James Fallows : The Atlantic

Super-Cool Obama, Super-Hot Christie, and a Book by Harper Lee

2012-02-11T15:19:24-05:00

Following my cover story in the current issue, and this message from an African-American professional woman, Nancy Wallace, about the Jackie Robinson-like pressure on Obama not to "let down his race," a few more. One reader writes:

Obama is also demeanor-constrained in the opposite direction from showing hot anger: he can't even be seen wearing sunglasses in public, since that would be seen as looking "too cool" - in the Malcolm X sense.

As it happens, Obama has actually been criticized on this score!

Reader Michael Harrington writes:

I am glad you ran that supplemental post that mentions how the president's demeanor may be sort of a construct due to the possible unfortunate implications of him getting too angry or emotional and fulfilling some awful stereotype. I am assuming that he is walking quite the tightrope a lot of the time, lest he scares America with his fury and we as a country decide he might not be able to "deal with the pressures of the job".

This is something I have been thinking about lately, partly because I am a Black man that works mostly with non-Black people in a leadership capacity and have to walk that tightrope, partly due to discussions I have been having with white associates outside of those professional settings, and partially due to reading Toure's latest book (Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?) and thinking about what he said about some of the most recent Black politicians, including President Obama.

I do not know if you read that book (I think everyone should, regardless of ethnic origin) [JF: I have not yet], but he makes the salient point that to be successful in politics or business as a black person (I feel this applies to Latinos as well), you have to be as inoffensive as possible, lest you make people feel uncomfortable or guilty. I am not surprised that the woman who emailed you the other day had a nervous breakdown, since this puts a lot of strain on Black people that I assume (I don't know if it is true) most white people don't have to deal with. I also found that talking about this with non-white people, even in a casual setting upsets them a lot. I brought up this point in regards to the president, and I was either scoffed at, talked over, or was ignored. I cannot imagine what the president and his family are going through, but I assure you that he knows very well that it is in his best interest to seem as rational and objective in public as possible, since it is apparent that many people in this country still have deep issues with race and the perception of how certain groups play out their "racial roles"...

Even though I am Black, I don't blindly support the president because of his race; I support the president because I am an American citizen and I am glad that the representative of the country is a rational, brilliant person who seems to want to learn more. I suppose most people that become the POTUS are exceptional by definition, but it is interesting that Barack Obama has to be both exceptional and for all intents and purposes, as flawless as possible. It almost seems like he has to stifle his humanity due to the color of his skin.

After the jump, one more, on the Chris Christie/Harper Lee angle.

A reader writes:

[Reader Nancy Wallace] said this about Jan Brewer: "Jan Brewer claimed that the president was being "threatening" toward her, and I believe she probably did feel threatened because there was a tall black guy in front of her who didn't look all that pleased."

Actually, Jan Brewer initially claimed the president was whiny and sensitive. She didn't introduce fear until later, and after pundits tried to assert that the finger-wagging Brewer was somehow being threatened by the President of the United States. "Bin Laden's gone; who's next?"

When I've wanted to illustrate the President's weakness around issues related to race, I think back to the Henry Gates-induced Beer Summit. I simply cannot imagine another president being forced to have a beer with someone they've insulted (justly or unjustly). Christ Christie is a great comparison point here. Think of his outbursts to questioners, most of them questioners. The response among the cable television was far from condemnation and closer to praise.

What's interesting to me is who the enforcers were for the Beer Summit. Sure, Republicans were giving Obama the whatfor, but if it was absurd most media types would have taken a pass. Instead, they took and they ran with it. My guess is because they felt Obama had overstepped. That was the angle of the story and he had overstepped racially. Something he knew instinctively, that Gates shouldn't have been arrested outside his own home and that race probably had something to do with it, was not something known instinctively by the people who cover him. Thus days of pressure until the Beer Summit. Obama had to make it right with the officer and with the press.

The same press threw the race flag on Obama when he referenced his grandmother as a typical white person.

Reminded me of Tom Robinson's misstep in his testimony in To Kill a Mockingbird. "I felt right sorry for her."

Yes, the leader of the free world - in black skin - must still know his place.

And he does. So does his wife.

Super-Cool Obama and the Spectre of the Angry Black Man

2012-02-10T16:19:35-05:00

I'll start posting some of the reactions I've gotten to my current cover story that tries to make sense of President Obama's successes and failures in his first three years in office.

Not many people who have written in about the piece have said, "But gee, it was so short!" It's all of 12,000 words long -- but even at that scale, we left lots of stuff out. Among the cutting-room floor material was an attempt to address the issue this reader's message raises: how much of Obama's super-cool demeanor, which can seem so icily effective when it works and so ineffectively passive when it doesn't, is due to the pressures on him as America's first non-white president. If I, as a middle-aged white guy, am aware of the perils awaiting him at the slightest flash of being an Angry Black Man, I can barely imagine how much more profoundly he must have wrestled with this question.

I am therefore glad that Nancy Wallace, whose name I'm using with her permission, has written in about the issue:

I wanted to write to you because I think there's an important element of Obama's emotional responses and the perception of those responses that you didn't mention: race. I grew up in a family that was black middle-class; we actually were kind of the Cosbys. From the time I was in elementary school, I was aware, even though no one ever said it out loud, that was supposed to be "a credit to the race". I had a responsibility to be a role model which meant studying hard and going to church and getting into a good college and going on to professional school and marrying someone of the opposite gender. I was taught to deal with emotions by hiding them, because tears or anger would immediately slot me into a stereotype of Mammy or Jezebel.

In 1995, I had a nervous breakdown in the office where I worked at Harvard. I was on medical leave for two months. When I came back, I couldn't shake the sense that as the only black woman in my office, my failure to handle an unreasonable and excessive workload would reflect poorly on all black women, everywhere. It took a long time and a lot of therapy to realize that I was carrying a burden that wasn't mine, and that by repressing my emotions to avoid being seen as "too angry" or "hysterical," I'd just made everything worse.

Unlike me, Barack Obama IS a role model. Everything he does and says is, on some level, viewed through the prism of "First Black President". Knowing that has to constrain his public emotional responses, especially anger. If he raises his voice the slightest bit, then he'll be seen as an Angry Black Man, and Angry Black Man is scary. Jan Brewer claimed that the president was being "threatening" toward her, and I believe she probably did feel threatened because there was a tall black guy in front of her who didn't look all that pleased. At any moment, he could have whipped out a gun, or overwhelmed her with his brute animal strength!

