Yesterday I posted some good news on the higher education front: The just-released Times Higher Education (THE) 2013 World Reputation Rankings show that no country can match the United States when it comes to great research universities. We are number one by a country mile. Today, however, brings some bad news: the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association released a report showing that America’s public universities face stiff challenges in staying on top of the global higher education pile.

Here are four big findings from the report:

• Average state and local funding per college student fell by more than 9 percent (after taking into account inflation) in 2012;
• The average tuition that students paid in 2012 after accounting for grants and scholarships (“net tuition”)  rose by 8.3 percent, the highest increase on record;
• The average support that state and local governments provided per student in 2012 stood at $5,896, the lowest level in twenty-five years;
• Total educational revenue (net tuition plus state and local funding) per student fell by 8 percent from 2008 ($12, 067) to 2012 ($11,085).

These figures are driven most immediately by the lingering effects of the financial crisis of 2008-2009. But they also reflect a decades long trend in the United States by which students are paying a larger and larger share of their higher education costs. As the figure below shows, in 1987 tuition generated roughly a quarter of all educational revenue. Today it accounts for nearly half of it.

The trend of shifting the burden of a college education onto students (and their families) works as long students and their families see the benefit to getting a college degree and can afford the four years (or more) that it takes to get a degree.

The evidence on the latter score is troubling. While tuition has been going up, real median household income in the United States has fallen since 1999. Average student loan debt is up sharply over the past decade, and loan default rates are rising. Given these trends, it is not surprising that polls show that more and more Americans doubt that college is affordable.

Rising college costs are one reason that the United States has tumbled down the global rankings in terms of the percentage of adults age twenty-five to thirty-four holding college degrees. That’s not a good sign for America’s long-term economic health given that globalization has put a premium on highly skilled workers and left unskilled workers to battle the whims of the market.

The tight budgetary environment doesn’t necessarily spell doom for schools like Berkeley, UCLA, and Michigan that populate the top of THE’s reputational rankings.  Many of them are quasi-private universities already given how much state support has fallen over the past several decades. (The University of Virginia, for example, gets only about six percent of its academic budget from the Commonweath of Virginia.) The big research universities will continue to leverage their reputations to win research grants, develop partnerships with the corporate world, and raise money from alums who get weepy hearing the first few bars of their school’s fight song.

And sure, MOOCs—massive open online courses—might revolutionize higher education. They might unleash huge budgetary savings that enable colleges and universities to do more with less.

But those benefits won’t come for a while, if they come at all. For now, public colleges and universities will be doing less with less. And that can’t be good for America’s long-term economic competitiveness.

The latest rankings are out! No, not the ones claiming that Gonzaga has the best men’s basketball team in the land. Rather, the Times Higher Education (THE) 2013 World Reputation Rankings for colleges and universities. They came out this week. As was the case with the THE World University Rankings that came out last October, the reputational rankings make it clear that when it comes to post-secondary education, “America rocks!”

The difference between THE’s world reputation rankings and its university rankings is that the reputational rankings don’t rely on any objective data. They simply reflect what senior academics think are the world’s best universities. So yes, the rankings may say more about the strength of a university’s “brand” than the actual quality of its faculty and students.

That said, here are the top twenty-five universities by reputation:

Source: Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2013

When looking at the top one hundred universities overall, forty-three are American. That’s down from last year’s survey. (Sorry, University of Arizona). The reputational rankings actually underestimate just how good U.S. universities are.  The rankings don’t include America’s superb liberal arts colleges like Oberlin and Swarthmore. No other country can match their abundance and quality.

Overall, English-speaking countries account for nearly two-thirds of the top one hundred universities. Non-English speaking countries account for just thirty-eight of the top one hundred and just nine of the top fifty.

Source: Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings 2013

Of course, reputational rankings are a snapshot of where things stand today. The more interesting question is where they are likely to stand tomorrow. There have been frequent predictions that Asian, and particularly Chinese, universities will soon dominate higher education because Asian governments are investing heavily in education and Western (and especially American) governments are not. While Asian universities generally fared better than they did in 2012, the two Chinese universities on the list, Tsinghua University and Peking University, dropped five and seven spots respectively.  That probably reflects the randomness inherent in the survey rather than a real trend.  But in all, Chinese universities have a long way to go to impress their counterparts elsewhere around the world.

