"Despite clear interests on almost all sides against a regional war [in the Middle East], all sides are acting in a manner that makes such a war increasingly likely," writes Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in an October 15 article calling for the Biden administration to push for "de-escalation" between Israel and Hamas.
He says that although the Biden administration is "well aware" of "escalation risks" that might lead to a broader regional war, talk of de-escalation remains off-limits. The Huffington Post reports that it has obtained State Department memos instructing employees to avoid terms like "de-escalation/ceasefire," "end to violence/bloodshed," and "restoring calm" in press materials and statements.
But is de-escalation even feasible after Hamas slaughtered Israeli civilians and continues to hold close to 200 hostages? How should Israel respond to the worst terrorist attack in its history? What can U.S. policymakers do to make the prospect of a bigger war less likely?
Join Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe for a live discussion of these questions and more with Trita Parsi this Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern on Reason's YouTube channel or Facebook page.
Sources referenced in this conversation:
"Biden refuses to talk 'ceasefire' even though it could prevent a regional war," by Trita Parsi
"Stunning State Department Memo Warns Diplomats: No Gaza 'De-Escalation' Talk," by
"Source: Iran warns Israel through UN against ground offensive in Gaza," by Barak Ravid
"Iran says 'preemptive action' by resistance front expected in coming hours," by Reuters
"Talks fail to let aid reach Gaza; Israel evacuates Lebanon border," by Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Dan Williams and Yusri Mohamed
"Biden is expected to request $100 billion for Israel, Ukraine and other crises," by Karoun Demirjian
The post Can America Help 'De-escalate' in the Middle East? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Leftists who openly celebrated the horrifying Hamas attacks in southern Israel argued that the end—the liberation of Palestine "from the river to the sea"—justified the means, including the indiscriminate slaughter of young rave revelers, elderly Holocaust survivors, children, and babies. Although that is a minority position even among harsh critics of Israeli policy, it reflects a more widely endorsed view that Jews, as "settlers" and "colonizers," have no legitimate claim to any of the country's territory and no business living there.
That view, in turn, is based on a simplistic morality tale that pits white European oppressors against "indigenous" people, eliding Israel's demographic roots and the ancient Jewish connection to the land. While this missing context is unlikely to faze people who see mass murder as a noble and heroic act of resistance, it is relevant for anyone who can imagine a less bloody resolution of Palestinian grievances.
In a speech last August, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who supposedly is committed to a peaceful settlement with Israel, asserted that "the Ashkenazi Jews, at least, are not Semites," meaning it is impossible for them to be victims of anti-Semitism. Abbas was invoking a theory positing that the Jews of Europe descended from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe that supposedly converted en masse to Judaism in the ninth century.
According to a 2016 summary by genetic researchers Ariella Gladstein and Michael F. Hammer, however, "Ashkenazi Jews are not closely related to modern populations that best represent the Khazars." Rather, they "appear equally close to both Middle Eastern and European populations," and they "likely arose from a genetically diverse population in the Middle East."
Notably, Abbas did not address Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who account for about 45 percent of Israel's Jewish population, compared to 32 percent for Ashkenazim. Overall, a 2000 study found, "a substantial portion" of Jewish and Arab Y chromosomes (70 percent and 82 percent, respectively) belonged to the same chromosome pool, results that were consistent with "previous studies that suggested a common origin for Jewish and non-Jewish populations living in the Middle East."
A 2001 study by the same researchers, which found "a high degree of genetic affinity" among Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Kurdish Jews, also found that Jews were "even closer to populations in the northern part of the Middle East than to several Arab populations." The authors suggested that "the Y chromosomes in Palestinian Arabs" reflected "early lineages derived from the Neolithic inhabitants of the area," which "are part of the common chromosome pool shared with Jews," combined with the impact of subsequent migrations from the Arabian Peninsula.
While genetic research belies the notion that Jews are newcomers to the Middle East, it gets you only so far. In particular, it does not address conflicting land claims based on much more recent developments.
Israel's founding in 1948, which most Jews celebrate but most Palestinians remember as the Nakba (catastrophe), involved a mixture of prior land purchases, arbitrary line drawing by the United Nations, and a war in which the nascent state was attacked by the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Some of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled their homes planned to return after the anticipated Arab victory, while others were forcibly expelled.
Israel's defenders have long argued that it could rightly claim land won in defensive wars—in 1967 as well as 1948. They have noted that Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab states and wondered why Arab states could not likewise absorb Palestinian refugees.
While there is something to these arguments, the overall message—that Palestinians should suck it up and start over somewhere else—is less than completely satisfying for anyone who values individual rights and peaceful coexistence. But that no-compromise position is only reinforced by extremists who take a similar view of Jews, whether or not they are prepared to endorse the final solution that Hamas prefers.
© Copyright 2023 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Jews, Like Palestinians, Are 'Indigenous' to the Middle East appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>My guest today is Daniel Akst, a journalist and novelist who has written one of the most remarkable books I've read in a while. War By Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance is an irresistibly readable history of peace-mongering practitioners of "Christian libertarianism" who refused to sign on to America's entry into World War II even after Pearl Harbor.
Two of the main figures in the book, Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger, served prison sentences in the 1940s for refusing to even register as conscientious objectors—they said the state had no right to make such demands on them. Along with others such as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, they pioneered the use of nonviolent resistance that energized the Civil Rights Movement and anti–Vietnam War protests in which they would figure so prominently.
Akst discusses Dwight Macdonald, the leftist writer and editor who worked at Fortune magazine, staunchly opposed the Soviet Union, ruthlessly critiqued mass media, and mentored a generation of public intellectuals including Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Bruno Bettelheim. He also explores the origins of the short-lived America First Committee, which opposed U.S. entry into World War II and whose members and sympathizers included a wide range of people, including future President Gerald Ford, Kennedy in-law and Peace Corps leader Sargent Shriver, author Gore Vidal, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and National Review founder William F. Buckley.
In War By Other Means, Akst recovers a lost current in American politics that will make you think differently about the past and the present, especially given how identity politics and the worst sort of unprincipled tribalism reign supreme in our world today.
Read Max Longley's review of War By Other Means in the March 2023 issue of Reason.
The post Daniel Akst: The World War II Pacifists Who Changed America Forever appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"What we want is a nonslave society, a society without masters," the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey told me late last year at the annual Liberty Forum conference of the Atlas Network, a group founded in 1981 by British businessman Antony Fisher. The Atlas Network supports nonprofits around the globe that fight against authoritarianism and push for free markets, the rule of law, and self-determination. McCloskey was one of a half-dozen participants I spoke with, and she was explaining the end goal of classical liberalism.
Strolling through the conference, which was held in a midtown Manhattan hotel, was like attending a great music festival. People from dozens of different countries and organizations were strategizing and planning on how best to defeat new threats to freedom while keeping and expanding the political, economic, and cultural gains we've made over the past decades.
These are uncertain times—many human rights activists agree that "tyranny is on the rise"—and the vibe at the conference was a mix of deep anxiety and upbeat commitment to empowering individuals in developing and advanced countries alike.
What follows are short conversations I had with McCloskey—whose acclaimed body of work documents the role of property rights, markets, and pluralism in lifting living standards (and whose interview begins at the 0:17:05 mark)—and five other people, including:
I talked with each of them about what they do and whether they're optimistic about the future.
Today's sponsors:
The post Deirdre McCloskey: 'What We Want Is a Nonslave Society' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Budgets are about priorities. In President Joe Biden administration's new budget, its apparent priorities are marred by problems. Here's the cheat sheet version: Rather than containing explosive growth in spending, it would use a bunch of new taxes to wage class warfare.
While this budget is dead on arrival in Congress, it's worth reviewing some reasons why this is so. The president aspires to spend around $6.9 trillion next year, a 55 percent increase over pre-pandemic levels, and $10 trillion by 2033. While Biden hopes to raise an extra $4.7 trillion over 10 years in taxes, the debt would nevertheless grow over the next decade by $19 trillion as the debt-to-GDP ratio increases from 98 percent to 110 percent. All this debt in a high interest rate environment would have Uncle Sam fork over $10.2 trillion in interest payments alone over that time.
Adding to this fiscal calamity is that Social Security benefits could be automatically cut by some 20 percent within the next decade or so if the program is not reformed. Biden does propose to reform Medicare, but his means are class warfare taxes, price controls, and transfers from the general fund. There are no improvements to the program's own finances. So Biden's seemingly aggressive plan fails to solve one of the biggest budgetary challenges we face as a country going forward.
Instead, the budget suggests all kinds of ways to raise tax revenue, many of which would fail to do even that.
In our system, no matter how high tax rates have been, the federal government has never managed to capture more than 19 percent of GDP for long. This constraint means that if Washington decides to spend over 25 percent of GDP, American taxpayers are being committed to major deficits to cover the difference.
Yet, someone in the Biden administration believes that facts like these don't apply today. For instance, the budget raises corporate income taxes from 21 percent to 28 percent. Economists have shown that most of the burden would fall on workers in the form of lower wages.
Further, Biden would roughly double the official capital gains tax rate for investments to 39.6 percent. But according to Americans for Tax Reform, "The U.S. currently has a combined capital gains rate of over 29 percent, inclusive of the 3.8 percent Obamacare tax and the 5.4 percent state average capital gains rate. Under Biden, this rate would approach 50 percent." What does the administration think this will do for investment in the green energy innovations it wants to unleash?
Even more concerning, the administration wants to impose an annual 25 percent minimum tax rate on the unrealized capital gains of individuals with income and assets exceeding $100 million. These gains aren't income; they're assets that have gone up in value on paper—something that might disappear overnight. More importantly for everyone else, this wealth tax would reduce the amount of capital invested in productive, job-generating projects—meaning economic growth, innovation, and wages would all decline.
Next, the budget would raise Medicare taxes by 32 percent for individuals earning over $400,000 annually. The tax would apply to business and investment incomes, wages, and self-employment incomes. As a result, it will hit many small businesses, going against Biden's pledge to spare them from his efforts to expand Leviathan.
There are even more tax hikes in this budget, but you get the idea. The higher taxes on small businesses and entrepreneurs, as well as less capital funding, would slow growth and hence put downward pressure on tax revenues.
This is not just some quirk to be corrected in the American tax system. Wealth taxes have been tried on large scales in Europe and have ignited such intense incentives to escape to friendlier tax environments that they've rarely raised much revenue. They do, however, have significant administrative and economic costs—costs that would only further dampen American economic growth.
Economic studies have shown the negative impact that large increases in government spending and the debt burden have on economic growth. Obviously, further hindering our already-subpar growth rates would severely impair people's ability to climb the economic ladder. But the most unfortunate impact—even in a relatively rich country—is that too sluggish of an economy can bring out the worst in us. Indeed, less opportunity means more tribalism and division. That can threaten the peace, democracy, and liberal values we take for granted.
In that sense, this budget is not only a commitment to less growth because of its taxes and spending, but a missed opportunity to give a little more economic hope to a divided and hostile America.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post Biden's New Budget Would Hike Taxes and Wage Class Warfare appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>War by Other Means: The Pacifists of the Greatest Generation Who Revolutionized Resistance, by Daniel Akst, Melville House, 368 pages, $23.19
In 1940, during the twilight between peace and war, a divided Congress passed a law to conscript young men into the Army—the first federal "peacetime" draft, which lasted throughout American participation in World War II. Congress accommodated young pacifist men whose consciences wouldn't let them take part in the fighting: If they could convince the government that their pacifism was sincere, conscientious objectors would be assigned to either noncombatant military service or noncombatant civilian service.
Noncombatant military service generally meant being a medic, getting shot at without doing any shooting oneself. If a young man thought wearing a military uniform was too much of a concession to the war machine, he would be assigned to civilian service on the home front—usually working in rural work camps, doing difficult forestry work, or fighting fires. Other civilian service options included working in mental asylums or serving as human guinea pigs for dangerous scientific and medical experiments. Those in military service were paid; those in civilian service received no pay. Refusing to cooperate with this system meant a prison sentence.
In War by Other Means, journalist Daniel Akst does discuss young pacifists who cooperated with the government. But Akst is more interested in militant draft resistance—in those conscientious objectors who did not cooperate (or did not fully cooperate) with the government's alternative-service schemes. Some refused any kind of alternative service, which led to prison, where they staged protests when they saw injustice. Some initially accepted civilian work assignments but walked off the job—and into prison—when they were convinced they were collaborating too closely with an unjust system. Others stayed in the work camps while engaging in strikes and protests.
All these groups, which often kept in touch with and supported each other, used nonviolent protest techniques such as work strikes, hunger strikes, and sit-ins at segregated businesses and prison cafeterias. Akst argues that the nonviolent tactics and principles learned in these protests informed the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, gay liberation, and other movements of the 1960s and later. He describes David Dellinger and others who defied the draft at the Union Theological Seminary as "exemplars of the type [of draft resisters] who mattered most to history: the radical pacifists who would go on to play important roles in political and social change in the decades to come."
While sympathetic to the World War II resisters, Akst disagrees with them on a fairly important point. The resisters, as complete pacifists, opposed the war against Adolf Hitler's Germany, which Akst considers just and necessary. Akst rebukes pacifists who thought it feasible for the Allies to stop fighting Germany in exchange for Hitler's agreement to let the Jews escape his clutches. (More pragmatically, some pacifists suggested that America loosen its immigration restrictions to save some Jews from Hitler's slaughter.) Many resisters also posited a moral equivalence between America's flawed republic and Hitler's terror state.
During American participation in the war, pacifists were cut off from the social mainstream. For the figures Akst covers, their beleaguered minority status inspired them to new militance. They protested against intellectually unchallenging labor assignments in the work camps, against prison mail censorship, and against racial segregation in the prisons and in society as a whole.
The establishment did not always capitulate; prison authorities sometimes force-fed hunger strikers. Yet liberal prison administrators could sometimes be induced to meet protesters' demands. In the work camps, run by the pacifist Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren under government supervision, labor could be arduous. But during their respites from work, residents could socialize and organize. Such comparative lenience is more than one might have expected of a country at war and was probably a reaction against the repressive treatment of war opponents the last time around, in 1917–18.