Even the media narrative is quick to slap Obama with the "angry" label. After his speech during debt ceiling crisis where he directly criticized the GOP, his demeanor was described in some headlines as "angry", when in reality, he managed to hold it down to vaguely irritated. Can you imagine what would happen if he'd said, "Look, these clowns in the House? Dumb as a box of hammers. If they want to stop dicking around and get serious, I'm here; otherwise they need to stop acting like a bunch of spoiled whiny brats."

Jackie Robinson agreed that during his first year with the Dodgers, he wouldn't respond to any of the abuse he received from players, officials or fans, because even just yelling back would be seen as proof that "they" can't handle the pressure. I suspect Barack Obama is fairly laid back in general, but we'll never know because he can't be anything else.

Today's 'Even Aerospace Engineers Have a Sense of Humor' Entry

2012-02-10T15:25:44-05:00

Check out Flight Aware's track of the route of the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group's flight 236 yesterday. This is the route the plane actually took, as logged by Air Traffic Control radar. Look at it for a minute, if you don't get the point immediately. Hint: the aircraft in question was a "Dreamliner," aka Boeing 787. Another hint is in the upper left hand corner of this page.

I recall a similar flight track a while back by a Boeing 747, without the fancy curvilinear fillip* at the end.

As a feat of flight planning, and of exhaustive Lat/Long entry into the plane's GPS-based autopilots, this is quite something. The coordinates for the route are after the jump, if you'd like to try it yourself (and have a plane with the range of a 787.) Nicely done, and thanks to JDK and TMF for the tip.
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* Yes, I know it's not just a curlicue...

Here is the route that led to the pattern shown by Flight Aware. Aviation buffs will recognize the combination of VORs (ONL, FOD, GYZ, and so on); "normal" fixes (HANKI, ALPOE, and so on); and Lat-Long specifications.

SEA J12 EPH GEG 4733N 11706W 4236N 11831W 4450N 11752W 4414N 11230W 4710N 11126W 4714N 11125W 4730N 11443W 4214N 11629W 4140N 11325W 4714N 11126W 4645N 10711W 4105N 11056W 4405N 10902W CZI KD81U KD72W 4148N 10335W HANKI YANKI ONL 4201N 9830W KP72C CVA 4148N 9034W GIZCY FOD KP81C KP87A ONL ATY 4523N 9711W KP12C 4743N 9843W 4845N 9655W 4755N 9857W KP15A KP06Y 4248N 10523W MBW ALPOE 4026N 10616W KD60U 3947N 10516W DVV KD60W BENNZ KD63W 4027N 10500W 4040N 10510W 4131N 10501W GYZ KD81W 4728N 9907W 4610N 9804W AMMAJ SOBME 4400N 9820W 4324N 9850W ADEDY ANW 4203N 10104W ALU KD75W 4245N 10424W 4333N 10518W 4404N 10552W 4437N 10558W MARLS YAFLU KU15W POVNY KP18Y 4746N 10000W 4742N 9930W 4753N 9901W MIB JINUK LAMBE 4711N 10515W MLS 4603N 10613W FOURS CZI 4406N 10900W 4643N 10703W 4734N 11444W 4439N 11546W MADPE 4733N 11701W SEA

Obama Story Is Online

2012-02-09T14:21:24-05:00

Much of this past fall I was interviewing political figures to get their judgments on what-we-know, and how-we-know it, about President Obama's successes and failures in office so far.

The results are now online here (but of course it's always best read on paper!) plus a short video q-and-a with Corby Kummer, who was my editor on this piece as he has been for nearly all other Atlantic articles I've done since the early Reagan years.

Will have more to say about the background of this article, implications, cutting-room-floor info (yes, even with a 12,000-word piece, there's a lot left out!), and so on in the days ahead.
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Also, for the record, the Reddit AMA session I did yesterday was interesting, at least to me, and the results are here.

If You Are Feeling Sorry for Mitt Romney After the Results Last Night

2012-02-09T00:41:57-05:00

To lift your spirits you might watch this now-famous bit from Jon Stewart four years ago, after Romney dropped out of that year's race against John McCain. The part from time 2:50 to 4:15 is the heart of it. (Via Steve Benen.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Mitt Drops Out

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

I was indeed feeling sorry for Romney in human terms -- losing every county! - and then I reflected on the kind of person who would find solace, in time of trial, in sentiments like the ones we hear from him.

Never imagined I would end up saying this, but: Go Santorum!

YellowShirtGirl: Finale on 'Ominous Asian' Imagery

2012-02-08T15:01:46-05:00

Finale, at least from me. A few incoming items on the "we take your jobs" / "YellowShirtGirl" discussion.

1) From Julia Kim Smith, a further HTML exploration.

[If you're tempted to write in: No, that's not what the HTML actually shows. ]

2) From Funny-or-Die, a parody that is not exactly Oscar Wilde-like in its rapier subtlety but that has its moments. My favorite is in the first 20 seconds, a joke on the theme of "my excellent math ability!" Plus a Jeremy Lin reference right after that.

3) From a reader who notes our old friend "false equivalence" in an NYT item on the controversy:

While I think this is a relatively minor offense, I just thought it was interesting that the New York Times article you linked to in today's blog made certain to include this:
>Senator Stabenow has done some China-blaming of her own. From her Senate Web site: "China has a clear pattern of flagrantly violating trade rules and it is long past time to stand up to them." And on Monday, in a conference call with reporters, she said, "We can't continue to sit back and let China's policies cost us jobs.''<

How is this even remotely comparable to the offensive commercial in question? Why does it deserve inclusion? It just serves to tar Senator Stabenow, unfairly, with the same brush.

I liked the NYT item but the reader has a point. It's one thing to talk about trade rules, currency valuation, etc and something else to run "me likee!" ads. The "to be sure" reflex really is deep, for all of us in the journalism business.

4) From Chauncey DeVega at Daily Kos, a clip that exactly matches the "visual dog-whistle" that I said the video was evoking, with its use of a smiling but treacherous young Asian beauty, issuing broken-English come-ons to the unsuspecting Yanks. This is a scene not from Apocalypse Now but from Full Metal Jacket -- a movie made 25 years ago about events 20 years before that, but whose imagery left a mark in the public mind. Someone involved with this ad had seen this movie. Really, the scene is a remarkable match to the Hoekstra ad:

Up-to-date bonus: The Nancy Sinatra soundtrack can be a hipster allusion to today's Lana Del Rey controversies.