Of course not everyone organizes colleges by countries. Some of us organize them by athletic conference. On that score the Ivy League is the runaway winner. Seven of its eight schools made the top hundred (sorry, Dartmouth), and six of those seven (sorry, Brown) made the top twenty.  The next best showing by an athletic conference was the Big Ten, which had nine of its twelve schools—the Big Ten values its brand over accuracy—land in the top hundred, led by my favorite university, the University of Michigan. Five PAC-12 schools made the top one hundred, as did one-third of the twelve schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Southeastern Conference pulled up the rear among the major college conferences landing just two of its member schools in the top one hundred.  Apparently the SEC’s prowess in football has yet to impress academics around the globe.

Two prominent political scientists, G. John Ikenberry of Princeton and Daniel Deudney of Johns Hopkins, have a new paper out guaranteed to give realists—and conservatives generally—fits. Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era is an unabashed liberal plea to restore the New Deal foundations of U.S. domestic as well as international policy. To preserve an open world order under the rule of law,  the authors contend, the United States must return to the principles it embraced under the administrations of FDR and Harry Truman, namely: a bipartisan commitment to liberal internationalism, solidarity with the world’s most established democracies, and a dedication to the progressive welfare state at home and abroad.

It would be easy to dismiss these arguments as quixotic. Given the polarized U.S. political landscape and the public’s yearning for retrenchment, can one really envision a revival of the domestic consensus that guided U.S. foreign policy through the Cold War? Is it credible that the future of world order will depend more on today’s tired democracies—an insolvent America, a crisis-prone Europe, and an anemic Japan—than on China and the larger cohort of dynamic emerging powers? And given the documented flaws of the welfare state, does a resurgence of social democracy—including in a divided, post-Tea Party America—seem the likeliest glue to bind the United States to its longtime allies?

Before rejecting these theses out of hand, the wise reader would dive into the paper itself. For it offers a thoughtful (if contestable) blueprint for how the United States might preserve the contours of the liberal world order and manage growing global interdependence while navigating its own relative decline.  A grand strategy of “democratic internationalism,” Deudney and Ikenberry argue, “would return liberal internationalism to its roots in social democratic ideals, seek to redress imbalances within the democratic world between fundamentalist capitalism and socioeconomic equity, and move toward a posthegemonic system of global governance in which the United States increasingly shares authority with other democracies.”

The paper’s premises are straightforward.

• First, the stability of the post-1945 world order was the product not only of U.S. power, but more importantly of U.S. liberal internationalism. During the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the United States consciously promoted a model of progressive democratic capitalism that promised both civil liberty and broadly shared growth, and it organized its Western hegemony through consensual multilateral institutions that gave voice to its free world partners. According to Deudney and Ikenberry, the resulting architecture of international cooperation—including the Bretton Woods Institutions, the United Nations, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)—projected outwardly the animating ideals of the New Deal and later efforts to expand the U.S. welfare state.

• Second, the contemporary “crisis” of U.S. global leadership actually reflects a historical triumph—America’s success after 1945 in promoting and defending a community of market democracies against illiberal powers and ideologies. If “today the United States is no longer exceptional and indispensable,” it is “precisely because of its success in creating a free world order in which so many states are liberal, capitalist, and democratic.” The challenge is to reconfigure U.S. leadership to an era in which democracy dominates—not only within the “old trilateral core” of Europe, North America and Japan but also in much of the non-Western and post-colonial world.

• Third, today’s plural democratic community is a broad but shallow one, vulnerable to divergences in values and tectonic shifts in global power. Ties have frayed between the United States and its longtime European partners, particularly since the Reagan years, when the U.S. welfare state began to come under assault. Likewise, U.S. relations with many emerging democracies are fraught, especially on lightning rod issues like sovereignty, human rights, and trade liberalization. As power diffuses to the developing world, including to illiberal states like China, new strategic rivalries may arise, existing multilateral institutions may weaken, and democracies may find cooperation on global problems elusive.

