are well aware of the enormous strain the last ten years have put on their forces, and the meager results we have to show for it, especially in Afghanistan. His new job could represent an effort to put the counterterrorist mission where it belongs.

The President remains on the defensive regarding the budget, even though some signs now suggest that the Republicans have overplayed their hand once again. He has scored a dramatic success, but he needs to keep the political initiative. The country is surely as sick of Afghanistan as it was of Vietnam in 1970, when President Nixon finally agreed to serious drawdowns. We have the chance now to declare victory and begin coming home, and I hope we take it.

The End of an Era?

The government shutdown is in the news, but I doubt very much that it will look extremely significant thirty years from now. Yes, the Democrats may successfully save funding for Planned Parenthood, but they have already agreed to cuts big enough to do a great deal of harm to important parts of the federal government without making any significant impact upon the deficit. We all remember that Bill Clinton prevailed politically the last time we had a shutdown, but I also remember that he had reacted to the Republican victory in 1994 by announcing that the era of big government was over. Now it looks to me as if an era of American civilization--though not, perhaps, western civilization--that has lasted about a century is coming to an end.

Quite simply, that was the era in which Americans believed that they could, through their government, apply reason and science to improve their lives and insure a certain degree of justice within the framework of a modern, capitalist economy. Capitalism's extraordinary capacity to generate inequality had become apparent before the First World War, and two younger generations--the Progressives (born about 1842-62) and the Missionaries (about 1863-1884) had reacted with various reform movements. The accidental accession of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 brought these ideas into the White House, and Roosevelt talked specifically about using the power of the executive branch and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to curb monopoly power and give the American people a "square deal." He did not get far, but the new generation got its chance in 1932 as a result of the Depression--and as the British say, they took it. The New Deal aimed specifically at regulating the excesses of the financial system, regulating agricultural and industrial markets, insuring the rights of labor, increasing the tax burden on the wealthy even in the midst of the depression, putting the unemployed to work, and providing social security in old age. While far from a complete success, it won the support of well over half the American people and enshrined a new way of thinking. The Nomadic Lost generation (b. about 1885-1904) was not won over to the New Deal, but some of its more liberal members played key roles in it nonetheless. The sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of the GI generation in the Second World War created a new sense of government responsibility to the people, and even the Lost collaborated in the construction of a new postwar society. By the time the Republicans regained the White House in 1953 they had no real desire to undo the achievements of the last twenty years.

"When I was a young man," the great Missionary W. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963) wrote in the late 1930s, "the foundations of present culture were laid, the way was charted, the progress toward certain great goals was undoubted and inevitable. There was room for argument concerning details and methods and possible detours in the onsweep of civilization, but the fundamental facts were clear, unquestioned and unquestionable." So it was too in my youth, and especially in the first half the 1960s, when JFK and LBJ tried to extend the New Deal tradition still further. Yet as so happens, the apotheosis of that particular civilization also marked the beginning of the end. The Vietnam War, that awful product of GI hubris, accelerated the process, but perhaps it was inevitable in any case. In 2000, at the end of my book American Tragedy, I drew on Strauss and Howe and predicted some kind of crisis and civic rebirth. I was right about the former; it seems now I was wrong about the latter, and I can see why.

The United States has in many ways been on a downward path since the age of Reagan. Reagan introduced two critical new trends: the gradual erosion of our progressive tax code (Reagan did not, in fact cut taxes--he shifted them to the middle and lower classes), and the decline of union rights and the de-industrialization of America. But Reagan was a GI, as were the leaders of the Congress in the 1980s, and the process was not allowed to go that far. The deregulation of the S & L industry in the late 1980s was catastrophic, but then, at least, the perpetrators faced punishment. 5000 industry insiders drew jail time for S & L fraud; not one major player has been convicted of anything for the crash of 2007. That is because in the interim new generations have come to the fore, with completely new principles.

The Silent generation (born 1925-42) got the deregulatory ball rolling. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and many of the other key players in the process were Silents. But a Boomer President and an increasingly Boomer Republican Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. The process accelerated under George W. Bush. By cutting taxes and embarking upon two very long wars at the same time, Bush created a new permanent federal deficit even in good times. That has turned out to be a critical achievement for him and those on his side of the aisle, because it has made it absolutely impossible for the federal government to respond adequately to the economic crisis that deregulation brought about.

To Prophet generations like the Boomers, Strauss and Howe argued, falls the duty of giving society a new direction when the old order collapsed. We have failed that test, and our day in power is just about over, even though the youngest Boomers have only just turned 50. Why? Conservative Boomers, like conservatives of every generation except perhaps the GIs, have been devotees of the free market, which is really another form of social Darwinism. The most transformational Boomer President was George W. Bush, who crippled the finances of the federal government and started an endless involvement in the Middle East. But what about liberal Boomers?