Akst's chief characters are Dellinger, Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Day, and Dwight Macdonald. These four pacifists provided organizational and intellectual leadership to the small but vocal group of draft resisters.
Dellinger refused to register for the draft even though, if he had, he could have claimed exemption as a religious seminarian. He went in and out of jail for this and other draft-law violations, agitating both on the inside and on the outside. During the intervals out of prison, Dellinger traded his seminarian berth for residence at Christian ashrams. The inspiration for Dellinger and many other resisters was Mohandas Gandhi, the Indian independence leader and champion of nonviolent resistance, who was himself imprisoned for opposing the war.
Rustin was an important link between the pacifist militants and the anti-segregation campaigns. He was a disciple of A.J. Muste, a minister turned full-time pacifist, whose group Fellowship of Reconciliation promoted nonviolent activism against war. Many of its members, inspired in part by Rustin, branched out and formed a racial justice organization called the Congress of Racial Equality, focusing on Gandhian/Mustian tactics against segregation.
Rustin himself was an expert organizer who rallied the troops (as it were) both within and outside of prison. Like Dellinger, he alternated between prison and freedom, gaining a relatively high profile as a speaker when on the outside and as a striker when behind bars. Although he supposedly had a steady boyfriend, Rustin indulged in promiscuous sexual behavior both in and out of prison, a habit that damaged his position in the anti-war and anti-segregation movements. His colleagues nonetheless continued to rely on his behind-the-scenes organizing after the war.
Day was a Catholic laywoman who, with the approval or at least the acquiescence of American bishops, formed a network of settlement houses for the poor. Her Catholic Worker movement attacked the injustices of the day, which as Day conceived them included all war. Her uncompromising wartime pacifism split Day's movement, as she refused to countenance war supporters under the Catholic Worker tent. Day made a gesture toward reconciling her pacifism with the church's "just war" teachings: While Christianity does not categorically reject all war, she argued, it does reject war under modern conditions of deadlier weapons and killing techniques. She also was an anarchist and was opposed to abortion, having repented of her own terminated pregnancy.
Macdonald was a New York intellectual who, as New York intellectuals tend to do, ran a journal or two during the war. He evolved over time from a Trotskyist to an anarchist. During the war he was going through a pacifist phase, and he promoted pacifist ideas in the Partisan Review and in Politics, a new magazine he founded in 1944.
Dellinger, Rustin, Day, and Macdonald were all familiar figures on the 1960s left, speaking out against segregation and then against the Vietnam War. Their anti-segregation protests partook of the Gandhian spirit that the resisters had tried to apply during World War II. But in the postwar years, their paths forked: Macdonald declared a few years into the Cold War that he supported (albeit with some caveats and exceptions) "the political, economic, and military struggle of the West against the East," while Dellinger showed a distinctly nonpacifist sympathy for Third World communist movements, often contorting himself to reconcile their violent statism with his anarcho-pacifist ideals. At some point that old 1940s emphasis on peace and nonviolence had gone astray.
By constantly highlighting the connections between the revolts of World War II and the revolts of the Vietnam era, Akst at times veers close to writing boomer history, a variation of Whig history in which everything is part of a pattern of progress that culminates in the 1960s. But at its best, War by Other Means paints a compelling portrait of World War II–era pacifist militance.
The post The Militant Pacifists of World War II appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, by Samuel Moyn, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $30
There is a technology that could radically shrink, perhaps even end, incarceration as we know it. But it might make the whole world a prison in the process.
The tech in question is GPS, which allows the authorities to monitor people in real time. Strapped into an ankle bracelet and surveilled by satellite, a criminal can live under house arrest, traveling only to his workplace and other approved locations, paying a share of each paycheck to his victims. As such sentences become more common, there could come a time when only those convicts who pose an actual physical risk to others would be confined in a more traditional way—and even that might be accomplished in a manner more decentralized than those big, brutal penal institutions.
That would be both more efficient and more humane than the old system, and it would deliver victims actual restitution instead of some platitude about "closure." Sounds good, right?
But the same system that could give greater liberty to people previously confined to cells could also mean less liberty for people who today are unincarcerated. Think of all the victimless crimes that are already on the books, and then imagine how the list might expand if critics couldn't confront new legislation with the argument Are you sure you really want to put people in jail for that? Ever-larger groups of offenders could be put under ever-more-intrusive sorts of surveillance and restriction, walking the streets but not walking them freely.
You can spin scenarios where we get some version of the first option but not the second; you can spin scenarios where we get the second but not the first. But there's also an uncomfortable possibility that the first will enable the second, with the state's hand clasping us more tightly in some ways even as it loosens its grip in others. As Samuel Moyn writes in Humane, "there is no single arc to the moral universe that guarantees that progress comes without regress on other fronts. The one can even facilitate the other."
* * * * *
Moyn's book is about wars, not prisons. But the dilemma he describes is strikingly similar. Humane tells the tale of two struggles, the fight to end war and the fight to humanize it, and how one gradually came to supplant the other.
When Moyn writes about humanizing war, he doesn't mean "humanitarian interventions" launched with promises to end a genocide or spread democracy—though the same people often embrace both ideas. He means making warfare itself more humane, by shielding the lives of noncombatants, outlawing the torture of POWs, and otherwise eliminating atrocities. Moyn, who teaches both law and history at Yale, offers a well-informed guide to how the laws of warfare were born and how they very gradually grew some teeth. Little bitty baby teeth, but teeth nonetheless.
But his account begins elsewhere, with an assortment of 19th century anarcho-pacifists—Leo Tolstoy, Adin Ballou, William Lloyd Garrison—who saw war itself as an atrocity. Garrison eventually made his peace with warfare, supporting the Civil War in order to bring slavery to an end. But Tolstoy drew the opposite conclusion from the abolition of chattel slavery: To him it showed that an ancient, seemingly permanent injustice was not inevitable after all, and that war perhaps could be eliminated one day as well. Moyn notes here that many reformers had fought not to stop slavery but to make it more bearable, "a project that coexisted comfortably with the strengthening of plantation discipline." Tolstoy would not settle for that sort of reform.
That era's push to humanize the battlefield was led by people with little interest in ending warfare altogether, and their earliest efforts to write their ideas into law had little impact on how combat was conducted. The peace movement had more momentum, helping inspire a series of arbitration agreements and disarmament treaties and, in 1928, the nobly intended if utterly ineffective Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which a host of nations formally agreed to outlaw war.
Those arbitration agreements were particularly popular. "The idea," Moyn explains, "was to encourage or force states into a system in which nonpartisan outsiders would adjudicate all or at least some of their differences." Unlike Kellogg-Briand, this actually got results: The 19th century saw "more than 150 actual instances of arbitrated compromise between states, in circumstances that might otherwise have led to armed strife." It was a more flexible, decentralized version of what later organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations were supposed to accomplish. In fact, Moyn notes, "it was widely believed that a system of arbitration between states would avoid the trouble of setting up a more formal international organization of nations."
Many pacifists put their faith in the League of Nations as well, and in the broader concept of forming a world federation. But that idea wasn't universally shared. Moyn points out that William Borah, the progressive Republican senator from Idaho, backed the Kellogg-Briand Pact while opposing the League. Borah's was arguably the more consistent anti-war position: Scratch those world-federalist dreams, and you'll often come across calls for a policing arm that keeps the peace by force. The United Nations certainly hasn't been a very pacific organization—and while many world federalists would attribute that to its dominance by a well-armed superpower, a more egalitarian U.N. would still have those blue-hatted troops at its command.
There was less room for the old peace movement in the wake of World War II, but the dream of a world without war stayed alive. And while there's an obvious overlap between the desire to end warfare and the desire to sand away its ugliest effects, there are places where those paths diverge. As the U.S. escalated the Vietnam War—not exactly a conflict free of civilian carnage—it nonetheless announced that it would follow "the humanitarian principles enunciated in the Geneva conventions." Meanwhile, anti-war activists focused on the idea that the war itself was illegal.
The latter, with their sometimes rather creative interpretations of international law, sounded more like attorneys pursuing a longshot case than Tolstoyan radicals. (The law treated a war between countries differently than a civil war, for example—and so, Moyn reports, the anti-war Lawyers Committee Concerning American Policy in Vietnam "spent most of its time arguing that South Vietnam was not truly a state.") But even after the My Lai massacre of 1968 put war crimes near the center of the Vietnam debate, the protesters' ultimate aim was to end the intervention, not to humanize it.
Moyn contrasts the reaction to the My Lai massacre with the reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004, which arguably did more to mobilize opposition to war crimes than opposition to war. That's certainly the impact it had in Washington. Barack Obama was widely seen as an anti-war insurgent when he ran for president, but while "the most egregious infractions of the prior administration were disowned," Moyn writes, "Obama's lawyers claimed authority to continue war indefinitely across space and time, devising formal legal frameworks for targeted killings." War would be less grisly but also omnipresent.
The resulting synthesis is still essentially intact today. Even former President Donald Trump, a man who skylarked publicly about targeting terrorists' families, didn't dislodge it: "He mainly aimed to take the policies of his predecessors further than they had," weakening Obama's rules but keeping the basic framework in place.
* * * * *
Needless to say, modern warfare is nowhere near as humane in practice as it is in the rhetoric of the warmakers. Drone strikes regularly hit the wrong targets, and even a narrowly focused killing can have vast and awful secondary consequences. (If NATO's Libyan airstrikes had killed no civilians, they still would have worsened a gruesome conflict.) But as a thought experiment, Moyn invites us to imagine a day when expertly programmed autonomous drones never hit the wrong man. Even then, he argues, we would have attained "not eternal peace but endless control."
And would those drones limit themselves to blocking terrorist attacks? Or would the control apparatus turn its automated system of surveillance and violence on smugglers, or migrants, or perhaps the leaders of a nonviolent rebellion in an allied state? Just as a carceral GPS system can be applied to an ever-growing list of offenders, so might this new eternal war. Indeed, the two systems could converge.
Wars today are both fewer and less lethal than in the last century, and that is surely a good thing. It is always better for civilians to be spared bombardment and for jailers to renounce torture. We should celebrate the shifts that make anything more humane.
But we can't let such reforms mark the boundaries of our goals. "A future of bloodless global discipline is a chilling thing," Moyn writes, even if bloody global discipline is chillier still. To avoid that fate, we need a "project of challenging hierarchy in all its forms." Otherwise, the same changes that made those hierarchies less brutal might transform the planet into a battlefield without frontiers and a prison without walls.
The post When Humanitarianism Prolongs the Inhumane appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As the streets of various U.S. cities descended into disorder set off by anger and anguish over police brutality, the domestic tranquility for which Americans theoretically surrender large chunks of their fortunes and freedom to the government seemed out of reach. Some protests devolved into generalized orgies of destruction and even arson—the most fiendishly destructive thing the average person can do in dense cities, and an act committed with careless glee dozens of times.
In the public debate between angry forces on the left and right wings, too many Americans insist on recapitulating the stark choices Germany seemed to offer its citizens between the world wars a century ago: a controlling, decadent left out to destroy private property, and a right embracing harsh, violent authoritarianism and viewing outsiders of all stripes with suspicion.
Each side seems so obviously, intolerably evil to the other that both sides agree the only moral or prudential choice is to come out swinging against the other side. The blood on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, where in August a right-wing 17-year-old shot three people during a protest is a small preview of where that path leads. Radicals on both left and right seem to agree that traditional American libertarianism either supports the evil side (wittingly or unwittingly) or, at best, provides a pusillanimous, pie-in-the-sky distraction from the necessary business of seizing state power to crush the enemy. But that old-school, nonrevolutionary, bourgeois libertarianism is, in fact, the only peaceful way out for our troubled country.
It is one of libertarianism's staid tenets that it's a mistake—both morally wrong and likely ineffective—to use government force to solve most social problems. As this year's urban unrest has shown, police power in the conventional sense can't keep cities secure if even a small number of people are unwilling to play by the nonviolent rules. If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the "right side."
What makes civilization work is people roughly hewing to "live and let live" principles. Fortunately, most of us do so even when we are not governed in a libertarian manner. Most people, most of the time, simply want to live in their justly owned space, work for a living, engage in mutually beneficial commerce, and thus contribute to the web of peaceful interactions that makes our lives rich in every sense.
Civilization collapses, on the other hand, when people relentlessly seek state (or state-like) solutions to their grievances—particularly when they act in ways that threaten their fellow citizens' liberty to live, think, express themselves, work, save, and do business in peace. Such violations of peaceful people's lives are not justified even if what you are protesting against are indeed evils that ought to be halted.
In a more libertarian world, police would not be continually engaged in overly aggressive assaults on citizens, whether those citizens were suspected of crimes or not. We suffer that now because police, as representatives of the state, are not subject to the same discipline that the rest of us are, and because they're charged with enforcing, potentially through violence, all sorts of petty or flagrantly unjust dictates, from traffic laws to drug laws.
In a more libertarian world, we also would not see angry, threatening mobs insisting that random fellow citizens join them in public expressions of political piety or setting fire to buildings and breaking windows. However honorable the cause may be, such actions tear at the roots of our prosperity: the ability to possess wealth and space and to use them to offer goods and services for a price, helping others while peacefully bettering ourselves.
American "movement libertarianism" is revolutionary—but only intellectually so. Most American libertarians, even in the face of obscene injustices inflicted by the state, do not conclude that transforming the civic order into a battlefield is the just or prudent response. The mission has always been convincing people that they would benefit from more libertarian governance and voluntary ways of life.
Some react to injustice by insisting, "No justice, no peace." But given the libertarian's limited sense of when violence against people or their property can be justified, even righteous anger at recalcitrantly evil policing does not justify vandalism, arson, and assault against bystanders.
When it comes to domestic battles to change government policy or public attitudes—as when it comes to overseas wars—most libertarians don't think the lives and property of innocent people are acceptable collateral damage. That is especially true when the connection between the violence or destruction and righting the relevant wrongs is obscure.
