The Atlantic

Donald Disappoints Davos

2018-01-26T17:00:25

President Donald Trump attends the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on January 26, 2018. Carlos Barria / Reuters

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND—In the internal psycholeadership struggle between Donald Trump’s good side, or what Senator Lindsey Graham has called “Tuesday Trump,” and his dark side, which Graham calls “Thursday Trump,” it was the first that prevailed at the World Economic Forum in Davos—much to the disappointment of many attendees.

Trump gave a friendly speech, one that was respectful of the billionaires, political leaders, and NGO chiefs that flock in late January each year to fraternize and frolic amid towering snow peaks. But that was not the show many in Davos really wanted. They got no fire. They got no fury. They got a listless, low-energy Trump—a pleasant Trump.

On the first day of the forum, when the U.S. government shutdown was threatening Trump’s attendance, many Davos types were in one breath declaring the American president a disaster for all good things in the world, and in the next expressing morbid curiosity in the brash and often insulting leader. The contradiction fit the broader irony that had propelled Trump to the Swiss Alps in the first place. Here was a president whose very ascendancy rebuked the kinds of values—global interconnectedness, trade, all things “elite”—so ostentatiously celebrated at Davos, and whose power threatened the relevance of the kinds of people gathered there. And yet Davos needed him, because all that elite consensus can be so dreadfully dull.

Amr Moussa, the former Arab League Secretary General and the Egyptian Foreign Minister, told me that without Trump, WEF would be just a lot of people running around without credible vision, purpose, or power, all pretending to be great and good, but not doing anything interesting. He predicted that Macron, Merkel, and Modi—the event’s other three headliners—would be rudderless and fail to create much stir. He was right.

I asked Moussa what he and the other Davos elites expected from Trump. He paused before saying: “If Trump is nice to us in Davos, we won’t believe him. If he beats us up and attacks us, we will revile him. But we need him. He defines who we are by who he is.”

The cost of being one of the lucky attendees at Davos often runs anywhere between $75,000 and tens of millions of dollars, depending on how deeply interwoven one’s firm is with WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s operation. And like with any high-priced theater ticket, say for Hamilton, the audience wants to see some sizzle, some genuine drama. They want to be in the room when Trump happens.

Schwab tried to provide it. He organized a 37-member, dazzlingly attired, feather-hatted, Swiss Honor Guard band, which played the Coburg March as Schwab and Trump walked on stage. This was dazzle that no Davos attendees had ever seen before, and some even thought it was off-putting. The spirit of Davos, in this view, is supposed to be one of serious discourse, not one of celebrating and paying tribute to heads of government, particularly Trump.

But at least the show started with some pomp. And tensing up the lead-up to Trump just a bit more, Schwab triggered boos by saying in his introductory remarks: “I’m aware that your strong leadership is open to misconceptions and biased interpretation.”

But the wow died fast. In words clearly Stephen Miller-free and crafted by one of the administration’s resident “globalists,” National Economic Adviser Gary Cohn, Trump actually said to a red meat-wanting audience that wanted to dislike him:

“Represented in this room are some of the remarkable citizens from all over the world. You are national leaders, business titans, industry giants, and many of the brightest mind in many fields. Each of you has the power to change hearts transform lives and shape your country's destinies. With this power comes an obligation, however—a duty of loyalty to the people, workers, customers, who made you who you are.”

What? What happened to shithole countries? Where was the Putin love? He even dropped in a line that “maybe joining TPP is possible.” This after he famously withdrew from the agreement that would set up a massive free-trade area among Pacific Rim countries, and is now going forward without America.

Trump even touted—and essentially took credit for—high employment rates of Hispanics, African Americans, and women in the United States. No barbs or jabs. He wasn’t high-energy, New York obnoxious. He was just benign—with the single exception of a parting shot at the press.

That was the opportunity to give the audience at least some value for the money. Trump took aim and said “it wasn’t until I became a politician, that I realized how nasty, how mean, how vicious and fake the press can be.” The boos from the audience were instantaneous and robust. But Trump didn’t test it further. He pivoted fast, back to the confines of pleasantly bland Tuesday Trump territory—the tension in the air just seeping away.

Just after the speech’s conclusion, the Financial Times deputy editor Roula Khalaf tweeted out sentiment she heard:

Some disappointment that Trump was scripted. “We’re here for a show and he didn’t deliver it” says a member of the audience#Davos2018 trump
— roula khalaf (@khalafroula) January 26, 2018

Many suggested that Trump had done better than they expected, in the sense that his speech was conventional and “healing” given his presumed disdain for the international order. He even acknowledged the benefits of trade, having run for office, and attempted to govern, with a protectionist bent.

But Kishore Mahbubani, an intellectual and former diplomat from Singapore, captured it best. “The most controversial thing I can say,” he said, “is that this was a middle of the road, unexciting, rational speech.” He continued, “what you read about him, you expect an edgy, tough speech—and there wasn’t any edginess in that at all.”

Polite applause came at the end. But one attendee declared: “Definitely not worth staying until the very, very, very end of Davos to hear that!”

One Last Trip With Joe Biden

2017-01-19T15:26:11

Susan Walsh / AP

When I boarded Air Force Two for Vice President Joe Biden’s final overseas mission, he had four days left in office. His leverage was diminishing by the hour, with every new question at a Trump nominee confirmation hearing, with every new @RealDonaldTrump tweet.

There was no chance of a miracle at that point, a few days away from Vice President-elect Mike Pence getting Biden’s keys to Air Force Two—to somehow rid Ukraine of its debilitating corruption, pull off a Cyprus deal, or stand between Kosovo and Serbia and neutralize the tension between them for good. It’s hard to shame Russian President Vladimir Putin or to inspire him to spiff up his behavior if the president-elect seems to accept Putin just as he is. And of course, there’s Iraq.

I’ve taken trips with the vice president before, and at the start of this last one, I suspected the mission was motored more by inertia than achieving real goals. Most journalist types, in fact, thought this would be a dud journey and were focused ahead of the inauguration on power ascendant, not power quickly fading away. I was the only one there. Biden though, treated the trip as a big deal—he was wound up, energized, shaking hands with those he is leaving, like he had just mastered the craft and was showing off, bounding up the steps to the plane, waving to the crowd as if to promise all of this is going to matter. Really. It will.

Nearing the end of a 45-year career in public service, the vice president kept trying to pack in just one more call, one more crisis, as the clock ticked down. I’ve described Biden in The Atlantic as a kind of “geopolitical therapist;” he’s the one who gets the difficult, unglamorous foreign-policy problems—Iraq and its several parts, Cyprus, Ukraine, sometimes Brazil and a slew of Latin American countries that don’t always rank particularly high in DC. Japan and South Korea with their unresolved tensions over wrongs done long ago. Turkey.

And Biden diplomacy is about relationships, about getting personal with leaders and knowing them and their motivations well enough, in detail and over time, that you know where you can move a leader and where you can’t. It was clear in these last few meetings, with, among others, Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko, whom he calls “Petro;” with China’s powerful and ascending Xi Jinping, whom he introduced to his granddaughter Finnegan in an effort to break new ground when the Chinese leader first took office; and with his old friend who sits at the nexus of many overlaid conflicts, Kurdistan’s Masoud Barzani.

Ukraine could be one test case of whether all of this really did matter. As we neared landing in Kiev in the early darkness of Monday morning, when America was remembering the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Joe Biden was working to help the country survive another day—despite Donald Trump’s nearly simultaneous calls that he might waive America’s sanctions on Russia over its annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in exchange for a nuclear deal. He and his team spent hours discussing the way for Ukraine to stay in the game, presumably despite Trump coming to office.

The vice president, though, looked as if he was there to show the Trump Team, and the world, that carving through the sovereign borders of a nation demands a unified response from civilized nations. (While some including Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain had argued that such a response should include weapons in addition to greater financial resources to buck Russian aggression, Obama had wagered on military restraint.) In Kiev, Biden couldn’t convey that all would be well as the Obama team leaves their positions, but he could convey—through his sixth trip to Ukraine as vice president, the fifth since the revolution on the Maidan helped overthrow a pro-Russian leader in 2014—that the problems there are of the highest order in the world.

He issued that reminder in a joint presser with Petro Poroshenko, a chocolate tycoon who now leads Ukraine as president:

Russia’s continued attempts to undermine your success, your security, your sovereignty, and your territorial integrity are manifold. False propaganda attacks. Attempts to destabilize your economy. Ukraine, like every country in Europe, has a right to determine its own path. Yet Russia seeks to deny that choice. And the international community must continue to stand as one against Russian aggression and coercion.

There are over 1.7 million internally displaced people. Oppression of Crimean Tatars continues. More than 9,600 Ukrainians have been killed in the fighting in the east and more than 22,000 wounded in the conflict. And fully one-fifth of those victims have been civilians.

And while he also reminded about Russia and its destabilizing aggression and called out his friendship with “Petro,” he spoke directly to the Ukrainian people, invoking John Kennedy’s line explaining why Americans had decided to go to the moon: “we are no longer willing to ‘postpone.’” The Ukrainian people, he said, “are no longer willing to postpone a free, open, democratic, and prosperous Ukraine.” He went on:

I strongly urge the people of Ukraine: Keep demonstrating your commitment to the rule of law; keep fighting corruption; insist on transparency; investigate and prosecute government officials who siphon off public funds for their own enrichment. Russia over the last decade or so has used another foreign policy weapon. It uses corruption as a tool of coercion to keep Ukraine vulnerable and dependent. So pursue those reforms to root out corruption. It’s not just about good governance. It’s about self-preservation. It’s about your very national security.

Perhaps a deal to pause the fighting that Biden and Poroshenko helped cobble together with Russian Foreign Ministers Sergei Lavrov and even Vladimir Putin, following the collapse of a previous one in 2014, may survive the next U.S. president. Biden thinks the effort worth it.

He exits office in a world that looks different from when he started. The trip included a stop in Davos—where he raced through other outstanding issues, through meetings with, among others, Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and the Kurdistan Regional Government President Masoud Barzani. Even as he did so, however, the conference was being owned by Chinese President Xi Jinping who, on the first occasion Xi or any Chinese president has spoken at Davos, gave a strong defense of globalization and the world liberal economic order.

That speech, combined with Donald Trump’s attacks on Europe, NATO, and seeming admiration for Russia and Vladimir Putin, dominated the chatter among the world’s annual flock fest of billionaires, major CEOs, and those who love them. Biden held a no press bilateral meeting with President Xi, whom he had worked hard to get to know. It was Biden who had laid the groundwork for Xi’s first meeting with President Obama at the famous Sunnylands visit.

Biden’s own address in Davos, on America’s and every nation’s stakes in a more ordered and just world, hammered a different point, one that touched on the human reality of those who haven’t shared in the wealth creation so evident at these meetings. He said:

Here in this exclusive Alpine tower, where CEOs of multinational corporations rub elbows with leaders of nations, it is easy to embrace the intellectual benefits of a more open and integrated world. But it is at our own peril that we ignore or dismiss the legitimate fears and anxieties that exist in communities all across the developed world.

The concern mothers and fathers feel about losing the factory job that has always allowed them to provide for their families. Parents who don’t believe that they can give their children a better life than the one they have. These are the pressures that are undermining support for the liberal international order from the inside. Globalization has not been an unalloyed good.

Shortly after that, the vice president wrapped up his last trip in that office—one he hoped was consequential—worth the plane, the effort, the jet lag and stress with the constant reminder from everyone around, every leader he met and every audience he spoke to, every soldier to whom he handed his vice presidential medal, that his hours with this power were winding down.

As President Obama remarked when awarding Joe Biden the most distinguished of all American civilian awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, Biden has a habit of quoting his mother or father with some folksy aphorism. He’s told me, for example, “My dad used to say to me: ‘Champ, if everything is equally important to you, nothing is important to you.’” I imagined another Bidenesque aphorism for the moment, that sounded like something his parents might say. “Joey, there’s always a chance to do good and be good. Always a chance, even at the very last moment, to do good.”

As Air Force Two approached Andrews Joint Base, the airport the President and Vice President use to fly in and out of Washington, Biden told me he’d spent the last several hours making calls to and having long conversations with five major world leaders.

Squeezing it in. Always a chance to do good.

The Geopolitical Therapist

2016-08-26T13:48:42

Larry Downing / Reuters

Recently I sat down with Vice President Joe Biden to explore whether his approach to foreign policy challenges, and his patterns of interaction with global leaders, constituted something distinctive enough to call “The Biden Doctrine,” which I wrote about here in The Atlantic. In a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion that touched on America’s current political contest, the vice president shared some of what he believes are Hillary Clinton’s strengths and weaknesses. And in a powerful ending to our chat, Biden indicted the leadership elites of both parties for looking down on and leaving behind Americans who deserve better. I felt that this material deserved its own space, and wanted to share the larger conversation with readers. The transcript, condensed and edited for clarity, follows.

Steve Clemons: Mr. Vice President, how do you see the Biden Doctrine? Through what frame do you look at national-security and foreign policy, and set strategic priorities?

Joe Biden: My dad used to say to me, “Champ, if everything is equally important to you, nothing is important to you.” So the hardest thing to do, I’ve found in 44 years [in government], is prioritize the most consequential threats and concerns, and allocate resources relative to the nature of the threat. There is a tendency to respond to the “wolf at the door,” but [policymakers] tend to sometimes over-respond and not leave enough assets to deal with the pack of wolves out there in the field.

I have had a view for a long time that, in terms of the use of force, the cause not only has to be a vital U.S. strategic interest, but when force is used there [must be] efficacy in the use of that force—and the effort [should be one that] can be sustained. I don’t have any doubt if we put 200,000 forces in Syria— although we might have a war with Russia—we could control the place, settle it down. But the moment we left, we’d be right back exactly where we are today. [We’re still] arguing about Afghanistan.

We tend sometimes not to look at the larger strategic imperative and what works. So, we have enormous military capability but using it, in my view, depends on A) what is the strategic national interest? And B) what are the second, third, and fourth steps in this process? So that you don’t put in 160,000 forces inside Iraq without a conceptual notion as to how you’re going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Well, you know how long you would keep them there? Forever? If you keep them there forever could [that] reduce the number of casualties in Iraq? Actually, we continue to have casualties. But secondly, are you likely to be able to pursue your national interest in any meaningful way when you use force? Or allocate those assets? These are the key questions.

For example, we went through a work-up a while ago on Syria, and everybody knew we don’t have enough ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance], and drones that are available to look down, etc. We had internally a debate about where the drones are all being used. We found out that an inordinately high percentage was being used in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan] for a relatively small number of people.

My argument was, “Wait a minute, the bad guys are closer to home. They’re in Syria. They’re in Iraq.” They said, “Well we don’t have the resources to be able to deal with ISR in this particular part of Syria.” I said, “Look guys, you have 10 assets and 80 percent of your problem is over here in Syria and you’re using 9 out of 10 of your assets over there in FATA where only 20 percent of your problem is.” I’m oversimplifying, but this was a problem.

The other piece is, the existential threats to the United States going forward have changed. You’ve often heard me quote the “Easter Sunday, 1916” poem, “All has changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” Well all has really changed since I started in this. What remains is the prospect that the real existential threat is loose nukes, an unintended conflict that erupts with another nuclear power—Russia, China, that not-stable figure in North Korea [Kim Jong Un], Pakistan. You may remember the debate [about] the most dangerous nation in the world—I said, nine years ago, “Pakistan.”

Clemons: That’s what my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in our Atlantic cover story, “The Ally from Hell.”

Biden: Exactly. The third part of the Biden Doctrine—and I haven’t thought about it in this way before—would be proportionality. Terrorism is a real threat, but it’s not an existential threat to the existence of the democratic country of the United States of America. Terrorism can cause real problems. It can undermine confidence. It can kill relatively large numbers of people. But terrorism is not an existential threat.

So part of the way we talk about this—about the way [Biden’s national-security advisor] Colin Kahl and I talk about this—is about us “rebalancing.” We talk a lot about rebalancing with Russia, which we’ve been trying to do since we got into office. I have not been a quiet voice about this, but I feel that we need a “rebalancing between balances” that we inherited. There is a disproportion in balance when we had 70, 80, or 90 percent of our military assets focused on Iraq. Look at what metastasized around the world.

So the Biden Doctrine is, first, you do not commit force unless you can demonstrate that the use of that force is sustainable and will produce an outcome.

Two: Engage because the world has changed and strengthening alliances and building new arrangements is vital, that relate to sharing responsibility, sharing intelligence, and allocating force on targets so we’re not the only game in town.

And three: It all gets down to the conduct of foreign policy of being personal. You’ve got to figure out what’s the other [leader’s] bandwidth [whether that’s a] good guy [or] bad guy. You have to figure out what is realistically possible. What does that leader think his or her bandwidth is, so that you can begin to make more informed judgments about what they are likely to do or what you can likely get them to agree not to do? And lastly, in the conduct of foreign policy, I think it’s vitally important that not only you know and have as hard of a read as you can get on the foreign leader with whom you’re dealing, friend or foe, but that leaders know that what you say, what you do, what you propose is real and is likely to be the U.S. response, initiative, or demand.

That requires establishing real relationships. You’ve been with me a lot on these trips. You have seen it happen.

Clemons: I’ve seen you use your grandchildren as opening acts. With Xi Xinping and others.

Biden: I can say it now because he’s publicly said this at a press conference—I have enough of a relationship and enough of a standing that [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu would grab me and say, “Can you help me normalize relations with Turkey?” I can pick up the phone, call and go see [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, as erratic as he may be, and say, “Look, this is in your interest. Let me tell you why.” As Bibi said, they would not have normalized relations but for the fact that I convinced the Turks this was in their interest—it was in both their interest. I mediated.

Or, you know, [Korean President] Park [Geun-hye] and [Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe. I go to see Abe and he says to me, “Will you help me with Park?” And I call her and say, “Will you do this?” And I don’t negotiate the agreement, but the end result was, because I had a personal relationship with both of them and they trusted me, I could be an interlocutor, that was more like a divorce counselor, putting a marriage back together.

But I can go down the list. I spent over an hour this morning with [Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-] Abadi, and he’s calling me to ask me not only for help but advice. [After] the horrific bombings in Baghdad, I called him, and he said, “Can you help?” And I said, “This is what you could do, and this is how you should do it.” He asked me advice today and mentioned, “Well so-and-so doesn’t like my deal.” “Well, you should tell so-and-so”—meaning someone in Iraq, an opponent—“why don’t you tell them this?” He said, “You think that’ll work?” I said, “Look, you know your politics better than I do, but I think it will work.” And he goes, “OK, so how would you do it?” So [it’s] as if I’m advising the minority leader on how to get something passed. But because of the relationship, not because I’m so smart—I’m pretty good at this stuff but that’s not it—they go, “Well, the guy’s not playing a game with me.”

Clemons: So you’re sort of like this psychological, political, geostrategic therapist?

Biden: Well in a bizarre sense, every successful foreign-policy person from [Henry] Kissinger on, that’s what they’ve been. I don’t go in and make demands. For example, [Ukraine President] Poroshenko, I pushed him on getting rid of a corrupt [prosecutor] general. We had committed a billion dollars, I said, “Petro, you’re not getting your billion dollars. It’s OK, you can keep the [prosecutor] general. Just understand—we’re not paying if you do.” I suspended it on the spot, to the point where our ambassador looked at me like, “Whoa, what’d you just do? Do you have the authority?” “Yeah, I got the authority. It’s not going to happen, Petro.” But I really mean it. It wasn’t a threat. I said, “Look, Petro, I understand. We’re not gonna play. It’ll hurt us the following way, so make your own call here.” The same with Erdogan.

I look at the people I’ve worked with over the years, at this level in foreign policy, and all of them have basically the same basic modus operandi. Two things that the other world leader recognizes: Either it is the president or you speak for the president, and that’s it; and two, they have a sense of who the hell you are and they know whether or not to have any confidence in what you’re saying and doing. All foreign policy really is—we like to make it this arena that only a few people can play in—is a logical extension of personal relationships with a lot less information to act on. I don’t want to diminish it; it’s consequential.

Clemons: A lot of the skill sets you bring to your foreign-policy work do not necessarily reside in Donald Trump—and perhaps not even with Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. You don’t really raise these psychological, leader-to-leader dimensions in your [recent] Foreign Affairs piece, but do you think that a President Clinton will be able to operate on that front?