5) From a reader of the Vietnam Generation, with extensive experience in China -- and it's not me! -- spelling out the imagery:

* The ad is actually aimed at angry, declining Vietnam-era people. The imagery is of southeast Asia. The young lady looks far more Vietnamese than she does Chinese. If the ad agency is that smart (and not simply guilty of "seen one Asian/seen 'em all"), they aimed at a specific demographic in Michigan, the fat droopy-mustached "men" left over and falling into the shadows ever since Vietnam.

* The young lady is overwhelmingly Asian American. [Versus actually foreign.] Just listen to her. This ad's real insult is to millions of American young women of Asian descent,who look and speak like this young woman.

* Most important, Hoekstra with this pathetic loser's cri-de-coeur hands to the cynics and the tough hombres in Beijing the tool with which to bolster their own grip; they point to stupid China-bashing artifacts like this one (and all the others at the TPM site) and say, whenever some American rightly calls attention to some rotten thing they're doing, "There they go again! It's just more China-bashing." Thanks, Pete, for making all the things you don't like about China all the more likely to succeed.

I think that's it; thanks to all.

In-House News: Reddit Session Today Noon - 1pm EST

2012-02-08T11:23:06-05:00

For devotees of Reddit IAMA sessions, I will be doing a live question-and-answer session there today starting at noon east coast time. FYI it will be at Reddit.com/r/iama.

Thanks to the Atlantic's Jared Keller, whose long-time entreaties have gotten me off the ball here. See you on line.

Bomb-Iran Drumbeat Watch: An Ongoing Series

2012-02-07T22:39:40-05:00

Today's installment comes from Mike Lofgren, familiar in these pages for his observations after a career working mainly for Republicans in the Congress. He begins:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran.

You can read the rest here.

Also from Peter Beinart, an argument I don't have the same personal standing to make, about the potential for American Jewry to help spare Israel a rash error:

Yes, Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon would create a lot of dangers and complications. But according to the latest testimony from the most authoritative American intelligence expert, the U.S. is not sure that Iran is even trying to build a bomb. It says nothing good about our current political/strategic climate that there is so much loose talk about "preventive" war at this stage. Eisenhower would not have talked this way, or Rabin, or other strong leaders from those two countries' modern history.

HTML to the Rescue! The Saga of Hoekstra and 'Yellow Shirt Girl'

2012-02-07T13:09:19-05:00

Who says that the people behind Pete Hoektra's "Your economy get very weak" ad are insensitive?

They haven't changed the ad itself, or the "Debbie Spend It Now" site festooned in nonsense Chinese and even more nonsense economics. (Best headline about all this, from the NYT: "Asia Bad. Take Many Jobs. Not Fair." )

But fortunately they have changed the HTML code! Here's what we saw last night, as part of the code referencing the comely and smiling "we take your jobs" Asian woman:

But now:

Who wouldn't call that progress! I know that I feel better. As I bet does the actress who appeared in the spot. I'm looking forward to hearing about it from her side some day.

Promised 'Red Tails' Update: Go See It

2012-02-07T12:10:29-05:00

As anticipated last month, I finally saw the George Lucas adventure movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, Red Tails. Here is how some of the real Tuskegee Airmen looked:

And??? OK, it's not Shakespeare. The dialogue is sometimes laugh-out-loud corny -- I mean really, several times I actually burst out laughing in the theater -- and the characters have a kind of comic-book obviousness. The naturally talented virtuoso who takes one risk too many; the college boy weighed down by parental expectations; the doomed sweethearts; the bigot who sees the error of his ways -- and the ones who don't; etc. Still, I'm glad I saw it, and I hope it registers as a success.

Reason one: It's not supposed to be Shakespeare! If put in its real artistic class -- not just contemporary aerial-Westerns like Top Gun and even Star Wars itself but also World War II standards like 30 Seconds Over Tokyo or Sands of Iwo Jima, all of whose real message is, "See how brave and good our people are! And how they must cope with personal problems, and how they miss their loved ones at home, as they resolutely fight for us"-- it's no cornier or thinner than the others.

Reason two: It's fun to watch. At least if you have any interest in seeing good guys vs. bad guys as they zoom around, engage in derring-do, and blow things up. Or, as a veteran flyer put it when defending the movie against nit-picking critiques of its accuracy:

None of them seem to understand that the film is for an audience of teenage boys--particularly African-American boys--and not 60-year-old rivet-counters.

Reason three: I hope it is officially considered a success, so that when movie people talk about "another Red Tails" that will be a green-light signal rather than a kiss of death. Lucas has said that he imagines the current film as part of a trilogy, which he'll make if the first one succeeds. For all the complaints about thin characters, I would actually would like to see a "prequel" movie explaining, for instance, how "Lightning" and some other rural-South characters ended up as fighter pilots (yes, I realize that this pattern was common among rural-Southern whites at the time) or how "the old man," Colonel Bullard, got to that rank. Or a sequel showing what happened to the flyers when they went back home. Including "Easy," who struggles with a drinking problem and his father's expectation that he'll follow him into professional life. Also, it wouldn't be bad to have Hollywood take it for granted that a movie with a nearly all-black cast could have mainstream success.

So: if you have a chance, check it out. Think of it not as Henry V but as a precursor to Top Gun
and you'll be set for a good time.

This Is So Classy: 'Yellow Girl'

2012-02-06T23:05:27-05:00

Thanks to TPM for a tip to what you see if you examine the HTML code* of the Pete Hoekstra / Fred Davis "we take your jobs" video.

The image of the "Chinese" girl in the video, who speaks American-accented English, is labelled as ... well, see for yourself:

Now, in context, they could have been referring to the color of her shirt, as seen in the picture below. Perhaps. Although in that case "orange girl" is the term that might occur to most people. (As illustrated by comparison with the actually yellow lettering in front of her.)

I suppose it's as if you were using a picture of Colin Powell or President Obama wearing a black shirt. If you were producing one of these ads, by the same logic you could just label it "black boy," right? I mean, why not?

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* Either you know how to do this, or you can look it up.

More on the 'We Take Your Jobs' Hoekstra Commercial

2012-02-06T16:55:53-05:00

Maybe everyone else in politics-land knew this, but I was interested to learn:

- The brains behind the ad belonged to Fred Davis, shown in a picture from his bio at his company's site.

- Davis was also the creator of two other memorable political ads, Christine O'Donnell's "I'm Not a Witch" and Carly Fiorina's "Demon Sheep" ads, clips of both of which can be found on his site ("Witch" here and "Sheep" here). Plus other greatest hits, as listed by the WaPo.

- Last year he did those weirdo pre-announcement ads for Jon Huntsman, and at the time said that Huntsman was "the only GOP candidate who has a prayer of beating Barack Obama."