How should the United States respond to this predicament? By doubling down on democracy, argue the authors. “America’s grand strategy should be refocused on initiating a new phase of liberal internationalism that renews and deepens democracy globally, prevents democratic backsliding, and strengthens and consolidates bonds among democratic states,” write Deudney and Ikenberry.

Five goals should be at the forefront of U.S. policy:

• increasing equality of opportunity throughout the democratic world;
• assuming responsibility for global problems at home;
• building new international institutions to manage interdependence smartly;
• reconfiguring rights and responsibilities between rising and established powers; and
• building the democratic community through efforts at mutual understanding.

Unlike traditional democracy promotion efforts, a grand strategy of democratic internationalism would focus more on the “pull” than the “push” of the democratic example, combined with a willingness to “push back” when necessary on the actions of illiberal states like China and Russia. Within the democratic community, it would require the United States to show greater toleration for domestic diversity among its partners, particularly from the global South, if it wishes to share the burdens of global leadership. Finally, it would require the United States to drop longstanding blinders imposed by American exceptionalism­­—particularly the notion that the U.S. national experience presents the best—even only—model for humanity.

“Democratic Internationalism” offers a sweeping, big-picture description of how the United States has led—and how it might lead in the future. Like any provocation, the piece raises more questions than it can possibly answer. Readers of a conservative bent will doubtless chafe at the authors’ selective mining of the U.S. historical record—and their progressive spin on American exceptionalism. Others may wonder how the authors’ domestic prescriptions—such as “restoring and modernizing the New Deal social contract within the United States”—will play in the Republican-controlled House or the thirty-two governors’ mansions occupied by the GOP after the 2012 elections. Finally, realists may scratch their heads and ask, does it really make sense to place such weight on cooperation among democracies, when we live in a G2 world? All good questions, stimulated by a good read.

The new college rankings are out. No, not the rankings for football prowess (though they are out too). The Times Higher Education World University Rankings. They debuted last week, and American higher education has reason to chant, “We’re Number One!” The question, though, is for how long?

Now university rankings should always be taken with a grain of salt for anything other than establishing broad trends. For example, I don’t know any University of Virginia graduate who thinks that UVA (#118) ranks behind the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (#42), let alone nearly every school in the Big Ten (which oddly enough has a dozen members). The reality is that universities have different strengths and weaknesses, and there’s no sure way to measure either. Even if there were, it’s not obvious whether great strength in, say, engineering should count more, the same, or less than great strength in the physical or social sciences. Throw in the differences across borders in terms of teaching formats and approaches, and global college rankings are a dicey enterprise.

That said, here is the world top 25:

Source: Times Higher Education World University Rankings

That’s an impressive showing for U.S. universities. They take seven of the top ten spots, eleven of the top fifteen, fifteen of the top twenty, and twenty of top twenty-six spots. (Georgia Tech and The University of Texas at Austin—UT asks that you capitalize “The”—are tied for twenty-fifth.) Overall, the United States accounts for seventy-six of the top two hundred universities in the rankings.

Much of the coverage of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings has trumpeted how universities in the West have lost ground to their counterparts in Asia. The British universities in the top two hundred slipped an average of 6.7 places compared to their ranking last year. Meanwhile, fifty-one of the top seventy-six American universities lost ground in the ratings.

The improved ratings for Asian universities, and especially Chinese and Indian universities, are to be expected. The rise of China and India as economic powerhouses makes it almost inevitable that their institutions of higher learning will become powerhouses as well. Indeed, Beijing is actively seeking to create the Chinese version of the U.S. Ivies, the so-called C9 League. These nine super-institutions recently received $270 million each from the Chinese government. That kind of money can buy a lot of bricks and books.

But Chinese and Indian universities still have a long way to go before they can to match the best in the West. The highest rated Chinese university is Peking University, which clocks in at #46.  Next is Tsinghua University at #52. (The University of Hong Kong stands at #35, but its history is quite different from mainland Chinese universities.) No other Chinese or Indian university is in the top two hundred. Elite status requires not just money but time and a lot of effort.