Biden: I think she is much better than people think. For example, she and I had breakfast once a week. I think the image of everyone is she came in stiff-necked, and “This is what I’m going to do, and I know exactly the right answer.” It was not that way at all. It was, “Joe, what do you think?” and “Well, how would you approach such-and-such?” Hillary has an open mind. I know she knows this, and I think that she can use her reputation for being hard-edged to some advantage. Everybody talks about her having a terrible relationship with Putin. That’s not such a bad thing right now, because he knows he can’t push her around.

My instinct and approach with this administration on the strategic side were in sync with the president’s; I didn’t move him. He was already there and ahead of me on a lot of stuff. But, as he said, we kind of made up for each other’s weaknesses. The fourth PDB [President’s Daily Brief] we had—I guess was like three, four weeks in, during the interregnum period where we’re deciding on policy and who’s going to fill administration positions, etc. We get in and we got the new team. We’ve got Hillary, we’ve got [then-Defense Secretary] Bob Gates, we have [then-National Security Advisor] Jim Jones, we have [then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Admiral [Mike] Mullen. We have, I forget who else. So we’re sitting there on a usual day, and Hillary says, “Well, Mr. President, we’ve come up with an Iraq plan that is totally consistent with the way you’ve campaigned and what you believe,” etc. She said, “And we want to present it to you.” And Obama goes like this: “No, no, no. Joe will do Iraq.” I’m thinking, “Not a good way to start this, Mr. President.” “Joe knows more about Iraq than anybody. Joe will do Iraq, so work with Joe.”

Clemons: How did your next lunch with Hillary go after that?

Biden: Turned out OK. The key is that they realize that I wasn’t trying to get attention. I wasn’t going to be the guy claiming credit. You know, when we’re having trouble with unaccompanied children [fleeing Central America for the United States in 2014]. I was in Turkey, or somewhere, [the] president called me and said, “You gotta go, you gotta take care of this. This is a crisis.” And, OK, I hadn’t been doing Latin America. When I was chairman [of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] I made sure that [Senator Chris] Dodd did Latin America.

But all kidding aside, we have the first big meeting and I came up with a proposal, and he said, “Look, you do the hemisphere.” And, jokingly, he said, “You make friends easy, and it’s in the same time zone. You can do it on the weekends.” I said, “It’s not the same time zone.”

Clemons: It sounds like he has a habit of handing you the lemons in foreign policy, giving you the tough tasks.

Biden: I think it makes sense—not because I’m good, bad or indifferent, and I really do think John Kerry is doing a hell of a job, for real—first of all, I think a couple things have changed in the last 20 years. No president, no secretary of state has the bandwidth to deal with all the stuff at play, number one. Number two, the president’s chances of being successful in terms of his policy are exponentially elevated if the person who is speaking for him agrees with the policy, understands or knows the nuances of where he would like to go, and has the authority to speak—and everybody, including the secretary of state, knows that person has the authority.

It makes sense to give me the problems that require husbandry every day. So I get Ukraine, I get Iraq, I get the relationship between Korea and Japan, I get Central America, I get Colombia. Because he knows—the guy is really good—it’s a matter of how you broach some of these. I talked [in a 2013 speech on hemispheric relations] about [how], from northern Canada to the tip of Chile, we can look for the first time at a hemisphere that is democratic, that is secure, that is growing, and we have more work to do on all this. And I really, really worked hard on this speech. And I said in there, “It’s no longer what we can do for [Latin America], it’s what we can do with [Latin America].” That had such a profound impact. The simple most important thing that I talked to the president about was establishing trust in the hemisphere. We have 200 years of bad karma. And so, he was convinced I could do this, because he knew I meant it and I had his authority, so it was, “Joe, go do it.”

That’s different than sitting down and my personally negotiating the FARC settlement. Yet, I get calls from [Colombian President Juan Manuel] Santos on the FARC settlement: “Will you come? Will you be there? What do you think I should say to this leader or that leader?” etc. It’s not like I’m the only one who can do these things—like rapprochement between South Korea and Japan, or an agreement with China and the United States relative to how to treat North Korea. These can be done by really well-informed people, steeped in public policy and history, and we have a lot of those people. But as you know, these take a ton of patience, of tending, and there’s no short-term solution. That requires establishing a trust, a long-term game plan, and constantly staying on it. I actually gave a directive to Colin [Kahl] and [Deputy Secretary of State] Tony [Blinken], to the foreign-policy teams. I said, “Look, for every time you want me to call a foreign leader to ask for something, make sure I call him three times just to say hi.” Not a joke.

Clemons: It’s occurred to me that virtually no one can talk to the average man in America as well as you can, and then all of a sudden Donald Trump is doing it. He is communicating a message that A) you citizens have gone off to fight these battles around the world but you’re getting screwed in these relationships, other nations aren’t paying enough, and we’re not getting a good deal. When I talk to my relatives in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, they’re hearing that. I’m just interested in what you think Americans need to hear that they’re not hearing about internationalism, international engagement, why it pays off for them in ways they are not sensing and feeling?

Biden: I absolutely think it is the key issue. It’s not only foreign, but it’s domestic. I was doing the interview on Morning Joe, and they asked the same question. And I said, “Look, the truth is we just haven’t paid enough attention to these people. We haven’t spoken to them.” And everybody went nuts going, “Aw Jesus! Hillary is going to think that’s an attack.” But I asked my team what did Hillary just say in her speech? She said we’re not paying enough attention—and the phrase I used that really upset them—I said, “We’re not showing them enough respect.” And she also said we’re not showing enough respect.

The truth is we are not showing enough respect. There is a new breed of Democrat that is represented by our administration, in my view, and the smart guys, the guys and gals who are Harvard, Yale, Penn graduates; the very, very well-informed, well-educated, elites of the party. They are the new version, if they don’t watch it, of the limousine liberals when I was coming up in the 60s. Because at its core there’s a disconnect with some really, really, really smart, good, decent people who are with us and part of the larger Democratic younger elite, the millennial elite who don’t understand the middle class anymore.

You may remember when I came in, [Biden’s then-Chief of Staff] Ron Klain said, “Look, ask to be able to do a middle class [task] force,” to focus on how can we administratively, by executive order, ease the pain of the middle class, which got clobbered, the bottom fell out with the Great Recession.

So the president gave me authority. I held an enormous number of Cabinet meetings and I said, “Here’s what I want you to do: I want every one of you, within two weeks, to get back to me with a name and a phone number, so I can talk to them, of someone you hired who reports only to you and whose only job in your department is to scrub the department to see what can they do administratively to ease the burden on the middle class and working class people.”

So, to his credit, [then-Treasury Secretary] Tim Geithner was the first guy to come in with a proposal. And his team came in and they sat here, I had five of my staff here, two women included, and all raised in classic, middle class backgrounds.

So they came in and said, “We have a great idea. We’ve figured out a way how to plus up 529s”—that’s that savings account for college tuition, that you can save it now, not pay the tax on it, and you’re able to use it toward college tuition, and they were decimated, like 401(k)s. And I listened and I said, “Well, that’s a good idea, Tim,” but I said, “I don’t know anybody who has a 529.”

And he looked at me, and I looked at my team. I said, “How many of you have 529s?” And they all had them. And I said, “I’ll make you a bet”—and this was after the Washington Post had printed, literally, “It’s probable no man has ever assumed the office of vice president with fewer assets than Joe Biden,” when I did my first financial disclosure. And, I said, “What percentage of people are eligible for 529s in the capital?” And [the guesses ranged] from 40 percent to 25 percent, or 20 percent, among my staff. And I said, “If more than 10 percent of the people eligible have a 529, once a month, lunch is on me any place you all pick in Washington. We’ll all go to lunch—it’s on me.”

So they came back. 7 percent. Nobody has any money to save. They’re of no value to the neighborhood I grew up in. These are people making, married couples with two kids making 100,000 bucks. They don’t have any disposable income.

So there is a disconnect. It’s like the book Coming Apart by the conservative sociologist [Charles Murray]. He points out there’s a new elite in America. And this new elite is a meritocracy. It’s black, it’s white, it’s women, it’s men. But it’s all about the best-educated people. And so, for example, I asked my younger staff, I lay 8 to 5, if you put up 20 neighbors I could tell you what neighborhood they live in.

There’s this test in Murray’s book—and it drove my sons Beau and Hunter crazy. I asked them to take it. Have you ever been on the factory floor? Were you’re raised in a neighborhood where over 60 percent of the people you live with, their parents did not have a college education? Do you know any one of your close friends that is obese? Do any one of them, in their refrigerator, have whole milk? Given a choice to be able to go to Starbucks or McDonalds, where do they go? All of the bright kids, I don’t want to indict anybody in this room, they live in neighborhoods of people who have the same view of art, the same view of culture, the same view of—

Clemons: The people you describe are my relatives in Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas, many uneducated, served in the military, eat mostly at fast-food joints—

Biden: Bingo! But here’s the deal: We don’t talk to them anymore.

Clemons: What do these folks need to hear? On the international stuff?

Biden: [Politicians have to] say, “Look, let me tell you why it’s so important to you that this happens.” The example I give, I say, look, everybody knows we need Europe and their armies, or God forbid if anything happens with Russia or if there’s a major war we have. Because we saw it happen when this great migration crisis occurred. It didn’t have anything to do with war or peace, but it destabilized a lot of these governments. Now, now Europe is doubting itself. The last thing we need, after building up a system for 70 years, of a Europe whole and free and secure, is for this to fall apart.

So what happens when we have a conflict? God forbid we have a conflict with Russia or China. Look guys, it makes no sense for us not to be involved in Latin America. And the reason is as long as they are unstable you’re going to have millions of people heading to this border. Now look, look what happened. Look what we did. This is what I do when I sit down at kitchen tables, which I still do because I go home.

Look what happened with Mexico. Fewer and fewer Mexicans are coming over. Matter of fact, there’s a net migration [out of the United States to Mexico]. Why? Mexico is doing better. Isn’t there interest for Mexico to be more stable? It helps us. Because, guess what? It’s like Ghostbusters, man. When there’s a problem anywhere else, call Ghostbusters. We’re Ghostbusters; so it makes sense that we are there to help them because it helps us.

Now here’s not what I’m going to do. Now it doesn’t make sense for me to send your son or daughter into a Muslim country as an occupying force and try to insist on a particular regime order. But it does make sense for us to use special [operations] forces, like in Libya right now, because there is an actual nascent government there. And they’re saying, “Can you help us take out [ISIS], in Sirte, there?” That makes sense for us to do.

But you can’t talk down to people because they’re pretty goddamned smart and they instinctively know what’s in their interest. But the other part of it is I don’t think we show them enough respect. Because what your relatives in Oklahoma and Kansas sense is that a lot of people in our party these days really don’t think they’re very smart, really don’t think they know what’s in their own interest—“we know best for you, we’re going to take care of you.”

So, if you notice, when I spoke about Hillary, I said, Hillary understands. Hillary understands student loans are about more than getting a talented child to college; it’s about saving that parent the indignity of having to turn to their beautiful child and say, “I’m sorry honey, I can’t help.” My dad, my dad was a classy man, a real gentleman. I remember going down to borrow a car to go to a prom. I asked where he was; said he’s outside by the lane going into the service entrance. I need the car to pick up my girlfriend up at the prom and drop my ’51 Plymouth off.

I walk up and my father is pacing back and forth. It’s a true story. I look at my dad and said, “What’s the matter?” He said, “Honey, I’m so sorry. I’m so goddamned sorry.” I thought something happened to my family. I said, “What’s the matter, dad?” He said, “I went to the bank and spoke to Charlie Delcher"—who’s at the Farmer’s Bank and who financed all the cars that were sold. [Biden’s dad] said, “I asked him for a loan to get you to school [send Biden to college]. I don’t have any money. I’m so goddamned ashamed. I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed.”

That’s what the hell they want to know that we know. That’s the middle class. They want us to understand what the pain for them is as it relates to the education—not just that the kid doesn’t get there. It’s that, I mean, what is more helpless than a parent looking at a kid knowing you can’t help them? And Hillary understands that. The way Teddy Kennedy used to talk. Everybody knew Teddy Kennedy wasn’t like them, but Teddy talked in terms when he talked to poor and middle class people that you shouldn’t have to suffer that indignity. And that’s what we have lost.

Clemons: If Hillary Clinton wins, is there a way you can play a role that helps her do that?

Biden: I don’t know. Hillary, I’ll do anything she wants—I’m not going to go back in administration—but you know, Hillary has never been afraid with me to let her guard down to ask me for an insight that she knows she doesn’t possess, any more than I was reluctant to ask Teddy about things that I didn’t understand.

And, for example, I’ll end with this, because it goes both ways. My son Beau dated a lovely young woman that was a classmate of Hunter’s girlfriend at the time, from high school into college. And she comes from one of the most prominent families in American history. And so, and they were serious for a while. So I’m sitting in a hearing, and Teddy said, “Hey, I saw Beau in so-and-so’s box,” and I said, “You gotta explain this to me, man.” And I said, “How do you deal with that kind of money and power?”

And he said, “Joe,” he said, “I can’t explain that to you. They’re in a different world than I am.” But I was genuinely trying to figure this out. “Teddy, how do you traverse that world?” Because I was never a part of that world, and I was trying to figure it out.

Hillary is as open, in reverse, with me in asking me, “OK, I’m going to speak to these labor guys. What is it? I’m right on policy with them. What is it that I say?” That’s not exactly what she’d say but, “Tell me how you would say this?” And I don’t want to offer myself as the oracle of labor and middle class—

Clemons: But people get that. They see you and they don’t see it from many others.

Biden: But I am more optimistic about her chances, in large part because of him [Trump]. But the truth is, and she says she’s no Bill Clinton, she’s not a natural—and sometimes paranoia is justified, you know? She has been so battered for so long. But you understand my advice to Hillary to open up, to show your soul a little more, show your vulnerability. I could understand why, given her experiences, after 40 years of what she’s been through, that’s a hard thing to do.

The Biden Doctrine

2016-08-22T12:29:00

Carlos Barria / Reuters

Joe Biden is now the vice president who will not be president. He’s been VP for seven and a half years, preceded by decades of work on U.S. foreign policy in the Senate, but the question remains whether he is distinctive in any memorable way for his work in international affairs. Was he simply a glad-handing flack pushing the Obama agenda, a manic schmoozer of foreign leaders? A gaffe-prone foreign-policy dilettante who, in the long run, won’t matter?

Biden puts some people off. His critics argue that despite his passion for worthy causes—from efforts to stabilize Iraq to the “cancer moonshot” to his task force devoted to “a strong middle class”—his bouts of imprecision and occasional foot-in-mouth foibles get in the way. An adviser to retired General Stanley McChrystal reportedly referred to Biden as “Bite Me.” Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates wrote in his memoir, Duty, that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

That hasn’t been my observation. I have traveled with Biden during his vice presidential tenure to Asia and Europe, watched him interact with foreign leaders abroad and at home, and have had wide-ranging discussions with him since his Senate days on everything from the confirmation battle over John Bolton’s nomination as U.N. ambassador to how the U.S. should approach its challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan. I haven’t always agreed with Biden’s positions, but those positions have tended to follow a pattern and demonstrate a consistency of approach, analysis, and engagement that stands out—particularly when compared with many other foreign-policy players who often don’t leave clear footprints.

The Biden Doctrine, as I’ve seen it emerge and as he described it to me in a recent interview in his White House office, contains some familiar elements. He can sound like a realist in the mold of George H.W. Bush’s national security advisor Brent Scowcroft—decisions on whether to deploy America’s “enormous military capability,” he said in the interview, should depend on assessments of “(a) what is the strategic interest? And (b) what are the second, third, and fourth steps in this process?” His contention to me that “you do not commit force unless you can demonstrate that the use of that force is sustainable and will produce an outcome” sounds nearly identical to the views President Barack Obama expressed to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic article “The Obama Doctrine.” So does his insistence that the U.S. has to “engage because the world has changed,” but that this has to involve “sharing responsibility, sharing intelligence, and allocating force on targets so we’re not the only game in town.”

Yet what makes his approach distinctive is that he may very well be the nation’s first “personality realist.” Unlike Obama—whose relationships with world leaders from Japan’s Shinzo Abe to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu are famously chilly—Biden says of his doctrine that “it all gets down to the conduct of foreign policy being personal. ... All [foreign policy] is, is a logical extension of personal relationships, with a lot less information to act on.”

It’s not as easy to discern as clear a framework for decisionmaking from the former secretary of state, and current Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. She may well have a doctrine, but what we know so far of her broad choices in foreign policy don’t yet add up to a set of replicable practices. As secretary of state, for example, Clinton pushed “digital diplomacy” and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, a kind of counterpart to the military’s own quadrennial review, this one aimed at evaluating the civilian elements of foreign policy. She pushed women’s rights, global poverty fixes, and economic development as strategic interests—but it’s not clear she consolidated these as American foreign-policy priorities during her time in the Obama administration.

As for national security, some, including this writer, have criticized Clinton for having her clutch stuck on “intervention,” and indeed this does appear to be the key pattern in Clinton’s approach. She supported the U.S. surge of forces into Afghanistan in 2009, at a time when Biden opposed it. In 2011, she supported both America’s Libya intervention and the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. But there are standout moments at odds with this tendency—such as buying into negotiations with Iran and cautioning against pushing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak out of office too abruptly in 2011—where she favored restraint.

In contrast, Biden’s approach has been definitive enough, particularly in approaching leaders, to hold clear lessons for future foreign-policy practitioners—including presidents such as, possibly, Hillary Clinton herself.

When I asked Biden recently to define for me what he thought the “Biden Doctrine” was, he opened in a Bidenesque way: “My dad used to say to me, ‘Champ, if everything is equally important to you, nothing is important to you.’ So the hardest thing to do, I’ve found in 44 years, is to prioritize what really are the most consequential threats and concerns, and allocate resources relative to the nature of the threat.” Americans, he said, tend to over-respond to the “wolf at the door” without recognizing that there are other wolves out in the field.

The “wolves in the field,” then—the real existential threats facing the nation—he sees not as terrorism, even from ISIS, but rather the prospect of “loose nukes, and unintended nuclear conflict that erupts with another nuclear power” like Russia or China. Other big threats include “that not-stable figure in North Korea,” Kim Jong Un, and Pakistan, which, he reminded me, he dubbed the “most dangerous nation in the world” nine years ago.

“Terrorism is a real threat,” Biden said, “but it’s not an existential threat to the existence of the democratic country of the United States of America. Terrorism can cause real problems. It can undermine confidence. It can kill relatively large numbers of people. But terrorism is not an existential threat.” If Biden were running for the presidency, this piece of the Biden Doctrine—what he calls “proportionality”—would no doubt be red meat for many who place terrorism at the heart of America’s challenges today.

The other striking element of the Biden doctrine is the degree to which it depends on establishing personal relationships. I had seen Biden take his granddaughter Finnegan to China to help break open new terrain with the new Chinese leader when Xi Jinping first took office, and do the same with his granddaughter Naomi* in meetings last January with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He told me in the interview that in conducting foreign policy, “You’ve got to figure out what is the other guy’s [leader’s] bandwidth. ... You have to figure out what is realistically possible ... so that you can begin to make more informed judgments about what they are likely to do or what you can likely get them to agree not to do.”

He recounted an array of encounters with some of the world’s most controversial leaders. He said that despite the in-the-gutter relationship between Israel and the U.S. today, Netanyahu had enough trust in the vice president to ask him to help normalize his country’s relations with Turkey, which had ruptured in 2010. Biden took the mission, mediating between Netanyahu and Erdogan—himself not an uncomplicated leader. And it worked. The two countries signed a deal to normalize relations this summer. Netanyahu called the vice president thanking him for his role in making their rapprochement—and a potential natural-gas deal between the two countries—work. Biden has tried to effect similar reconciliations between South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—who at one summit of Asian leaders in 2013 spent less than 30 seconds on stage together and refused to speak with one another. Since then, the two have met several times in efforts to mend ties. Abe has visited South Korea, and Park has just announced plans to visit Japan in November. Biden gets the assist. The vice president has also spent more time hand-holding Iraq’s leaders, most recently on an hour-long call with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi after a horrific bombing in Baghdad this summer, than any other member of the administration.

But Biden is not just glad-handing; he’s testing the waters for what is possible—and pushing leaders to do what he sees as both in the U.S. and their own nations’ interests. He described, for example, a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko—whom he calls “Petro”—in which he urged Poroshenko to fire a corrupt prosecutor general or see the withdrawal of a promised $1 billion loan to Ukraine. “‘Petro, you’re not getting your billion dollars,’” Biden recalled telling him. “‘It’s OK, you can keep the [prosecutor] general. Just understand—we’re not paying if you do.’” Poroshenko fired the official.