The standard American libertarian has been traditionally and boringly bourgeois. While preserving life is indeed a higher priority than preserving property, libertarians understand that property's vital role in human flourishing means it should not be blithely sacrificed merely to show how angry you are or even to follow a dimly lit path to "justice" for others.
Bloody extremism never really appealed to most libertarians, at home or abroad. Our love of liberty, and of the peace and prosperity it helps secure, inclines us to think that truly effective and secure social change comes not from violence, chaos, and force but from treating fellow humans with respect—as ends rather than means—and working to persuade them that libertarian ideas should shape social life.
The fanatical insistence on "no justice, no peace" makes any reasonably desirable civic life impossible, no matter how great the wrongs you aim to right. Sacrificing peace in a way that alienates too many of your fellow citizens likely will damage your chances of getting the justice you say you want. Such potentially alienating actions include denying people the right to use public streets unmolested and ruining their livelihoods, especially since history teaches us that violent unrest can destroy a neighborhood's prosperity for decades.
What America needs most right now, then, is boring old bourgeois libertarianism: the lived philosophy of peacefully enjoying life and property while mostly minding your own business. That philosophy rules out attempts to enforce orthodoxies of thought and expression, no matter how good the cause, and refuses to treat other people's lives and property as dispensable in the pursuit of political goals, no matter how noble.
When people reject those principles, they create civic spaces where no one can thrive—in the long run, not even them.
The post Bourgeois Libertarianism Could Save America appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After nearly 20 years of incessant fighting, the U.S. and the Taliban might ink a peace deal by the end of the month. The accord is contingent on the Taliban abiding by a violence reduction agreement over the next seven days.
"The United States and the Taliban have been engaged in extensive talks to facilitate a political settlement to end the war in Afghanistan, reduce United States and Allied Forces presence, and ensure that no terrorist group ever uses Afghan soil to threaten the United States or our allies," said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a statement released this morning.
After the deal is signed, the Taliban and Afghanistan's U.S.-backed government have agreed negotiate the conditions of a permanent ceasefire and a roadmap for the country's political future.
Today's announcement is the culmination of a process started in 2018, when the White House ordered U.S. diplomats to start direct talks with the Taliban.
Provided a new outbreak of violence doesn't spoil it over the next week, this could be the beginning of the end for a war that has cost the lives of some 2,400 U.S. military personnel and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians.
A lot of specifics still need to be worked out, though, including how many of the 14,000 U.S. forces in the country will be withdrawn and how quickly that will happen. The Trump administration has previously said that 5,400 troops would be pulled out of the country within 135 days of signing a peace deal with the Taliban.
"It's a good thing that a deal is beginning to be finalized and it seems like there's some political momentum behind it," says John Glaser, foreign policy scholar with the Cato Institute, while adding that "there are a number of things that are inherent to this process that are very risky."
An agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. that specifies a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals contingent on reductions in Taliban violence could add stability to any peace process, he says.
Glaser warns against creating too many conditions for withdrawing U.S. troops, noting that this would increase the chances their departure will be delayed. There's also a significant risk that the peace process will be derailed by a breakdown in talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban.
President Donald Trump was sharply critical of the war in Afghanistan while a candidate, but he increased the U.S. military presence in the country while in office. Congressional bills that would wind down the war have gone nowhere.
It's encouraging that the White House is now ready to sign a peace deal. As Glaser says, "the war is a disaster and cannot be won."
The post Trump Administration Says It's Ready to Sign Peace Deal With the Taliban by the End of the Month appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Never before has there been a presidential candidate quite like Marianne Williamson, the Democratic hopeful and purveyor of healing crystals who wants to combat the "dark psychic force" shrouding the White House. But that battle can't be fought in typical fashion, she says. Instead, she suggests that the country create a Department of Peace.
The approach is Williamson's modus operandi, which consists of taking established political norms and turning them topsy-turvy. We don't have a health care system, we have a sickness care system. We cannot just suppress violence, we also need to create nonviolence. We should not wage war, but instead, we must wage peace.
Williamson correctly acknowledges the pitfalls of our current attitude toward defense. "We spend more on our military than the next nine largest militaries in the world," the plan explains. "As has become evident in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, as well as against terrorist enemies like ISIS, at best our military can solve part of the issue, leaving the true, underlying problems unaddressed."
And the way to do that, she says, is to deploy global peace-building support and humanitarian aid resources—food, health care, education, and more—to assist countries in ending conflict.
It's an attractive idea, and parts may even be prudent in countries where U.S. military intervention has contributed to community decay. Take Afghanistan, for instance, where decades of conflict have left many without access to food and water. But would Williamson's plan make a difference?
Probably not.
That our modern-day mindset toward the military has been a failure is largely wrapped up in the regime change wars we've waged. Such endeavors are doomed, most notably because the U.S. does not (and cannot) know the cultural underpinnings of every foreign nation. Why would peace-building be any different?
A 15-year study by Susanna P. Campbell, an assistant professor at the School of International Service of American University, hits at the heart of that very query. After spending time in Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nepal, South Sudan, and Sudan, she concludes that international attempts at peace-building fail to produce the desired results, as those efforts are inherently accountable to foreign entities, not the local communities where the work takes place.
Aid workers on the ground—who, in Williamson's plan, would be accountable to the U.S. government—are working to fulfill the demands of faraway stakeholders without fully integrating into the cultural landscape. Success is often measured in how much money workers spend out of the allotted project funds.
"People focus on spending. They have so much to spend and so little time," one international aid worker in South Sudan told Campbell. "People spend 40 percent of their time talking about their burn rate [the rate at which they spend allocated funds]." Campbell suggests a local approach, where international aid groups must answer to communities—not the other way around. Such a model would be fantasy if taxpayers were funneling billions of dollars into the Department of Peace.
Williamson also proposes a broad domestic plan that is conspicuously light on specifics. If president, the spiritual guru would "effectively treat and dismantle gang psychology," "rehabilitate the prison population," and "address factors such as drug and alcohol abuse, mistreatment of the elderly, and much more." Okay, but how?
Part of that would be accomplished with her Peace Academy, she says, a four-year institution to complement U.S. military academies. Graduates will serve at least five years in public service, where they will work toward violence prevention, either domestically or abroad.
It's hard to argue with warm and fuzzy ideas like "violence prevention" and "conflict resolution," which Williamson says she would like to see taught in schools. True to her campaign, the presidential hopeful has taken the conventional conversation and flipped it on its head, making us question why things really are the way they are. But a Department of Peace is unlikely to meaningfully reduce our aimless military pursuits and bloated defense spending—let alone the alcoholism and gang violence Williamson also hopes to fix.
The post Marianne Williamson Wants To Defeat Dark Psychic Forces With New Department of Peace appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 turned into a mess that led to an immense loss of life and years of violent havoc in the Middle East, the war's backers flippantly declared that "everyone" agreed on the war. The invasion's evolving justifications—Saddam's supposed amassing of "weapons of mass destruction" to his alleged ties to Al-Qaeda—were overblown, but if everyone was in agreement then who could possibly second-guess the military effort?
At the Editorial Board of the Orange County Register, we produced one piece after another questioning the war. We even got in a spat with one Fox News personality, who took umbrage at criticism of the war while the fighting was going on. That was somehow unpatriotic. But the United States has been involved in endless conflicts. If Americans held their tongues while bombs are dropping, then when could they ever feel free to air their concerns?
"There is no real threat to the United States, only a theoretical one based on faulty premises," I opined at the time. "It is unjust, in that it is not a war of last resort. It will run up tens of billions of dollars in costs, and it will lead to the limiting of civil liberties at home. Furthermore, America will be managing Iraq for years, perhaps decades, and our presence there is more likely to destabilize than democratize the region."
Those points largely were correct. (This column isn't about "I told you so," by the way, but about "look how far we've come.") Even the current GOP president has lamented that war. When Donald Trump recently called off airstrikes on Iran at the last minute, almost everyone expressed relief. It's a new world ideologically and our long-standing foreign policy consensus is, finally, up for debate again. It's taken long enough, but better late than never.
Many of us have serious concerns about our increasingly fractious political discourse, but it's great that old coalitions are falling apart, new ideas are flourishing, and we're seeing a rethinking of age-old international policies that have been off-limits to debate. It's refreshing to see many conservatives abandon their kneejerk support for militarism—and nice to watch a prominent Democratic presidential candidate, former Sen. Joe Biden, held accountable for his support for the Iraq blunder.
One recent Boston Globe column highlights how much the ground has shifted. Both sides have their billionaire bogeymen. Conservatives dislike George Soros and liberals dislike the Koch brothers. But Soros and the Kochs are "uniting to revive the fading vision of a peaceable United States," according to the article. They are working to end our "forever war" policies and "promote an approach to the world based on diplomacy and restraint rather than threats, sanctions, and bombing." Bring it on.
The founding fathers were skeptical of empire. In his oft-quoted farewell address, George Washington warned against "the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." This has been a constant thread even in modern times. We all know that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a celebrated general, warned about the "military-industrial complex."
During World War I—another costly, unnecessary conflict that led to horrific unforeseen consequences—progressive writer Randolph Bourne warned that "war is the health of the state." Indeed it is. During wartime, the public becomes part of "the herd," he wrote. It is reluctant to criticize its own government, which always is the main threat to our liberties.
These days, many of Trump's supporters are paleo-conservatives, who have always looked askance at military adventurism. Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, a member of Congress from Hawaii who served in the U.S. military in the Middle East and is a major in the Army National Guard, has been the most thoughtful Democrat on the subject.
She complained to National Public Radio about "leaders in this country from both political parties looking around the world and picking and choosing which bad dictator they want to overthrow." She opposes "sending our military into harm's way and then trying to export some American model of democracy that may or may not be welcome by the people in those countries."
These are unusual political times. We've got many evangelical Christians celebrating the "miracle" of a president who, let's just say, has a spotty moral background. We've got "limited government" conservatives championing government control of the economy through tariffs and "big government" Democrats espousing free trade. And yikes—we're even debating socialism again.
But the good news is things have gotten weird enough that Americans appear ready to consider a foreign policy based on peace and diplomacy. I didn't believe that was possible in 2003 when the United States was invading Iraq, but it's possible now—and that's heartening even if everyone isn't on board with it yet.
This column was first published in the Orange County Register.
The post As Politics Get Shaken Up, a Peace Coalition Emerges appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Monday, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) tweeted about playing golf with President Donald Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) over the weekend. Graham and Paul don't see eye-to-eye on military intervention in the Middle East, and they've essentially been the angel and devil on Trump's shoulder when it comes to foreign policy. Paul's tweets made it clear that he's still encouraging the president to pull American troops out of war zones and bring them home:
Proud that @realDonaldTrump and I argued with you against endless wars! @POTUS made it clear to all of us at the table, we are getting out of the Middle East quagmire. We've been there too long. Time to bring our troops home. https://t.co/trO0aIHbzk
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) July 15, 2019
Today, Politico reports an interesting agenda on Paul's end. Paul is looking to serve as Trump's diplomatic emissary to Iran to try to serve as a counter to the many, many advisers in Trump's orbit (like Graham and National Security Advisor John Bolton) trying to rev the engines for a brand new war. Politico notes:
Paul has been among the most prominent voices warning against military intervention. When Trump last month called off retaliatory military strikes against Iran after an Iranian military official downed a U.S. drone over international waters, Paul went on the president's favorite television network to offer unqualified praise. "It really takes a statesman to show restraint amidst a chorus of voices for war," Paul told Fox News' Martha MacCallum.
He also took a jab at the administration's policy, arguing that Iranians view the punishing sanctions imposed by the Trump administration as "an act of war." …
Earlier this year, Paul pressed [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo on whether the administration believes it has the authority to battle the Iranian regime under a 2001 law that allowed the U.S. to pursue the fight against al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups in Afghanistan and beyond.
When Pompeo tried to sidestep the question, Paul warned the administration not to pursue such a conflict, at least not without Congress' imprimatur.
"You do not have the permission of Congress to go to war with Iran," Paul told Pompeo during the April hearing on Capitol Hill. "Only Congress can declare war."
The hawks consulted by Politico are not happy that Paul might succeed here and whined to Politico about how this could weaken their bargaining position.
But this is good news for anybody who wants our country to seek peaceful resolutions to conflicts rather than threaten—and declare—war. Trump backing off on a militarized response to the downing of a drone off the coast of Iran was the right thing to do. If Paul being friendly with Trump can keep America out of a new war, the relationship is worth more than its weight in blood and treasure.
The post Rand Paul Wants To Be Trump's Man in Iran. That Would Be Good News for Peace. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When I'm having a bad day, I trawl the internet for videos of happy cyborgs. My favorites are clips of hearing-impaired people getting their cochlear implants turned on for the first time. The videos follow a soothingly predictable pattern. Mumbly background chatter and shaky cam—the cinematography is rarely good—then a pregnant pause, wide eyes, and finally that peculiar kind of sobbing that human beings do when we are overwhelmed. The pattern is the same whether it's a babe in arms or a full-grown man.
If you catch the right algorithmic wave on YouTube or the right hashtag on Instagram, you can surf for hours in this genre: videos of Parkinson's patients as their tremors are calmed by a new therapy, paraplegics walking with the help of adaptive prosthetics, infants getting their first pair of coke-bottle glasses, and more.
Adorable kittens and soppy love stories do little to warm my cold, dead heart. But show me a part-robot baby flipping out because he heard his mom say "hello" for the first time, and it's onion city.
I'm not deaf or hard of hearing, but I am aware that cochlear implants are not without controversy in that community. As with almost everything you see on the internet, behind the scenes there is invisible labor, difficult setbacks, and the occasional disaster. Hardly anyone posts those on their YouTube channel.
Still, entire religions were once built around the spectacle of someone banishing a severe disability with the wave of a hand. Today any certified R.N. in the right audiologist's office can be a secular saint. When my own worthless eyeballs were corrected with lasers, making me a blind(ish) woman given the gift of sight, I didn't fall to my knees and worship the ophthalmologist. I just got out my credit card. We live in an age of reliable, scalable, profitable miracles.