Forty years ago our parents viewed liberal Boomers protesting the Vietnam War as spoiled children. It turns out that they were right, although not perhaps in exactly the way we believed. Liberal Boomers--including the few liberal politicians of any importance like Bill Clinton--have pretty much abandoned the New Deal tradition. They have stood by or collaborated in the de-industrialization of America and the deregulation of the financial system. Instead, they have focused on the rights of minorities, women, and gays. Those were important issues, but they stood out in the 1960s and 1970s largely because other at least equally important economic issues had been solved by our parents. We took those achievements for granted and assumed they would go on forever. They would not. We have secured minorities' equal right to participate--but in what?

Universities were a big part of the New Deal coalition, and provided a lot of the ideas that went into social and economic reform from the 1930s through the 1960s. The economists who taught me as a freshman were focused above all on keeping employment high, the legacy of their youth. They gave way to free-marketeers who almost totally dominate the economics profession now--and who, as the film Inside Job showed, are rewarded with six-figure consulting contracts. Many historians also focused upon the role of the state in society and the economy. Now those topics are virtually ignored by the faculty of our leading colleges and universities.

And that is why, it seems to me, today, in the midst of an economic, budgetary and political crisis, there is really no counterpoint to Republicans' continuing efforts to destroy the government. Roosevelt seized on the Great Depression as an opportunity to build up the federal government. They have seized upon the Great Recession as an opportunity to destroy government at every level. The punditocracy, with virtually no exceptions, has cooperated now in promoting the idea that cutting the deficit is our most important task--and no one takes the idea of tax increases seriously any more. There will be no Boomer President to restore a stronger role of government in the economy.

Generation X has gained enormously in power during the last three years. It occupies the White House and makes up most of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives. And Generation X has no memory either of the New Deal or the postwar High. It spent its childhood amidst collapsing institutions, particularly the institution of the family, and it emerged with a lifelong distrust. The vast majority of Gen Xers view our crisis as a purely individual matter and are not interested in uniting for the common good. A Gen X Congressman, Paul Ryan, has just introduced a plan to destroy Medicare just in time for his own generation to retire. One cannot understand how that could happen without generational theory.

The attack on government has also become an attack on reason in public life. It is no accident that the darlings of the new right have included people like Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann, who actually thought that the Revolutionary War had begun in Concord, New Hampshire. Intelligence is now seen as an attribute of an out-of-touch elite. It is clear that the Republican plans for health care, the economy and the budget are catastrophic--cutting government at all levels will impede recovery, not help it, and the free market is what has gotten us where we are today. But they do not care. The rationalist impulse is only one human impulse, and not by any means the strongest one. For the time being it seems that it has had its day. We live in a world of sound bites and images, with little time for reflection and understanding, and that is making it harder and harder to deal with our problems.

The Millennial generation (born about 1982-2002) might have been the new GIs, had the older generations enlisted them, too, in a great crusade. Now it seems that will not happen. Some of them are engaged in small-scale crusades of their own, using their own brains and their cooperative spirit to solve problems. That holds out a little hope for the present and more for the future. But for the next decade or two there seems little hope for any escape from our new Gilded Age. Boomers lived through a great era of American politics. Unfortunately for them and their children and grandchildren, it came to an end as they reached adulthood. Yet we can remain faithful to the best of our past, just as Europeans like Stendhal kept alive the ideals of the French Revolution in the 1820s, secure in their faith that such times would come again--as indeed, eventually, they did.

P.S. Last night, after an agreement was reached to avert a shutdown, President Obama said that Americans of different beliefs had come together and hailed "the biggest annual spending cut in history." Yes: the Republicans won on the principle of dismantling the federal government at home, the Democrats won on funding for planned parenthood and powers for the EPA that will never be effectively applied. (As of 8:20 this morning EDT, no one seems to know whether funding for PBS survived or not.) That is a fitting commentary on the power of the two parties today, and on how President Obama increasingly sees himself: a Democrat on social issues and a moderate Republican on economic ones.

Barack Obama, revealed

While the future of the country remains entirely uncertain, the State of the Union left no doubt whatever as to what Barack Obama wants for America and for his Presidency. It is certainly not what either his more fervent supporters (like myself) or his paranoid detractors expected, and it may well be impossible of achievement; but it fits, in a rather extraordinary way, into Strauss and Howe's theory of generations, and it might hold the key to our future. Barack Obama is indeed nostalgic, but not, as Fox News would have it, for the glorious days of 1960s radicalism that he is supposed to be reliving under the influence of his purported friend Bill Ayers. Instead, he wants to recover the 1950s and perhaps the early 1960s, the last High, a real golden age, in some respects at least, in American life, an era of technological progress and consensus. Two things, however, stand in his way. First, there is as yet no evidence that the Republican party, now ascendant, has any interest in his vision. Second and more importantly, the country still has gigantic problems that cannot be solved without a struggle--a struggle which he is now renouncing.