This personal element is, perhaps, why Biden is regularly handed the lemons in the foreign-policy sphere—the tough, unglamorous cases, the ones that have to be worked for a long time. It’s worth noting, as Goldberg has, that there are leaders Obama never really warmed up to. Biden tends these relationships. “It makes sense to give me the problems that require husbandry every day,” Biden said. “So I get Ukraine. I get Iraq. I get the relationship between Korea and Japan. I get Central America. I get Colombia. I mean—it makes sense—because he knows—the guy [Obama] is really good—he knows it’s a matter of how you broach some of these.” Whereas the former Iraqi Ambassador to the United States has said, and White House readouts of calls with foreign leaders confirm, that Obama didn’t speak to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for more than two years (with the exception of one brief White House visit), Biden was a frequent, consistent interlocutor. He continues to be the primary interlocutor with Abadi and many of the notables in the Iraqi political scene. On the Asia front, he’s in regular contact with Japan’s Abe about not only Korea but also the growing challenge from China. When the child migration crisis flared on the southern border of the U.S. in 2014, Biden said, Obama told him, partly in jest: “‘Look, you do the hemisphere. ... You make friends easy, and it’s in the same time zone. You can do it on weekends.’” Biden recalled replying, “‘It’s not the same time zone.’”

If Obama has always seemed more of a Russian Blue cat—smart but indifferent to other talent in the room—Biden would be the golden retriever of the administration. But the sense of White House players that I have spoken to is that Biden frequently “makes space for things to happen”—and his personal connections with leaders, and the trust that key administration personnel have in him, opens up possibilities that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

The Biden Doctrine, then, has four key components. 1) Don’t use force unless it counts and is sustainable. 2) Shore up and strengthen alliances—and build common cause on common projects with other global stakeholders. The world is changing and fragile and America can’t do all that needs to be done alone. 3) Have a sense of perspective, and think about proportional responses to threats—terrorism is not existential but nuclear exchanges are. 4) Relationships and the personal side of foreign-policy making—with allies and with enemies—is a key part of successful foreign-policy execution. It’s this fourth dimension of “personality realism” that represents the vice president’s biggest contribution, and the element perhaps most difficult for future leaders to mimic, though they would be wise to.

In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, Biden offered a kind of summary of all he feels the Obama/Biden team has accomplished on the international front, as well as a bit of counsel to the next president. “The next administration,” he wrote, will have to contend with “uniting the Western Hemisphere, deepening our alliances and partnerships in Asia, managing complex relationships with regional powers, and addressing severe transnational challenges such as climate change and terrorism.”

That administration could very well be led by Hillary Clinton, who, Biden told me, has never been shy about asking for his input when she felt she needed it. It’s possible that some of Biden’s guiding precepts could continue to shape American foreign policy. “I’ll do anything she wants,” he said. Except maybe one thing: “I’m not going back in administration.”

* This article originally referred to Joe Biden’s granddaughter as Nicole. We regret the error.

What Is America’s Proper Place in the Global Economy?

2016-04-12T16:03:51

A statue of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, in front of the Treasury Department in Washington Evan Vucci / AP

What would “a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence, impoverished, in squalor … the 10-dollar Founding Father without a father” think about Bernie? About Trump? About manufacturing vs. finance, main street vs. Wall Street? About China?

Alexander Hamilton, America’s first treasury secretary and now the protagonist of an insanely popular Broadway musical, remains an embodiment of the tensions characterizing the American political debate some 240 years after the events depicted in Hamilton. He is somehow, simultaneously, patron saint both to American protectionists and Wall Street financiers. His plan to invest in and protect American manufacturing in its infancy arguably helped the U.S. become the industrial giant that gave the eventual global superpower its backbone. At the birth of the nation, Hamilton also helped institute trading in credit and debt, and helped establish capital markets as the lynchpin of America’s eventual dominance of the global economy.

But today and throughout America’s history, there has been a palpable ambivalence about the country’s global engagement, whether military, diplomatic, or economic. As America’s current treasury secretary, Jacob Lew, wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, this ambivalence is evident “from George Washington’s Farewell Address [written, incidentally, with an assist from Hamilton], to the Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations after World War I, to the initial reluctance of the United States to enter World War II, and to the difficult process of winning congressional support for the postwar economic system itself.”

In the economic realm, there is clearly a tension between what many Americans feel they are getting from the international system—or better yet, not getting—and commitments to free trade and institutions like the International Monetary Fund. An awful lot of Americans in both political parties are frustrated that they are getting gut-punched, not helped up, by such commitments. And American candidates across the spectrum reflect this feeling; modern populists like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders tend to portray trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a massive, multi-country agreement shepherded by the Obama administration—as gutting the muscle and heart out of America. Hillary Clinton, too, has opposed it.

The political pendulum is swinging toward protectionist Hamilton and away from high-finance Hamilton; in a recent interview with me, Lew, who now occupies the office of the 10-dollar Founding Father, was evidently concerned. (We also briefly discussed the vexed issue of Lew’s planned currency redesign—the secretary has assured Hamilton creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda that the founder will keep some role on the bill, though a woman is likely to take starring spot on the 10’s face.) Lew’s Foreign Affairs article advocates for continued American leadership in the global economy. “History has shown,” he writes, “that U.S. economic leadership is vital to the well-being of American workers and families, as well as to the ability of the United States to project its values and achieve its larger foreign policy objectives. ... International economic cooperation has delivered benefits to the United States and other countries that would have been impossible to attain otherwise.”

Yet he acknowledges that making this case is “not always easy.” To take just one example: It took five years of debate and disaffection in Congress to approve reforms to the IMF that the Obama administration helped negotiate in 2010. Those reforms, which aim to bolster the IMF’s resources to deal with financial crises and to increase the voting shares of developing countries like China, Brazil, and India, in Lew’s words “illustrated a distinctive feature of how the United States has exercised economic leadership by expanding the number of nations with an ever-greater stake in the success of a rules based global system that benefits all.”

Here are highlights from our conversation, which has been edited for clarity and condensed for length.

Steve Clemons: If there was no IMF during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, what would it matter?

Jacob Lew: If we didn’t have these institutions that we now take for granted and we had a moment of crisis, you’d have to create them as a place to talk to each other. [Former Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan once asked me, why do you do all the meetings you do? Is it because of the communiqués? Is it because of the specifics? It’s [so that] at a moment of crisis, you all know each other. So leaving aside the money that is moving through these institutions, do you or don’t you have the relationships to put together a solution? The human piece of this matters. The bilateral and multilateral diplomatic piece of this matters.

Now, there is a lot of money too. In a financial crisis, you need to stack up money in the window, because that will stop a run on the banks [if people feel their deposits are covered]. Well, the IMF is the international stack of money in the window.

Clemons: China’s proportion of [voting] shares went up [under the recent reform], surpassing and irritating Japan, but some tell me that the tug-of-war is really between the U.S. and Europe in the IMF?

Lew: If you want to just look at whose shares moved, Europe, not the United States, gave up quota [of required contributions to the institution] to emerging economies, because the United States [remains a] powerful economy, and Europe has not been as much so.

But I think everybody understands. Do you want the emerging countries—China’s obviously the biggest but it’s not the only one—do you want to have China, India, Brazil feeling a deep connection to the rules-based system and the values-driven system that we’ve built up? Or do you want them feeling like they’ve got to go out to other places to express themselves? You want them at the table. That’s your way to project the things that you value and you believe in for the next century. We can’t pretend we’re in the post-World War II world, when the only source of hard currency and the only source of manufactured goods was the United States.

Clemons: In your article, you mentioned a lot of significant international achievements by the Obama administration—the climate deal, the Iran negotiation, Trade Promotion Authority, reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank, signing TPP, and more. Are you worried that these measures didn’t pass with full-throated bipartisan support?

Lew: The Washington Farewell Address is real—resisting foreign entanglement is a pretty basic American creed. We’ve seen on the military side an exhaustion with the amount and sustained nature of military engagement in recent years. We’re seeing the economic tools more and more are being turned to as ways to project our policy objective internationally. So I talk about sanctions, about the need to pull countries together so you can work to get an Iran deal, so you can put that kind of crushing pressure on Iran’s economy, which is why they came to the table [to negotiate over their nuclear program].

The fact that China worked with us in the UN on the North Korea sanctions is huge. The North Korean people would starve if they weren’t getting food from China. It is a much more fundamental economic relationship than any they have in the world. So if China really implements, it gives you the ability to be effective when otherwise, we all have such minimal contact, it’s not that effective.

Clemons: Many Americans feel that the quid pro quo—of them sacrificing and serving as the world’s ultimate security guarantor and global cop, and having in return better jobs and economic conditions—feels broken. This is in part what is driving some of the support for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Are they wrong?

Lew: Certainly the political environment is not one today that’s hospitable to a lot of the basic ideas that I’m describing. It’s why I think TPP is so good and so important, because it’s yet another way of protecting our values. That’s certainly not the way it’s being approached in the political arena this year. I think we have to continue to make the case for why these things matter.

I don’t find it hard to understand how eight years after the worst recession since the Great Depression there is an unusually high level of anxiety and anger in the American population. The fact that we’ve created 14.5 million new jobs, the fact that we have a sustained recovery that’s better than [that of] any of the other industrialized countries, the fact that consumer demand remains very strong, should suggest people would feel better. Why don’t they? You can say it’s because other people stole our jobs through trade agreements, and people respond to that. I don’t know if that’s really the explanation, but it’s certainly not the answer to the future. Because in the future, the growing markets are not here. Population growth and growth of the middle class is in all these other markets we want to be part of.

Look at the Great Recession. Think about people our age. I would have been 50, 52 when the economy went south. If you lost your job and you were 50 years old and you couldn’t find the right next job for a couple years, you’re probably a step down from where you were.

Now think about somebody who graduated high school or college during the recession. They didn’t get work right away. They saw other kids coming out after them getting started before them. They’re trying to catch up. And we know it’s really hard to catch up. So there are things coming out of the recession that are contributory factors. I would think that there are answers that are much more constructive than a lot of what we’re hearing in the debate this year. But it’s not hard to understand why there is uneasiness out there.

Clemons: One of the interesting things about your essay to me is that it argues for U.S. leadership in the global economy—but not from the traditional stance of many of your predecessors, that is, from a neoliberal economic frame [which promotes unfettered free trade, no constraints on capital movements, and is uber laissez-faire]. Does an ad hoc approach make it harder for the U.S. to lead? What is your North Star in all this?

Lew: I wouldn’t put the label neoliberal or neoconservative on it. I do try to be pragmatic. I feel perfectly comfortable adopting some things and challenging others. In the 21st century, the world needs the United States to be a North Star. The world wants us to be the North Star. I really do believe that. I am amazed at how other countries want to hear our advice and what we think makes sense. Sometimes we may have the habit of lecturing too much. We have to be careful not to do that. But I’ve had prime ministers from other countries thank me for having helped influence decisions and [creating] a policy environment where they can do what they needed to do. There is no other country in the world that has the ability, in that way, to do that.

Clemons: You warn U.S. policymakers not to take U.S. dominance of the global economy for granted, not to take the reserve currency status of the dollar for granted. What would happen if they do take these things for granted?

Lew: I don’t think that there is any other currency that could replace the dollar right now. But it is not a static world. If countries do what they should do—if China goes through its reforms and emerges as a healthy economy; if Japan gets its act together after decades of very bad performance; and if Europe gets over this demographic hump—you can’t assume the world 20 or 30 years from now will be where it is today.

Putting in place U.S. policies that we require other countries to participate in is just something we have to be very careful about. If we are doing sanctions together, then it’s a powerful tool that can have great effect. If you start to use sanctions where some of the world but not most of it agrees with us, it gets harder and harder. A reality is there are other banking sectors in the world—you could see slow migration of economic activity to places [that] don’t touch the U.S. financial system, and we shouldn’t want that. We shouldn’t want that economically, because it’s a source of economic strength. We shouldn’t want it in terms of our leadership role, because the enormous power we have because our economy is the dominant economy that everyone touches, gives us the ability to use these tools. So it just behooves us to be judicious.

I would never say we should swear off the right to independent action. We have to reserve the right to act independently to protect [the] U.S. interest. But it should be a rare occurrence. For years I’ve sat in meetings in the [Situation] Room, where the military always put out in very clear terms the cost, both in dollars and casualties, [of] what happens if you use force. People who advocate using sanctions have to treat them as powerful tools that have real costs as well as benefits. And using them judiciously, treating them with the respect they deserve, doesn’t mean not using them. Just like it doesn’t mean not using force. But we don’t escalate to the highest level of force hardly ever.

Clemons: I don’t know if you may have read Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic piece on the Obama doctrine—

Lew: I skimmed it. I didn’t read it word for word. It’s sitting right over there.

Clemons: Well, what Goldberg surfaces is the president’s realist take on a lot of international issues, careful cost-benefit analysis before engagement, and a critique of free-riding allies who the president feels need to invest and commit more in international matters than they are doing. Thoughts?

Lew: The president and I tend to be very like-minded on the realist approach. If you look at something like Ukraine, in putting together support for [the government there following the country’s 2014 revolution]. The anchor was an IMF program [of $17 billion in urgent support]. It also needed to work with the Europeans [to] put in a significant amount, because [Europe] was right there. But then we went around the world, and we got countries that don’t have immediate exposure to Ukraine or Russia, [including] Canada and Japan. We put together a global effort so that with our loan guarantees, the IMF package, European support and contributions from other countries around the world, we actually helped Ukraine.

I think it gets harder and harder because everyone is feeling fiscal constraints. But I think we have a very powerful ability to cross that moral threshold, where countries know they should [contribute], and then it becomes a budget question of how much you can get them to do. Could we have put together a $25 billion package, or $20 billion [for Ukraine]? We couldn’t. But you put it all together, and it’s the world telling Russia that Ukraine will have a long enough runway to get back on its feet. That’s geopolitically of great significance.

Clemons: Many wonder whether as China grows, particularly in international institutions, whether it will adopt our norms and values or will just fake it until they are in more of a controlling position.

Lew: I think that we have to recognize there are going to be areas where we have overlapping interests; there are areas where [we’re] going to have differences. We’re going to have to make progress in the space where we agree, but [we also have to] put down really hard markers, whether it’s over [the] South China Sea or cyber theft—we can’t just gloss over those issues.

One of the things I have found in my engagements with the Chinese is that they respect the directness of that. It’s not on its face offensive to say, “You do these things that we find unacceptable.” We shouldn’t kid ourselves that just by saying it they will change. We are pulling them along as a global community to a better place. [China’s current economic transition] is one of the hardest economic transitions that any country has ever undertaken; [it’s] one of the biggest economies in the history of the world shifting from a centrally controlled, non-market, top-down structure to something that is more market-driven.

The question is not whether they intellectually understand the importance of that transition. They all understand what they need to do. Are they prepared to live with the bumps that come with making that transition? They are not small bumps. You dislocate millions of people from their manufacturing jobs. You either reposition them in different jobs in different places or provide some support because they are no longer working. Those are huge things to do.

They say the right things, but the proof of pudding is in the eating, and it’s hard. I don’t say that in a condescending way at all. If you asked me to relocate 1.5 million American workers, that would be very hard. But they have no choice because of where their economy was, and where it has to go.

They value the relationship with us. You know this whole communication thing, it’s not natural to them. Being open and transparent is new to them. They don’t intuitively know when they need to communicate. When I get on the phone with some of my counterparts and say, “You can’t surprise the world by doing something like this,” they try actually to do better going forward. But you can see from the way they have moved in the last few months that the learning curve is steep.

Where Does Hillary Clinton Stand on China and Russia?

2015-04-14T14:10:59

Hillary Clinton in Hong Kong Tyrone Siu/Reuters

In a recent Bloomberg View column on the policy positions Hillary Clinton will likely take in the 2016 presidential campaign, the veteran political chronicler Al Hunt included a head-scratcher of a passage on international affairs:

On foreign policy, she’ll take a tough line on Russia; President Vladimir Putin and the Clintons show a reciprocal animosity. She’ll call for more engagement with China and, to the consternation of labor supporters, she will back trade deals, but with some conditions.

I tend to cringe when relations are boiled down so casually with major powers like Russia, which currently boasts an arsenal of 7,500 nuclear warheads, and China, now a $10-trillion economy with attitude. Both countries are permanent members of the UN Security Council. Both are partners with the United States and other nations in nuclear negotiations with Iran. Both are rivals and competitors in other spheres.

But to say that Hillary will essentially engage positively with China and negatively with Russia is to let her off too easy. Washington has a deep strategic interest in the course and behavior of Beijing and Moscow. It's critical to understand beyond the binary on-off switch how Hillary perceives these powers and America's long-term posture toward them.

In the case of China, Hillary used to be dead set against cooperating with China because of its human-rights record, suggesting in 2008, for example, that then-President George W. Bush boycott the Beijing Olympics because of China's intransigence on Darfur and Tibet. I argued at the time that Clinton's position was highly unpresidential given the dilemmas the world faced on climate-change policy, WMD proliferation, global economic growth, and more. On all these issues, China was and is a vital, necessary partner. Her position, had she won the 2008 election, would only have offended the Chinese and raised the price of Beijing's cooperation—and not solved the conflicts in Tibet or Darfur. One of the major journeys that Hillary made as Barack Obama's secretary of state was moving from China-basher to China-embracer, in line with the president's "pivot to Asia."

The question that matters today is which view of China Hillary holds. Or has she evolved beyond a good-bad frame to now see China in many shades of gray?

On Russia, the Obama administration is currently developing a national-security strategy that mixes pressure with engagement. The president's team knows that without Russia, it will be virtually impossible to achieve a new equilibrium in Syria (even with Moscow's support, realizing this goal will prove an extraordinarily tough challenge). As one of the world powers negotiating with Iran, Russia is also crucial to securing a nuclear deal with Tehran. And yet the administration is also intent on stopping Russia from further destabilizing Ukraine and spreading its national-dissection campaign from Ukraine to, say, Moldova and the Baltics. Doing so requires more than platitudes about international norms and on-the-cheap arms provisions. It probably requires a comprehensive plan to squeeze Russia in areas that it cares about at home and elsewhere in the world.

Does Hillary get that? Saying that she will "take a tough line on Russia" gives little sense of whether Hillary understands the array of costs and benefits that arise when dealing with a complex, nuclear-armed power that America cannot ignore and occasionally needs on its side—whether it wants to admit so or not.

The Anguish of Saving Endangered Scholars

2014-10-12T11:14:01

A sketch of the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, a beneficiary of the Rockefeller Foundation's scholar-refugee program Wikimedia Commons

Over the last three and a half years, the Syrian conflict hasn’t just killed nearly 200,000 people, displaced almost 10 million others, and destabilized an entire region. It’s also robbed the country of its intellectual capital. Two-thirds of Syrian refugee children are out of school. Seventy percent of Syria’s medical professionals have fled the country. A nation deeply scarred by civil war has lost all nine of its psychiatrists.

More than eight decades ago, the Rockefeller Foundation set about addressing this very challenge—only then it was intellectuals fleeing war and fascist governments in Europe. The institution, which was devoted to promoting public health, did something that institutions rarely do: It took a big risk, getting into the business of saving scholars. Between 1933 and 1945, the organization spent $1.5 million through a series of programs to subsidize teaching positions for more than 300 academics at schools in the United States and Europe, including many appointments at New York’s New School for Social Research. The scholars, over 60 percent of whom were German, worked in the humanities and social, natural, and medical sciences.

Recently, I interviewed Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin and visited the Rockefeller Foundation’s archives—located outside New York City in one of the Rockefeller family’s former estates, in Pocantico Hills—as part of a larger investigation into institutional risk-taking. (A disclosure: In the two years since I began my research in the archives and interviews with Rodin, The Atlantic and Atlantic Media have received support from the Rockefeller Foundation for journalistic work on cities and a number of Atlantic Live events on urban and social-system resilience. My discussions predate and are independent of these partnerships.)

What I discovered in the Foundation’s archives were fascinating, consequential debates about intellectual life under the Nazis—heart-wrenching correspondence about the state of European universities at a time when Adolf Hitler was beginning to wage war against both independent thought and Jewish academics. The gravity of this campaign wasn’t initially apparent to the Foundation, whose public-health program officers in Europe spent the early 1930s cabling assessments to headquarters of political conditions in the region as Hitler rose to power. (In fact, the Rockefeller Foundation funded German eugenics research prior to World War II, helping support the intellectual ecosystem from which the notorious Nazi physician Josef Mengele emerged.)