People are ungrateful wretches, of course. Once anyone can reliably perform a miracle, it immediately ceases to seem miraculous. Babies generated without sex—actual virgin births—are humdrum. We carry nearly all of human knowledge in our pockets. Within a decade, burgers made without meat will be commonplace (page 10). And the memory of a time when HIV was a death sentence will soon fade to almost nothing (page 30).
As a species, we're brilliant at focusing on the negative. There are some very useful evolutionary implications of this trait, but an unfortunate side effect is that we always feel like the sky is falling, even when it's 70 degrees and sunny.
But historically speaking, it's a beautiful day.
In 1820, nearly 84 percent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty (roughly less than $1.90 per day per person). In 1981, according to the World Bank, that number was still 42 percent. Today, it's hovering around 8 percent.
Also in 1820, 90 percent of the world's population was illiterate. Today that number is inverted: 90 percent can read.
Since 1990, an additional 2.6 billion people have secured access to clean water.
And in 1990, zero percent of the world's population had access to the World Wide Web. By 2020, more than half will.
In other words, the people around us are healthy and long-lived. They have words to read and videos to watch. The water is clear and blue. Food is plentiful and delicious. And the soundtrack—whether it's piped in through the latest medical technology or just an ordinary pair of earbuds—is gorgeous.
All of these heartening facts and figures (and much of my hope for humanity) are drawn from an upcoming book, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know, by Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey and the Cato Institute's Marian L. Tupy (page 12).
These are mere material gains, the determined pessimist might say. True enough. We are the children of Steven Pinker's "long peace" and the grandchildren of Deirdre Nansen McCloskey's "great enrichment." We are safe and wealthy beyond the imagining of our ancestors, the beneficiaries of an astonishingly lengthy stretch of success for liberal institutions, international trade, and the free exchange of ideas.
These institutions are not automatically self-sustaining. But they are self-reinforcing. People aren't perfectible, and they are prone to both personal and political error. Everything could always go pear-shaped.
But so far, billions of healthier, wealthier, better-educated, and better-connected people have also proven themselves better able to understand and defend the values of the free society.
Politics, of course, is crap. But politics has consistently been crap throughout the last couple of centuries, and yet here we are in the greatest period of global peace, enrichment, and innovation in human history. Truth be told, even the crappiness of politics is way down over the last 200 years. The modes of amplifying the shouting have gotten better, so the whole enterprise is noisier. But it's far less fatal than it used to be. Not every downward trend line is an inflection point.
"Put not your trust in princes," the psalmist warns us, "nor in the son of man in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish." The first bit couldn't be more true. But the rest is absolute rubbish.
Human beings are doing remarkably well lately, especially for such fragile, mortal creatures. As with the cochlear implants, a lot of messiness, horror, and hopelessness are hidden from view. It's wrong to dismiss or ignore suffering just because it's not part of a broader trend. But it is also wrong to despair.
The combined efforts of the sons of man have wrought astonishing changes. And their thoughts do not perish when they die but live on through their inventions and institutions. The dead of the last two centuries have bettered the world not just for themselves but for those of us who came after them. Their legacy is a world rife with boring, ordinary miracles.
The post We Live in a World of Reliable Miracles appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Donald Trump has embraced the popular "peace through strength" doctrine (PTSD) with his characteristic panache: "I'm going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody—absolutely nobody—is gonna to mess with us," Trump has said.
On other occasions he's said similar things: "We want to defer, avoid and prevent conflict through our unquestioned military strength" (same link) and, a year ago, "Nobody is going to mess with us. Nobody. It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history."
I will acknowledge that the PTSD has surface appeal. Why not show the world the United States is so awesomely powerful that no one in his right mind would even think to get on its wrong side? It seems to make sense in a practical sort of way.
Once people believe that, of course, they are softened up to accept unlimited military spending and the concomitant deficits and debt. As John T. Flynn used to say, military spending is a favorite of big-government types precisely because the conservatives won't object. Conservatives rail against even small amounts of so-called foreign aid and welfare, but they drool over monstrous sums for the armed forces and spy agencies. (Thankfully, some conservatives don't.)
Progressives, by the way, are not immune to the allure of military spending. When a Pentagon budget cap was debated a few years ago, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), a leading progressive and a Black Caucus leader, opposed it because he feared losing jobs in his district.
Military spending thus has something for nearly everybody: strength for conservatives; economic stimulus for progressives. The conservative Keynesians like both justifications.
It takes only a few minutes to see that the "peace through strength" doctrine is a racket intended (by some of its advocates at least) to gull the unsuspecting populace into supporting whatever the war party and the Pentagon want. It is handy for parrying the antimilitarist' charge that its espousers are dangerously reckless, if not outright warmongers. "We're not warmongers," they can reply. "A military second to none will prevent war and promote peace. We're the peaceniks. You doves are the promoters of war." They are also likely to quote (without knowing the source) Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus's De re militari, "If you want peace, prepare for war."
Brilliant!—but the doctrine encases a racket just the same, much as "war is a racket," as the highly decorated U.S. Marine Maj. Gen Smedley Butler put it. I'd like to meet the grifter who thought it up.
At least one thick book could be written on the flaws in the doctrine. I can sum them up by invoking the law of unintended consequences and the law of perverse incentives, by which I mean the well-established public-choice problems regarding policymaking and voter interest. People may have the best intentions in supporting the PTSD, but they have absolutely no reason to believe the policy would be carried out as they envision. We must expect the worse, or as David Hume charmingly wrote, "Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, … every man ought to be supposed a knave." Had we listened to Hume, many fewer things would have gone awry.
Trump's deployment of the PTSD suggests that the U.S. military isn't already powerful enough to deter an attack. But that is balderdash. The government now spends more on the military than the next 12 countries combined. The recent increase alone was bigger than Russia's entire military budget.
But that is an understatement because the Pentagon budget is far from the total amount the U.S. government spends on "national security." Robert Higgs wrote in 2007:
Hardly anyone appreciates that the total amount of all defense-related spending greatly exceeds the amount budgeted for the Department of Defense. Indeed, it is roughly almost twice as large….
Lodged elsewhere in the budget, however, other lines identify funding that serves defense purposes just as surely as—sometimes even more surely than—the money allocated to the Department of Defense. On occasion, commentators take note of some of these additional defense-related budget items, such as the Department of Energy's nuclear-weapons programs, but many such items, including some extremely large ones, remain generally unrecognized.
Thus when George W. Bush formally proposed to spend $583 billion on the military in fiscal 2008, Higgs calculated the real tab at $934.9 billion. The story is the same today. We may reasonably ask: how can Trump know the military isn't already powerful enough to deter any would-be attacker and how can he know that spending less would make Americans less safe? What we have here is a knowledge problem, which politicians and bureaucrats are likely to exploit in favor of more spending.
By PTSD standards, no amount of spending is enough: "If I'm wrong," the militarist will say, "we'll blow a few bucks. If you're wrong, we'll be speaking Russian, Chinese, Arabic, or Farsi."
The war party tries to bolster its case by claiming the U.S. military was hollowed out by Barack Obama; thus we must rebuild. Bullfeathers! As Nick Gillespie of Reason pointed out a year ago:
There's little doubt that the military is exhausted. Since 2001, we've been waging endless wars, including in countries against whom we've never officially declared war. We're still in Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, and all signs point to boots on the ground in Syria sooner or later. War footing isn't simply expensive (even if we're spending less on "overseas contingency operations" that we did in the mid-Aughts), it introduces incredible strain and stress throughout the military and society at home.
But depleted, underfunded, undersized, unready? Please. Defense spending ratcheted up during the Bush years in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. It hasn't come close to coming back down. In a nation that has supposedly wound down two of its longest wars and where the principal threat to the homeland is a group of religious extremists who live thousands of miles away (and are, lest we forget, a byproduct of our own failed occupation of the Middle East), we always need more money for defense, right?
To be sure, Trump has doubled down on all the Bush-Obama wars, but those have nothing to do with the safety of Americans. Therefore the personnel could be brought home and the military budget cut.
To put things into perspective, when Dwight Eisenhower was president, at the start of the Cold War, his annual military budgets for seven out of his eight years were under $400 billion (in 2012 dollars)—less than Harry Truman bequeathed him. So why does Trump need $716 billion today (to use the official but incomplete figure) when the Soviet Union is long gone, Russia's military gets only $47 billion, and China, which spends $192.5, is a major trading partner? (We'll get to Iran and North Korea shortly.)
Another objection to the PTSD is the temptation the overgrown military establishment presents to policymakers. This was best articulated by Bill Clinton's secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who recounts in her memoir how—in the late 1990s, as Clinton was looking to intervene against Serbia—she asked Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Here was the supposed chief diplomat more or less saying, "We've got this big hammer, so why not see every problem as a nail."
Government officials, hiding behind classified material, can easily inflate and even create so-called threats, and they have an obvious incentive to do so. Moreover, a big military is going to be a menacing military because it will conduct war games close to other countries; when governments respond, they can be accused of provocation and aggression. (In contrast, American moves are never provocative.) And yes, politicians and bureaucrats lie, especially in foreign policy. War is a lie, to appropriate David Swanson's book title. Post-Vietnam, we should not have needed to be reminded of this danger, but we sure got a reminder with Iraq in 2002-03.
Who do the PSDT advocates think would attack the United States unless it has a bigger military? Who presents an existential threat? Some will say we no longer need to fear a conventional attack or invasion by a nation-state. What then? Terrorists? What is more ridiculous than the contention that a terrorist organization would be deterred by an even more powerful U.S. military? Osama bin Laden hoped the U.S. government would respond to 9/11 by invading the Muslim world and spending itself into bankruptcy. And does anyone seriously believe a domestic lone wolf, having been "radicalized" after looking at al-Qaeda websites or seeing news accounts of U.S. atrocities in the Middle East, would take the size of the U.S. military into account when plotting retaliation?
Perhaps before we dismiss the nation-state threat we ought to ask if Iran and North Korea are special cases. The leaders of Iran have been called "mad mullahs," and Kim-Jong Un has been described as insane. But this poses a problem for the PTSD. If those rulers are indeed mad, how can we expect them to be rational enough to do calculate the costs and benefits of an attack?
On the other hand, if they are not mad—and we have no reason to believe they are—we may reasonably assume they know they would gain nothing from an attack. A larger U.S. military would not change that; neither would a dramatically scaled-back military. But the large national-security apparatus the United States already has is a daily threat to Iran and North Korea. These so-called threats have been manufactured in Washington, D.C.
For the record, Trump's military brain trust says the biggest national-security challenges come from Russia and China, not terrorism. "Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security," the new National Defense Strategy's unclassified summary states.
Finally, military spending takes money out of the pockets of taxpayers, who, it's safe to say, have personally important uses for that money. Instead of labor and resources flowing into industries that make consumers better off, they go to politicians, bureaucrats, and all the businesses that long to sell things to the government. This is the infamous military-industrial complex, which is far more pervasive than anything Eisenhower ever had nightmares about. The deep distortion of economic activity is part of the incalculable cost of the national-security state. We literally don't know what we're missing because of it.
The way to achieve peace is not to prepare for war but to reject militarism and empire, and embrace nonintervention. Prophecies of war are too easily self-fulfilling. Thus, as a pioneer of modern libertarianism, F. A. Harper, put it many years ago, "It is now urgent in the interest of liberty that many persons become 'peace-mongers.'"
This piece was originally published by The Libertarian Institute.
The post 'Peace Through Strength' Is a Racket appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday was Memorial Day, a federal holiday remembering all those who have died while serving in the United States armed forces. So, in today's column, I take a brief look at the declining share of men and women worldwide who can expect to be exposed to the horrors of war. Looking at armed forces personnel as a percent of the total labor force, we can observe a sustained decline since the end of the Cold War. Globally, it has dropped from 1.08 percent in 1990 to 0.8 percent in 2014. That's a 26 percent reduction.
In Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, it has declined by 27 percent, 54 percent, 43 percent and 40 percent respectively. Even in the Middle East and North Africa, armed forces personnel as a share of the total labor force declined by 58 percentage points—though, admittedly, some of the conflicts in the region have become more serious since 2014.
A similar trend can be observed in the United States and also in our two most important geopolitical competitors, China and Russia. The three countries saw reductions of 50 percent, 32 percent and 34 percent respectively. (The figure for Russia reflects the period between 1992 and 2014.)
The end of the Cold War turned out to be beneficial for another reason. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was born before World War 2, explained in 2014 that the world is "in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime." But is that really true?
The number of armed conflicts and wars rose steadily until the collapse of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Then they started to decline. Empirical evidence suggests that those who remember the bipolar world dominated by the United States and the USSR as a period of stability, are mistaken.
Consider the following astonishing fact. According to the Council on Foreign Relations' Global Conflict Tracker, the Western Hemisphere is, with the exception of the drug-war in Mexico, free of conflict. No person alive can remember our Hemisphere to be as peaceful as it is today. That is something to be grateful for as we look back on this past Memorial Day.
The post Fewer People Exposed to Horrors of War appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For decades American presidents have tried, with varying degrees of effort and to varying degrees of success, to negotiate a peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Donald Trump, with his apparent lack of interest both in policy detail and in pretending the U.S. is a neutral party, could be uniquely qualified to accomplish what has eluded his predecessors.
Since the Camp David talks of the mid-1970s, the term "peace process" has mostly meant American-led negotiations. That in itself is a problem: When the U.S. takes too large a role in the talks, it removes the pressure from Palestinian and Israeli diplomats to arrive at a deal on their own. But Trump has shown little capacity for the kind of long-term, sustained attention that allows Israelis and Palestinians to abdicate their leadership.
That attention, full of "shuttle diplomacy" and frenetic attempts at legacy-building, rarely moves the peace process forward in a meaningful way. U.S. disengagement, by any avenue, could create the space for real progress.