The tenor of Obama's speech has been noted by almost everyone, and only a few quotes will capture it. "We are part of the American family," he said. "We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed; that the dreams of a little girl in Tucson are not so different than those of our own children, and that they all deserve the chance to be fulfilled.
"That, too, is what sets us apart as a nation.

"Now, by itself, this simple recognition won’t usher in a new era of cooperation. What comes of this moment is up to us. What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow.

"I believe we can. And I believe we must. That’s what the people who sent us here expect of us. With their votes, they’ve determined that governing will now be a shared responsibility between parties. New laws will only pass with support from Democrats and Republicans. We will move forward together, or not at all -– for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics. . . .

"The future is ours to win. But to get there, we can’t just stand still. As Robert Kennedy told us, 'The future is not a gift. It is an achievement.' Sustaining the American Dream has never been about standing pat. It has required each generation to sacrifice, and struggle, and meet the demands of a new age.

"And now it’s our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. (Applause.) We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future."

The President then stressed the need for investment and innovation to compete in a changing world, and then, in what was clearly intended to be the headline phrase of the speech, identified this as the "Sputnik moment" of this generation. Meanwhile, he was extraordinarily upbeat about the nation's economic situation, showing a satisfaction that Herbert Hoover never pretended to. "We are poised for progress," he said. "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again." And that, indeed, represents the economic achievement of his team and especially of the Federal Reserve: by flooding financial markets with all the nearly-free money they want, they have completely disconnected the financial system from the economy at large. Wall Street's capital used to come from the earnings of productive American workers and corporations. Now it comes from the Federal Reserve at interest rates of about 1%. All will be well, the President suggests, if we can start focusing on innovation and quiet our voices. How he has settled upon this strategy is a fascinating question which, I am convinced, has a great deal to do with the course of his own life.

When Strauss and Howe wrote their books in the 1990s, they did not anticipate that a Generation Xer would be in the White House at this moment. In the previous crises in our national life the country had been led by relatively younger members of the current Prophet generations, the Transcendental Abraham Lincoln (born 1809) and the Missionary Franklin Roosevelt (b. 1882.) These men, like today's Baby Boomers, learned in their childhood of the great and violent achievements of their immediate forbears (the Revolution and the Constitution in Lincoln's case, the Civil War in FDR's), yet grew up in times of peace and relative prosperity. When they entered the White House in times of great crisis, both specifically compared the situations they faced to the nation's earlier trials, and promised to emerge from them victorious with our freedoms both reconfirmed and expanded. Now in fact, Baby Boomers did occupy the White House from 1993 to 2009. Bill Clinton, who had quite an untypical childhood for a Boomer, had no hopes of transforming America: he was if anything less of a reformer than Obama. George W. Bush, on the other hand, wanted to emulate the great deeds of the Roosevelt Administration and transform large parts of the world. Being a Baby Boomer, as I often noted during his presidency, he thought he could do so cheaply and painlessly, and he was not capable, apparently, of the sustained concentration that would have allowed him to set realistic goals. In addition, while Lincoln and FDR had realized that the government and its revenue had to be enlarged and strengthened to deal with a crisis, Bush was ideologically committed to cutting it. And thus, for the first time, the United States in 2007 entered a tremendous economic crisis with an existing huge permanent deficit. That has made a truly effective response to the crisis--one that would actually put large numbers of people back to work--impossible. We now face the worst long-term unemployment problem that we have seen since the Great Depression and although it is less serous than it was then, we have, this time, no strategy to deal with it at all.

Now Barack Obama, born in August 1961, was too young to have remembered the confident, consensus era of the 1950s. In one of the most revealing passages in Dreams From my Father, he mentions that stories of his father were inextricably mixed up in his mind with the Kennedy period, that last era of hope, innocence and consensus which shattered--like Obama's own life--just Obama was becoming conscious. Many Gen Xers had extremely difficult childhood's, and Obama's was as tumultuous and disorienting as anyone's. His father's death was followed by his mother's marriage to an Indonesian, the birth of a new sibling, and a sojourn in that country. Then it was back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents, who provided a taste of the stability they had known as young adults. Suddenly, in High School, he found himself catapulted into the local elite--Punahu School is to Hawaii what Andover is to Massachusetts--and thence to the embraces of the mainland elite, first on the west coast (Occidental College) and then on the East (Columbia and Harvard Law School.) Somehow, aside from a few typical youthful pranks in high school, he kept his equanimity through all this and remained a dedicated student and a young man who could get along with almost anyone. That could not have been easy, but it is the lot of many among his generation. After law school he worked as a community organizer in a Chicago neighborhood devastated by plant closings. He described this experience in Dreams from My Father, but without ever suggesting that radical economic reform was needed to rebuild the citizens' of the communities lives. That, indeed, is one of the astonishing omissions from that book.