The real threat to Western, and specifically U.S., universities comes not from Asian universities flush with cash but from eroding support at home for investing in top-flight universities. California’s budget woes have rocked the world’s greatest single higher education system; five University of California campuses rank in the Times Higher Education’s top fifty but their budgets are being slashed. The flagship universities in Georgia, Illinois, Texas, and Virginia (among others) face tough choices about how to maintain academic excellence as state support shrinks in relative (and sometimes absolute terms) and the pressure to hold down tuition increases. Whether states choose to continue investing in their colleges and universities, and whether students can find ways to finance their college educations, will go a long way to determining how competitive the United States remains in a global economy.

One final point. The focus on how many universities each country has in the top fifty or hundred misses what may be the most profound trend in U.S. higher education, namely, that U.S. universities are becoming far less “American” and far more global in their makeup. The “multinationalization” of the faculties of American universities has long been evident to students taking math and science courses. But increasingly it describes the student themselves. Nearly one-in-four Columbia University and Stanford University students are international students, as is one-in-five Northwestern students and one-in-seven UC-Berkeley and University of Michigan students. So the simple fact that a student goes to class in Palo Alto, Evanston, or Ann Arbor says increasingly less about which national economy will capture the benefits of his or her higher educational attainments.

The hot new buzzword in university circles these days is MOOCs—massive open online courses. They may be the future of higher education. Or maybe not.

MOOCs are just what their full names imply: online courses that anyone anywhere in the world with access to the internet can take. And massive means just that: massive. A MOOC on artificial intelligence that Stanford offered last year attracted more than 160,000 students. This spring MIT offered a MOOC on “Circuits and Electronics” that enrolled more than 150,000 students.

Just how hot are MOOCs? Well, the New York Times reported yesterday that Coursera, a company that announced itself to the world just five months ago, has enrolled 1.35 million students in its free online courses. Coursera draws its courses from faculty at its thirty-three partner universities. And these aren’t obscure directional schools or pump-and-dump outfits that advertise on the back of matchbooks. These are the cream of American higher education: Michigan, Penn, and Princeton to name just a few.

The enthusiasm for MOOCs reflects excitement about the potential economic benefits that could be unlocked by bringing higher education to people around the world. Making it far easier for people to acquire new skills and knowledge wouldn’t just benefit developing countries. It could also help developed countries like the United States seeking to revitalize and renew their human capital. And it could in theory deliver these economic benefits at a fraction of the cost of traditional bricks-and-mortar colleges.

But the enthusiasm for MOOCs also reflects dreams of pots of gold at the end of the MOOC rainbow. The era of persistent double-digit tuition increases looks to be over, so universities are looking around for new revenue sources. (One of the reasons that the University of Virginia Board of Visitors gave for its ham-handed—and ultimately botched—dismissal of UVA president Teresa Sullivan this summer was that she had not moved Mr. Jefferson’s university boldly into online courses as many of its peer institutions had.) The vision of hundreds of thousands of students around the world sending checks to campus bursars is enough to make any academic administrator salivate.

So far most MOOC offerings have been STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math) courses. That makes sense for two reasons. First, students who take such courses are likely to want to acquire skills that translate directly to the workplace. “Critical Theories of Modern Poetry” doesn’t fit that bill. Second, STEM courses lend themselves to right/wrong answers that can be graded by computer. Who wants to wade through a hundred thousand essays on Robert Frost’s use of metaphors in “The Road Not Taken”? (The humanities aren’t always left out. The Berklee College of Music is offering courses on introduction to guitar and improvisation if you are so inclined.)

For all the excitement over MOOCs, a few glitches need to be worked out. One is that student enthusiasm for MOOCs seems to follow the trajectory of New Year’s diet resolutions. More than half of the students who enrolled in MIT’s circuits course didn’t even bother to complete the first assignment, and just 7,157 students (or less than 5 percent of enrollees) passed the course.