Trump has also shown little interest in upholding some of the fictions of American diplomacy. When he declares that his administration will "always stand with Israel," he adds none of the nuance of the Obama era, when such language of friendship was constantly coupled with promises to hold Israel accountable. Trump's rhetoric matches the reality on the ground: Since Israel is one of the top recipients of U.S. military aid, negotiators won't see Washington as a neutral party even if the U.S. would like to assume that role.
Trump has, in fact, said he wanted to remain neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Let me sort of be a neutral guy," he said at one campaign stop last year. "I don't want to say whose fault is it. I don't think it helps." This desire did not stop Trump from making unabashedly pro-Israel statements during the campaign or since taking the presidency. With any other politician, a desire for neutrality would be incompatible with statements of unqualified friendship. But Trump is not a typical politician, and his propensity to make contradictory statements without even attempting to reconcile them has arguably destroyed the credibility of his presidency.
Whatever else that might do, it could have the salutory effect of giving Israeli and Palestinian negotiators the impression that they're on their own. A long series of active and respected American presidents have been unable to move the peace process forward. Maybe an inactive president with little credibility is just the jumpstart the negotiations need.
The post Trump: Uniquely Qualified for an Israeli-Palestinian Peace Deal? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Apparently most folks would be nicer to each other. At least that's the conclusion reached by some researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo as they parsed data about player behavior in video game in which the world ends. I know. I know. It's a video game, but it's still interesting.
Years ago when I was a member of the War Games Club* at the University of Virginia, I was recruited by some social psychology grad students to play a sort of diplomacy game as part of an experiment. They recruited several other members of the club to play as well. I am not sure what the researchers hypothesized, but what they did find out was that if you tell a bunch of late teen/early twenty-something wargamers exactly how many rounds of play there is going to be, well, the ending round of play turns into an all-out scorched earth war of conquest. At least it did in our case. May as well go out with a bang!
But new research suggests that maybe other people are more pro-social. A team of researchers led by SUNY Buffalo psychologist Ah Reum Kang got their hands on 275 million records of player behavior in beta-testing phase of the massively multiplayer online role playing game ArcheAge. Since the game was in beta-testing, the 80,000 or so players all knew that it would come to an end. So what did their study, "I Would Not Plant Apple Trees If the World Will Be Wiped: Analyzing Hundreds of Millions of Behavioral Records of Players During an MMORPG Beta Test," find?
Our findings show that there is no apparent pandemic behavior changes even when the CBT [closed beta test] ends. While we did find that some players resorted to anti-social behavior, such as murder, aggregate sentiment through chats shows pro-social trends. When we focus on individual users' behavioral changes, we find significant differences between churners who voluntarily left the game before the end and players who stayed until the end. In particular, we found that churners were more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior. …
Also, we have provided additional empirical evidence in favor of the emergence of pro-social behavior. Our findings that the sentiment of social grouping specific chat channels trend towards "happier" as the end times approach is a first indication of this pro-social behavior: existing social relationships are likely being strengthened. Further, we saw that players that stayed until the end of the world exhibited peaks in the number of small temporary groupings: new social relationships are being formed. …
We also found that contrary to the reassuring adage that "Even if I knew the world would go to pieces tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree," players abandoned character progression, showing a drastic decrease in quest completion, leveling, and ability changes at the end of the beta test.
Only 334 out of the 80,000 or so players committed murder during the last two weeks of play. Instead most players stopped striving and started socializing as the end approached. What to do at the end of the world: Party on!
*Early political correctness note: When we War Games Club members asked student council for some funding out of our mandatory student fees (basically to buy beer), they turned us down. The next semester we changed the club's name to the Historical Simulation Society. We got the funding and drank the beer.
The post How Would You Behave If the World Was Ending? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, memorialized in film and song, informal ceasefires were declared along the Western Front of World War I. British, French, and German soldiers met in No Man's Land, where they traded gifts, sang carols, played soccer, and buried their dead. It is remembered fondly today as a rare moment of humane behavior in one of the worst wars in European history.
But maybe it wasn't so rare after all. The Scotsman reports:
[H]istorian Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, has uncovered evidence that festive meetings continued throughout the war, with a significant number in 1916 despite the huge casualties suffered in the Battle of the Somme.
Professor Weber has been given access to a large number of family memories of the war that show that, despite officers recording in official documents that no such friendly exchanges took place, the situation on the front lines was very different.
Weber wrote about some of these truces in his 2010 book Hitler's First War. In the trenches near Fromelles in 1915, he reports, the authorities actively attempted to prevent a rerun of the previous Christmas by ordering "massive machine-gun fire," among other measures. Nonetheless, small-scale acts of fraternization took place. If they weren't as widespread as in 1914, Weber argues, that wasn't because the men were less willing; it's because the higher-ups were working harder to stop them.
They kept trying to stop them as the war dragged on, but sometimes peace broke out anyway. The Scotsman story mentions "a truce between German and Canadian troops at Vimy Ridge in 1916":
The official version of events recorded by the Canadian Regiment, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, stated that the Germans tried to interact but that no one responded to it.
But the historian found that a letter written by Ronald MacKinnon, the son of a Scot from Levenseat, near Fauldhouse in West Lothian, tells a rather different story…."We had a truce on Xmas Day and our German friends were quite friendly. They came over to see us and we traded bully beef for cigars. Xmas was 'tray bon' which means very good."
In Hitler's First War, Weber notes that when the Canadian soldiers arrived at Vimy Ridge in October, some Germans had greeted the newcomers by holding up a sign that said "Welcome Canadians." (Another sign said: "Cut out your damned artillery. We, too, were at the Somme.") As December 25 approached, the authorities again tried to prevent a spontaneous holiday peace. Some officers even cancelled their men's Christmas rum ration, fearing that it would only encourage fraternization—but they didn't coordinate this as well as they could have, because some other officers decided to double their men's rum. In any event, "All attempts to prevent a truce had been futile. The men of the Princess Pats embarked on a truce with their German opponents, conversing with the help of a Canadian soldier who spoke German."
Bonus reading: I first learned about the 1914 Christmas Truce in Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, which covers it in a great chapter about the many ways "nonaggression between the troops emerged spontaneously in many places along the front." The chapter opens with a wonderfully frustrated quote from a British staff officer visiting the trenches—and not at Christmastime. He was
astonished to observe German soldiers walking about within rifle range behind their own line. Our men appeared to take no notice. I privately made up my mind to do away with that sort of thing when we took over; such things should not be allowed. These people evidently did not know there was a war on. Both sides apparently believed in the policy of "live and let live."
The post There Was More Than One Christmas Truce appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, by Johan Norberg, Oneworld Publications, 256 pp. $27.99
Johan Norberg wrote his excellent new book Progress for three reasons. First, because something important happened. Second, because no one believes it. And third, because it's dangerous that they don't believe it.
Norberg's book comprehensively documents the myriad ways the state of humanity has vastly improved over the past couple of centuries. Global life expectancy was just 31 years in 1900. Now it has risen to over 71 years. In 1800, no country on earth had a life expectancy greater than 40 years. Now no country has a life expectancy under 40 years. And people aren't just living longer; they're living longer with fewer disabilities.
The World Bank has defined the level of abject poverty at the equivalent of $2 per day. In 1800, when world population was around one billion, 94 percent of our ancestors lived in abject poverty. In 1990, some 37 percent of people still lived below the abject poverty line. Since then, the percentage of people on earth living in abject poverty has fallen below 10 percent.
Global GDP increased as much in the past 30 years as it did in the previous 30,000 years. In 1986, global GDP stood (in inflation-adjusted terms) at $33 trillion. It now exceeds $73 trillion. Thirty years ago, global per capita GDP was $6,600. It is $10,000 today.
Being healthier has gotten cheaper. In 1900, for example, the infant mortality rate in countries with a per capita income of $1,000 was 20 per 100 live births. Today, in a country with exactly the same per capita income, the infant mortality rate is 7 per 100 births. "So even if a country had not experienced any economic growth in a 100 years, infant mortality would have been reduced by two-thirds," he writes. Spillovers in sanitation and medical knowledge help even the very poorest live longer and healthier lives.
We probably live at the most peaceful time in recorded history; your chances of being killed by another human being are far lower than in the past. For example, the annual homicide rate in medieval Europe was 32 people per 100,000. In the late 20th century, that rate dropped to about 1 per 100,000. The death rates of people being killed in wars have also fallen steeply, dropping from 195 people per million in 1950 to 8 per million in 2013.
The environments in which people live, especially as countries become wealthy, have dramatically improved. Thanks for modern farming, the world is approaching peak farmland, which means that millions of acres of land will be reverting to nature over the course of this century. Composite air pollution levels in the U.S. are 63 percent lower than they were in 1980. In a recent talk at the Cato Institute, Norberg presented a graph that showed the global progress made on hunger, poverty, illiteracy, child mortality, and U.S. pollution since 1990:
Norberg also writes intelligently about tradeoffs in the environmental arena. For example, he points out that spending $10 billion to build natural gas electric generation plants could help lift 90 million people out of poverty. Spending the same amount on renewable sources of electricity would help only 20 to 27 million people, leaving more than 60 million still living and dying in poverty.
Norberg also celebrated the progress made on boosting education. In 1800, only 12 percent of adults could read. As late as 1950, the global literacy rate was just 40 percent. It is now 86 percent. The literacy differential between men and women is also shrinking. Among those aged 15 to 24, the international female literacy rate is almost 96 percent of the male rate.
Educating women is key to even faster progress. Study after study finds that enabling girls and women to complete secondary education cuts the number of children they bear by between one-third and one-half. Basically, the desired number of children that couples want to have falls as women gain greater control over their fertility and participate in the wage economy outside of the home. A 2015 study by the McKinsey consultancy calculated that if women achieved parity with men in the labor markets, that would boost global GDP in 2025 by $28 trillion, or 26 percent.
Yet few people in rich countries actually believe all this amazing news. Max Roser, curator of the invaluable Our World In Data website, reports cluelessly depressing data from polls that asked if people think the world is getting better, worse, or neither. Only 6 percent of Americans said the world was getting better. Even fewer Britons, Germans, Australians, and French thought that world is improving.
One reason: People focus on the floods of bad news that clot our 24-hour news channels and social media platforms. Since people are psychologically constituted to focus on the negative, people get the impression that the world is falling apart.
Norberg argues that this incredibly dangerous. "Fear is the health of the state," he asserts. Or as newspaperman H.L. Mencken once observed, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Such mistaken beliefs, Norberg warns, actually undermine support for the institutions of liberty that make progress possible.
"All of the progress that has been recorded in this book is the result of hard-working people, scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs with strange, new ideas, and brave individuals who fought for their freedom to do new things in new ways," Norberg concludes. "If progress is to continue, you and I will have to carry the torch."
The post There's Never Been A Better Time to Be Alive appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Voters in Colombia narrowly rejected a peace deal struck between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerilla/narcotrafficking group. With 99.25 percent of votes reported, 50.24 percent of voters rejected the deal, while 49.75 percent voted to approve it. Out of nearly 35 million eligible voters, about 13 million came out to vote, The City Paper of Bogota reports.
Heavy rains from Hurricane Matthew along the coast, where support for the government and the referendum (the latter becoming something of a proxy vote on the former) was believed to be strongest, were blamed on lower turnout there. Climate change alarmist Naomi Klein tweeted that if such reports were true, the role of climate change in "intensifying conflict" was on a "whole new level." It's a specious argument. Irrespective of whether Hurricane Matthew is even a result of whatever Klein defines as "climate change," its effect on the referendum, if any, is not innately pro-conflict. Had the hurricane hit a part of the country considered a stronghold of opponents of the deal, it could've, assuming any effect in the first place, helped get the Yes vote over the top.
As it stands, the political climate in both Colombia and especially neighboring Venezuela played a far more prominent role. The low-intensity conflict between FARC, other left-wing militant groups, as well as right-wing militant groups, paramilitary groups, and the government has been ongoing since the early 1960s, when FARC was founded, and can be traced even back to the 1940s, and the era of La Violencia, a ten-year civil war sparked by the assassination of the left-wing populist politician Jorge Gaitan. The United States has sporadically intervened in the conflict over the last half century.
Opponents of the government complained that the president, Juan Santos, associated himself too much with the deal, turning the referendum on the peace deal into a referendum on him. Other supporters of the No vote insisted a better deal was possible, one where FARC militants would face more penalties for their various crimes during the conflict and perhaps would not receive unelected seats in the national legislature. The leaders of FARC themselves indicated prior to the vote that a rejection of the deal would not send them back into the bush, but that they were committed to peace, making the vote less of a "peace or war" decision than some backers of the deal portrayed it as.
The current peace deal emerged from negotiations held in Havana—the United States eventually sent a diplomat of their own, signaling approval of a peace deal in principle in a conflict U.S. intervention—via material support for the government and its counter-narcotics/drug war policies in the region has helped intensify. The situation in Venezuela, whose government once tried to broker a peace between FARC and the Colombian government, may have influenced voters as well. Once a prominent example of actually-existing socialism for socialist boosters in South and North America, Venezuela is now quickly descending into a self-inflicted political and economic chaos, with widespread shortages and an increasingly authoritarian government that blames all kinds of actors other than their own central planners on the government's failures. The military even stepped in this summer to take control of food distribution services. It's not difficult to imagine Colombian voters looking at the tragic outcome of left-wing, socialist, chavismo in Venezuela and deciding they did not want to risk that for their own country by inviting Marxist extremists to participate in the political process on the strength of their terrorist campaign alone.