- His uncle is ... Senator Jim Inhofe! I'd love to be there at Thanksgiving. It's kind of like the Adams, Taft, or Roosevelt lineages of leadership.

On the merits of the ad, two reader comments. First, about its cinematography:

You have probably already noticed that the opening and the ending are stock footage from SE Asia somewhere. I am guessing that the meat of it was shot in Kern County somewhere.

Now, about the possibility of an extra dog-whistle, an American reader with a Chinese last name adds:

You mentioned the visual dog-whistle this ad provides, and I would add to that characterization. In addition to the Vietnam imagery of films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, or The Quiet American, it also evoked the specter of Vincent Chin, the Chinese American who was killed 30 years ago by a Detroit-area auto plant superintendent who thought Chin was Japanese. This was during the period of American paranoia about Japanese domination of business, especially the automobile industry. The killer allegedly said to Chin, ""It's because of you little m***s that we're out of work!" even though Chin was not Japanese. Chin was beaten to death and the perpetrators were given very lenient sentences for what is in my view, a hate-based and pre-meditated crime.

I'm sure I won't be the first or last reader to point this out, but the Hoekstra ad served as another, perhaps unintentional dog-whistle. As someone whose ancestors came from southern China, just as Vincent Chin's ancestors had done, maybe from a place similar to the setting of this advertisement, this resonated loudly and unequivocally: don't let Asians take your jobs.

And, from a Michigander now living in the South:

As a Son-of-Michigan-In-Exile, I am appalled at Hoekstra's ad. It's so bad, I won't be able to make fun of South Carolina politics for the rest of the week, and I'm sure there will be something wonderful said by someone down here - they never disappoint.

The ad is flat out racist, and there is no idea behind it except racism. What, you say? The ad is supposed to show how China is getting ahead in global competition? Then why is the word "China" never mentioned in the ad? This as has only one message: vote for Hoekstra if you hate Asians (although it's probably phrased a little more offensively than that).

Finally, from a veteran of Republican politics:

Liberals are without doubt hyperventilating over the racist implications of Pete Hoekstra's political ad against Debbie Stabenow. But believe me, that's not a very effective way of attacking Hoekstra. Most of his potential voter base (including socially conservative industrial union members in Michigan) simply won't care, and he will in any case spin it that he is being persecuted by the politically-correct thought police.

The more interesting angle is one of hypocrisy. Hoekstra voted for permanent MFN for China in 1999, and China's creditor status vis-à-vis the U.S. simply reflects all those good-paying union jobs Hoekstra shipped there (yes, I know international economics is more complicated than that, but would certainly put Hoekstra on the defensive.)

'Where's My Flying Car?'

2012-02-06T12:35:14-05:00

It is humanity's deepest question. Or at least for the one seven-billionth of humanity represented by me. Today AVweb answers the question in an unexpected way.

For previous installments in the "Where's My Flying Car?" saga, see here and here, including this action shot of the charming Terrafugia (which AVweb says will not turn out to be the Flying Car you're looking for).

Keep hope alive.

Today's Bomb-Iran Reading List

2012-02-06T10:29:50-05:00

1) The weakest case anyone has made in public for going to war, from a celebrity professor. Reflect upon this being published in a leading magazine.

2) Historical analysis worth reflecting on (including the comments), from a less publicly-known professor who makes a more serious contribution. This essay, by James Fearon of Stanford, argues that today's existing nuclear powers have, overall, been less militarily aggressive after acquiring nuclear weapons than they were beforehand. One of his sample charts:

Fearon is obviously not contending that such correlations prove cause-and-effect, and he is not complacent about the possible consequences of Iran's getting the bomb. But he addresses one crucial part of the argument for pre-emptive strikes on Iran: that, if its regime had control of nuclear weapons, it might behave in an "irrational," necessarily suicidal, non-"deterrable" way, unlike the other nine countries that have had nuclear weapons. That is: Iran will be "different," or more precisely that Israel and the United States cannot tolerate the risk that it might be different. A sample of his case:

The fact that the other members of the nuclear club generally didn't get much more aggressive in their foreign policy behavior after they tested [nuclear weapons] doesn't mean that Iran won't. But I think it's astonishing how weak a case for this we are hearing from the preventive war advocates...

To be clear, I'd strongly prefer that the Iranian regime not get the bomb, mainly because of the risks of further proliferation in the region and attendant risks of preventive war and loss of control of weapons. But attacking Iran seems likely to guarantee pursuit till acquisition, to more effectively license future attacks on Israel, and to greatly increase popular support for the current Iranian regime and a course of nuclear self-defense.

Very much worth reading, and comparing closely with dashed-off cases for war like the other article. Especially in light of the recent statement from the U.S. intelligence community that they are not sure that Iran is even trying to build a bomb.

Superbowl Special! My Nominee for Most Revolting Ad

2012-02-05T15:55:31-05:00

During the 2010 midterm-election campaign, I said that the "Chinese Professor" ad was the bit of political persuasion/propaganda most likely to be remembered long after the campaign. Of course, that was before I knew about "I'm Not a Witch."

I considered the "Chinese professor" ad skillfully done. It was ominous but just short of race-baiting (since the "villains" were not Chinese but Americans collectively, and its triumphalism was incidental, as an ending touch, rather than central); and it was in the long-standing American tradition of using external threat as a vehicle for addressing internal concerns. If you'd like to see how the same approach looks when carried out by people who don't worry for a second about what lines they cross, consider one that lucky viewers in Michigan will see later today.

It's for this year's campaign for the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, now held by Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat. Her Republican challenger, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, works a "clever" play on her name to show how she's actually advancing the interests of the wily Chinese.

Let's not even get into the logic of the ad -- eg, the fact that China's formula for creating jobs has involved more public spending and more public "guidance" of industry than America's. Let's skip to the bonus points for racial imagery in the ad, apart from the obvious.

1) The "Chinese" woman speaks in American-accented English, and I would bet she is actually an Asian-American. But the script has her make pidgin grammar errors, "Me likee!!"-style.

2) The ad's words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about -- 'Nam!! Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country's rise -- ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it's because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

This ad is embarrassing for America! Regardless of party, I hope it loses Hoekstra more votes than it wins him. For an earlier illustration of a comparable approach, see this one from Nevada ~~Arizona~~. [Apologies to Arizonans.] Update: Politico has more on the ad. (And thanks to YA for the tip.)