Eventually, the organization’s president and trustees concluded that something had to be done to rescue Europe’s top minds. But deciding who to save also meant deciding who not to. Internal memos between Foundation staff in Europe and New York anguished over whether to act or not, whether doing so would endanger the institution, and whether the organization was equipped to engage in such efforts.

One of the surprises for me was the active role that Joseph Schumpeter, the Harvard innovation and economic theorist, played in pushing the Foundation to aid academics. He suggested names of scholars to assist throughout the 1930s. At the same time, however, he expressed the uncertainties of the day about what Hitler’s rise meant and how to contextualize it. Schumpeter went so far as to say he was “prepared to forgive [Hitler] much” in a May 2, 1933 letter to Edmund Day, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s social-science division:

[T]he case of Stolper and Merschak who are really exceptional men, might be taken up separately and merely on their merits as economists in which case nothing in the way of an unfriendly act towards the German government would be implied which indeed I should not approve of myself. I know something of the government which preceded Hitler’s and I can only say that I am quite prepared to forgive him much by virtue of comparison...

In July 1940, Thomas Appleget, the Foundation’s vice president, objected to a full-fledged operation on behalf of refugee-scholars, suggesting that the Foundation fund the Institute of International Education to do the work instead. He worried about the “inevitable confusion” that would arise “between the hardboiled desire to save intellect and the humanitarian desire to save lives”—foreshadowing later concerns among Foundation staff that the refugee-scholar program was morphing into a large-scale relief effort. In a memo in which he clearly struggled with the life-and-death realities of scholar-selection, Appleget wrote:

The more I think of the refugee scholar situation, the more I think that the problem is one in which the Foundation should not operate directly. We cannot use the principals [sic] of limitation which control our actions in the case of fellowship awards or aid to deposed scholars. Because we are supposed to have unlimited resources, every grant we would make for an outstanding scholar would bring increasing requests from others who are not outstanding. Incidentally, I am not sure that those who now clamor for our aid in order to leave their native lands are—in many cases—those who most deserve help. There would be inevitable confusion between the hardboiled desire to save intellect and the humanitarian desire to save lives. And this would be complicated by the fact that, because of our aid to institutions and our fellowship programs, we have thousands of friends among the scholars of Europe. To select a few of these for aid and refuse the rest would cause widespread disappointment and bitterness in an area where we want goodwill. In view of all these factors, I suggest that the Foundation take no direct action for refugee scholars.

That same summer, Joseph Willits, the Foundation’s social-sciences director, penned a prescient assessment of the situation in a memo entitled “If Hitler wins—.” A sweeping Nazi victory, he predicted, would have a devastating effect on civil society in Europe. “Great Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, will almost certainly cease to offer the kind of milieu in which social science research can flourish,” he wrote. The Foundation’s ad-hoc approach to helping scholars was not effective, he continued. “I would do this cold-bloodedly on the assumption that Nazi domination of these countries makes them a poor place for a first-class person to remain in. And on the further assumption that the Foundation could make no finer contribution to our culture than to bring over, say, 100 of the best minds from Great Britain, 75 from France, and smaller numbers from the other countries.” Willits’s arguments largely prevailed within the Foundation.

Ultimately, the Foundation settled on five criteria for choosing which scholars to support. The academics, the organization reasoned, must:

1. Be outstanding in their field

2. Be in their productive years

3. Have lost their position and generally be considered to be in some danger, whether for religious, racial, or political reasons

4. Hold the promise of improving existing scholarship in American universities

5. Have an assurance of a teaching position for at least two years—this visa requirement also benefitted the Foundation’s financial interests, as scholars without long-term positions would require additional resources.

Marc Bloch was one of those singled out for saving. He was both a French patriot, having fought in World War I, and one of the world’s leading economic historians, teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris. On October 31, 1940, Bloch cryptically appealed for help to a Professor Leland, who was involved in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Emergency Program for European Scholars:

Since I wrote you, I had a letter from Professor Earl J. Hamilton, who told me that the Rockefeller Foundation thought of inviting me to come to the U.S., and I have been in touch with my government. I have every reason to suppose they would allow me to accept an invitation from an American institution. But it is, I think, very important that the invitation should come as soon as possible. Though I cannot give you all the particulars, I may say that it would make everything easier for me, here. Moreover the events in Europe are moving, as you know, at a very quick pace and there is always the possibility that new obstacles to travelling may spring up. I should hate to seem troublesome or fidgety.

At the end of the letter, he added, “My mother, who is marvellously young for her age, does not want to leave us. I hope it would be possible for her to come with my children, my wife and me.”

But Bloch, who was Jewish, never made it to the United States. He was accepted into the Foundation’s program and visas were secured in April 1941 for him, his wife, and four of their six children. He was told that visas for the two eldest boys would arrive in June, but Bloch refused to leave them in France in the interim. By July, the French government had issued a decree that forbade males between the ages of 18 and 40 from leaving Paris. Bloch remained in France, joining the resistance. In June 1944, the Nazis captured Bloch and executed him with shots to the head, before tossing him in an unmarked mass grave in Lyon, France.

The Rockefeller Foundation managed to save a number of eminent scholars, including Henri Bonnet, Henri Gregoire, Claude Levi-Strauss, Otto Meyerhof, Charles Oberling, and Ludwig Von Mises. The group included six Nobel Prize laureates and six future Nobel Prize winners. But many more, like Marc Bloch, went unsaved, some as a result of the Foundation’s selective criteria. How many future Nobel laureates—how many intellectual lights—are now being swallowed up by the darkness of Syria’s civil war? And what’s the best way to save them?

How Institutions Take Risks

2014-10-12T11:13:54

Wikipedia

As Adolf Hitler harassed, isolated, and murdered many of Europe's greatest scientists, philosophers, and thinkers, the Rockefeller Foundation pivoted from its core public-health work to the heart-wrenching and perilous business of saving scholars who were seeking refuge from the Nazis.

In light of this episode and others, I decided to explore the Rockefeller Foundation's archives and interview its current president, Judith Rodin, to learn more about philanthropies, risk, and the links between risk-taking today and during the Nazi era. (In the period since my interview with Rodin, The Atlantic and Atlantic Media have received support from the Rockefeller Foundation for journalistic work on cities and a number of Atlantic Live events on urban and social-system resilience. My discussion with Rodin predates and is independent of these partnerships.)

The following interview examines the refugee-scholars program of the 1930s and early 1940s; Rodin's efforts at the University of Pennsylvania to invest endowment resources in West Philadelphia; her work in developing the field of impact investing; and her big bet at the Rockefeller Foundation on urban resilience. The interview has been edited and condensed.

Steve Clemons: I’d like to talk about how institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation make decisions and take risks, and about the work of your philanthropy from inception to today—how Rockefeller started with global public-health questions nearly a century ago and today is working on city resilience and revaluing ecosystems.

Was public health an obvious choice in its time? Are your huge investments today in building a global network concerned with urban resilience an obvious choice? I’m interested in understanding how leaders and institutions decide to break new ground. There are reputational risks, institutional risks—and some efforts can fail. I am wondering if you can reflect as a leader on how you make these decisions and how they were informed by the past.

Judith Rodin: I think philanthropy is very privileged because it really is America’s risk capital. If we don’t take risks, then we aren’t performing in the way the public deserves. These are tax-advantaged dollars designed to take smart risks, not foolish risks.

And so philanthropy that does best, and as I have looked over the last 100 years at what we have done best, we have taken a lot of risks. You mention the field of public health, and what [the Rockefeller Foundation was] looking at the time was curing hookworm—and they had a separate program on ‘Negro literacy in the South,’ as they called it—and they realized when they were doing both that maybe hookworm and illiteracy were interconnected.

So out of that developed massive education programs—promoting wearing shoes, indoor plumbing, and the like. It was risky at the time to work on ‘Negro literacy’—pre-civil rights, there were many forces in the South who didn’t want ‘Negroes educated,’ who wanted to keep them illiterate, many forces who wanted to see them die of hookworm. So moving that forward and then recognizing that in this new field of public heath—sanitation, the sciences, not only medicine—[the Rockefeller Foundation] caused a transformation and revolution in almost all that we know about prevention today.

Clemons: How did the Rockefeller family and their foundation decide to take risks on China [100 years ago]?

Rodin: We are credited with bringing Western medicine to China. So why were they doing this? I think three things. First of all, the Rockefellers had their eye on the world. At a time in the early 1900s, who was thinking of the wider world? They were always fascinated by and committed to the big world out there. So they weren’t only focused on problems here, and you can see a debate between Carnegie and Rockefeller in their letters between each other as they are both setting up their foundations—Carnegie really wanting to focus on domestic problems and Rockefeller arguing that the way to solve America’s problems was to focus on the world’s problems, but that you had to focus on a lot of these individual populations initially.

Second, I think that they really thought deeply about the difference between charity and philanthropy. And so they wanted to solve problems at their root cause, and even today we are trying to tip systems, we are looking at root causes ...

Clemons: And that has been true from the beginning? Have there been flops?

Rodin: There have been loads of flops.

Sometimes the flops were not recognizing that we should have gotten out of something sooner. Certainly the [German] eugenics program in which we were heavily investing for a long time was one we should have gotten out of—and [they] were not looking at the results or reading the tea leaves properly. But they focused on philanthropy rather than charity and that was a root-cause issue.

And the third thing, and the thing that resonates for me most and the reason why I took the job as president of the Foundation—they called it 'scientific philanthropy' at the time but they recognized that in order to really be able to take risks, to take big bets, you had to measure along the way and you have to be willing to change based on feedback and results. This work isn’t like running controlled double-blind clinical trials, because of the recognition that you need to know in real time what is and what isn’t working, and change things, and fix things, and remodel. It is critical to really being effective and producing pretty extraordinary outcomes. They saw this early, and I have known through my career, and I’m an empirical social scientist by training, that unless you measure, monitor, diagnose, and then change in real time, you are never going to have big outcomes and you’re going to waste a lot of money. That is the problem with our federal government programs.

Clemons: Is what you are doing today and the risks you are taking tied back to your experiences in risk and social investment [as president of the University of Pennsylvania]?

Rodin: There’s an important link. In my inaugural address at Penn, I talked about the West Philadelphia neighborhoods and the power of universities—that we had to move down from the ivory tower into the streets. I think recognizing the enormous power to do good requires engaging all the stakeholders, planning all together, not what you are doing to people, but rather what you are doing with them. Many university presidents were hunkered down, building walls. Every renovation we did—we did enormous construction then—we opened all the windows to the streets. We opened several campus streets to the broader streets.

Clemons: So what was the secret sauce of this? What led you to decide that investing in what was then a fairly rotten part of Philadelphia was something you should do?

Rodin: We couldn’t get anyone to invest in West Philadelphia at the beginning. We took money out of the endowment and made some of those early investments.

Many of the faculty screamed because they believed we should be investing in the English Department, and they were right. But this was a set of calculated tradeoffs in which we were convinced, and ultimately convinced our faculty colleagues, that (a) we had to do something different in the interests of the model of educating our children; (b) we weren’t going to be able to hunker down very long—someone was murdered out in the community my second month as president. So we had to fundamentally change the model without more police, and it wasn’t about busing our students around at night. The streets were totally empty at night because we were busing our students everywhere.

We developed small- and medium-sized businesses in the community. [We undertook] housing development [and] retail development, and we built a public school and said it is not a charter school, not for faculty kids, the opposite of what Columbia did at the time. You had to live in the neighborhood to have your kid go to the school, and we spent $1,000 a pupil for the first 10 years—and it became the highest-performing school in Philadelphia, and the third highest-performing school in Pennsylvania. But now it’s on its own, and it’s doing incredibly well.

Right now Penn invests no more money in West Philadelphia. Private developers are in there. Schools are built by the school board. It’s sustainable. But you have to ask yourself how. Rockefeller does not enter an area without having a defined and board-approved model for what our exit strategy is—because it forces us at our design stage to think about sustainability, which I don’t think many foundations do.

Clemons: So, with your 100 Cities Initiative [the Rockefeller Foundation’s competitive grant to help build cities’ ability to withstand disasters and other shocks], how do you compare what you did at Penn with this? How do you inculcate the desire to run cities differently? Or is that appetite already out there?

Rodin: When we started talking about resilience seven years ago, people would roll their eyes. Nobody actually understood what we meant or why we’d be interested in it. And now, whether it is because of the droughts, or floods, or the economic shocks, or the social shocks and social unrest, people really get the idea that they can’t predict everything. You can’t prevent everything. So how do you build a system or a person that allows you to fail more safely and rebound more quickly, against those shocks and stresses you can’t recover from?

I am struck by how strongly that realization exists in governments. Everyone talks about resilience now. Boston talks about how resilient they were after the marathon bombers. The president talks about resilience. So there isn’t resistance to trying to become more resilient; there is a lack of capacity and skills to get there.

We are going to try a suite of services. First, land use and infrastructure planning, but the other three are less obvious. One is social resilience. There [are] always the social-fabric issues that enhance resilience. We have a big-data partner in Silicon Valley which will actually take the data that cities have and turn it into a prevention and recovery instrument for them. This has never been done before systematically. The [next] is innovative financing. [World Bank President] Jim Kim will be announcing that the World Bank is going to create a tool kit for our cities, and they are going to use it to make cities creditworthy for private financing and create the kind of policies that allow private financing for infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure-bank ideas that we just created in New York, and Rahm Emanuel [created] in Chicago, can be generalized.

We then want the network to proselytize to and teach other cities. So we're hoping to establish a global movement, if you will, around urban resilience.

Clemons: So this swims right along with another interest of yours, which I know you've helped develop, which is impact investing. American philanthropy in Africa, where I know you're also working, to me often feels like the subject of a Sunday school volunteer exercise, in contrast to the more mercantile activities of the Chinese who are going in and deploying infrastructure, constructing dams, and building telecommunication facilities. The Chinese may very well be building and responsible for the middle classes in Africa 20 or 30 years from now.

I have been worried that our philanthropic support and partnering model with Africa is not sustainable. So my perception is impact investing could be a very different approach.

Rodin: Your diagnosis is exactly right. You know, Rockefeller started this field. Impact investing was a high-risk proposition. One of the things that really made this work is that we said our best role is not to invest our money in an impact-investing fund, but rather to build the infrastructure—the scaffolding, the plumbing, if you will, that would make this field take off.

We would hear over and over again, 'I know how to do the financial due diligence. I don't know how to do the social due diligence. So how do I know what social impact looks like? How do you know what a social outcome is?' You move from corporate social responsibility, which was a great thing, to really recognizing that companies can change their own business models in a way that does benefit people. Not every company is going to be able to do this. Not every company has that business model.

Clemons: Let me jump into a different area. I recently traveled to visit the Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Sniffing around, I ran across the Foundation’s refugee scholars' experiences before and during World War II.

I have two questions based on this. What was it like when you first discovered and learned about this extraordinary and complicated effort, both in saving so many scholars, but also reading about the tough choices the Foundation had to make about engaging in this effort at all and, to some degree, having to make hard-edged decisions on who should be saved and who not?

Rodin: I think they struggled because as a Foundation committed to solving problems at their root cause, they were asking themselves [whether] the root cause is Hitler, Nazism, a political climate of despair in which this kind of hatred can grow.

Clemons: But you had assessments from people about all of this in the early 1930s that were avant-garde assessments. If you look at the broad political climate in the U.S., there's no way that their reports from Europe represented conventional thinking in the United States. They were way ahead.

Rodin: Totally way ahead. Now, in retrospect, we might have both tried to pressure the U.S. government more. And in our approach today, we would have done that, as well as tried to save more people. I wish they had done that.

On the other hand, the piece that the Foundation did in the 1930s and early 40s was so extraordinary, Steve, because they were making life-and-death decisions. They came to understand that, again, quite early. This is clear in reading both the diaries of the program officers and the decisions that they made. Many of those saved had an enormous effect on Western society, and even on America's growth. You know, often the interest has focused on how many of these scholars came and worked on the atom bomb—and we all know that story—but there were many other major thought leaders, particularly across the social sciences. Philosophy and psychology and sociology, the best minds, and ...

Clemons: The efforts started out with folks in the public health arena …

Rodin: Because that's who we knew. So it was scientists, primarily in the medical and physical fields, that Rockefeller started with because that's who the Foundation was funding in those days in Western Europe. But very quickly and again, to the credit of our predecessors, they recognized that many others should be saved that had great potential for contributing to society if they were here and survived.

Clemons: Rockefeller had a process where people, nominators basically, sent in lists of who to save. Joseph Schumpeter, the famous economist, was active in nominating people. I think that this hasn’t really been recognized about Schumpeter, at least to my knowledge.

Rodin: I know. I know. And they did it despite it being so very tough. They had to say, 'OK this guy's too old,' you know, 'we're not going to get that much benefit.' So they made age decisions. They made field decisions. They made size-of-family decisions, because they were looking at thousands and thousands of possible refugees to rescue, and they could only save hundreds because they paid for all the family, and they relocated them if they were scientists. They set them up in laboratories.

Sometimes when I'm despairing, I think of who we didn't save, and we have to admit that part of the equation—but it's an amazing thing to look at all who were saved.

Clemons: My final question is: If you were to fast-forward 100 years from now, what risks will you have taken to solve what big deficits that society needed to tackle?

Rodin: Well, we really do think that society does need to tackle resilience. I think we spent our first 100 years looking at root causes because we thought if you look hard enough and you work hard enough, you can solve the world's problems, or at least those that you're trying to address.

And I think in the beginning of our second century, we are recognizing you can't, because the fact of the world globalizing, the complexity, the dynamism, the pace of change means that we can't solve all the problems. So, we've got to help ourselves rebound more effectively while we're trying to solve these things. We don't want to give up, but we've got to build that elasticity or we are moving towards a brittle economy, a brittle society, a brittle ecosystem. Everything's fragile and it's going to snap. And so we've got to try to make our systems less fragile.

'Thank God for the Saudis': ISIS, Iraq, and the Lessons of Blowback

2014-06-23T11:40:06

ISIS fighters at a checkpoint in the northern Iraq city of Mosul Reuters

“Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” John McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends,” the senator said once again a month later, at the Munich Security Conference.

McCain was praising Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services and a former ambassador to the United States, for supporting forces fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham had previously met with Bandar to encourage the Saudis to arm Syrian rebel forces.

But shortly after McCain’s Munich comments, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah relieved Bandar of his Syrian covert-action portfolio, which was then transferred to Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. By mid-April, just two weeks after President Obama met with King Abdullah on March 28, Bandar had also been removed from his position as head of Saudi intelligence—according to official government statements, at “his own request.” Sources close to the royal court told me that, in fact, the king fired Bandar over his handling of the kingdom’s Syria policy and other simmering tensions, after initially refusing to accept Bandar’s offers to resign. (Bandar retains his title as secretary-general of the king’s National Security Council.)

The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the “moderate” armed opposition in the country, receives a lot of attention. But two of the most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the latter of which is now amassing territory in Iraq and threatening to further destabilize the entire region. And that success is in part due to the support they have received from two Persian Gulf countries: Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Qatar’s military and economic largesse has made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra, to the point that a senior Qatari official told me he can identify al-Nusra commanders by the blocks they control in various Syrian cities. But ISIS is another matter. As one senior Qatari official stated, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

ISIS, in fact, may have been a major part of Bandar’s covert-ops strategy in Syria. The Saudi government, for its part, has denied allegations, including claims made by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, that it has directly supported ISIS. But there are also signs that the kingdom recently shifted its assistance—whether direct or indirect—away from extremist factions in Syria and toward more moderate opposition groups.

The United States, France, and Turkey have long sought to support the weak and disorganized FSA, and to secure commitments from Qatar and Saudi Arabia to do the same. When Mohammed bin Nayef took the Syrian file from Bandar in February, the Saudi government appeared to finally be endorsing this strategy. As The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote at the time, “Prince Mohammed’s new oversight role reflects the increasing concern in Saudi Arabia and other neighboring countries about al-Qaeda’s growing power within the Syrian opposition.”

The worry at the time, punctuated by a February meeting between U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice and the intelligence chiefs of Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, and others in the region, was that ISIS and al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra had emerged as the preeminent rebel forces in Syria. The governments who took part reportedly committed to cut off ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, and support the FSA instead. But while official support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia appears to have dried up, non-governmental military and financial support may still be flowing from these countries to Islamist groups.

Senior White House officials have refused to discuss the question of any particular Saudi officials aiding ISIS and have not commented on Bandar’s departure. But they have emphasized that Saudi Arabia is now both supporting moderate Syrian rebels and helping coordinate regional policies to deal with an ascendant ISIS threat.