The post Did the Climate Influence Colombian Voters' Rejection of the FARC Peace Deal? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over at the invaluable American Council on Science and Health, ASCH senior biomedical fellow Alex Berezow reports the depressing news that only 6 percent of Americans believe that, all things considered, the world is getting better. The most optimistic people are the Chinese; 41 percent think that future is bright. Berezow is citing data collated by Oxford economist Max Roser and shared at recent conference of "ecomodernists" at the Breakthrough Institute. Why are so many people so pessimistic? Berezow reports that Roser suggested (1) they forget how bad things were and (2) they don't know how much progress is being made. As Berezow notes:
The fact is that bad news sells. Good news does not. Proclaiming widespread misery is how politicians get elected (and how most environmentalists get funded), and giving coverage to mass shooters is how newspapers are sold. Giving people a balanced perspective, which often includes a dose of good news, rarely excites anybody.*
Last year, in my column, "The End Is Nigh," I reported similar dispiriting data from the Futures survey:
A majority of people—54 percent—surveyed in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom believe there's a risk of 50 percent or more that our way of life will end within the next 100 years. Even worse, some 25 percent of respondents in the same poll believe it that likely that we'll go extinct in the next century. Americans were the most pessimistic, giving those gloomy answers 57 percent and 30 percent of the time, respectively. And younger respondents tend to be more pessimistic about the future than older ones. …
This pervasive pessimism about the human prospect flies in the face of a plain set of facts: Over the past century, the prospects and circumstances of most of humanity have spectacularly improved. Depending on how you calculate it, world per capita GDP has increased between 5-fold and 10-fold since 1900. Average life expectancy has more than doubled in the same period, and we live in the most peaceful time in history.
I hold modern intellectuals, fellow members of the scribbling classes, responsible for the miasma of cultural pessimism that has engulfed so many rich societies. I reiterate:
In 1982, the brilliant futurist Herman Kahn published The Coming Boom, in which he pleaded for the reestablishment of "an ideology of progress." Kahn warned:
Two out of three Americans polled in recent years believe that their grandchildren will not live as well as they do, i.e., they tend to believe the vision of the future that is taught in our school system. Almost every child is told that we are running out of resources; that we are robbing future generations when we use these scarce, irreplaceable, or nonrenewable resources in silly, frivolous and wasteful ways; that we are callously polluting the environment beyond control; that we are recklessly destroying the ecology beyond repair; that we are knowingly distributing foods which give people cancer and other ailments but continue to do so in order to make a profit.
It would be hard to describe a more unhealthy, immoral, and disastrous educational context, every element of which is either largely incorrect, misleading, overstated, or just plain wrong. What the school system describes, and what so many Americans believe, is a prescription for low morale, higher prices and greater (and unnecessary) regulations.
Three decades later, large swaths of the Western intellectual classes still preach an apocalyptic anti-progress ideology. As the Futures survey shows, corrosive pessimism has clearly trickled down and is demoralizing many citizens. Such cultural gloom is a significant drag on scientific, technological and policy innovation. Overcoming that pervasive pessimism and restoring the belief in human progress is one of the most important philosophical and political projects for the 21st century.
Still true.
*Compare the sales of my realistic new book, The End of Doom, to the sales of doomster Paul Ehrlich's apocalyptic tomes. Well, I, at least, have the satisfaction of being right.
The post American Pessimism: Only 6 Percent Think the World Is Getting Better appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's the time of year when people sing about peace and goodwill. Unfortunately, in the United States, too little thought accompanies the nice words. Otherwise Americans would be in the streets demanding that President Obama shut down the war machine.
They would also be repudiating every presidential candidate who endorses the fundamentals of America's criminal foreign policy, and that means every presidential contender in the major parties. Each one of them thinks it's the U.S. government's obligation to destroy ISIS (which it helped create), and most of them think—contradictorily—that Americans should overthrow the Syrian government, even though massive noncombatant casualties would result, fanatics would benefit, and neither ISIS nor Bashar al-Assad pose an existential threat to our society.
The ruling elite and its cheerleader squads across the political spectrum tell us endlessly that the United States—by which they mean its central government—has been a force for good in the world. The nation may be exceptional, but, grandiloquent declarations notwithstanding, not in any virtuous sense. For over 200 years it has been a killer and an oppressor on a massive scale; when it has not committed those crimes directly, it has enabled ruthless proxies. America's victims span the world.
The motives are varied and intertwined: a nationalist, geopolitical, and economic mixture, presented as the call of destiny. America was seen as chosen to change the world, however unwilling the recipients of this gift.
Few people expected Obama to surpass his predecessor George W. Bush in making war, but he has. The wars he promised to end—Iraq and Afghanistan—are nowhere near completion, and more than 14 years after the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of War Ash Carter expects 2016 to be another "hard" year. ISIS has now joined the Taliban in the effort to drive the Americans out.
Away from the news cameras, Obama inflicts or enables violence against the people of Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, where the Saudis and their Gulf-state partners have bombed and embargoed their way to a humanitarian catastrophe. Again, the winners are al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The Made-in-the-USA mayhem is justified by the mindless slogan that "they will come here and kill us all." But countless times this has been exposed for the nonsense it is. Even the official 9/11 commission and a study done under then-War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attributed the 2001 attacks to previous U.S. intervention in the Middle East—including the starvation of Iraqi children, stationing of the military near Mecca and Medina, and collusion with Israel against the people of Palestine. The 9/11 attacks were monstrous crimes, but they were not bolts out of the blue. Rather, they were provoked by decades of American cruelty and mass murder.
Before Bush II invaded Iraq—despite Saddam Hussein's innocence with respect to 9/11—al-Qaeda was a small number of men in Afghanistan. Since then, with a boost from Obama's bombing and regime-change in Libya and his declaring open season on Assad, al-Qaeda has spread and spawned even more-virulent offspring, notoriously ISIS. The U.S. government is Dr. Frankenstein to the al-Qaeda/ISIS monster loosed on the Middle East and beyond. Obama's landmark contribution to foreign policy is his placing the U.S. Air Force at the service of al-Qaeda in Syria and Yemen.
Americans would not be fearing Islamist terrorism (however inflated in their imagination) were it not for Bush and Obama. But the culpability reaches beyond those two men to the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
Through jingoism and apathy the American people allowed it all to happen. Antiwar movements have been fleeting and flimsy, considering they evaporated overnight with the end of conscription in 1973 and the election of a Democrat in 2008.
It's no surprise, then, that the presidential contest is over minor variations on the imperialist theme. No one challenges the empire at its root.
So we'll end up with another war president who has no scruples about murdering noncombatants and laying waste to entire societies so long as it advances the mission: maintaining American hegemony throughout the world and disposing of anyone who would chart an independent course.
Singing about peace and goodwill while cheering America's warrior state is a repulsive spectacle. The near-term prospects for change are bleak.
This piece originally appeared at Richman's "Free Association" blog.
The post The Season of Peace Requires Action, Not Songs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1997, battered by their country's civil war, approximately 1,500 campesinos from San José, Colombia, established a zone they called the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartada. Henceforth, no armed groups would be welcome in their territory, be they leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, or soldiers and police.
In The Power of Staying Put, a monograph published by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, Juan Masullo Jimenéz notes that 210 community members were assassinated in the ensuing years. But the villagers dug in, grew stronger, recovered a lot of the land they'd lost to the paramilitaries, and created a neutral, autonomous island in a civil war. Along the way, he adds, they created a self-managed community capable of "carrying out several state-like activities and building institutions…from which the state was left out." These functions include education, conflict resolution, building trails, keeping common areas clean, and running the local cacao operation.
The post Peace City appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Some years ago, I predicted that the Arab Spring drive to create democratic regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Syria would fail. My conclusion was based on evidence from political science studies. In particular, I noted:
The auguries of political science strongly predict that the Arab Spring rebellions will succumb to new autocrats in the near term….
[Why?] Because, broadly speaking, data on the arcs of post–World War II revolutions suggests that their chances of successfully transitioning from autocracy to democracy are less than 50/50.
That dispiriting appraisal is based on a new data set, compiled by the UCLA political scientist Barbara Geddes and her colleagues, that provides transition information for the 280 autocratic regimes (in 110 countries with a population of more than a million) in existence from 1946 to 2010. More than half of the time, one autocrat has been followed by another. The odds of transitioning from autocracy to democracy are even worse for personalist dictatorships and one-party states, although military dictatorships make the transition about two-thirds of the time. A personalist dictator is a ruler who basically runs the state as a family business. As it happens, all of the regimes in which Arab Spring revolutions were successful were more or less personalist dictatorships: Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen, and Bashar Hafez al-Assad in Syria.
And so my predictions have so far proved all too sadly true, except in the case of Tunisia.
I am happy to report that today the Nobel Prize committee anncounced that it is awarding this year's Peace Prize to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet. In the Quartet came together in the wake of a series of political assasinations and growing civil unrest that was destabilizing efforts to create a constitutional and democratic government. The Quartet has comprised of the Tunisian General Labour Union, the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts, the Tunisian Human Rights League, and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers.
The result of these efforts was the election of a secular-Islamist coalition government earlier this year.
From the Nobel Committee's press release:
The course that events have taken in Tunisia since the fall of the authoritarian Ben Ali regime in January 2011 is unique and remarkable for several reasons. Firstly, it shows that Islamist and secular political movements can work together to achieve significant results in the country's best interests. The example of Tunisia thus underscores the value of dialogue and a sense of national belonging in a region marked by conflict. Secondly, the transition in Tunisia shows that civil society institutions and organizations can play a crucial role in a country's democratization, and that such a process, even under difficult circumstances, can lead to free elections and the peaceful transfer of power. The National Dialogue Quartet must be given much of the credit for this achievement and for ensuring that the benefits of the Jasmine Revolution have not been lost.
Tunisia faces significant political, economic and security challenges. The Norwegian Nobel Committee hopes that this year's prize will contribute towards safeguarding democracy in Tunisia and be an inspiration to all those who seek to promote peace and democracy in the Middle East, North Africa and the rest of the world. More than anything, the prize is intended as an encouragement to the Tunisian people, who despite major challenges have laid the groundwork for a national fraternity which the Committee hopes will serve as an example to be followed by other countries.
Hearty congratulations to the Quartet. Holding elections is much easier than inculcating liberal democratic values, but surely we all join the Nobel Committee in hoping that year's prize will contribute towards safeguarding Tunisia's nascent democracy.
The post Nobel Peace Prize: In Tunisia Alone Is the "Arab Spring" Still Green appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1997, battered by their country's civil war, around 800 peasants from northwestern Colombia "decided to protest in front of the government building and demand protection." And so they
marched from San José to the city of Apartadó and established a temporary refuge in the city's coliseum. After some negotiations with a government-sponsored commission, they went back home and, upon their return, some leaders were assassinated. In view of this response, a group of about 1,500 San José villagers opted instead for self-organization in order to find a collective, campesino-based solution to the problem. After discussing possible courses of action, the villagers sought the support of external actors, stating their determination not to leave the village while, at the same time, opting out of war.
Inspired by a proposal by Monsignor Isaías Duarte Cancino, the then-Bishop of the Dioceses of Apartadó, San José villagers decided to formally declare themselves neutral to the conflict and establish a Peace Community. In doing so, they pledged not to participate in any possible way in the war and disavow any form of cooperation with all armed groups, including the national army and the police. In addition, with flags, symbols, billboards and fences, they explicitly delineated and designated physical areas where Community members stayed, while armed groups, without distinction, could not enter or pass through.
That's Juan Masullo Jiménez writing in The Power of Staying Put, a new monograph from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. The reaction to the peasants' project—dubbed the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó—was violent and sometimes lethal: 210 of the community's members would be assassinated in the ensuing years. But the villagers dug in, grew stronger, recovered a lot of the land they'd lost to paramilitary groups, and generally succeeded in creating a neutral and autonomous island in a civil war. Along the way, Masullo writes, they built a voluntary, self-managed community capable of "carrying out several state-like activities and building institutions…from which the state was left out." These functions include education, conflict resolution, building trails, keeping common areas clean, and running the local cacao operation, among other activities.
It's an interesting study, well worth a look. You can read a pdf of it here.
Bonus link: nonviolent resistance to the mob.
The post In Colombia's Civil War, Peasants Try to Build an Island of Peace appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If Rip Van Winkle had gone to sleep sometime in the past five decades and awakened today, he would know nothing about the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. But he would have no trouble following the debate, because he's heard it before. Presidents, adversaries and the world have changed; the arguments have not.
It's no surprise that the Republicans running for president find the accord to be lacking in any merit whatsoever. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ranked it among Barack Obama's "worst diplomatic failures." Jeb Bush called it "appeasement."
Even Rand Paul, who sometimes diverges with GOP hawks, rejects it. Some of the other candidates couldn't comment because their heads were exploding.
The United States has a long history of presidents, including Republican ones, striving to address nuclear dangers through negotiation instead of war. Every president going back to Dwight Eisenhower has pursued—and in most cases achieved—agreements involving doomsday weapons.
Richard Nixon signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union. Jimmy Carter put his name on the second—which Ronald Reagan opposed, only to abide by its terms once in office. Reagan went on to forge his own nuclear agreements with Moscow.
George H.W. Bush negotiated another. So did Bill Clinton, who also made a nuclear deal with North Korea. When it collapsed, George W. Bush tried to reach a second accord.
But the U.S. also has a long history of critics treating such efforts as products of blindness, wishful thinking and cowardice. Obama can take some consolation in knowing that Nixon and Reagan were also vilified as craven dupes. George W. Bush's efforts in the North Korea talks were labeled "immediate surrender."
Welcome to the club. When Eisenhower hosted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, the legendary conservative columnist William F. Buckley Jr. distinctly heard "the death rattle of the West."
It's not so much that the critics regard Obama as a villain and a weakling, though they do. It's more that he is engaged in a task they regard as inherently hopeless and destructive, if not evil. They could no more accept it than Baptists could renounce the Bible.
This debate may appear to be just between Republicans and Democrats. But the real dispute is deeper than that.
It's between those who believe the United States can generally rely on diplomacy to advance its interests and those who think military force is the only useful tool. It's between those who are prepared to accept compromises to make us safer and those who chase the fantasy of complete invulnerability.
The particulars of any deal are not the problem. Arms control and diplomacy are the problem, because they require us to bargain with our adversaries to achieve compromises that serve the interests of each side. They obligate us to behave as though hostile governments have a right to exist.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., lamented, "A third-rate autocracy has now been given equality with a world power, the United States of America." Should we refuse to sit down with second-rate autocracies? First-rate autocracies? All autocracies?