America's Top Spy: We Don't Know Whether Iran Is Even Trying to Build a Bomb

2012-02-05T12:49:36-05:00

What I am about to mention is not "news" and will be familiar to people following the Iran story. But it is important. Precisely because there is so much daily chatter about a possible military strike on Iran, it is worth going back to make sure this part does not vanish from the public record or front-of-mind consciousness.

This past week, the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community said that they were not sure that Iran was even trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Why does this matter? Much of the mounting chatter about Iran takes absolutely for granted that its leaders have a bomb-building program under way. Thus the only questions worth asking are:
- How close are they?
- How dangerous would they be?
- What would it take to stop them?
- How much time does anyone else have to fend them off, before it's too late?

But here is what happened last week.

1) At a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last Tuesday, Olympia Snowe of Maine had this exchange with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence -- who was appearing with David Petraeus of the CIA. Emphasis added:

Senator Snowe: I gather we agree with the fact that Iran has not made the decision to weaponize at this point. Director Clapper, do you agree on that?

General Clapper: Yes, but they are certainly moving on that path, but we don't believe they've actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon.

I heard this exchange while I was driving around yesterday (on C-SPAN radio -- yes, now you know my darkest secret). You can see a video of the whole hearing at C-Span's site, and a reference to the exchange on the CFR site.

2) Before that hearing, Clapper released his "Worldwide Threat Assessment," available online in PDF. The relevant Iran portions say:

We assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons....

We judge Iran's nuclear decision making is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran. Iranian leaders undoubtedly consider Iran's security, prestige, and influence, as well as the international political and security environment, when making decisions about its nuclear program.

Obviously this doesn't resolve the whole issue. US intelligence has been wrong on such matters before, to put it mildly. (Although warnings that Iran is close to having the bomb are decades old.) Just now Jeffrey Goldberg, who emphasizes that he is the anti-bombing camp, posts a reminder of the reasons to be wary of Iran.

Still: the next dozen times you hear about how to cope with Iran's "headlong" or "inevitable" or "destabilizing" progress toward building a bomb, reflect for a minute that in the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community, we are not sure that they even trying. And reflect on the factors the Iranian leadership may be weighing as it makes this choice.

On That Promised Iran-Debate Update—Updated!

2012-02-04T14:52:04-05:00

[Please see UPDATES below.] Earlier this week I said that I would soon be presenting a bunch of links and highlights on the emerging debate over a military showdown with Iran. I said that, in contrast to the rush-to-war mood 10 years ago that preceded the invasion of Iraq, this time we were starting to hear more "wait a minute: Is this war a good idea? Is is necessary?" questions from a range of voices before fighting began. For the record, I am in the "It is not necessary, and it is not a good idea" camp.

I haven't gone on to post the promised additional info. The reason is that the "war with Iran?" question is no longer any kind of fringe topic. It has moved to the front pages, the lists of "most clicked" items, and to the center of mainstream news discussion. Apart from Ron Paul, no prominent Republicans seem to be expressing second thoughts; and members of the Obama Administration, from the president on down, are sticking to their "all options are on the table" mantra -- as they should.* But everywhere else a real debate seems to be underway. So this is a closing-the-loop note for the moment. If you want more back-and-forth on Iran, open up the paper or go to any news site. Right now, mainstream coverage is telling us about a main issue, and with more pushback than I would have expected.

Update: But because I should mention a non-mainstream site worth following, see the range of reports on Nuclear Diner.
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* "As they should?" Yes: even if the president had fully and sanely decided that a preemptive strike would be a ruinous error, he has everything to gain by leaving his intentions ambiguous. Unless in so doing he frightened the Iranians into a panicky preemptive move -- but, without playing out all the scenarios at the moment, this is one case where it makes sense for a president to keep his public statements vague.

UPDATE^UPDATED The Atlantic commenter known as mikey writes:

2 points I think worth making.

First, Iran is VERY different from Iraq in a critical way. The Iraq invasion and occupation did not have a noticeable impact on the global economy. Indeed, there were quite a large number of individual corporations that profited from that war, and the rest did much the same as they would have had the US never invaded. Iran is certainly different. There is no doubt that Iran will use economic warfare to leverage her position and weaken that of the aggressors, using a number of tactics to take as much oil off the global market as possible. Oil companies might see a short term spike in profits, but the rest of the US and Europe's economies will immediately fall into deep, stark recessions. The cost of shipping Asian goods will suddenly change all the manufacturing calculations and China's economy will stall. To the extent that we have learned since 2007 how utterly financial interests control government policy, they will do what they can - and I submit they can do a great deal - to prevent a war with Iran. So barring some gross miscalculation, I don't expect one.

Second, on this coy, facile "All options are on the table" mantra. First, does anybody really think there's any substance to that? Or perhaps to put it another way, if we stopped saying that tomorrow, would anybody assume that a pre-emptive attack on Iran was no longer on the table? I think it might make sense to take some of the pressure OFF of Iran. Of all the parties involved in the disputes with Iran, which one do you suppose feels the most threatened? Daily pronouncements of belligerent intent, and a calm, dispassionate discussion about bombing Iran's cities and killing thousands of her people? Do you sometimes expect one of Iran's leaders to stand up and shout "HEY! I'm right here in the room with you. I can HEAR you talking!" If I was the Iranian leadership, I would certainly be moving toward a nuclear deterrent just as fast as I could. I would already know precisely the date I was going to kick out the inspectors and and go into my finishing sprint.

I think this might be one of those cases where a little less smirking cowboy and a little more humble global neighbor might change the equation.

Overall, this makes sense.

What the Security State Hath Wrought

2012-02-03T19:09:18-05:00

A citizen of a Western European country, who works in the United States for a fast-growing Internet startup company, writes today:

In many of your TSA related post, a key theme is the illusion of security through ineffective and "invasive" means. Seems like there is more of this going on in the broader "security" world.

-A young British couple was sent back from the US after some ill-advised but innocuous tweets;

-Muslim man gets arrested for using term "blow away the competition" in a text message

It's one thing to have Google and Facebook data mine your life to make money for themselves. It's another thing if innocent communication gets you in trouble with a humorless bureaucracy without adequate recourse.

The fact that as a green card holder I seriously hesitated before hitting "send" on this message means something I think.

The stories my correspondent links to are quietly incredible. About the latter episode, which took place in Quebec, today's news story describes what happened to a telecom salesman named Saad Allami:

On Jan. 21, 2011, Allami sent a text message to colleagues urging them to "blow away" the competition at a trade show in New York City.

According to [a lawsuit for damages he has filed], he was arrested without warning by police three days later and detained for over a day while his house was searched. During his detention, a team of police officers allegedly conducted an "intrusive" four-hour search.