Like elements of the mujahideen, which benefited from U.S. financial and military support during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and then later turned on the West in the form of al-Qaeda, ISIS achieved scale and consequence through Saudi support, only to now pose a grave threat to the kingdom and the region. It’s this concern about blowback that has motivated Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to encourage restraint in arming Syrian rebels. President Obama has so far heeded these warnings.

John McCain’s desire to help rebel forces toss off a brutal dictator and fight for a more just and inclusive Syria is admirable. But as has been proven repeatedly in the Middle East, ousting strongmen doesn’t necessarily produce more favorable successor governments. Embracing figures like Bandar, who may have tried to achieve his objectives in Syria by building a monster, isn't worth it.

A Question for Obama's Syria Critics: What Are the Alternatives?

2014-02-17T15:59:30

A Free Syrian Army fighter takes cover during clashes with the Syrian Army in Aleppo. Reuters/Goran Tomasevic

This weekend, on CNN's State of the Union with Candy Crowley, John McCain reacted to the failure of the latest round of Syrian peace talks by declaring that the Obama administration's "policy towards Syria has been an abysmal failure and a disgraceful one."

It's a common refrain for the Republican senator, one often accompanied by praise for the Gulf states' comparatively greater and less cautious support of the Syrian rebels. "Thank God for the Saudis. Thank God for the Qataris," he said at the Munich Security Conference this year. This time around, McCain said that there are viable options other than U.S. military intervention that Washington is not pursuing in Syria. But he failed to articulate them, with the exception of further boosting the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Notwithstanding the question of how the Saudis and Qataris feel about McCain thanking his God for their work, the senator is mistaken in thinking that the core interests of the Gulf states align with America's. In Syria, as in Iraq, the Saudis see the conflict as a case in which fellow Sunnis have come under siege, which explains the kingdom's support for hardcore Sunni Islamist fighters throughout the region. Saudi Arabia just announced that it will supply Syrian rebels with mobile anti-aircraft missiles, something that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey has strongly resisted.

Nearly all analysts—whether or not they support U.S. intervention in Syria— acknowledge that the Syrian rebel forces are weak and fragmented, and that one of the problems in providing material support to the "moderate" FSA is keeping the Islamist extremists who are also targeting Bashar al-Assad's regime from hijacking the aid. For the Saudis and Qataris, pressuring Assad while heavily resourcing jihadi fighters helps shore up their own governments. But for the U.S., the chances are uncomfortably high that those anti-aircraft missiles will one day be turned against American or Western targets.

McCain and others like Anne-Marie Slaughter, formerly of Hillary Clinton's State Department policy planning staff, have called for more boldness in America's Syria policy. Slaughter has advocated establishing humanitarian zones, or corridors, inside Syria—but these zones could require U.S. or international forces to establish no-fly zones and use force to halt Syrian military incursions against those seeking refuge in such zones.

To Slaughter's credit, she acknowledges that U.S. or international forces would be essential to establishing such zones, but she thinks that the benefits far outweigh the risks of getting drawn into yet another Middle Eastern civil war and zero-sum proxy conflict between regional stakeholders.

But most of those urging the U.S. to intervene more aggressively in Syria are woefully short on details and shrug off the risks of blowback and escalation. If a strategy existed that would tip the scales toward the rebels with little likelihood of blowback, then skeptics like me might be turned into supporters.

It's emotionally wrenching to watch killing on the scale that the world is witnessing now in Syria. But the depressing likelihood is that the country will be convulsed with conflict for years to come. Obama is not to blame for that. In fact, he should be commended for the abundant caution he has shown during this tragedy.

China's Latest Food Scandal: Fox-Tainted Donkey Meat

2014-01-02T14:21:06

SKsogang/Flickr

According to one Chinese expression, donkey meat is heaven on earth. Until, that is, it's revealed as fox meat. (SKsogang/Flickr)

As if a nasty bribery scandal in Mexico was not enough to deal with, Walmart is now embroiled in a fox-meat scandal in China. Over the holidays, I watched Fantastic Mr. Fox, and now just can’t help but imagine Walmart CEO Mike Duke exclaiming, “Those feisty foxes!”

According to a Chinese saying, “In heaven there is dragon meat, and on earth there is donkey meat.” But it has to be pure donkey meat, straight up.

Messing with heaven on earth, Walmart’s China operation has apparently sold and now recalled fox meat-tainted “five spice” donkey meat and created quite a headache for the global retailer. According to Reuters, the Shandong Food and Drug Administration reported that DNA tests conducted on samples of the Walmart-sold donkey meat showed that the product included fox meat.

While we in the West may chuckle at this story, donkey meat is a big deal in China. Here is a bit of context from The Silk Road Gourmet’s Laura Kelley:

Donkey meat is also available in Beijing, Shanghai and most big cities in between, but Gansu is the epicenter of donkey cuisine and where the most delicious dishes can be found. I sampled several donkey dishes, but by far the most delicious was the Donkey with Yellow Noodles (lurou huangmian) [I] had in Dunhuang….

The meat is tender, sweet and delicious. It tastes nothing like pork or beef. For obvious reasons, it does taste a little like horse, only it is sweeter and more tender, and like horse and many hoofy game meats it is also low in fat and high in protein. In addition to tasting good and being a healthy meat, it is also, very inexpensive, which I am sure adds to its popularity. The strips of charchuterie donkey meat for dipping are a little plain, the sandwiches and burgers are too ‘bready’ and the starch interferes with the great flavor of the meat … but for this wandering girl, the donkey with yellow noodles was just right. Another thing I like about the dish, was that it was a very “Asian” way to enjoy the dish.

Yum. After Kelley’s description, I’d try some. Now I better understand the frustration in China over fox meat getting mixed up in such tasty cuisine. According to Reuters, Walmart has promised to investigate the incident and strengthen its food-safety compliance. The company has also issued an apology over the Twitter-like platform Weibo.

This isn’t the kind of story one reads every day, though it’s certainly more familiar in China than in many other places. In recent years, consumers there have been regular targets of rat, fox, and mink rings trying to pawn off these meats as beef and mutton.

A hat tip to the Quartz Daily Brief for sending this delicious morsel my way.

Biden’s 330-Minute Balancing Act in China

2013-12-04T19:47:15

Reuters

Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. (Lintao Zhang/Reuters)

BEIJING — On Wednesday, fresh off a visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Joe Biden spent five and a half hours in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping over a series of meetings and dinner. The marathon diplomacy capped a delicate effort by the vice president this week to tamp down Japan's anger over provocative Chinese actions in the East China Sea while not coming down too hard on China.

Tensions have been growing in Asia among a number of key regional players—particularly Japan and China, which have been squaring off over competing sovereignty claims to five tiny, uninhabited islands that the Chinese call the Diaoyu and the Japanese call the Senkaku. Last week, China raised the blood pressure of Japan's prime minister—and many a commercial airline pilot—by unilaterally imposing an Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, that overlaps with territory Japan and South Korea also claim.

With Biden already scheduled to make a trip this week to these same three countries, the vice president became the obvious Obama administration official to referee the dispute and issue guidance about America’s perspective on China’s actions and possible countermoves by others in the area.

Many observers in Japan—and some hawks in the United States—wanted to see Biden draw a red line in Beijing over China’s ADIZ and demand it be revoked (Japan, South Korea, and the United States all maintain ADIZs around their own shores). But they were disappointed.

Japan's prime minister, on the other hand, had a shrewder understanding of the geopolitics at play in the dispute. In a carefully constructed diplomatic effort, Abe did not ask Biden to call for a rollback of China’s ADIZ because, according to a senior official in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Abe knew that Biden would not make that request of Xi Jinping, and didn't want the world to see any light between Japan and America on the issue.

Why wouldn't Biden demand that the Chinese step back from a move that senior administration officials have called “potentially dangerous” and “provocative”? Insiders say the vice president and President Obama didn’t want to draw a red line in an already-tense mess when there are options beyond escalating it into a full-blown conflict—and especially when China would likely balk at such a demand.

So into the fray Biden has moved, counseling all parties to contribute to regional stability rather than undermining it and harming their own economic prospects and security. On Tuesday, Biden reaffirmed America’s support of Japan, calling the island nation the “cornerstone” of America’s security in the Pacific. He expressed support for a Japanese call to create a hotline between Tokyo and Beijing and broadened the initiative conceptually to include regional crisis management mechanisms and infrastructure, ostensibly bringing South Korea into the mix to preempt “accidents and miscalculations.”

While in Tokyo, Biden called on China to not create more ADIZs and to keep Chinese fighter jets from intercepting other aircraft. White House officials reported that the U.S. and Japan will not recognize China’s ADIZ and will not share flight identification information with China for U.S. and Japanese military aircraft (commercial aircraft are managed differently than fighters and bombers, and the Federal Aviation Administration automatically issues guidance to all commercial carriers operating in international airspace to comply with information requests in air defense identification zones). Senior Obama administration officials have stated that while commercial U.S. aircraft will provide Chinese authorities with their flight information, this does not represent a shift in policy or official recognition of China’s ADIZ.

When U.S. officials granted me and other journalists access to a portion of the meeting between Biden and Xi, the vice president seemed solemn, emphasizing the importance of his friendship with the Chinese president (the two have previously met in Chengdu and Los Angeles) and how a new approach to great power relations, which Xi has advocated, requires trust and understanding the motives of the other side.

“They covered every single topic in the U.S.-China relationship,” said one senior administration official. On the ADIZ, Biden “indicated that we don’t recognize the zone, that we have deep concerns.” He also told Xi that the United States is “looking to China to take steps to reduce tensions.”

A senior administration official also shared that “President Xi was equally clear in laying out their view of the zone and of territorials disputes in the region,” adding that “Ultimately, President Xi took on board what the vice president said. It’s up to China, and we’ll see how things will unfold in the coming days and weeks."

In the past, America’s role as a guarantor of security and stability in the Asia-Pacific region may have created a moral hazard problem wherein nationalist leaders could shake their fists at each other over deep historical grievances without fearing the outbreak of war. As he travels through Asia, Biden appears to be subtly breaking with that state of affairs, pushing countries in the region to not free ride on American security but rather collectively develop a more stable and resilient infrastructure to handle crises. The goal, it seems, is to not only manage conflict but also build a future of what Biden called “limitless benefits.”

What John Kerry Should Have Said in Egypt

2013-11-06T11:18:50

Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry participates in a joint news conference with Egypt's Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmy in Cairo, November 3, 2013. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

Secretary of State John Kerry stumbled into a hornet’s nest with the Egypt slice of his 11-day trip to the Middle East and North Africa.

Someone should have advised Kerry that it’s simply too soon for a Scowcroft-goes-to-China maneuver—the tactic made famous by President George H.W. Bush’s efforts to get U.S.-China relations back on track after the Chinese regime’s bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.

During his visit to Cairo on Sunday, which included a meeting with Egyptian army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Kerry said nothing about the upcoming trial of the coup-ousted Mohammed Morsi, which began on Monday. In sending a message to Egypt’s military overlord that U.S.-Egypt strategic relations are vital and that America wants Egypt back in its fold, the secretary could be fueling the rise of another Mubarak, with enormous consequences for whether young Egyptians, whose ranks are swelling, choose violence or democratic methods to realize their collective goals.

Regrettably, it’s increasingly in vogue for some Egypt analysts to say that if a national election were held tomorrow, al-Sisi would win overwhelmingly. And perhaps that’s not all that surprising. As hyper-nationalism rises in Egypt, the general’s photo is popping up everywhere, plastered on the sides of buildings, trucks, and backpacks—and recalling the flag-waving, fear-based frenzy that accompanies leadership transitions in North Korea.

But amid the al-Sisi-mania, resentment is also building—a dynamic not dissimilar to the one that played out under the long and corrupt tenure of President Hosni Mubarak, who managed Egypt’s affairs with a tight fist through the country’s military and intelligence wings. While some American liberals applaud the return of a secular strongman who supports a somewhat gender-balanced, religiously diverse order (so long as the armed forces get their fair share of Egyptian commerce), the truth is the Arab Spring—in Egypt and elsewhere—has given way to an Arab gloom.

In a dramatic illustration of the gaping, unresolved rifts now dividing Egyptians, Morsi, who has been held incommunicado since the military removed him from power in July, stood defiantly on Monday in a Cairo courtroom, where he is charged with inciting murder. The legitimately elected, then deposed president refused to wear the garb of a prisoner, insisting on a professional blue business suit and demanding a microphone to be heard.

In an electric statement, he exclaimed, “There is a military coup in the country.” And he is right. Sure, millions did take to the streets to protest Morsi’s government, arguing that he “betrayed the values of the revolution” and engineered “a coup against the spirit of Tahrir.” But the former Egyptian leader’s tenure was not terminated through electoral challenge, or by the kind of legislative dysfunction on display recently in Washington, involving a system of checks and balances designed to paralyze an overzealous chief executive. Morsi, a civilian, was toppled by Egypt’s armed forces.

Egyptian liberals, much like liberals in many corners of the world today, revolted against Mubarak to end the state’s control over their lives, but then were unable in the ensuing chaos to assemble a coherent national vision and a roster of formidable national leaders who reflected the spirit of the revolution, ceding the political arena instead to the better organized, narrowband Muslim Brotherhood.

Today, some of these progressives are being threatened, harassed, and detained by Egypt’s military regime. The prime example of late is Bassem Youssef, Egypt’s—and arguably the Middle East’s—most popular comic, who found himself in court last week for subtle pokes he made against the new order (the jokes deriding Morsi were much less subtle last season!) during the first show of the new season of his program, El- Bernameg, which has since been suspended. Each week, 30 million viewers tune in to hear Youssef’s Jon Stewart-like satire of affairs inside the country. He’s a big deal, and his humor was a sign of green democratic shoots—until they were trampled.

I happen to be one of those foreign policy realists who believe that thuggery and illiberal political orders are a long-standing and probably permanent part of the global political landscape, and that the United States must deal with these regimes, particularly when its national security interests are at stake.

But Egypt’s political tumult is strategically consequential for the United States, both because developments in the country help set the tone for the entire region and because America’s messaging to a bulging youth population, many of whom subscribe to political Islam, matters. Will youthful followers of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups choose to chase their aspirations through non-violent, political means—or will they resort to violence and terrorism?

When Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain visited Egypt after this summer’s coup, they delivered the message that political inclusion and elections matter. Graham stated that Muslim Brotherhood members needed to get out of the streets and back to the ballot box. But, with all due respect to the senator, why would they when the military violently deposed and detained their elected leader?

This summer, at a joint meeting in Aspen, Colorado of the Aspen Strategy Group and the Brookings Blum Roundtable on Global Poverty, I asked former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice what the stakes are for the United States and the Middle East/North Africa region if the Muslim Brotherhood is once again driven underground.

She replied:

Egypt is an extraordinarily difficult situation. There are just some things on your desk that you just don't want to get up in the morning to face. If I were Secretary Kerry this would be one, because there are now no really good answers for Egypt. The fact is that if we had been able to get Mubarak to reform, maybe we wouldn't be here—but we are where we are.

I think the only course is to try to get the military to—as quickly as possible—put in place a transition to civilian leadership; and I mean a real transition. That will take some time because one of the problems right now is that the democratic opposition forces are not very well-organized. There's a reason the Muslim Brotherhood ran away with the elections; the Islamists have been the best organized in the Middle East for decades now. And so get a transition in place as quickly as possible.

The other thing is—I think you put your finger on something very important. I don't have anything for the Muslim Brotherhood to do. I think they took power and tried to subvert democracy to keep it, full stop. But if the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly maybe some portion of it that really thought they were contesting for political power, if they go underground and don't access the political process in some way, Egypt will not be stable.

And so you've got to find some way for the political process to include some elements of Islamists—and that by the way is true across the Middle East because you can't say, as much as we would like, just because we don't like what you stand for, you can't participate in the political process.

So I think there are really three very urgent tasks. One is to get the military not to use force; secondly, to get the military to organize as quickly as possible a transitional process—give the democrats a little time to get organized; and third, try to find some elements of the Islamists who are prepared to participate in the political process.

Rice has it right. And her advice to include some constructive Islamists, whom al-Sisi is now killing, detaining, and harassing, would have been good messages for Secretary Kerry to have clearly and forcefully expressed as he met with Egypt’s post-Morsi leaders in Cairo.

Still Sergeant Hagel After All These Years: A Talk With the Defense Secretary

2013-10-11T10:54:25

Jacquelyn Martin/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel speaks to the media about the U.S. government shutdown at his hotel in Seoul. (Jacquelyn Martin/Reuters)

Recently, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sent a 904-page book to Egyptian Army commander in chief Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, with whom he has had over 20 conversations since taking over at the Pentagon. The book, Washington: A Life, won the Pulitzer Prize for its author, Ron Chernow. Rather than suggesting he read it all, Hagel emphasized to General Al-Sisi the chapter on Washington giving up his power at the end of his presidential term and thus securing for the young nation one of the key pillars of leadership transition in a democracy run by civilian authority.

Hagel connected with the Egyptian general, who would later lead the anti-Morsi coup, when he toured the Gulf region bolting down a major U.S. arms sale in April of this year. Hagel and his Pentagon team had tied together Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirites, and Israel in a $10 billion deal bolstering these countries' defenses against potential Iranian aggression. Though each of the deals were particular to the specific countries, they knew that the cumulative impact would send a signal of resolve to Iran’s Supreme Leader. Given that the powerful lobby, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, was formed in part as a response to American’s 1981 effort to sell military aircraft to Saudi Arabia, the implicit cooperation between the Israelis and Saudis on the Hagel deal was unusual.

After seven months on the job, Hagel has generally kept a low profile. One of the few exceptions was when he announced the American findings that Syria had used chemical weapons in a dozen or so cases, killing then around 150 people.

In an interview below, on September 27, Hagel’s seven-month anniversary as secretary, I spoke to him about the impact of budget cuts on military readiness, the sequester kicking in on his third day on the job, and the issue of sexual violence in the armed services.

I asked Hagel where he was on the issue of attacking Syria and how he felt about the current environment—not just with Assad over chemical weapons, but with Russia, and somewhat remarkably, Iran. We spoke about his three trips to Asia, from where he just returned—as well as what breakfast was like with the Defense Ministers (and some Deputy Defense Ministers) of Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and others at the ASEAN Plus 8 Defense meeting after the August 21 chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian regime. They all were keenly focused on what Obama would do.

One of the centerpieces of the Obama Administration's foreign policy is the so-called pivot to Asia. I asked Hagel if he was driving this policy, and he demurred. Vice President Joe Biden, he said with characteristic modesty, was the lead on Asia.

Sergeant Hagel, who later became a successful businessman, then president of the troops-supporting USO, then a notable U.S. Senator from Nebraska, said that there would be no “era of Hagel” at the Pentagon, that he didn’t see his job as one of making sure he had a vanity imprint there. He saw his job as making the military work better and the nation safer.

Steve Clemons interviews Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon. (Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo/DoD)

Today marks your seventh month on the job. Congratulations.

Yeah, thank you.

Since you have been sworn in, you have had to deal with so many issues, from sequestration hitting your third day, North Korea’s antics, Egypt and so on.

I'd like to know how you're getting on running a place where one in 100 Americans work for you. How are you getting beyond the stage of fundamentally reacting to these challenges and beginning to establish your strategy for the Pentagon?

First, I recognize that the role of the Secretary of Defense is very clear and it is to focus on the security of this country. And within that role, there are many facets that the Secretary is accountable for, starting with the fact that our Defense Department is an instrument of foreign policy. It doesn't lead foreign policy.

As Secretary, you work for the president. You are accountable to the president. You manage. You lead. You respond. And then you get beyond that where, for example, I'm meeting with the president of Uganda this morning. I meet with presidents, foreign ministers. Yesterday in New York, with John Kerry, we met with all the GCC foreign ministers.

So, the scope of the responsibilities of the Secretary of Defense are pretty broad. And within that, you are also dealing with the realities of budget issues, sequestration, and what you have to manage through. So, I've never seen my job or the time I’ll spend here as defining a Hagel era.

I've never seen it that way, because I think this is a job and a responsibility that encapsulates all of the different dimensions of the people here—the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the chairman, the secretaries, the sergeants, every person who has a role in making our defense and our security the best in the world. It's going to continue after I'm gone, was here before I was here.

So I don't see it as a Hagel imprint. The way I do see my role is what can I do to improve our security? What can I do to improve this institution while I'm here? How can I enhance it by my leadership and by my presence? And then the rest of it takes care of itself.