By that logic, diplomacy is inferior to war, because war allows us to destroy our enemies rather than dicker with them. So the theory goes, and sometimes it works—as when we smashed Nazi Germany. But war doesn't always work out well. Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest examples of its pitfalls, including the possibility of creating new and worse dangers.
In the case of Iran, Obama's critics insist we can get our way without launching air strikes. They claim economic sanctions, cranked higher, would make Tehran surrender.
But the Bush administration tried that approach without success. As The New York Times reported this week, "every new round of sanctions was answered with an escalation in the size and aggressiveness of the Iranian program to enrich uranium."
University of Chicago professor Robert Pape, who has studied previous sanctions efforts, says no country has ever been forced to capitulate on a vital matter of national security through economic sanctions. What makes anyone think Iran would be the first?
History indicates that even conservatives, when they reach the Oval Office, come to appreciate the value of negotiating on nuclear disputes rather than going to war. The critics? They never learn.
© Copyright 2015 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post The Iran Debate and the Echoes of History appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In his book Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, historian Stanley Weintraub presented the letters and diaries of the men who temporarily ended WWI for two weeks circa Christmas 1914. One wrote, "Never … was I so keenly aware of the insanity of war."
In the book Weintraub also quotes a 1930 comment delivered by Sir H. Kingsley Wood in the British House of Commons. Wood had been a major in World War I and a participant in the Christmas truce. He went on to become a cabinet minister after the war. Wood noted how many officials now labeled the refusal to fight as "degrading" and unworthy of a soldier. Wood disagreed.
"I … came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired," he said. The carnage resumed only because the situation was in "the grip of the political system which was bad." Rather than being degrading, the truce was a triumph of shared humanity over the ambitions of empire, something worth remembering 100 years after the fact.
The truce was a series of unofficial and widespread cease-fires that extended over two weeks. The truce between mostly British and German troops centered on the Western Front, defined by lines of trenches that stretched across France from the North Sea to the border of Switzerland. The trenches were often close enough for the combatants to exchange shouted words and to smell food their adversaries were cooking.
Life in the trenches consisted of extreme boredom broken by spikes of terror when an attack was launched. Young men left the comparative safety of their own trenches and crossed open ground into "no man's land" to try to reach the trenches opposite. Even successful attacks racked up huge casualties. The Battle of the Somme in France was waged between July 1 and November 18, 1916, and came to symbolize the cost of trench warfare; more than one million men were killed or wounded. An estimated 12.5 percent of troops on the Western Front died, often from wounds for which antibiotics were not yet available; the casualty rate (both killed and wounded) was estimated at 56 percent. In all, more than 10 million soldiers died in World War I.
It was natural for each side to wonder about the men living so close them who endured the same wretched cold and wet conditions, and who faced the same prospect of an early death. The top brass recognized the danger this curiosity posed to military order. On December 5, 1914, British General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien sent a warning to the commanders of all divisions: "Experience … proves undoubtedly that troops in trenches in close proximity to the enemy slide very easily, if permitted to do so, into a 'live and let live' theory of life…officers and men sink into a military lethargy from which it is difficult to arouse them when the moment for great sacrifices again arises."
Several factors contributed to the danger of "military lethargy." Many of the Germans spoke English well. Weintraub observed, "It is estimated that over eighty thousand young Germans had gone to England before the war to be employed in such jobs as waiters, cooks, and cab drivers." Moreover the British King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. The fact that the Front conflict occurred on French soil might have also mitigated hostility. Both the British and Germans were European and overwhelmingly Christian, which promoted a veneration for Christmas. Indeed, concerned that Catholics were fighting Catholics, Pope Benedict XV actively sought a Christmas truce in 1914 in order to prevent the "suicide of Europe." Although German officials reportedly entertained the idea, the British did not. But the soldiers may have paid attention.
Meanwhile, powerful factors acted against the likelihood of camaraderie. In the months since WWI had erupted in August, hundreds of thousands of troops had been killed or wounded. Soldiers on both sides had lost friends and witnessed horrible scenes of death and mutilation. Moreover, both sides had conducted massive propaganda campaigns aimed at stirring hatred toward the other.
Against this backdrop, a remarkable thing happened on December 19, 1914. British Lieutenant Geoffrey Heinekey described it in a letter home to his mother. "Some Germans came out and held up their hands and began to take in some of their wounded and so we ourselves immediately got out of our trenches and began bringing in our wounded also. The Germans then beckoned to us and a lot of us went over and talked to them and they helped us to bury our dead." Heinekey could not have been alone in concluding, "I must say they [the Germans] seemed extraordinarily fine men."
Incidents of fraternization kept occurring. A German philosophy student-turned-soldier named Karl Aldag reported that hymns and Christmas songs were being sung in both trenches. German troops foraged for Christmas trees that they placed in plain view on the parapets of their trenches.
By the time Christmas Eve arrived, so much interaction had occurred between the British and Germans that Brigadier General G.T. Forrestier-Walker had officially forbidden fraternization. In his book A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, Judge John V. Denson quoted the directive. Fraternization "discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys offensive spirit in all ranks. … Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited."
On Christmas Eve, a hard frost fell. In his book The Truce: The Day the War Stopped, Chris Baker reported on the events of December 24, 1914. "98 British soldiers die on this day, many are victims of sniper fire. A German aeroplane drops a bomb on Dover: the first air raid in British history. During the afternoon and early evening, British infantry are astonished to see many Christmas trees with candles and paper lanterns, on enemy parapets. There is much singing of carols, hymns and popular songs, and a gradual exchange of communication and even meetings in some areas. Many of these meetings are to arrange collection of bodies. In other places, firing continues. Battalion officers are uncertain how to react… ."
Some officers threatened to court-martial or even to shoot those who fraternized, but the threats were generally ignored. Other officers mingled with enemies of similar rank. The Germans reportedly led the way, coming out of their trenches and moving unarmed toward the British. Soldiers exchanged chocolates, cigars, and compared news reports. They buried the dead, some of whom had lain for months, with each side often helping the other dig graves. At its height, unofficial ceasefires were estimated to have occurred along half of the British line. As many as 100,000 British and German troops took part.
On Christmas morning, the dead had been buried, the wounded retrieved and the "no man's land" between the trenches was quiet except for the sound of Christmas carols, especially "Silent Night." In one area, the soldiers recited the 23rd Psalm together: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want… ." Soccer and football matches broke out. In some areas of cease-fire, soldiers openly cooked and shared their Christmas meal.
Fraternization continued thereafter but to a diminishing degree, because the high commanders were now acutely aware of the situation and responded with threats of disciplinary action. For one thing, the interaction made many troops doubt if the reports they read in their own newspapers were true. One officer wrote a letter, which was published in the The Daily News on December 30 and one day later in The New York Times. He commented, "The Germans opposite us were awfully decent fellows – Saxons, intelligent, respectable-looking men. I had a quite decent talk with three or four and have two names and addresses in my notebook. … After our talk I really think a lot of our newspaper reports must be horribly exaggerated." These were the first reports on the Christmas truce, because news was suppressed as a threat to "national security."
The English officer Lieutenant A.P. Sinkinson became even more critical of his own government. He wrote, "As I walked slowly back to our own trenches I thought of Mr. Asquith's [British P.M.] sentence about not sheathing the sword until the enemy be finally crushed. It is all very well for Englishmen living comfortable at home to talk in flowing periods, but when you are out here you begin to realize that sustained hatred is impossible."
The atmosphere of goodwill needed to cease. And, so, slowly fraternization was quashed. On New Year's Eve, some singing and shouting of messages occurred, but the truce was over.
Weintraub's book concludes with a chapter entitled "What If?" What if the Christmas truce had continued and soldiers who refused to fight? In summarizing the chapter, Denson comments:
"Like many other historians, he [Weintraub] believes that with an early end of the war in December of 1914, there probably would have been no Russian Revolution, no Communism, no Lenin, and no Stalin. Furthermore, there would have been no vicious peace imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, and therefore, no Hitler, no Nazism and no World War II. With the early truce there would have been no entry of America into the European War and America might have had a chance to remain, or return, to being a Republic rather than moving toward World War II, the 'Cold' War (Korea and Vietnam), and our present status as the world bully."
War is against the self-interest of average people who suffer not only from its horrors but also from its political fallout. Those who benefit from both are the ones who threaten to shoot those who lay down their guns: politicians, commanders and warmongers who profit financially. But even the powerful and the elite cannot always extinguish "peace on earth, goodwill toward men," even in the midst of deadly battle.
The post The Christmas Truce of World War I appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a piece that confusingly suggests that politicians skeptical of permament war are hiding their true colors until after the midterm election even as he concedes that non-interventionism is an increasingly popular position among Americans, Nicholas Wapshott frets for Politico that "after election day, the isolationists will be back."
When we wake up Wednesday morning, a lot of us will be isolationists again. All the tough election-season rhetoric about supporting U.S. troops abroad will have disappeared overnight, and many Americans can be expected to revert back to what has been a rising and unmistakable trend: For the first time in nearly three-quarters of a century – since the months before Dec. 7, 1941—many people are forthrightly embracing isolationism as an election issue. And the feeling isn't likely to go away any time soon, despite some recent polls suggesting that more and more Americans outraged by the videotaped beheadings of two journalists have supported military action against ISIL, also known as the Islamic State. With the war against ISIL expected to last many years, the pivotal issue of the 2016 election might turn out to be not the economy or health care but whether the United States should continue as the world's policeman, as it has since the end of World War II, or should finally come home for good.
"Isolationism" is Wapshott's preferred term throughout; he castigates as a "weasel word" any attempt to distinguish isolationists who didn't want to engage the world at all from non-interventionists who support free trade and peaceful interaction with the world, but object to the D.C. fetish for dropping American bombs and bodies into every knife fight on the planet.
Wapshott acknowledges that "isolationism" as well as opposition to NSA surveillance unites Americans, "bringing together the far left of the Democratic Party with libertarian Republicans in a show of solidarity rarely seen in Washington."
It's also popular among Americans who vote for those politicians, he concedes, with support for limited action against ISIS acting as an exception to public opposition to greater military intervention, according to Pew. Reason-Rupe polling finds almost identical results, with support for air strikes against ISIS balanced against opposition to the use of ground forces.
That skepticism about intervention extends elsewhere, according to Reason-Rupe polling. Only 28 percent of Americans want to increase the U.S. military presence around the world, while 36 percent want to decrease America's global military presence.
This skepticism of permanent war is so popular that…non-interventionists send "dog-whistle signals" to reassure the faithful without letting hawks catch on, according to Wapshott. But "as soon as the midterms are out of the way, dovish Democrats and libertarian Republicans will feel free once again to express their reluctance to continue to support military action abroad."
But the polling…Never mind. Wapshott is convinced that this is an underground movement—of the majority.
His spin aside, Wapshott is likely right. Non-interventionism—or "isolationism," if he insists—is on the rise, with limited exceptions made for special horrors like ISIS. Wapshott clearly doesn't like that development, but those of us who care about American lives might find it encouraging.
The post The Secret 'Isolationist' Majority That's Lurking Until After the Election appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Helping Poor
Peace
Pro-Choice
Civil Liberties
The post 4 Ways Democrats Are Full of Shit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Friday Funnies: Anti-War, When Convenient appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Friday Funnies: About That Nobel Peace Prize… appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As the latest war between Israel and Hamas continues to rage on and rising Palestinian civilian body counts leave Israel further isolated from the international community, one wonders: What happened to Israel's anti-war movement?
Despite being at war for nearly its entire existence, there has always been a robust peace movement in Israel. But this time around, the doves are the fringe in Israeli society. Last Saturday in Tel Aviv, the largest anti-war protest since the latest battle began was attended by a few thousand people (estimates vary from 1,000 to 5,000) and a recent poll shows 87 percent of Jewish Israelis support continuing the siege on Gaza.
In a small nation with compulsory military service, where every single miltary casualty is national news, and the country's political class is willing to trade thousands of Palestinian prisoners for a single Israeli soldier (and sometimes for the bodies of fallen soldiers), it is no small thing to loudly advocate against war. Accusations ranging from dangerous naivite to being a self-hating Jew to aiding the enemy are common.
As Marina Strinkovsky wrote in the New Statesman:
Protest is one thing, but the angry recriminations of loved ones—that is something I admit is beyond the scope of my bravery. In my life, I have faced potatoes lobbed at me from upper floors by small children on demonstrations and anguished accusations of indifference to my family's safety. I know which hurt more.
Harriet Sherwood of The Guardian adds:
It is a big contrast with the 400,000 people—then almost a tenth of the country's population – who took to the streets in 1986 to protest about Israel's war in Lebanon. In 1995, 100,000 people attended the rally in support of the Oslo accords at which prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. And in 2009 several thousand people joined peace marches during Operation Cast Lead, Israel's three-week assault on Gaza….
The reasons for the decline of Israel's peace movement are, inevitably, complex and interrelated. They include the failures of the Oslo accords and of successive attempts to forge a peace deal; the growing voice of the extreme right in Israeli politics; the "normalisation" of the 47-year-long occupation; and the relative marginalisation of the Palestinian cause both in Israel and internationally.
Added to that mix is weariness and hopelessness. "I think the peace movement became frustrated that nothing changes," said Maayan Dak of the Women's Coalition for Peace. "Things just repeat. People feel there is no point."
Beyond failed diplomacy and a generations-long occupation, the collapse of the Israeli anti-war movement can also be attributed to the dread felt by Israelis over rockets that have reached further into their cities than ever before and the discovery of sophisticated tunnels that go deep into their country. If the polls are to believed and the sparsely attended protests are any indication, the Israeli populace is far more concerned with temporary security than permanent peace.
Few would argue against Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Hamas, whose unwillingness to ever recognize Israel is well documented, but talk of a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians pretty much died last month (along with John Kerry's Nobel Peace Prize ambitions), when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters he would never allow for a fully soveriegn Palestinian state in the West Bank. While not explicitly rejecting a two-state solution, Netanyahu reiterated the popular opinion among Israelis that the country's unilateral 2005 pullout from the Gaza Strip created the conditions that led to the current war with Hamas and that he would never allow for such a security vacuum to exist in the West Bank.