"The whole time, the officers kept repeating to the plaintiff's wife that her husband was a terrorist," the filing reads.

The British couple, shown below in a photo via ABC, got in trouble for a slangy use of the word "destroy" in a Tweet. The ABC account says:

"Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America," one of the tweets read. Bryan told The Sun [in England] that in this context "destroy" just meant party.

"The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me 'You've really f***ed up with that tweet, boy'," Bryan told The Sun.

There are a lot more details in The Sun's account -- and with all allowances made for the imaginative potential of UK tabloids, it is worth a look.

Yes, we need to be "safe." It is worth noting what we are giving up in the name of safety. Think about the last line in the note from my European friend.

Black Cheese, Green Meat, and Beer in a Can

2012-02-03T16:25:33-05:00

From high school I recall some amateur-psychology experiment about the power of sensory incongruities. If you were offered a piece of cheese that was colored black, or a slice of meat that was green, you would think, Yucckkk!, even if its taste was perfectly fine.

I'm not going to get into whether this behavior is learned, innate, evolutionarily sensible, or whatever. I'll just say that I have the same reaction to beer in a can. If it is coming from a metal housing -- like the one at the right, which I saw all too often in my long-lost years in Texas -- then I (snobbishly) assume it is not going to be very good. Or, even worse, the one at the left, popular during an era in American history I don't even tell my children about.

Imagine then my confusion at encountering the beer below in a local store. It's is called Dale's Pale Ale, and it looks like it comes from the same schlock brewing tradition as Texas Pride. I would have instinctively shied even from getting close to it on the rack, let alone buying or drinking it -- were it not for a reader's note saying: Never mind that it's in a can, it's good.

And it is! Here it is, shown on this sunny February afternoon in DC.

Historians of the American craft-brew wars are presumably well familiar, as I was not, with Dale's Pale Ale and the Oskar Blues brewery in Colorado that produces it. The brewer who came up with the formula tells the Creation Story of the beer, and the brewery has an official-description page that tells more about its pedigree, awards, and so on. The brewery also includes this claim to restoring the dignity of canned beers as a whole:

America's first hand-canned craft beer is a voluminously hopped mutha that delivers a hoppy nose, assertive-but-balanced flavors of pale malts and hops from start to finish. First canned in 2002, Dale's Pale Ale is a hearty (6.5% and 65 IBUs), critically acclaimed trailblazer that has changed the way craft beer fiends perceive canned beer.

I'll say: it's a start. Try it for yourself. And if you're tempted to send me a lecture about not judging things on appearance, I'll say: Yeah, yeah, tell me about it when you're eating green meat.

Facebook, Google, and the Future of the Online 'Commons'

2012-02-03T12:55:49-05:00

As part of digesting the meaning of the Era of the Facebook IPO, please check out an essay today by Dave Winer, which builds on one yesterday by John Battelle, which itself was a response to one the previous day by Keith Woolcock. All are worth reading, and all concern the way Facebook's rise is changing -- and distorting -- the overall shape of the internet.

In brief they argue:

- Google's business success depended on a worldwide internet structure as open, untrammeled, and transparent as possible. Therefore most of what Google did for its own corporate interest also advanced those aims -- or at least did not impede them.

- Facebook's business success depends on an internet structure that is increasingly "gated" and segregated into proprietary realms. Therefore most of what Facebook has done is to induce maximum sharing of personal information within its propriety sphere, while erecting barriers to the flow of information from one realm to another.

- The shift of business advantage from the "public" to the "private" model means more than a different subset of people becoming zillionaires. It will also affect the fundamental structure of the Internet and its value to the 99.999% of us who are neither Google nor Facebook IPO-beneficiaries. Already its effects are being seen, as all these pieces argue, with Google's promotion of its "G+" and social-search features. Facebook's ascent leaves Google with no choice but to compete on those terms.

Or as Battelle puts it:

1. The "old" Internet is shrinking, and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb. Sure, Google can crawl Facebook's "public pages," but those represent a tiny fraction of the "pages" on Facebook, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning. Similarly, Google can crawl the "public pages" of Apple's iTunes store on the web, but all the value creation in the mobile iOS appworld is behind the walls of Fortress Apple. Google can't see that information, can't crawl it, and can't "make it universally available." Same for Amazon with its Kindle universe, Microsoft's Xbox and mobile worlds, and many others.

2. Google's business model depends on the web remaining open, and given #1 above, that model is imperiled.

It's not just a battle between companies. (And, for later discussion, Google's* challenge is managing three struggles-for-survival at the same time: against Facebook on the "social" side, against Amazon on the e-commerce side, and against Apple and others in the mobile market.) It's also a battle with important "externality" effects on the rest of us. For instance: Google's success has depended on people spending as much time within its online ecosystem as possible. Thus it had an incentive to offer, free, services like Google Earth, whose commercial predecessors charged subscribers thousands of dollars per year. Or Google Maps, which is expensive to maintain. Facebook's success mainly depends on having users share more and more of their personal information within the Facebook environment. Its business logic leads to fewer "public goods."

To wax geostrategic for a moment, this argument over the Internet "commons" is very much like debates through the post-World War II era about the conflict between relatively open and relatively closed political and economic systems. Ie, the more a closed or beggar-thy-neighbor regime prospers, the worse behavior it evokes -- for survival reasons -- from all other participants.

More on that later -- and, as soon as I can, more on how I have come to peace-of-mind about Google's new privacy settings. Hint if you want to do research on your own: sign in to Gmail or one of your other Google-related accounts (YouTube, Google docs, Blogger etc). Then, while signed in, go to google.com/dashboard. You will be interested in what you see, and the changes you can make. First, read these three pieces. Update: Andrew Keen today on CNN also worth reading.
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* Routine for-the-record disclosure, which at some point I'll have given so often that I can dispense with it: I have no financial involvement (alas!) with any of these companies. But I have many friends, and now a family member, working at Google.

World Is Getting Better, GBA Dept.

2012-02-02T22:28:27-05:00

President Obama's speech this morning at the National Prayer Breakfast actually deserves study as an instance of turning religious themes and imagery to the service of his larger policy message. We take it for granted that Republicans will do this; it is interesting to see it done, and deftly, by a Democrat. I will leave the sentence-by-sentence parsing to you in the privacy of your homes. (Seriously, it is interesting -- full CSpan video here.)

I will say only that one of my personal prayers has been answered by the revised way in which the President chose to end his remarks. He mentions a meeting with Billy Graham and says:

I have fallen on my knees with great regularity since that moment -- asking God for guidance not just in my personal life and my Christian walk, but in the life of this nation and in the values that hold us together and keep us strong. I know that He will guide us. He always has, and He always will. And I pray his richest blessings on each of you in the days ahead.