I read the other night the readout of you calling the commanders of the ships stationed off the coast of Syria and telling them that this was going to be a longer haul, and appreciating their service during a tense time. Tell me about how you are connecting with the people who are actually serving and how you are remaining connected to them.

Are you doing a lot more of these kinds of calls?

I'm doing that all the time. I mean, I don't know how much you know about some of the things I do around here on that point, but the first month I was here, Steve, I said I wanted to hold a monthly luncheon with the lower enlisted. I do that every month. I've done it for every month I've been here.

The senior enlisted people in each service—they pick one individual each month. I don't want them here in the building. I want them to come outside—from outside the building. I want them to be lower enlisted, E-5 and below, all different backgrounds.

We sit at that table right there, no one else in the room, for an hour. Have lunch. Have a little fun. And they ask me questions. I ask them questions. But I start every luncheon with "tell me a little bit about yourself." Now, I read their bios, but it doesn’t tell the full picture if I read just what's in their bio. "Why did you join the service?" "Are you going to stay in the service?" "What do you think is right?"

You know, personal things. And you—you really stay connected, not just that one way, but every way. When I go out, for example, when I try to get out as much as I can to see our troops. I'll be in Korea and Japan next week, as you probably know. I'll meet with our troops there.

Third trip to Asia, right?

Third trip to Asia. Aside from all the other things I've got to be doing and should do and will do, I meet with our troops, spend time with them. And many times, for example, one of the, I think, most memorable examples of what I'm about to say is when I was at Camp LeJeune recently with the Marines. And asked to see women Marines alone for an hour, a little more than an hour; all different ranks; officers, enlisted. There were 13 of them.

Went around the room—sexual assault. It was an amazing—

Were they candid?

Tremendous. Tremendous. We had—we had lesbian officers who were able now to get married. I mean, just—just an incredible variety of people, of personalities, of people dedicated. Their core focus was this country. They love this country. They want to enhance this country. They want to help this country with all the problems that some of them had been having to deal with over the years.

And they're amazingly honest. And I do so many of these kinds of encounters. I call the officers on the ships, spend time with our people out there and in this building. Do one-on-ones. Because that is—it's just who I am, for one thing. But it's one way for me to also stay connected to what—what the core responsibility of this job is, because it's people.

Institutions never change anything. They—they're structures. They represent different opportunities to change things. But it is—it is people who change things. They make decisions, people make decisions. And so you've got to stay connected to your people. And your people have to now that. They have to know they have a Secretary of Defense that they can rely on, that cares about them personally, about their families, about their futures.

And yes, we'll all make decisions based on what we think is the right—right interest of our country.

Well, the sexual violence issue is something you had to deal with early on. There was enormous press coverage. Is that largely in a static state now?

Well, it's not status quo at all. I just met for an hour, by the way, in that room over there this morning with the Secretary of Defense's Women's Advisory Board. Very, very impressive group of people. Interestingly, there's one man on it. But these are former three-stars in all different varieties, backgrounds, races, everything.

And this—this board was—was empaneled in 1951. And it's gone through ups and downs in how the secretaries have used it. But I have put a premium on that advisory board. I just spent—most of that hour was about sexual assault. You probably know, I've put out more than 16 new directives on representation for the first time for victims. And am now moving other initiatives supporting victims and working to change the culture here that has been a problem.

I—several months ago, I sent a letter up to Congress asking for Congress to look at amending the Uniform Code of Military Justice and some of the accountability structures. No, I'm very active on this. It is the one issue that I hold a meeting on once a week, one hour, sexual assault.

The vice chiefs, the chiefs, the legal people, all the sexual assault prevention leaders, we go around the room and I get a report. And I say, "What are we doing? How come we're not there yet? Are we on time?" I want them to tell me what's going on at the Naval Academy and those kind of things. "What's happening here?"

It's the one issue I’m on consistently, and I've been doing this for months, that I've taken personal control of. ...but no, this is not anything status quo. This is something I work a great deal on—talk to members of Congress. I've talked to all of the senators, the women senators, the House women members; Levin, Inhofe. I talk to all of them. Our guys here talk to all of them.

I've instructed all our people to be involved, be connected, be honest, be direct. When you say "keep your powder dry," what I've said—here's what I've tried to do on that. I took the position, and still have it, that we want to listen to everybody. We're open to everybody. We've got a broken system. We can fix it. We will fix it. We are fixing it.

But it isn't going to get fixed with one law. It's not going to get fixed in six months or a year. This is societal. It's cultural. There are a whole bunch of things here. But we'll fix it.

But I told the President one of the first times we talked about this, this—this problem will get fixed in this institution. We need help. Absolutely, we need—we need some changes in the law. Absolutely. But you can't take it away or out of the institution because this is all about accountability. And everyone in this institution is accountable in some way. There are chains of command accountability.

That chain of command has failed over the years, obviously, for a lot of reasons. But if it's going to get fixed, it has to get fixed here in this culture, in this institution, in each service. And that's what we're focusing on. So, no, I'm as connected in this thing today as I was six months ago.

Let's discuss the strategic picture for a minute. When you take a step back, it seems there is a new perk-up in Middle East peace talks. You have President Rouhani of Iran giving an extraordinary sets of speeches and talks at the UN General Assembly and the Council on Foreign Relations that I've ever heard from an Iranian leader. I listened to the Council on Foreign Relations program yesterday and both Jarvad Zarif and Rouhani were united in presenting a completely different posture towards the U.S.

You now have Russia and the United States back collaborating somewhat on a deal that could end up with Syria giving up its chemical weapons. And while one doesn't want to get lost in fantasy and hope, fundamentally all this raises the question of whether the Obama administration got really, really lucky, or whether this a function of design and smart strategy.

And I'd like to get your thoughts on the role you have seen the Pentagon play in helping to shape the environment that might have made these new developments possible, if it's not just luck.

Well, here's the way I would respond. Let's start with my role and the Pentagon's role in this process. As you know, I am a member of the National Security Council as well as the chairman, General Dempsey. We participate in every meeting. We have a voice. The president is very receptive. We're at the table, just a very few of us. And that's, I believe, as it should be. This president uses his National Security Council and he listens carefully. He probes. He pushes. He wants to know.

So we are very active in that. But as I said earlier, our role is not—is not to lead foreign policy. Our role is—is an instrument of foreign policy. Our role is input in the National Security Council. And we give the president our best advice on military affairs and so on. But at the end of the day, whatever foreign policy the president decides on, then our responsibility is to review if it includes any kind of military option. And then we will carry that out. And he has confidence, the country has to have confidence, that we will employ whatever option the president decides.

Now, that said, more to your question—luck, so on and so on. I don't think it's that simple. People who try to put these things in categories—was this strategic brilliance? Was this stumbling? Was this bumbling? Was this luck? Oh, I think it's all part of it. Because first of all, you start with very imperfect situations. I don't think we've ever seen the world as complicated, as interconnected, as it is today.

The Middle East is, of course, a key laboratory for that. And Syria and its chemical weapons, for example, are not just about Syria and not just about chemical weapons. Look at the composition of the opposition in there—Al Qaida, Al Nusra, Hezbollah. And the right kind of people, the moderates who want to do something that's inclusive for Syria.

Israel is right next door. What's going on in Egypt? Iran? The refugee problem —2, 3 million refugees spilling into Jordan, putting huge pressure on Jordan. Turkey's involved in this. Problems in Iraq, the religious, historical differences that are really now starting to play out in the Middle East. Chemical weapons are another dimension of that. Russia, our relationship with Russia. Their piece. What's their interest? What are our Western allies' interests?

So you have to frame all that up because you can't disconnect any of those pieces. So what you try to do is you try to find common interests that make sense, where you can get Russia on board as one example with the Syria situation. The president is right. A political resolution in Syria has to be our goal—and essentially the Middle East, what's going on there, all these combined efforts—the renewed efforts that we're making regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians, these have to all be resolved through smart diplomacy, smart strategy, and political settlement.

That's the only way that we're going to be able to move forward. It's complicated. It's difficult. You stumble. It's imperfect. But you've got to keep your eye on the larger strategic interest as to what is the end-game.

Then you add something like chemical weapons to the mix. Now, that's the presentation of another complicating component of a nearly 100-year agreement by most civilized nations of the world. Governments are not going to allow this agreement to be undermined.

And so, if there's no international response to the use of these chemical weapons, then—then what effect or consequence could that have on North Korea, because they have a large chemical weapons stockpile also; or—where Iran may be going and may be wanting to go, we'll see, on development of nuclear weapons capability.

So, that's another component of this. So, how do you resolve the issue? Well, yes—there are a lot of bends in the road. There are a lot of twists and turns. But on this particular issue, where we are today on Syria, probably not Iran as much, but certainly Syria, with the Russians, with the OPCW in The Hague and the United Nations, I don't believe, and the president has said this, and I think he's absolutely right, that without the very credible threat of force, I don't think we'd be in the place we are today.

So, there is a component of power, of your military, that you have to employ wisely, judiciously, carefully. But it all does fit. So, I don't think there's a simple answer to was it luck, was it just the way it was. On the other hand, I think – actually I know – there was a lot of strategic thinking in this. But you have to remember that strategies never work out exactly the way you lay it out. There's no blueprint. There's no road map. There's no cook book.

You manage. You deal with the situation every 24 hours, but you've got to keep your eye on the larger strategic interest at the end. And then you have to constantly consider how try to manage all of the moving pieces. And in this, you've got to have a role for Russia somewhere.

Of course, in round one, you were the official to announce the administration's findings on chemical weapons use, the smaller-scale, 12 or so incidents that happened. In round two, with the horrible revelations on August 21, you were in Asia. I think you were in the Philippines. You were talking to world leaders in the Asia-Pacific region.

What were you hearing from them about what they hoped to see from the United States? And how do you think they would have reacted had the United States at the time not acted?

Well, that was a very interesting time, because I was with the ASEAN-plus group—we're 10 nations in ASEAN, and then eight other plus nations, which I was in along with the Russian deputy defense minister. I was with the Chinese defense minister as well. And the Japanese defense minister.

Breakfast must have been interesting.

It was. The South Korean defense minister was there too, in addition to all the ASEAN countries. So, all these components, all these key defense officials there at this time was particularly interesting. What I was doing—I was doing Asian business during the day and doing the Syrian-Middle East business at night.

And we noticed the bags under your eyes were getting bigger.

Getting up at 2 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning, and, you know, doing the secure SVTS with the National Security Council.

And so, in answer to your question about what the defense ministers and others were saying that I was with—yes, they were first of all looking to the United States for some leadership response, some reaction. The were asking me “What do you think? What are you going to do?” I've said publicly that in conversations with the South Korean defense minister, one of the points that he made to me right up front was, "We are very concerned about North Korea's capacity, capability of delivering chemical weapons, because they have large stockpiles and they're right there—that close."

So that’s a snapshot from the Asian perspective, at least the South Korean view. The Japanese, by the way, have the same concerns about what the absence of an American response on Syria would signal to the North Koreans; how would the North Koreans interpret this if there's no international response.

I was on the phone with my European colleagues on this, too—the French and the British in particular, and the Germans, their interest and their response. And I think you know where the French have been and then what happened regarding Cameron in the Parliament and so on.

So, yes, there—there was absolute intense focus when I was there in Asia with all those Asian country defense ministers on what we were going to do.

Would you characterize your position as having been supportive of, then, the notion of an early strike? And how did you feel about the president's decision sort of midway to jump a different course and ask for congressional authorization?

Well, let me take that last piece separately, because there's been a lot of misunderstanding, I think, and misrepresentation on that. But back to your first point, take one of the countries—Indonesia, largest Muslim country in the world, as you know; the Philippines, large Muslim population; Malaysia, large Muslim population. They were not enthusiastic about us taking a military option or striking militarily, for their own individual reasons.

And it wasn't that they would be opposed to it per se, but they had to be careful for their own political reasons. And this gets back to my point earlier about complications. Every country has different political dynamics. We do. We saw that in the vote in Parliament, in London. Each one of those leaders has to comply with the realities and boundaries that they have within their own borders—their own political world, on how far they can go on anything. And what they can say and what we all can say privately is a little different, obviously, than what's projected on the outside.

And by the way, that's not anything duplicitous. That's just a matter of reality. So, the reason I say that, Steve, is because there were no absolutes here—I didn't pick up any absolutes by any of those countries that you should strike or shouldn't strike or not use our military forces. But where they all wanted to go, all of them, was, "Can you find—can we find some way to resolve this?" And these messages came back, the Russians have to be part of it. And I've always thought, too, that Iran is always a factor in these Middle East and South Asia dynamics.

And so, that was probably more the consensus. Not that anybody said overtly they'd be opposed to a military strike, but they all said there has to be a response in some way, somehow—the U.N. And there was a strong adherence to the U.N. That's the point—the objective of the body, why it was formed, and let's—let's go there first. I mean, there was strong support of that.

To your other question, again, the way much of—at least what I've seen—the reporting that was done on the President's decision to go to Congress, it was kind of like out of nowhere this came, that he didn't get any advice from people. And he and Denis walked in the garden and—and then there was some epiphany.

Not at all. That's not the way it happened. I mean, yes, when—when the actual calls to seek Congress’s support were made—the president had already been thinking about this. We had been talking about it in National Security Council meetings. All different options were on the table. I mean, the president asked for those options. He likes the give and take. He asked for the give and take. Everybody expresses themselves very openly and frankly on these things, as they should.

So it wasn't this abrupt, out of nowhere lightning strike. And so, I mean, I wasn't surprised by the President’s decision. And I don't think it was out of left field—I can't speak for anybody else—because we had talked about this scenario. It was one of the question of ‘should we or shouldn't we?’; ‘is this the right thing to do?’ And one of the points that was made in those discussions, the president talked about, was about the role of Congress.

Here you have the President, the Vice President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, National Security Council members. All products of the United States Senate. We all came out of the United States Senate. All four of us believed strongly, and we do today, on the role of Congress; Article I in the Constitution—the role of Congress on foreign policy, taking a nation to war. And, I mean, you can have technical debates on is it war or not war. But when you employ your military, there is some component of war. I mean, I think that's just common sense.

So, you know, this just didn't come out of nowhere. This was something that was discussed and the president felt that it was the right thing to do. Now, he also said at the same time that he believed that he had the Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief, within the War Powers Act and under current laws, to take unilateral action based on what he thought and thinks is a threat to our security.

And he laid that out very clearly, that he would keep that option open. And I think he should. And I thought that that was the appropriate way to go. And I said in testimony and other conversations that, again I'm not speaking for anybody else, but as Secretary of Defense, I strongly supported every step along the way of series of options and decisions the President made.

I just want to tie a few things together and get your reaction.

So, I sometimes wonder if you yourself are the Asian pivot. You're out negotiating, talking about access arrangements, spending a lot of time in Asia. But at the same time, I'm reminded that during the turmoil in Egypt, you were the point person talking to General al-Sisi regularly. And the triple-part arms deal with Israel, the UAE and the Saudis. When one looks back at that, and looks at the fact that whether they were all tied together formally or just giving winks and nods to each other—from my talking to Israelis is that they were quite comfortable and aware and supportive of the fact that the Saudis were in the deal. This is pretty amazing given the history that when AIPAC was formed, it was formed out of frustration over an AWACS arms sale from the United States to Saudi Arabia.

I know that you were deeply involved in that. So, I am interested in this notion of the Asia pivot and whether you're the administration person who's laying the groundwork for substantial relationship and infrastructure development there. But at the same time, you're playing this unique role in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt, and then, you know, also this military positioning with Syria.

So I know this is a long question and have packed a few things here, but I feel like it's important, so—

Yeah, no, no it's very important. It's very important.

Well, let me break down the components of your question.

On Asia, no, I—I'm playing my role, but—but the Vice President has a lot of responsibility for this. You know, everybody has a role to play in this. The president's going over there in a week, I think next week. So, I may be playing more of a role than a Secretary of Defense might otherwise play, but here's where I see all that. And actually, my view of that before I ever got in this job.

The president's decision to rebalance was more than just, as you know, military and security dimensions of that Asia-Pacific relationship. It had to be and continued to be grounded, anchored by economic development and opportunities, friendships, partnerships, historic relationships. We've always been a Pacific power. So there wasn't anything new in that sense. It was a rebalance, which was exactly the right thing for all the reasons that anybody who knows anything about Asia—the demographics, the people, the markets, the economies.

Now, I also said we're not retreating from any part of the world either. The president made that pretty clear in his speech at the U.N. We're not retreating from anyplace. But you're always rebalancing and you're always adjusting and you're always realigning, depending on opportunities and threats and so on. So that's not new.

I can play a role in that. I want to play a role in that. And I'll continue to play a role in there as long as the President wants me to. So I can take some initiatives based on some of my responsibilities as Secretary of Defense. But we don't want to lose sight of that rebalancing because we are so completely focused on —we haven't even talked about Afghanistan, interestingly enough, in this interview.

It is the one country where—

That’s the fourth thing I wanted to squeeze into the last question.

Okay. We'll talk about that just briefly, because I think we need to. We're still at war. It's the one country we're still in war at, and we're still losing people. We've still got a lot of people over there.

So, now with the Middle East and all the different things happening simultaneously, and the priorities of Iran and Syria and chemical weapons, and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and North Korea. We don't want to lose sight of our key priorities in Asia. So I can play a role in that. I intend to continue to play a role in that within my capacity to do that. But I'm not—I wouldn't call myself the point man on this front. I mean, I think probably the Vice President has the main responsibility. But I can play a role and maybe I can expand the role.

On Afghanistan?

No, on Asia. I'm going to leave Afghanistan until the end.

On the Middle East, in particular the arms deals and so on, I think, as you know, when I went over there and we announced those deals and we signed those agreements, I went to Saudi Arabia and I went to Egypt and saw al-Sisi. And I went to Jordan and UAE and spent a lot of time there because all of this needed to be bolted together.

It just happened that it kind of fell in my arena at the right time. And as you may know, I have relationships with all those people. I've had over the years substantial contact with leaders in Israel as well as all the Arab countries. And I've always tried to keep a balanced relationship because I think they all need each other. And I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that that is the case.

So maybe I have some credibility that was built up in the Senate over the years with a lot of these groups. So I can play maybe play a role in moving this kind of cooperation forward.

Well, what's interesting, if I may, is they all acted like they needed each other. And I've never seen that happen.

Yeah, well, I think that's just—that's the intersection that we're—we're approaching in common interests. And it's clearly in the common interests of Israel and the Arab countries to have that clarity. And where do they go here? Is this perpetual war that's going to get worse? And chemical weapons maybe; maybe nuclear weapons? I don't think responsible people and responsible governments want to go there. So, you know, eventually you will get to some point where cooperation is more sensible.

Now, once you get to that intersection of interests, it's a matter of how then do you manage all this and what do you do about it to actually start bolting together the required facets to capitalize on common interests, to actually do something and move forward. And I think this case was one area where these interests came together.

So, I mean, I played a role in this, but I don't take any particular credit. It was just kind of where it was at the time and I could do some things most likely because I had some unique relationships that were helpful in the region.

But you did meet General al-Sisi during this effort?

I did meet him. And I spent a day on Egypt. I still talk to him—still.

I read the readouts. Is he listening to you?

Well—

You don't get his readouts.

I sent him a book, by the way, last week—a book on Washington, Ron Chernow's.

Oh, on George Washington.

Yeah, on George Washington.

That's a great book, a huge book. I always found it interesting that one of the revelations that Chernow shared in that book was George Washington’s really terrible relationship with his mother. But we can discuss that another time.

Well, the specific chapter that I focused on with General al-Sisi, with whom I have had conversations with many times: Are you going to be the George Washington or are you going to be the Mubarak of Egypt? So, I point out in the book, and I told him, that one of the last chapters on how Washington walked away from power.

So, we'll see how that affects him, how things work out.

Amazing story.

It is an amazing story.

Great book.

Yes, it's a great book.

And anyway, I do think, you know, nations have their own self-interest. And personal relationships are not going to change those or shift those. But what personal relationships do do is they provide a lubricant. And if that lubricant is not there in relationships, then there is no relationship. And then it's just a straight kind of factual numbers business. And personal relationships do sand some things down where at least you can get some antennas turned on. And your receivers are on both ways, rather than just transmitting, you actually get a country's receiver turned on. And your receiver has to be on. And we probably would all be better off if we turned more of our transmitters off and our receivers on. But we'll see.

