The chief strategy alternative to what the Obama Administration is doing in Afghanistan seems to be to accept any result that the political system there throws up, and then to buy off the winners. This sounds wonderfully realist and non-Wilsonian. It has the added advantage that some thoughts along these lines have no doubt occurred to certain leaders of the Taleban. In their case, of course, the transfers of funds and material support would not be viewed as protection money, but tribute. The North Koreans have been up to the same thing for about 15 years, not without success; in fact, it is possible to argue that this kind of arrangement is the optimum treatment for small, isolated powers that can make credible threats in their own region but are not otherwise dangerous. That argument cannot be made for victorious enemies with clandestine global reach who can brandish the transfers as evidence of their ideological superiority.
President Obama seems to have wit enough not to try that approach, but you wonder about Vice President Biden.
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Michael Scheuer, by the way, has by no means changed his views on Afghanistan since publishing Imperial Hubris. In a recent contribution at AntiWar, he makes this interesting connection:
Obama’s mind is emerging as a mind filled with war-causing secular theology of the French Revolution. That revolution was all about enlightened leaders "perfecting" the common man for what the revolutionary elite deemed to be his own good, and using the vehicles of government edict, fanatic secularism, and force to do so. (Sounds a bit like the universal health-care plan, doesn’t it?)
You see: Tea Parties and the Jihad are two peas in a pod.
Yes.
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Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal says that the Democrats and the Republicans are in danger of serial catastrophic victory:
Passage of the health-care bill will be, for the administration, a catastrophic victory. If it is voted through in time for the State of the Union Address, as President Obama hopes, half the chamber will rise to their feet and cheer. They will be cheering their own demise...It was not worth it -- not worth the town-hall uprisings and the bleeding of centrist support, not worth the rebranding of the president from center-left leader to leftist leader, not worth the proof it provided that the public's concerns and the administration's are not the same, not worth a wasted first year that should have been given to two things and two things only: economic matters and national security...Republican political professionals in Washington assume a coming victory. They do not see that 2010 could be a catastrophic victory for them. If they seize back power without clear purpose, if they are not serious, if they do the lazy and cynical thing by just sitting back and letting the Democrats lose, three bad things will happen. They will contribute to the air of cynicism in which our citizens marinate. Their lack of seriousness will be discerned by the Republican base, whose enthusiasm and generosity will be blunted. And the Republicans themselves will be left unable to lead when their time comes, because operating cynically will allow the public to view them cynically, which will lessen the chance they will be able to do anything constructive.
The greater danger for the GOP is that the passage of a healthcare reform could put them in the position of the boy who cried wolf. Any bill likely to pass will not affect the way the great majority of the people interact with the medical industry. To the extent people notice it all, the perceived effect will be in areas like coverage for pre-existing conditions and insurance for young adults, areas in which it will be well received.
Health care is not the issue of the early 21st-century historical crisis. The matter will lapse, like Prohibition did, as more important issues present themselves.
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Speaking of strategies that are anachronistic in a crisis, I came across one in connection with some banking I had to do for my condominium association. One of the banks we use no longer has branches, it has "stores," which are laid out in the sort of spacious open-office format that you would want to work in if you had to work in an open office. Traditionally, banks' retail offices favored marble and bronze. This served to emphasize the institution's wealth and security, which was especially necessary when the public rightly suspected that the bank's actual capital consisted of the founder's gambling IOUs. Now we have "stores," which by their appearance instruct the public that they are centers for the communication of financial information rather than depositories of static wealth.
Not to be a spoilsport, but it seems to me that a message of mere stability would be well received right now. Customers are less and less eager to find exotic ways to access their equity and more and more interested in making sure that it does not evaporate. Banks are again becoming savings institutions. Forget about Stores. Try Forts.
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Readers may be appalled to learn that this has been Armageddon Week on The History Channel. The Book of Revelation has been sliced and diced into a fine powder of anxiety. The skies have been darkened with the people's beloved asteroids. One show, the Earth in 2100, seems to recycle the same tale of ecologically induced social collapse that has been appearing in pseudo-documentaries since the mid-1970s. And there was After Armageddon, which presents a somewhat genteel version of a Mad Max sequel to some general catastrophe.
How shall I put this? If you live in an area where government normally functions, then after a catastrophe it does not go away. In fact, in effect, you're drafted. Sometimes government is the solution. This is one of them.
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But the classics will always be reimagined, as we will see in the 2010 version of Red Dawn:
The Chinese propaganda posters, carefully set inside the windows of the Chinese/American Friendship Center in Detroit, say it all: the first, a picture of the Capitol in Washington DC having its rotunda blown off, with the words "Defeating Your Enemy" running along the top. The second, a Chinese hand reaching down to help up an American, with the phrase "Helping You Back On Your Feet", and the last, a burly laborer hammering away at an anvil, a figure of the US dollar beneath his descending hammer, with the slogan "Repairing Your Economy" in large white letters on the poster. Another poster makes its point even more directly: beneath a picture of the chastened US dollar, "Deceitful Leaders. Greedy Corporations. This is Not a Democracy. We Are Here to Help."
Thankfully, this is not the Detroit of today, rather the Detroit of tomorrow, at least as envisioned by director Dan Bradley, who is in the midst of remaking the 1984 cult hit Red Dawn, but this time with the Soviets taking the back seat and the Chinese standing in as the aggressor.
I was never much of a fan of the 1984 movie; far more interesting, I think, is the 1952 Cold War film, Invasion USA. (The 1985 film Invasion USA, starring Chuck Norris, should be avoided at all costs.) In any case, the novelty with the 2010 film is that the invasion meets with some popular approval. The country really had been mismanaged for some time, the story says. A period of occupation is seen as an opportunity to simplify the situation and work things out.
We may note that the rise of China nowhere raises the sort of anxieties that the existence of the Soviet Union did. Actually, China seems to meet with less resentment in America than Japan did in the 1980s. We may also note that sinophobia could be a quickly perishable phenomenon: even The New York Times has discovered James S. Chanos.
Again, in connection with the Chinese Bubble, I don't quite see how a bubble can collapse in the ordinary way when liquidity is generated by fiat. An economy that produces goods that no one much wants to buy and infrastructure that no one much wants to use cannot go on forever. The question is, how does it shut down if prices don't work?
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Speaking of unworthy republics, Goldman-Spengler at First Things has some thoughts on Cicero v. Augustine:
Cicero, of course, lost his battle to preserve the Roman Republic. He briefly allied with Mark Antony against the assassins of Caesar (whom he opposed), but Antony turned on him and displayed Cicero’s severed head. That Cicero is an honorable man is not in doubt, but whether he was a wise man is another matter...In July 2008 I reviewed Jean Bethke Elshtain’s excellent book on sovereignty, which cites Augustine’s critique of Cicero, who defined a republic as an assemblage of people of common interests....[Augustine] means, I think, [that a] people that foresees its own extinction experiences death in life, but God’s People, which believes it will endure forever, trusts in life beyond death...Augustine’s view that a people is founded upon a congregation bound together by love and right is most relevant here. A slave-state half of whose inhabitants live in unspeakable conditions is no such thing. Cicero bravely defended the indefensible...In a world of failed and failing states, it seems to me that Cicero’s failures are more instructive than his virtues.
To this we may say that Rome was merely a nation located late in the history of its international system; Augustine's ideal republic was really the archetypical empire. Any nation comes off badly in comparison.