He always has, and He always will. Evocative language, and a graceful ending. Peace upon us all.
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Thanks to KK for the tip. Previously in the "world is getting better" series here.

On Superhuman Pilots and Emergency Landings

2012-02-02T14:08:40-05:00

Today's Atlantic Wire has a fascinating item about a pilot-and-flight-instructor duo who landed their small plane safely, in Mexico, after its propeller broke off (right). The original YouTube video, from a little more than a year ago, is here; it shows the in-cockpit view when things suddenly became very quiet inside a single-engine Cessna 172, and the pilots glided the plane to a safe landing on an empty road.

The video itself is interesting enough, but there were two extra items I thought worth highlighting. One is the headline on the Atlantic Wire item: "Superhuman Pilot Lands a Plane After Propeller Falls Off." The pilots certainly were level-headed and skillful in doing what they needed to do -- with two very frightened passengers in the rear. But this was "superhuman" only in the sense that everything involving aviation is. Any person who has earned a pilot's certificate has been forced to practice for this kind of emergency countless times. And glider-plane pilots of course land this way after every single flight. [*See update below.]

I mention this because it underscores the difference between what is actually hard / dangerous / problematic in the flying world, and what seems hard or dangerous from the lay perspective. If an engine fails when you're flying, that is never good. But contrary to what most people would assume, it is an immediate, life-threatening emergency only if it happens soon after takeoff, when you are closest to the ground and have the least time to respond. The higher up you are, the better -- because then you have the longest time to set up the plane to descend as slowly as possible, as a glider, and pick out the site you would like to aim for.

Every airplane is designed to glide through the air, rather than simply plummet, if the power is cut. And for each model of airplane, there is a "best glide speed," the airspeed that maximizes its gliding distance without power as it inevitably descends. As a pilot you have to know that by memory (for the plane I fly, it is 88 knots) -- and be prepared, as the first reaction to an engine failure, to configure the plane for that speed. Then you start looking around, as the pilots in Mexico did, for the most promising (flattest, safest, least obstructed) site you can glide to. Every pilot has repeatedly practiced such "power-off forced landings," and been examined on them many times. The stress level in practice is obviously different from the for-real pressure of a propeller actually coming off. In practice or a check ride, the instructor will typically pull the throttle and keep his hand over it, saying "OK, you've got no power, what do you do...?" Then you'll either take the plane all the way to a power-off landing, if you're near an airport, or restore the power when you're close to the ground. In 15 years, I've never had to do a "for real" power-off landing, though I've practiced them often.

So: well done by the Mexican duo in executing this when it was not just a test. What would really be "superhuman" would be for a pilot without instrument training to fly into a cloud, as JF Kennedy Jr did, and somehow survive without crashing the plane. That's for another day.

Here is the other relevant point. The big breakthrough that Cirrus Design brought to aviation in the late 1990s was a built-in parachute for the entire airplane, as shown at right. That is the innovation I described in Free Flight, and its significance is that it gives pilots like those two in Mexico another choice. They had the good fortune of clear weather and an uncrowded road within gliding range. But if it were dark, or cloudy, or over the mountains, or at night, a gliding descent might not have ended as well.

Or over water -- because hitting the water's surface even at a "slow" landing speech of around 70 knots can be dangerous. Seventy knots is about 80 mph; imagine driving a car off a high bridge at that speed. Recently Dick McGlaughlin, a medical doctor and Cirrus owner who had been flying volunteer service missions to Haiti, had his engine fail while over the water off Andros Island in the Bahamas. He pulled the parachute, landed on the water safely, and with his daughter was picked up unharmed by the Coast Guard.

Here is an interview with McGlaughlin about the engine failure and descent, at the Cirrus owners' website; a precis, by Cirrus pilot and former Atlantic guest blogger Sanjay Saigal, of McGlaughlin's medical work in Haiti; and an hour-long video of a detailed analysis by Cirrus pilot Rick Beach about the safety record of the parachute. And here's one of several Coast Guard pictures of the McGlaughlins leaving the plane in their raft (which is required on long over-water flights).

Congrats to the pilots in Mexico last year. Congrats to the McGlaughlins this year, and to the Cirrus and Ballistics Research engineers who created the parachute they relied on. And on reflection, maybe everything about this actually is superhuman.
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* UPDATE As several people have written to note, there is indeed a separate question of the structural damage that could be done by a propeller blade ripping off, at very high RPMs. It didn't appear, from the look and sound of the video, that any such damage occurred -- but if it had, it would have created a much more serious emergency. I am talking strictly about the challenge of landing an airplane when the engine power has failed.

If Dickens Came Back to America, He Would Note Today's WSJ

2012-02-02T11:46:26-05:00

Front page of today's Wall Street Journal, similar to front page of all other papers:

Detail from the highlighted box:

Front page of WSJ's "Marketplace" section today:

Detail from the lead of the story:

Now of course: there is no connection at all, except coincidence of timing, between this moment of success for some and of further hardship for others. The success is for a virtual-economy, social networking company, whose product is advertising (which is of course also the source of much of our revenue at the Atlantic); and for the people and firms dealt into its IPO.* The belt-tightening is for a "material-world" transportation company dealing with the gritty realities of fuel prices, weather forecasts, cranky passengers, security threats, huge capital commitments for aircraft, and "legacy" union costs; and who for those who have held ordinary jobs there. I know that in even the healthiest economy, "creative destruction" means that some businesses are always failing even as others are starting up.

Still: whatever Charles Dickens or John Steinbeck is rising among us might well use this day's paper as a bit of atmosphere for what has happened to America. Or the next Dreiser or Hugo or Zola. On the day that the graffiti artist who decorated Facebook's headquarters learns that he may be worth another $200 million, tens of thousands of AA workers learn they may have no more money coming in at all. I loved Otto Friedrich's Before the Deluge for its effortless evocation of the tension and madness of Weimar Germany through the quotidian details of life and news reports. We are not Weimar, but the ultimate historian of our era will say something about this year's Groundhog Day. [Thanks to DZF for pointing these stories out.]
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* Disclosure: I am biased against Facebook, because of its consistent record of shady, corner-cutting privacy practices**. I am biased in favor of American Airlines pensioners and employees, because my cousin is one of them, and I know what she has gone through as a career flight attendant.

**And on privacy practices, I'll have more to say soon about the recent changes in Google's rules.

World Is Getting Better, IPA Dept.