But, you know, I think again that you've got to look at Egypt in the context of the larger framework of the Middle East. Where are our interests? Where are America's interests here? And I don't think the Middle East –- given all the problems in each of these countries and also regionally – is going to be solved in a year or two.

Right.

These are going to play out. And I think Egypt is somewhat of an example of that. There was Mubarak, and then an election and then Morsi, and now Morsi's gone. Now there's an interim government. They're moving toward a new constitution—and elections. There are going to be twists and turns. Where all that goes, I don't know.

So we end this way, and then we'll go to Afghanistan real quick.

Yes.

I'm very much a realist, always have been. But I'm also an optimist. But I'm clear-eyed. I see the world pretty clear—doesn't mean I'm smart, doesn't mean I'm right on everything or anything maybe. But I come at everything on a basis on what's real, not—not what do I hope would be the case, but what I really have here.

Take the budget, for example, or any component of what I'm dealing with day-to-day here as Secretary of Defense. I get information. I get real numbers and situations. Now, I've got to manage through this material and scenarios. I've got to take those numbers—

Those are your part of your strategic choices review?

Exactly right, which probably did more to help me understand this institution than any one thing because it—when we looked at the entire components of this institution, that probably educated me quicker than any one thing could have. Now, that wasn't the intention of why I asked for it. But the process has been a huge benefit to me—I put a lot of time in it. I spent a lot of time going hours and hours and hours and trying to understand all of what is going on here. Because I have to. Oh, I suppose I could defer it to comptroller and so on.

But that review helped me. And I don't want to get off the point here, but—I'm optimistic about where we go from here; realistic too. There will be bumps in the road. We may get knocked back. I don't know.

But I don't think you can come at world affairs without a realistic perspective – but at the same time, leaders can't afford but be optimistic because the people you lead, the people who look to you for accountability, responsibility—they have to have some hope. Be honest, too, which I tell everybody. The first day I was here, I told our chiefs, I told everybody, "Always be honest. Go to the Hill, be honest. Don't overstate anything. But don't understate it. Just—just give them the facts. Just be honest." So that's kind of where I am on Middle East and where we are.

Now, Afghanistan. That's still complicated. We need a bilateral security agreement we don't have yet. That's a key. I'm very involved in that because we don't have an arrangement in place. Then the President cannot make any post-2014 commitments and decisions for the reasons we all understand. That means our allies are probably going to be left out on where they're going to be.

Are you hung up on the same thing in Afghanistan as we were in Iraq, on the Status of Forces agreement?

Well, there are a number of issues and we're working through those. Now, I'm hopeful that we can get this done, but it has to get done very soon. The Congress wants to know when this is going to settled. We've still got a lot of people over there. We're getting them out on schedule. We've got a lot of materiel over there. We're getting that out on schedule. You've got the complication of Pakistan on one side, which is going to continue to be a complication. You know, how we deal with those issues; how we manage that. And of course, Iran's on the other side.

So, we can't lose sight of our obligations here. And I remind our people here every day that we can't lose sight that we're still at war in one place, and that's Afghanistan. And we can't take our eye off the ball. And our guys don't. I mean, our chiefs, we've got some of the best leaders I think that this institution has now and has had in General Dunford over there. Lloyd Austin is our CENTCOM commander—I think two of the absolute best, common sense, capable people that we've produced out of this institution in a long time.

So, I mean, I'm hopeful. We'll get there. But still a lot of serious issues ahead of us in Afghanistan to complete the transition. And then we have to decide what’s the next steps are—we've said train, assist, advise; that our combat role is over. It's going to continue to be over, but we want to continue to have some presence to help them so on and so on.

The Afghan army has made tremendous progress. If you look at the history of Afghanistan, the geography of Afghanistan, the demographics of Afghanistan, they don't have a very good record on any kind of authority, central government ever being able to really govern that country.

So, it's difficult on a good day, and I'm hopeful, though, because, again, common interests do always bring people back to some core sense of their future. Now, whether they're wise enough to see it and to do something about it is something else. But I will end this way.

That's where strategically we need to go. And I think President Obama has really given some significant leadership and vision to this the last five years. Vice President Biden has helped him immensely on this, too. Kerry gets this. John Kerry, I mean—to have Kerry where he is at this time I think is about as important as we could have as a Secretary of State. He knows the issues and he's studied them deeply.

And what I want to say is this. On helping to build allies' capacity—we can't do it. I mean, we're—I don't think we're going to get ourselves into another two wars anytime soon or be putting over 100,000 of our troops on the ground and all that went into that. So, what's the answer, then, in a dangerous world, an interconnected world, complicated world?

The answer is alliances. The answer is help build each of those countries in their capacity to deal with terrorism—cyber, all these threats that face all of mankind. They're not limited to borders, nations or even regions. So, the more and stronger we can develop and build our alliances and our relationships—they'll all imperfect. You don't need to have everything exactly lined up. You never will, but just enough, just enough to serve our interests, their interests and the common purpose of making the world better, the world safer.

Because in the end, this is about making a better world. It is about our future. It is about leaving it better than we found it.

Two-second question? Thank you for all this, by the way, Mr. Secretary.

I am interested that when you look at the history of defense secretaries, many defense secretaries,I think it's fair to say, an adversarial relationship with their command staff.

And I'm interested in how you see your relations with these generals and admirals with whom you work every day. Because you are dealing with substantial budget cuts, substantial resource constraints. Why aren't you guys at war with each other?

Well—

Or am I missing something?

I can't respond for them. You can ask them, as you probably will. I'll give you my response for this Secretary of Defense.

When I first got here, the day I got here, when I went and visited every chief, every secretary and senior enlisted, I said, "No matter what happens, we're going to all be together. I will always listen to you. I will always listen carefully. I will seek out your advice. I'll need your advice. All these big issues that we're sailing into, we're going in together. We're coming out together." That's what I said to them.

We're going in together. We're coming out together. There will be differences. I understand that. There should be differences. You each have—and this is something else I said to them, "You each have responsibility for your own service. I get that, as it should be. You must focus on that responsibility. But you have a higher responsibility. I have a higher responsibility. And that's to this country. That trumps—that trumps each service. And as long as we all understand that and can agree on that, we'll get through it. And I'll support you."

And that's the way I went in it. And I told them I'd always be honest with them. I'll never, ever play games with you. And I haven't. I said, "I don't want you playing games with me." They're honest with me. I spend a lot of time with them. I'm in the tank with them once a week. We have meetings once a week. I have lunches. I mean, I'm with them all the time.

You stay close to them. You listen to them. And, I guess, probably where I start is from my own military experience. I've always had a very positive, strong sense of the military, respected the leaders.

And these are unique guys, too. I mean, having nothing to do with me. I am so fortunate to have General Dempsey as my partner. He is one of the best, smartest, well-grounded, common sense guys I've ever dealt with.

Sings well.

And sings well.

But all those chiefs, all those chiefs are really good human beings, to start with, and really care about their country, really care about their people. And we all share that same feeling. So I like them personally. I get along well with them. I like it. I make an effort to do that. There will be differences. There are differences. But we resolve our differences, Steve, right up front.

Manchin-Heitkamp: The Senate's Compelling Alternative Syria Resolution

2013-09-09T11:39:58

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia was none too pleased when a Democratic Senate colleague, North Dakota's Heidi Heitkamp, blocked his efforts to move a notch forward on gun control by expanding requirements for background checks.

But now the two of them are leading an effort in the Senate to put forward what Manchin calls a "sensible alternative" to the White House-drafted Syria resolution. Manchin and Heitkamp have argued that a punishing blow against Syria's Assad regime, which stands accused of deploying chemical weapons against its own citizens, could escalate in unexpected ways or could draw the U.S. directly into Syria's civil war. They argue that the nation deserves to know how this action fits into the strategic objectives of the United States -- and what the trade-offs are against other priorities.

The Manchin-Heitkamp resolution calls for two primary things. First, it gives the administration 45 days to secure from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad a commitment to join those nations who have signed and agreed to the Chemical Weapons Convention. If Assad fails to comply, then the Senate gives full authorization to the president to use whatever means possible to respond to the regime's apparent August 21 use of chemical weapons.

In a fascinating and potentially consequential announcement today, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said that his country will push Assad to relinquish all chemical weapons.

Secondly, the draft resolution calls for the White House in the next 45 days to fully articulate its Syria strategy to the Senate. Manchin and Heitkamp call for detail on how the end game in Syria's civil war does not hand over the nation to the Islamic extremist wing of the opposition and how the U.S. will respond to and deal with various escalation scenarios -- not just with Syria but also with its strategic partners, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and others. The resolution offers the White House a classified information channel, as well, to articulate these goals and scenarios.

Given that President Obama said that he could strike Syria in "a day, a week, a month," waiting 45 days to try and secure a major leap by Syria from being a holder and deployer of chemical weapons to one that joins the international community in opposition to them makes smart, strategic sense.

Furthermore, the element of surprise is gone in responding to Assad on his regime's use of chemical weapons. Attacking him would have made sense, even in a limited way, if designed to change his strategic calculus on working through some form of deal with elements of the Syrian opposition. Today, the delays are emboldening Assad. Waiting another 45 days won't degrade the situation further, but may allow an opportunity for some net positive to emerge.

The White House has refused to consider Manchin's proposal and has resisted considering alternatives, according to a source close to the administration's efforts to secure congressional support on Syria. But according to Senate sources, Manchin and Heitkamp's efforts are giving on-the-fence senators an alternative that they feel provides the possibility of success without mindlessly marching off to war.

Here is the draft resolution, titled the "Chemical Weapons Control and Accountability Resolution."

Chemical Weapons Control and Accountability Resolution of 2013 9 6 2013

'We Were Bored ... So We Decided to Kill Somebody'

2013-08-20T12:25:45

I have been greatly affected by sad news from Oklahoma today, another case of a victim of gun violence that deserves as much attention and public concern as the more grisly mass slayings we have heard so much about and which still have not produced progress on gun control.

In the latest incident, Australian student Christopher Lane was killed while visiting his girlfriend in Duncan, Oklahoma. The young college baseball player, studying in the United States at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, was allegedly shot and killed by three juveniles, one of whom confessed to the police saying, "We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody."

My friend and former head of the Obama White House's Office of Personnel and Management John Berry was just sworn in as the new U.S. Ambassador to Australia, and I can't imagine a more difficult task than meeting with the parents and family of Christopher Lane and apologizing for the idiocy and delinquency of these young thugs. (The new Ambassador Berry should make it a priority to meet these parents.)

I also happen to love Oklahoma and identify Bartlesville, Oklahoma, as my family home. Bartlesville is in a different quarter of the state than Ada and Duncan -- but still there are too many disengaged youth and too many politicians there who support rampant gun proliferation over any other state priorities. This kind of murder in Oklahoma is not rare, and until the state moves more decidedly toward trying to prioritize building "healthy communities" that shun violence and provide opportunities for youth, the state deserves to be knocked down a few notches in terms of its status as a haven for new job-creating investments. There are a lot of Australian firms in the strategic energy arena -- and it wouldn't surprise me if firms considering Oklahoma decided to move elsewhere.

Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, continues to work hard behind the scenes in delivering on a sensible step forward on gun control. He's a gun owner big time -- loves to hunt and believes in protecting his family -- and he's been talking to Republicans offline to try and get them to step forward, as they should, on sensible background checks (though Manchin and Senator Pat Toomey's bill does not establish a national register for these checks).

I really like Oklahoma's Senator Tom Coburn on a number of fronts. He's hard core conservative but he's got a brain and is not an ideologue. I respect him. I have more trouble with his U.S. Senate colleague and fellow Oklahoman Jim Inhofe, who managed to ask during Defense Secretary confirmation hearings whether Senator Chuck Hagel was an agent of Iranian interests. But that aside, these are generally smart, mostly principled political leaders.

They should be stepping forward after this sad murder of a promising, young student who had chosen their state to invest his time and aspirations in and get behind the Manchin-Toomey effort.

Last week, I was in Bartlesville and Tulsa, Oklahoma. I saw signs everywhere for a coming major gun show and was reminded by one of Tom Coburn's friends that "his best friend in Oklahoma" owns those gun shows and is rabidly opposed to any form of gun constraints, even anything as innocuous and as sensible as background checks.

Tom Coburn should step up. He has the capacity to do so. This murder of a young man in Oklahoma deserves his response. Other teens in the state who have easy access to guns should learn from Coburn and hopefully Inhofe that this incident harms them, harms the state, and harms America in the eyes of not only Australians but many others around the world.

How to Toughen Up Human-Rights Activists and Liberal Interventionists

2013-08-13T15:07:43

Reuters

Foreign Affairs managing editor Jonathan Tepperman confesses in the New York Times on Friday that he finds that in the realm of international affairs he finds the arguments from both "human rights and democracy advocates" as well as "hard-boiled foreign policy realists" frustrating and difficult to sort through. He says that in both cases, "smart people with total conviction" are putting forward compelling arguments. In the end, he considers whether the problem is that the "positions appeal to different parts of the body, heart vs. head."

Let me get my own sentiments out of the way first. I like Jonathan Tepperman and feel that Foreign Affairs is lucky to have someone as editorially and intellectually creative as he is. That said (here comes the hard-boiled realism), he makes the mistake that many human rights-tilting foreign policy analysts today who have grown too distant from the Cold War make: he suggests realism is not about the heart as well as the head.

The challenge, from my perspective, is how to smarten up human rights advocates and interventionists who tend not to think about the head but rather react rashly and impulsively without thinking through the costs and benefits. Ted Koppel gives this some historical flourish in his excellent Wall Street Journal piece this week, "America's Chronic Overreaction to Terrorism."

As I have written previously, the late Richard Holbrooke was a significant exception to the playbook-absent liberal interventionists who dominate that faction of the foreign policy establishment. Holbrooke thought in terms of costs and benefits and was willing to negotiate with some of the world's most abhorrent, immoral characters if it moved American interests forward and served to promote global justice.

Although my friends at the realist-home base, The Center for the National Interest (previously the Nixon Center), tend to cringe when I refer to Holbrooke as a successful Nixonian-like foreign policy progressive, the fact is that his example shows that he was one of the few human rights advocates on the scene who played to both head and heart. He was a realistic human rights advocate who ruthlessly focused on results and achieved them, and the world was better for it.

Realists, in contrast, want to square away national interests first and foremost and make sure that America's stock of power is not eroded by crusades and endeavors that distract from core interests. That said, they believe America serves a great global good in shaping the international system in ways that serve both its own interests and those of its liberal, mostly (but not always) democratic allies -- and that when America has the stock of power on hand to do so, it can help mitigate great humanitarian crises around the world in a way that both serves others and keeps American power intact and growing.

Realists don't believe, however, that even a superpower (less super than decades ago) like the United States can easily influence the deep internal dynamics and behavior of other countries -- nor should the U.S. attempt to do so. They feel that this kind of intervention inside other nations can just as easily generate blowback, or a perception of either bullying or impotency about the U.S., for objectives that were never really in reach anyway or worth the gamble.

In other words, the starting error that many human rights and liberal interventionist analysts make is that their aspirations for foreign policy were never attainable, or to say it less charitably, not solvent.

For example, Tepperman opens his essay suggesting that Obama's foreign policy weakness is responsible for all sorts of "bads" in the domestic scenes of other countries. He writes:

In just the last few weeks, the Russian government has used a show trial to silence a prominent activist, Egypt's junta has massacred protesters, Turkey has cracked down on peaceful dissent, and the rulers of Cambodia and Zimbabwe have stolen elections -- again.

In each case, the Obama administration has done little more than mutter objections under its breath.

Bad stuff has been happening inside other countries for a very long time -- even when U.S. power was its zenith after World War II and during the toughest spots during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Elections were stolen then. Genocides happened. Tyrants manhandled their citizens. Show trials occurred not only in the USSR, but also in places like Cuba, Argentina, Chile, and more.

Tepperman is mistaken, I think, to suggest that any of these cases reflects a weak foreign policy posture of the United States in general, and of the Obama administration during this period in time.

Had he instead suggested that the inability of President Obama to get Germany's Angela Merkel to do what he wanted at the 2009 London G-20 Summit; or the difficulty the administration has in getting the U.S.-military dependent Japan to ratchet down its nationalistic, China-antagonizing rhetoric; or Obama's inability to get Israel's Netanyahu to stop building Middle-East-peace-wrecking settlements on Occupied Territories; or the president's inability to (as of yet) move or seduce Iran on to a normalization track that comes without nuclear weapons capacity; or that Saudi Arabia has shifted away from its general foreign affairs docility to more active engagement in the MENA region based on its calculation of U.S. weakness and strategic contraction; he would have been on target, as these are better measures of America's declining foreign policy effectiveness and strength.

Unfortunately, Tepperman sees American vacillation and lack of resolve as the reason for its ineffectiveness and perceived weakness -- even if he and I could agree on what measures reflect American power in the world.

The realist answer to Tepperman's concern about declining U.S. power, and the right one in my view, is that America's national security decline is a function of (1) the mismanagement of its foreign policy resources and equities in the past -- i.e., too many "wars of choice" and the ascension of global policy crusades untethered by realistic cost and benefit calculations, (2) the relative rise in both economic and military power of other global stakeholders (America is still great and greater than the rest but not GREAT like in days of old), and (3) an absence of coherent strategy -- that could include waffling, duplicity, pugnaciousness, and earnest involvement in wrestling through foreign policy challenges.

Tepperman suggests that articulating a clear strategy for the world and sticking to it would be better, but my sense is that America's stock of power had been badly depleted during the Bush/Cheney years and that Obama is working hard to increase that stock of power. That takes time -- and it means that waffling on some things, while moving on others, is the smarter play.

Tepperman's essay is wonderful as a teaching tool and offers opportunity for a serious debate about what drives successful or failed foreign policy outcomes. He references democracy strategists like Stanford's Larry Diamond who suggests a roster of economic and diplomatic sticks that the U.S. could use to influence the behavior of some small countries. But the bigger question that the cases mentioned raises is whether or not America's limited amount of diplomatic, military, and economic capital should be spent on compelling change in these small countries -- or whether that power should be directed at more serious challenges, like Iran for instance.

Tepperman also mentions Burma as a successful case in which diplomacy, seasoned with improved diplomatic and trade ties with the United States, moved the country's generals toward democratic liberalization. What is not mentioned is that an increasingly, regionally pugnacious China compelled Burma's leadership to hedge its bets. Vietnam did the same. Once I asked Henry Kissinger about the process of normalizing with China, and he said that the commander of a large Russian tank division amassed on the Sino-Soviet border really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for clarifying matters to China. Myanmar, Vietnam, and the ASEAN region as a whole have had their U.S.-tilting interests clarified by a juggernaut they reside next to and worry about.

When President George W. Bush came into office, his then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice initiated a set of teach-ins with prominent national security and foreign policy intellectuals. One of these was Robert Kaplan, then an acclaimed "realist" traveling correspondent for The Atlantic and now Chief Geopolitical Anaylst at Stratfor, who told Bush in a private meeting that he would have to talk a lot about democracy and posture in favor of the expansion of democratic ideals -- but in truth he would have to do deals with thugs.

Kaplan was right. America has to waffle on occasion because deeply intervening somewhere involves risks and can recklessly spend down the stock of American power so that the U.S. is less able to fix problems in the world tomorrow than it was prepared to yesterday.

The problem with the costly wars America recently pursued is that they were not designed first to ensure that U.S. power prevailed in the long run -- they were mostly emotional, knee-jerk reactions to events triggered either by 9/11 or by a faction of a policy establishment types trying to settle old grievances. For the record, I supported the assault on Afghanistan and the Taliban -- but I did not support the Iraq War, nor the doubling down in Afghanistan after Obama came to office. These wars, rationalized by many in humanitarian terms, telegraphed military fatigue and overextension to nations like Russia, China, Iran, and more. They generated abuses at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo that fed extremist terrorist recruitment in the region. U.S. military power was not leveraged in these missions; it was squandered and contained.

One Chinese strategist once told me that China's grand strategy was trying to figure a way to keep America distracted by wars with small countries in the Middle East. While America was distracted, China had an easy time expanding its influence globally.

Humanitarian interventionism has its place -- but the deployment of U.S. forces should be infrequent. Overuse of the military has burst the bubble of America's superpower mystique, and mystique was always the secret sauce of America's global influence. There was a time when people around the world -- both in the developing and developed world -- perceived the U.S. to be without limit, without boundaries, always able to invent, or create, or compel change in the world like no other nation. In recent years, because of a self-created economic crisis, the collapse of its global moral prestige, and the sense of military overextension, America is perceived by the rest of the world as a limited, rather than a boundless, force in the world.