Israel's security concerns aside, no one in the Palestinian political camp, even Israel's on-again, off-again negotiating partner, Fatah, would ever agree to Israeli police and military patrolling inside a nominally sovereign Palestinian state. Thus, the status quo of Israeli occupation over the West Bank, a near-total blockade of the Gaza Strip, and brief wars every few years that leave both sides further hardended, will be kept in place.
When the latest fighting goes into "cease-fire" mode (not to be confused with peace) Israelis will once again be at a crossroads. Will they have made their point by destroying a few dozen tunnels and leveling much of Gaza's infrastructure? Will they follow the lead of their late ex-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (no dove by any stretch of the imagination) and make tough concessions including dismantling illegal settlments and negotiating directly with the people they've fought for decades?
The answer is unlikely, unless a lasting peace is as much of a priority as temporary security.
The post The Battered Israeli Anti-War Movement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Barack Obama and John Kerry should make up their minds: Do they want war or peace with Iran?
We should hope for peace, but Obama and Kerry make optimism difficult.
Ideally, the Obama administration would simply exit the Middle East, taking all its military and economic aid with it. The U.S. government cannot micromanage events there, especially when it is no honest, neutral broker. Shamefully, it is firmly in the Israeli camp against the Palestinians (who, let us remember, are the occupied, not the occupiers), and generally in the Sunni Muslim camp against the Shi'ites, led by Iran. (Iraq is the anomaly.)
As welcome as a U.S. exit would be, alas, it won't happen anytime soon, so the best we can hope for is rapprochement with Iran. The U.S.-led economic sanctions impose an unconscionable hardship on Iranians — for example, depriving the elderly and children of medicines and nourishment. Clearly, a war would be catastrophic on many levels for nearly all concerned, including Americans. (I say "nearly all" because opportunistic rulers in Israel and Saudi Arabia could benefit.)
Given the circumstances, one might expect signs of wholehearted American support for rapprochement, but we're not seeing them. The U.S. government, along with the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, reached an interim agreement with Iran aimed at demonstrating the peaceful nature of the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities. Of course, we already knew the intentions are peaceful. Iran is a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is routinely inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has certified that no uranium has been diverted to weapons production. Moreover, U.S. and Israeli intelligence say that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear bomb, and its Supreme Leader long ago condemned weapons of mass destruction as sinful.
Under the interim agreement, which is to be a bridge to a permanent accord, Iran will take additional measures to reassure the world, including converting its enriched uranium to a form unsuitable for weapons but appropriate for power generation and medical purposes.
This should cheer all peace-minded people. So why do Obama and Kerry say things that make us doubt their sincerity about seeking a diplomatic resolution?
For example, Kerry recently said that "the military option that is available to the United States is ready and prepared to do what it would have to do." Threatening war hardly demonstrates the spirit of peace-making.
Further, investigative reporter Gareth Porter points out that Kerry repeatedly says the agreement obligates Iran to "dismantle" nuclear equipment, such as centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani protests that this is incorrect. Porter writes that the "tough U.S. rhetoric may be adding new obstacles to the search for a comprehensive nuclear agreement."
Is the administration moving the goal posts?
"In fact," Porter continues, drawing on CNN interviews, "[Iranian foreign minister Javad] Zarif has put on the table proposals for resolving the remaining enrichment issues that the Barack Obama administration has recognized as serious and realistic.… Zarif observed that the actual agreement said nothing about 'dismantling' any equipment.… So Iran was not required by the interim agreement to 'dismantle' anything." Instead, Iran agreed not to enrich over 5 percent, far below weapons grade, "and not increase enrichment capacity." Kerry's use of the word "dismantle" when discussing the future permanent agreement also disturbs Iran's leaders.
The NPT does not prohibit parties from enriching uranium for electricity and medical treatments.
"The Obama administration's rhetoric of 'dismantlement,' however, has created a new political reality: the US news media has accepted the idea that Iran must 'dismantle' at least some of its nuclear program to prove that it is not seeking nuclear weapons," Porter writes.
Thus, Kerry's deception could inflame the public against Iran and jeopardize the chance of a settlement.
Obama himself told the New Yorker's David Remnick there's less than an even chance of a permanent agreement, which is worse than the odds he gave late last year. And while he reminded Americans that it was the United States that overthrew a democratic Iranian government in 1953, he called on Israel and Saudi Arabia to focus on their common bond against Iran.
That doesn't sound like a man seeking peace.
This column originally appeared on the Future of Freedom Foundation.
The post Obama and Kerry Jeopardize Peace With Iran appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"We turn down any extension," Erakat told the official Voice of Palestine radio station, adding that some of his recent remarks about the matter had been misinterpreted.
"I said that if we reach an agreement on all final status issues, we could continue to discuss the details," he said.
The post Palestinians Rule Out Extending Peace Talks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The provisional agreement with Iran concluded last week — freezing uranium enrichment above 5 percent, committing the Islamic state to neutralizing its stockpile of 20 percent uranium, and allowing weapons inspectors ready access to suspect sites (in exchange for unfreezing some $6 billion in Iranian assets)—is merely the latest to provoke cries of "Munich!" and "appeasement!"
But there aren't a lot of great choices when it comes to preventing a nuclear-armed Iran. The Washington Post's Max Fisher runs through the unappealing menu of "four bad options": Bomb Iran, invade it, take covert action to topple the regime, or continue the status quo in the hopes that Iran will finally cry "uncle." There's "one okay option": Try to negotiate a deal. These choices essentially reduce to two: war or diplomacy.
Even Winston Churchill, Munich's fiercest critic and nobody's dove, recognized in 1954 that sometimes "jaw-jaw"—even with the Soviets—was "better than war-war." So too here.
Of course, the repugnant nature of the Iranian regime suggests a stronger version of Reagan's maxim for negotiating with the USSR: Don't trust—verify.
The interim agreement provides means for doing just that. It allows weapons inspectors daily access to Iran's key nuclear sites and monitoring of centrifuge production facilities and uranium mines. It's hard to see how that enhanced scrutiny increases the chance of a nuclear "breakout" for the six-month period it will be in effect.
We could, of course, continue as before, hoping they'll just give up. But the preemptive "cessation of nuclear enrichment by Iran," even for civilian purposes, was always a nonstarter. Besides, as Jeffrey Lewis observes in Foreign Policy, there's no guarantee that the international will for restrictions will continue: "Sanctions have always been a wasting asset. It makes sense to get something for them now."
It's very much worth trying to prevent Iran from going nuclear, but not because of the fanciful scenarios some hawks advance, like a suicidal first strike on Israel or "a nuclear suitcase" in New York.
Nuclear deterrence has an impressive track record: It's worked even for demonstrably genocidal dictators like the nuclear-armed Mao and Stalin, and for extremist Islamist regimes like Pakistan. There's a reason Iran has never given chemical weapons to its terrorist clients Hamas or Hezbollah—the threat of massive retaliation by Israel, which has some 80 nuclear warheads deliverable by F-16s, ballistic missiles and submarines. The same logic of deterrence would apply to a nuclear Iran.
Like it or not, there is no plausible military option that could stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons if it's hell-bent on doing so. (For whatever it's worth, the U.S. intelligence community consensus is that the regime has not yet made that decision.).
We're not going to invade and occupy a country with more than twice the population of Iraq; and airstrikes would only delay a nuclear breakout, while empowering hardliners who want the bomb. "You can't destroy knowledge and you can't destroy the basic technology," says defense analyst Jeffrey White. Air raids would set a weapons program back "maybe two years, maybe three years." At what cost? Likely a wider war in the Middle East with Iranian attempts to close the Straits of Hormuz and terrorist strikes on the U.S. homefront.
Trying to broker a deal with a reprehensible regime isn't ideal. But, as CIA operative Tony Mendez described his unlikely hostage-rescue plan in last year's Oscar-winner "Argo": "There are only bad options. It's about finding the best one."
War is the worst bad idea we've got–by far. Thankfully, it just became a little less likely.
This column originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.
The post Negotiating with Iran is Better than War appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Jeffrey Feltman told the Security Council that four months since the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks aimed at a two-state solution, negotiators "have gone some way towards narrowing their differences."
But he said "strains have been growing dangerously between the parties, and these can and must be overcome."
The post UN Warns New Israeli Settlement Could Set Back Peace Talks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Kerry met with Peres following his meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Peres told Kerry that he had the deepest respect and appreciation for Kerry's "unmatched energy and devotion" in his bid to resolve "such a complicated situation" which keeps changing all the time, necessitating that Kerry should move faster than the situation. Peres acknowledged that it was not simple because everyone involved has "to take cautious decisions" but with all the complications he was convinced that "none of us have a better alternative to peace."
The post Peres Asks Kerry Not to Screw Up Israel-Palestine Peace Plan appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chelsea Manning (formerly Pfc. Bradley Manning) was recently awarded the Sean MacBride Peace Prize by the International Peace Bureau for doing "outstanding work for peace, disarmament and/or human rights." There's a bit of a problem, though. Now that the famous military leaker is not so isolated and has settled into serving her sentence at Ft. Leavenworth, she's discovering how she is being presented by her own supporters, and she is concerned even they don't quite grasp why she did what she did. The Guardian explains:
Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks source formerly known as Bradley Manning, has expressed intense unhappiness at the public profile that is being presented about her, warning that a false impression is being given to the outside world that she is an anti-war pacifist and conscientious objector.
In a statement issued to the Guardian, Manning insists that she did not leak hundreds of thousands of US classified documents to WikiLeaks because she was explicitly motivated by pacifism. Rather, she sees herself as a "transparency advocate" who is convinced that the American people needs to be better informed.
"It's not terribly clear to me that my actions were explicitly done for 'peace'… I feel that the public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don't even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects."
Manning said she didn't even realize she had won an award, but her lawyer talked to her and said she had gotten confused about it during the process of her indoctrination into prison.
Follow this story and more at Reason 24/7.
Spice up your blog or Website with Reason 24/7 news and Reason articles. You can get the widgets here. If you have a story that would be of interest to Reason's readers please let us know by emailing the 24/7 crew at 24_7@reason.com, or tweet us stories at @reason247.
The post Chelsea Manning: I'm a Transparency Activist, Not a Peace Activist appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a statement issued to the Guardian, Manning insists that she did not leak hundreds of thousands of US classified documents to WikiLeaks because she was explicitly motivated by pacifism. Rather, she sees herself as a "transparency advocate" who is convinced that the American people needs to be better informed.
"It's not terribly clear to me that my actions were explicitly done for 'peace'… I feel that the public cannot decide what actions and policies are or are not justified if they don't even know the most rudimentary details about them and their effects."
In her first public comments since she was sentenced in August to 35 years in military custody for leaking the largest quantity of US state secrets in history, Manning writes that she is increasingly concerned about what she calls a "substantial disconnect" between her experiences at the US military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where she is being held, and the messages that are being put out to the rest of the world without her knowledge or approval. "I was shocked and frustrated about what's occurred here," she writes.
The post Chelsea Manning: Leak Motivation Was Transparency, Not Peace Activism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>British philosopher Thomas Hobbes asserted in his 1651 book, Leviathan that "it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man." So in order to obtain peace and security people form a social contract in which they surrender some of their natural liberty to "a common power to keep them all in awe." And it fact, the modern anthropological literature does show that violence is endemic in pre-state societies. People living outside of states are in fact engaged in a war of every man against every man.
The good news is that the evidence for the declining trend in the mortality rate from violence continues to accumulate. The headline of this post is the title of a new article by University of Tel Aviv political scientist Azar Gat in the journal Peace Research. Gat's review of the recent literature finds:
…that claims a sharp decrease in fighting and violent mortality rate since prehistory and during recent times. It also inquires into the causes of this decrease. The article supports the view, firmly established over the past 15 years and unrecognized by only one of the books reviewed, that the first massive decline in violent mortality occurred with the emergence of the state-Leviathan. Hobbes was right, and Rousseau was wrong, about the great violence of the human state of nature. The rise of the state-Leviathan greatly reduced in-group violent mortality by establishing internal peace. Less recognized, it also decreased out-group war fatalities. Although state wars appear large in absolute terms, large states actually meant lower mobilization rates and reduced exposure of the civilian population to war. A second major step in the decline in the frequency and fatality of war has occurred over the last two centuries, including in recent decades. However, the exact periodization of, and the reasons for, the decline are a matter of dispute among the authors reviewed. Further, the two World Wars constitute a sharp divergence from the trend, which must be accounted for. The article surveys possible factors behind the decrease, such as industrialization and rocketing economic growth, commercial interdependence, the liberal-democratic peace, social attitude change, nuclear deterrence, and UN peacekeeping forces. It argues that contrary to the claim of some of the authors reviewed, war has not become more lethal and destructive over the past two centuries, and thus this factor cannot be the cause of war's decline. Rather, it is peace that has become more profitable.(emphasis added) At the same time, the specter of war continues to haunt the parts of the world less affected by many of the above developments, and the threat of unconventional terror is real and troubling.
In his new book, Human Capitalism, Cato Institute senior fellow Brink Lindsey notes:
Contrary to romantic fantasies about noble savages, the evidence now suggests that intergroup interaction in the prehistoric era was unremittingly violent. According to anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, about 0.5 percent of the population died every year from warfare. To put that modest-sounding figure in perspective, consider the fact that about one hundred million people died in the bloody wars of the twentieth century. Had the prehistoric mortality rate still prevailed, however, the death toll would have been two billion!
Although Lindsey's 100 million killed in the 20th century may be an undercount, even doubling it shows a considerable decline in the rate of violent deaths. The fact that you are less likely to die a violent death today than at any other time in human history and that violence has been declining for centuries was also reported by Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker in his book. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Go here to see my interview with Pinker.
The post Is War Declining—and Why? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>