2012-01-31T23:34:12-05:00

As previously noted, Sierra Nevada has won my heart by making Torpedo one of its "regular" beers, available year-round. (Of course, when I was living in China, I was thrilled to find a single "ordinary" Sierra Nevada Pale Ale in a store in Hong Kong -- and then smuggle it back across the border and later open and savor it in a special ceremony in our apartment in Beijing.) At a dinner in Washington a few months ago, I was sitting next to a person who turns out to be in charge of craft-brew distributorship in the DC area. He said that there had been an amazing spike in Torpedo sales in one convenience store in DC. I said, "Would it happen to be the one on MacArthur at...." Of course Sierra Nevada's year-end seasonal "Celebration" Ale is predictably worth waiting for and seeking out.

I've just tried a new (to me) Sierra Nevada seasonal, "Ruthless Rye." Very nice! Check it out. (Photo from BeerFM.)

In the same upbeat spirit, two other breweries -- one the king and pioneer of "mainstream" craft brewing, the other a deserving regional contender -- with offerings that brighten the heart. I took this picture on the back porch in September, when leaves were still on the trees. On the right, Sam Adams Latitude 48 IPA. A review that matches my own appreciative thoughts here; the name refers to the latitude-48-North "hop belt" of central Europe and the Pacific Northwest where great hops are grown. (Pro tip: if you see a field of ripening hops, don't be tempted to pick one off the vine and eat it. Yuck! Bittterrrrrrrrrrr!)

On the left in the photo above is the new (to me) Headwaters Pale Ale, from the regionally renowned Victory Brewing Company of ~~central~~ southeastern Pennsylvania. [Sorry for previous geography error, greater-Philly loyalists.] Victory is most famous for its Hop Devil ale. Headwaters is less hop-bomby and is described with that dreaded term "refreshing," but I think it's a big success as a properly tasty and hoppy ale.

No one from my office will still be reading at this point, so I can admit that this afternoon -- with light winds, limitlessly clear skies, and mid-60s temperatures across the mid-Atlantic region -- I decided that it was time to step away from the computer and get in some flying practice. This took me directly over the craft brewing heartland of central Pa -- including Victory's headquarters city of Downingtown. I recognized the brewery from its placement near a golf course and a quarry, which I'd checked out earlier on Google Earth. Next time, I'll approach at ground level -- and enjoy its products as I find them my local stores.

Kaplan on Mearsheimer on China: From Our Current Issue

2012-01-31T13:15:09-05:00

Frequently as I exhort readers to "Subscribe!" to our print edition, that being the center of our evolving print/online/"live" business and the heart of our journalism, I really should be talking up print articles even more than I do. The latest Jan-Feb issue is an illustration. Adam Davidson's cover story, on the realities of what it would take to re-create a "middle class" society, has been cited by half the op-ed writers in the world and could have been the background briefing to the President's State of the Union address last week. (Here is the background "enhanced" briefing the White House actually put out, but it dovetails with the article.) Cullen Murphy, for 20 years an editor here, explains how the original Inquisition prefigures the current one. Lane Wallace talks about the perils and appeal of air races; Megan McArdle, about the perils and appeal of business school; Gregg Easterbrook, about the perils and appeal of the sun; and on through a long list of strong stories (on REM, Joan Didion, Mike Ditka, etc). Seriously: read the series of short "Dispatches" that start the issue, at one sitting, and you'll be impressed and will go on to the rest.

Now, about a feature article that deserves more attention than it seems to have received so far: Robert Kaplan's profile of John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago. Kaplan devotes half of his article to the subject for which Mearsheimer has been best known and most controversial in the past five years: his book, with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. If for some reason you were asleep recently, the controversy was because, as Kaplan puts it, the book "alleges that groups supportive of Israel have pivotally undermined American foreign-policy interests, especially in the run-up to the Iraq War." Kaplan engages the merits of the Mearsheimer-Walt argument more deeply, and in a fairer and calmer frame of mind, than most other treatments of the book. He doesn't agree with all of it, but he comes down thus:

[Mearsheimer and Walt argue that] the reason the Israelis are not more cooperative is that in the final analysis, they don't have to be--which, in turn, is because of the pro-Israel lobby.... I see nothing wrong or illegitimate about this core argument. And no amount of nitpicking by their critics of The Israel Lobby's 100 pages of endnotes can detract from it. I say this as someone who is a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and who supported the Iraq War (a position I have come to deeply regret).

The other half of the article explores the Mearsheimer world view that, in Kaplan's view, has been unfairly slighted because of the "Israel lobby" furore. That is his doctrine of "offensive realism," especially as it indicates that the U.S. should be girding for an inevitable showdown with a rising, ambitious, and expansionist China. The article begins with these words, a quote from one of Mearsheimer's classroom lectures:

"I--China--want to be the Godzilla of Asia, because that's the only way for me--China--to survive! I don't want the Japanese violating my sovereignty the way they did in the 20th century. I can't trust the United States, since states can never be certain about other states' intentions. And as good realists, we--the Chinese--want to dominate Asia the way the Americans have dominated the Western Hemisphere."

Kaplan makes clear that Mearsheimer is overstating for effect. But he also explains why Mearsheimer believes a strategic/military confrontation between the US and China truly is inevitable -- and why he, Kaplan, mainly shares this view. I mainly disagree with both of them, and the basis of our disagreement touches on another important theme of the article.

In an article of my own in next month's issue, and in my forthcoming book, I argue that China has too many things going on, and going wrong, within its own borders to have the time, energy, skill, or ambition for much of an "expansionist" world effort. From the outside, it looks like an unstoppable juggernaut. From inside, especially from the perspective of those trying to run it, it looks like a rambling wreck that narrowly avoids one disaster after another. The thrust of Mearsheimer's argument is that such internal complications simply don't matter: the sheer increase in China's power will bring disruption with it. I am saying: if you knew more about China, you would be less worried, especially about military confrontations. He is saying: "knowing" about China is a distraction. What matters are the implacable forces.

Naturally, I think this view is wrong, or at least too mechanistic; and that while we need to think constantly and seriously about China, a "showdown" would be a result of miscalculation or recklessness on either side, rather than of unstoppable tectonic pressures. On the other hand, I completely endorse Mearsheimer's (and Kaplan's) view that we should have been paying more attention to China, and been less bogged down in the Middle East, through the past decade. But his case is certainly worth considering, and Bob Kaplan lays it out very well. I expect that we'll also hear from Jeffrey Goldberg soon about the other part of the article, about the Mearsheimer-Walt book.