That is what well-meaning humanitarian and democracy advocates need to figure out. Their objectives are easier and more likely to be attained when America gets its stock of power restored. That means choices between challenges.That means delivering success on one or two major challenges and then translating that momentum into dealing with the next global conundrum.

What Tepperman should really be calling for is not the abandonment of foreign policy waffling, or of duplicity in foreign affairs, where the U.S. says one thing and does another, but rather for a decided "strategy" as its North Star.

That North Star for me is increasing America's stock of power and capability so that it can shape the international system with other partners in beneficial ways well into the future -- including on great humanitarian goals. The head -- and then the heart. Power is a function of future expectations, just like the value of a business in the stock market, and America has to rewire itself so it convinces its citizens and others around the world that its power will be considerable and consequential in the future.

Why Would the Muslim Brotherhood Believe in Voting Now?

2013-08-05T16:08:55

Max Taylor/The Atlantic

Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are heading to Egypt, apparently as symbols of democratic magnanimity that losers in political contests should not be rounded up and thrown in prison.

Graham told CNN that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry believed it would be useful to send Obama's presidential opponent to Egypt to reinforce to Egypt's military a message of political inclusiveness.

Senator Graham said:

I think it really does demonstrate how democracy works. They didn't put John McCain in jail so he could never come back again.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has been running point on Egypt given the close ties between the U.S. and Egyptian military commands and has also been calling for political inclusiveness. Here is the latest readout of Hagel's exchange with Egypt Defense Minister and coup leader Abdul Fatah al-Sisi:

Secretary Hagel spoke with his Egyptian counterpart, Defense Minister Gen. Abdul Fatah al-Sisi Saturday morning. Secretary Hagel expressed concern about the recent violence in Egypt and urged General al-Sisi to support an inclusive political process ... General al-Sisi affirmed to Secretary Hagel that Egypt's leadership remains committed to the political roadmap leading to elections and the formation of a constitution in Egypt.

Understandably, the Obama administration and legislators like McCain and Lindsey Graham are preaching restraint and 'inclusion' to the military leaders who are currently disappearing Morsi's key supporters and shooting protestors who want their President back in place. American calls for Egypt's generals to stop the killing are on the right track.

But there is a second bizarre message being telegraphed to those Islamists protesting against the military takeover. Some, like Senator Graham are telling the Muslim Brothers to take their lumps and get back to a democratic process.

In an exchange that aired last Sunday with Senator Graham on CNN's State of the Union with Candy Crowley, Graham offered context on his and McCain's rationale for an Egypt trip now. He said that the Brotherhood had to "get out of the streets, back to the voting booth":

GRAHAM: ...if you're going to pick between the two of us, Senator McCain is far more valuable than I am. But, we've got a call from the president, Secretary Kerry, the message that the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood is to get out of the streets, back into the voting booth.

The Egyptian military must move more aggressively toward turning over control to the civilian population, civilian organizations. The military can't keep running the country. We need Democratic elections. The brotherhood needs to get off the streets and back into the political arena and fight your differences there, and we need to put Egypt back to work. If this continues, it's going to be a failed state. That's why we're going.

But the question that stands out here is why would Muslim Brotherhood members believe in democratic process now? Why would they consent to an electoral plan that asks them to acquiesce to their political leader being toppled if elected?

Adherents of political Islam have for years been debating amongst themselves the nuts and bolts of democratic process and have been struggling with the issue of whether democracy is primarily a tactic to achieve a victor-decides-all political result or whether it is an ongoing process that should include rights for other, not like-minded political entities. The Al Jazeera Centre for Studies has played a leading role in convening these MENA region political Islamists who have been engaging in these debates.

Whether seeing democracy as tactic or process, the key issue is that numerous revolutionaries in the Middle East North Africa nations chose a political rather than violent process for pursuing their aims. It seems that getting Islamists to believe that democratic process, rather than violence, can deliver on their aspirations should be a key national security objective of the United States, Europe, and other liberal powers.

But if this military coup is accepted in Egypt, without a significant rebuke from the world's leading democracies, why would political Islamists put any faith in the process again? There is an inherent contradiction in the Obama administration calling for "inclusiveness" from military leaders who staged a coup while simultaneously encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood to give voting a chance again. How is this not sending a message to young Islamists who previously played by democratic rules that their only real hope is through armed resistance and violence?

America's Egypt policy is twisted in a knot. It is an unusual moment when a realist like myself and a liberal interventionist like Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post or Brookings Doha Center Research Director and frequent writer about 'democracy' Shadi Hamid find ourselves in agreement. We all see negative consequences of purported democracy-hugging progressives riding to power on the backs of tanks -- while those who played by the rules, the Islamists in this case, are arrested and in some cases, killed.

Diehl, Shadi Hamid, and many neoconservatives and liberal interventionists see the Egyptian coup as violating fundamental democratic principles that the U.S. should be working hard to globally promote.

Realists like myself see that cutting off a democratic option to Islamists assures that they will go underground, turn to violence, and/or make the firm decision that democracy is indeed just a tactic to fully dominating a political order, rather than one where power and governance are negotiated. A systemic shift away from non-violent political participation by Arab region youth poses strategic consequences for the U.S. and its allies.

America could decide that it supports a strong-man approach to ruling the Middle East and help support, arm, and fund a new generation of illiberal leaders in Egypt and elsewhere in the region who brutally suppress Islamists -- but that would entail enormous military and financial costs in these counties at levels approximating the height of the Cold War. There simply is no appetite among Americans today for that kind of realpolitik style of investment in global authoritarians.

But if supporting strong-man rule isn't a real option, America has to accept that those parties who engage in and ascend via democratic process may often be objectionable to Western progressives.

Lindsey Graham and John McCain would make history and help yield a third way out of the mess in Egypt if they supported the restoration of President Morsi while simultaneously securing a deal from him and the Muslim Brotherhood that they establish a more flexible and political-minority respecting political process.

That option leaves the legitimacy of the Morsi election in place -- while giving Egypt's embryonic democracy an opportunity to work out its problems in the "inclusive" way the Obama administration is promoting. There will still be problems and pitfalls, but at least then young Islamists would be working inside the system, rather than fighting it violently on the outside.

Deception in Counting the Unemployed

2013-07-20T11:47:44

Reuters

Leo Hindery, Jr. is one of those big personalities in real life that we see characters trying to play in the movies. He sees himself as a larger than life change agent, working to rewire America's social contract to be more fair to American workers. A former CEO of cable firm TCI, then AT&T Broadband, Global Crossing, and the Yankee Entertainment Sports Network, Hindery helped lead firms to rationalize their assets, streamline staffing, and pump up productivity. From a CEO perspective, he saw businesses offshore their production and service lines rather than re-invest in workers in the United States.

Believing that financial institutions were being deregulated even as the labor market was stuck in 1930s-era legal structures, Hindery believed that the American government, U.S. business leaders, and the markets were on track to wreck the foundations on which middle class America was based.

He believed that workers would see their jobs continually off-shored, and their pensions and savings ripped off in a system increasingly designed to work at odds with them. In the end, Hindery surmised that this would forfeit America's future to other rising powers like China, which was making smart investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, and in workers.

As a CEO who found his soul and developed a profound concern for the state of American workers, Hindery wrote a book called It Takes a CEO: It's Time to Lead with Integrity, in which he argued for a new deal between workers, firms, government and the financial markets -- one that was fairer and more supportive of the aspirations of workers. I got to know him when he supported some of the work at the New America Foundation, where I had founded the American Strategy Program.

After this, HIndery joined the worker-concerned presidential campaign of John Edwards as senior economic adviser to the failed and now legally beleaguered former candidate. When Edwards' campaign sputtered Hindery was assigned the task of proposing that the ascendant Obama take Edwards as his vice presidential running mate. Obama adviser David Axelrod shrugged that off, but Hindery nonetheless joined the Obama campaign ranks as someone carrying the flag for American working families and the eroding middle class.

As soon as Obama prevailed in his first presidential win, Hindery and many of the labor leaders and worker-concerned Congressional leaders working with him believed that their sector of campaign supporters would be elevated in Obama Land. This didn't happen. Instead, those with a general neoliberal economic tilt, who tended to see workers as micro-economic distractions to bigger macro-economic crises, took over the helm of Obama's financial and economic team.

A former big-time CEO who had turned into one of the nation's leading supporters of organized labor might have been perceived by Obama as the kind of bridge-builder he needed between divergent national economic factions -- he could have made for a distinctive Secretary of Commerce. But in fact, has America had a distinctive Secretary of Commerce? Not in recent memory -- not perhaps since the late Ron Brown held the post. Penny Pritzker, confirmed just weeks ago, may emerge as a Secretary of Commerce who finally does something -- but Hindery's profile indicates that he would have either succeeded or crashed in ways there that made Commerce consequential. But while he was on the list for the job, the administration kept him at arm's length, in part because "he was too close to labor," a White House source shared with me.

To make matters worse, Hindery offered a car and driver to his friend and business colleague Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader and leading health care adviser to the Obama campaign, as well as a potential vice-presidential running mate or chief of staff to Obama, which helped undermine Daschle's political perch in Obama Land. While the press reported this as Daschle accepting a gift on which he did not pay taxes, the real story is that Hindery kept on his payroll a driver he had known for years, whose health care needs were significant, and who desperately needed a job lest he and his family face destitution because of their medical costs.

Hindery didn't need a full-time driver in Washington -- he lived in New York -- but he was moved by the needs of this individual and wanted to keep him working. That's the guy Daschle would occasionally get rides from, and that's what cost Daschle any number of political appointments. Daschle's rivals kicked back with happy grins when they learned that the worker-loving Hindery had hurt Daschle's appointment prospects by helping out a struggling driver.

This context is important because whether Hindery was maladroit at points in his own political aspirations -- which included for a short time considering a Quixotic run for the presidency to raise the fact that the American middle class was under siege -- he has been obsessive in getting a fair deal for and more focus on the real plight of workers.

One of the ways the Obama administration, as well as many administrations before it, cheat American workers is through an institutionalized duplicity about worker employment figures.

For decades, the only employment numbers that anyone would discuss were those issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For the latest month, June 2013, the BLS reported a 7.6% unemployment rate, noting that U.S. employers had added 195,000 non-farm jobs and that there were 11.8 million unemployed persons in the United States.

But in the last few years, Hindery's dogged efforts to get pundits, reporters, and policy practitioners to abandon discussion of "official unemployment" rates to "real unemployment" figures has percolated in the media more and more. The latest example was New York real estate baron and US News & World Report owner Mortimer Zuckerman's extensive discussion of the real unemployment challenges facing America in the Wall Street Journal last week, titled "A Jobless Recovery is a Phony Recovery."

In a monthly email that Hindery personally sends to leading members of Congress, labor leaders, a large flock of journalists ranging from Fox News to The Atlantic, business leaders, and others, he dissects the BLS statistics and notes what is missing.

Hindery says up front that the BLS only notes those specifically looking for work. That may make sense to some -- until one learns who is left out.

According to the Hindery report, those who are left under the rug of America's unemployment mess are a number of discouraged workers who have given up looking for work and partially-employed workers. He notes those that BLS does not include are:

a. Marginally attached workers, of whom there are now 2.6 million. These are workers who, "while wanting and available for jobs, have not searched for work in the past four weeks but have searched for work in the past twelve months." Currently included among them are 1.0 million "discouraged workers" who did not look for work specifically because "they believe there are no jobs available or none for which they would qualify."

b. Part-time-of-necessity workers, of whom there are now 8.2 million, are workers unable to find full-time jobs or who've had their hours cut back. These workers are often referred to as the "underemployed".

The zinger from the Hindery unemployment assessment is that:

In June 2013, the number of Real Unemployed Persons increased by 757,000 to 22.6 million and the Real Unemployment Rate increased by 0.4% to 14.3%, reflecting large increases in the number of "marginally attached" and "part-time-of-necessity" workers.

In other words, BLS reports that official unemployment stayed flat at 7.6% while Hindery's more extensive figures show that real unemployment increased by 0.4% to 14.3%.

As America struggles with not only those entering the workforce now but also those trying to stay in it and get back into it, it's important to realize that the scale of need is about 22.6 million jobs. That should be the policy target -- not some scaled down version that is more politically palatable.

For those interested, here is the Hindery report on real unemployment for June 2013.

If anyone would like to receive this report on a monthly basis, email me at "sclemons @ theatlantic.com" or send a note to me on Twitter at @SCClemons, and I will forward my monthly report to those interested.

Obama Succeeded in Libya; He's Failing in Syria

2013-06-24T11:08:11

A Free Syrian Army fighter reacts after his friend was shot by Syrian Army soldiers during clashes in the Salah al-Din neighbourhood in central Aleppo on August 4, 2012. (Goran Tomasevic/Reuters)

President Barack Obama made his first call for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad to step down on Thursday, August 18, 2011 and then proceeded to enjoy a private 10-day vacation with his family on Martha's Vineyard. Nearly two years later, Assad is still in power, and it seems clear today that Obama's posturing nearly two years ago was unattached to an action plan to achieve Assad's ouster.

At the time, liberal interventionists and neoconservative hawks pommeled the White House for dragging its heels in finally calling for Assad's ouster, and many of these critics claimed credit for Obama's eventual statement that the United States government favored regime change in Syria.

Perhaps Obama believed that Assad's position would crumble like that of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who did relinquish power after President Obama called for him to step down. In the Egypt case, then-Senator John Kerry called for Mubarak to step down on Tuesday, the February 1. The following day, Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain "broke with the President" and joined Kerry's call to Mubarak for the President to step down.

Within a week, President Obama called for Mubarak to step down and to transfer power -- and to the surprise of many, though it was messy, Mubarak did relinquish his power. he United States had leverage over a large package of military and non-military aid that the U.S. provided Egypt each year -- but otherwise, the Obama White House helped through persuasion and diplomacy to tip the scales against Mubarak, a process the protestors in Tahir Square had put in motion.

Huffing and puffing worked. There was no need for an "intervention plan" to deliver a political transition in Egypt, like appears to be needed in Syria.

When presidents call for the ouster of other presidents, particularly without a strategy to deliver those results, lines are drawn and diplomatic and political options are decreased. Obama's call for Assad's departure, prolifically reiterated in public comments by Obama since, foreclosed the possibility of a real partnership with the Syria-hugging Russia in engineering a transition.

The Russians, who have interests in not seeing the sectarian hostilities inside Syria drive other regional and transnational ethnic instabilities, have suggested numerous times that the White House walk back its rhetoric on Assad having to leave -- and then get all parties to commit to an election process or governance structure that would be inclusive of those protesting against the government. This is surely short of revolution that many human rights and global justice advocates desired -- but it might have been the best strategy to get the killing to stop.

Interestingly, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has been trying to push the White House to engage not only with Russia but with other global powers like India, Japan, and China -- as opposed to the regionally-reviled former colonial powers of England and France -- to call for an election process that would achieve transition and yet give Assad a face-saving way out of power.

In an interview with The National Interest's Jacob Heilbrunn, Brzezinski states:

. . .there should be some sort of internationally sponsored elections in Syria, in which anyone who wishes to run can run, which in a way saves face for Assad but which might result in an arrangement, de facto, in which he serves out his term next year but doesn't run again.

The entire interview is worth reading, as Brzezinski outlines how strategically inchoate America's Syria strategy has been. He notes that President Obama calls for Assad's ouster and then green-lights David Petraeus-led covert provision of weapons and war counsel to Syrian rebels through the national proxies of Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and then backs off when it becomes clear that the most ferocious (and then successful) parts of the Syrian opposition were Islamic extremist militants of the sort America had been battling for a decade in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East North Africa region.

Now, America is back in the game of the Syrian civil war and has used low-level use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime to justify stepping up military support provided directly to the rebels by the US. America has taken a side in the war -- and the Russians and Iranians are on the other. Thus, underway today in Syria is now clearly a proxy battle between regional and great global powers set on top of a sectarian civil war.

If one of America's top global strategic priorities is influencing the strategic course of Iran and its decision to build nuclear weapons, then investing resources deeply inside the Syrian conflict should be measured against that goal.

Does America's alignment with the rebels enhance or hinder American points of leverage with Iran? When it came to the same question with regard to Afghanistan, also a neighbor of Iran, there was no question that Iran perceived America's engagement there to be a constraint on U.S. power, not an amplifier. Iran felt more emboldened by America trapping its resources and attention there. Iran may very well see that its proxy of Hezbollah, now operating inside Syria against the rebels, gives it an upper hand against the U.S. and Gulf State-supported rebels and helps to distract the US from its other global strategic ambitions.

Brzezinski makes the point that Obama's response to Syria has been reactive rather than proactive and consistent, that the president is being nudged into the worst kind of "ineffective interventionism."

The Heilbrunn-Brzezinski exchange:

Heilbrunn: How slippery is the slope? Obama was clearly not enthusiastic about sending the arms to the Syrian rebels--he handed the announcement off to Ben Rhodes. How slippery do you think this slope is? Do you think that we are headed towards greater American intervention?

Brzezinski: I'm afraid that we're headed toward an ineffective American intervention, which is even worse. There are circumstances in which intervention is not the best but also not the worst of all outcomes. But what you are talking about means increasing our aid to the least effective of the forces opposing Assad. So at best, it's simply damaging to our credibility. At worst, it hastens the victory of groups that are much more hostile to us than Assad ever was. I still do not understand why--and that refers to my first answer--why we concluded somewhere back in 2011 or 2012--an election year, incidentally--that Assad should go.

When Obama empowered his National Security Advisor Tom Donilon to move forward on a Libyan military intervention, including a no fly zone plus other measures to neutralize Moammer Qaddafi's offensive military machine against Benghazi, certain criteria needed to be satisfied first. These included securing both regional and international support for the intervention -- that meant Arab League and UN Security Council support. Though Russia and China abstained in the United Nations, Donilon secured these key criteria required then by Obama.

Obama also would not agree to any military action in Libya unless the commitment of force would make a clear tipping-point change in circumstances on the ground and give the advantage to the Benghazi-based rebels. In addition, the military footprint would have to remain small, limited in duration and scope.

Libya, somewhat like Syria, did not represent a challenge to vital U.S. national security interests -- but an intervention could be justified on other grounds, in the case of Libya on what was feared to be mass slaughter of Benghazi citizens by Qaddafi's forces, and in Syria by the red line trigger of chemical weapons use.

In the case of Libya, Obama acted surgically and preempted the typical slippery slope to a larger military intervention that involved "owning the outcomes" inside Libya. Obama's strategy worked, and the U.S. in partnership with France, England, the UAE, and Qatar delivered a low-cost political transition inside Libya.

With Syria, Obama is behaving in ways that run counter to the decision criteria he applied in Libya. He is committing intelligence and military resources to a crisis that does not have UN Security Council sanction, and he is not framing his response to the chemical weapons use in terms of either punishing the commanders who authorized their use -- or to secure those weapons. Instead, Obama is joining the rebel forces and committing to a regime change formula that could potentially falter. And that is before calculating the global strategic costs of getting in a nasty stand-off with Russia whose support is needed on other global challenges.

This is sloppy interventionism -- strategically inchoate, potentially at conflict with other larger and more important U.S. strategic goals, and potentially the kind of commitment that obligates the United States to support a rebellion that America avoided doing in the Libyan case.

The question of what exactly comprises the Obama doctrine is getting murkier by the week. How does intervening in Syria help or hinder America's broader global objectives in shaping Iran's nuclear pretensions? Does intervention in Syria constrain American power or leverage it? If the rebels were to succeed, what will America's position be in Syria Civil War 2.0 between the rebels America likes and the Islamic extremist rebels it doesn't?

Why did the administration's response to Syrian regime chemical weapons use not involve either punitive measures against the commanders that ordered their use -- nor a strategy to secure those weapons?

The success of President Obama's foreign policy depends on how well he implements a strategy and sticks to it. The Asia pivot comes to mind -- as opposed to having his foreign policy focus hijacked by events and forcing him into reactive national security decisions.

Syria as it looks today will likely take a decade or longer for forces inside to burn out and to come to some internal political terms. Many will tragically die -- and the ability of outside players to influence internal outcomes inside Syria will be very limited. Obama needs to settle in for a long Syrian sectarian conflict and avoid silver bullet options.

President Obama needs to get back to what he was doing for the last two years -- avoid getting caught up in the Syrian storm, his call for Assad's ouster aside. Obama was right to remain focused on the economic and national security challenges really facing the United States and avoid those challenges that are peripheral.