And this leads me to the other astonishing omission from the State of the Union (and even more from the preview that was circulated to campaign contributors like myself): the complete failure to speak directly to the unemployed, the Americans who have lost their homes through foreclosure, or the poor. "That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts on once busy Main Streets. I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear -– proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game." That was his only reference to the millions whose lives have been shattered during the last few years and to whom today's economic statistics give little or no reason for hope--and even that reference spoke about them, not to them. One has to wonder whether he expects them, like himself as a child, to suck it up and deal with it. Franklin Roosevelt realized his contemporaries' lives had been shattered by forces behind their control--including, as he never tired of repeating, the greed of the wealthy--and that they needed active, sustained help. In today's New York Times Charles Blow points out that Obama's failure to refer specifically to the poor is almost unprecedented in a Democratic state of the union message.

Another interesting detail about Obama appears in this week's Time. Not too long ago he evidently hosted a second meeting of Presidential historians. (I do not have enough presidential credentials, apparently, to make the list.) The first such meeting, in the spring of 2009, I have been informed, spent a good deal of time on warnings to the President that war could destroy his hopes for progressive reforms. This time, the President wanted to hear, more than anything else, about Ronald Reagan. Now Ronald Reagan occupies a very special place in the hears of Generation X, whose oldest members were turning 20 when he came into office. He was the first President they had heard speak with confidence and optimism about the future--even though he presided initially, like Obama, over a terrible recession, and did not leave America's working class better off when he left office than when he came in. Obama now seems to be treating our profound economic troubles like a move to Indonesia: they are painful, but we must endure them and put our noses to the grindstone. Meanwhile, he would like, like Reagan, to cheer us up and get us focused on a more hopeful future--forgetting, apparently, that Reagan's actual policies started us down the road that led to our current economic hell.

Obama, like Clinton--whose former associates he is turning to more frequently than ever now--is above all a politician, and that is nothing to complain about. His pollsters and the election results have evidently convinced him that traditional Democratic responses to the crisis are indeed complete non-starters in today's political world, and he thus has no choice but to argue that the reforms he already managed to pass were more than enough to do the job. But it is not at all clear to me that his new consensus strategy can work. Yes, it delighted David Brooks, as I knew it would, and it probably would have brought cheers from Tom Friedman as well, but he seems to be on one of his periodic book leaves. But the Republican Party is now in a more revolutionary mood than ever. The new House majority wants to block the President at every turn. Representative Darrell Issa, whose most interesting background was laid out in great detail a couple of weeks ago by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, plans to harass the Administration with ceaseless investigations. More importantly, the House majority is quite likely to create a worldwide financial crisis by refusing to raise the debt ceiling in just a couple of months, and the Republicans have plans to destroy much of the existing federal government. Simultaneously, Republican legislators and governors are planning the kinds of draconian cuts in their work force that did so much harm in various countries in the early stages of the Great Depression. Within the next six months we could face a new political and economic crisis in this country--not to mention the rather striking developments taking place in other parts of the world, which I must save for another time. In one respect and one only Obama has brought his vision of a return to the late 1950s and early 1960s to life: the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, removing a critical barrier to legal equality similar to the racial barriers that fell back then. The freedom to participate equally in today's economy, however, remains a very mixed blessing.

The political basis for Obama's strategy, in short, seems to be lacking--but that really is the less important problem he faces. We cannot move to an era of true consensus without a real and determined effort to solve our economic problems, and we are no longer even making any. The real question now is whether things are going to get worse. Did the George W. Bush Administration--like those of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson--actually create a new America which, despite huge financial and economic problems, can become the basis for a new consensus under Barack Obama? Can we limp along for a decade with unemployment between 8 and 10 per cent? Can political rhetoric moderate, as Grant wanted so badly, and can the parties start to cooperate? Or are we likely to face a new economic downturn and financial crisis, with consequences that we can only guess?

I cannot decide, actually, which alternative I prefer. Last Wednesday I met my Generations in Film class, composed almost entirely of middle-of-the-road generation Xers in the military, for the last time. Several had written papers addressing this very point, and all their papers expected--and in one case, actually welcomed--another crisis which would finally force the country to face reality, pull together, and do something about our problems. Yet as I see it, the destructive voices on the right are so much stronger today than progressive ones that I fear what a new crisis would do both economically and politically. In the long sweep of history, it would be a great setback to stabilize things where they are. But the history of other nations shows that other, much worse outcomes, are possible as well.