Then there is the matter of credentials. Several of the earliest MOOC courses have offered students certificates for completing the class. The certificates may be suitable for framing, but it’s unclear that potential employers will see them as anything more than participation ribbons. Workplace acceptance is especially a problem given that MOOC sponsors have yet to create systems for ensuring that the person who receives the certificate is the person who took the exams. And then there is the question of how individual course certificates might be bundled into something approximating a college degree.

But the biggest problem with MOOCs is their business model, or more precisely, their lack of one. As the New York Times described the Coursera venture earlier this year:

Coursera does not pay the universities, and the universities do not pay Coursera, but both incur substantial costs. Contracts provide that if a revenue stream emerges, the company and the universities will share it.

Or as the Times quotes Ohio State president Gordon Gee in its story yesterday:

We’re doing this in the hope and expectation that we’ll be able to build a financial model, but I don’t know what it is. But we can’t be too far behind in an area that’s growing and changing as fast as this one.

Savvy administrators may yet figure out how to successfully “monetize” MOOCs. And not all MOOC initiatives are intended to generate a profit. EdX, which Harvard and MIT started and which now includes the University of California, Berkley among its members, is a not-for-profit venture. But even (intentionally) not-for-profits have to find a way to cover their costs.

So at this point, it is premature to predict that MOOCs will be the golden goose for cash-starved U.S. colleges and universities—or that they will remake the world of higher education as we know it.

Companies sending U.S. jobs overseas has quickly become a major campaign issue, with both political parties trading barbs on who has been responsible for more job loss and analysts trying to give more context about what the issue actually means for U.S. employment and the economy.

Two stories in the Washington Post on outsourcing have cause a flurry of claims and counterclaims on the campaign trail. In June, the it published a story that raised questions about whether private equity investment firm Bain Capital facilitated sending jobs overseas while GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was a partner there. This week, another Post story reports that critics on the left argue that President Obama has not made good on his 2008 campaign promises to stem the flow of U.S. jobs to other countries.

Edward Alden on CFR’s Renewing America blog says while it is “absolutely right that outsourcing by multinational corporations poses a huge challenge to the United States,” the Post’s stories on Romney and Obama are misleading and do not raise the quality of conversation about the problem.

“The debate over outsourcing deserves better than this, though judging by the thousands of comments on the two Post stories, it is clearly a topic of great interest. It should be,” Alden writes. “The United States desperately needs to figure out how to do more to expand investment and jobs in a world where other countries are competing aggressively to do the same.”

Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson notes that there is “a distinction between outsourcing (subcontracting work to another company) and offshoring (moving jobs outside the United States)” and lost in campaign debate is “perspective on how much offshoring reduced U.S. job growth,” which he says isn’t much.

Samuelson says bashing offshoring may be good politics but “the success or failure of the next president in reducing unemployment will depend mostly on how much — or how little — his policies influence Americans to spend, hire, and shed their present pessimism.”

For more on the candidates’ stances, check this issue tracker on The Candidates and the Economy.

Suggested Other Reading:

At Foreign Policy, Vivek Wadhwa says the real U.S. outsourcing crisis isn’t the hotly debated loss of jobs to cheap overseas labor, it is “the thousands of potential entrepreneurs and job creators who are prevented from setting up shop in America because of immigration laws.”

This CFR Backgrounder looks at the impact of multinational companies and outsourcing on the U.S. economy, jobs, and taxes.

A new report on GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s corporate history has opened new a line of attack on his domestic job creation record (ABC) as he continues to face a tight race on the economy.

An investigative story by the Washington Post‘s Tom Hamburger says that while Romney ran Bain Capital, the firm invested in other companies that specialized in relocating jobs done by U.S. workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India from call centers to the manufacture of computer parts.

The report runs counter to Romney’s campaign, which centers in part around his experience creating U.S. jobs, his plans to combat the toll competition for jobs overseas has taken in the U.S. economy, and his promises to bring jobs back to the United States and protect domestic employment by getting tougher with China.

The Romney campaign called the report a “fundamentally flawed” story that skirts explanation (Politico) of the difference between “outsourcing” and “offshoring,” or shipping jobs overseas.

The progressive blog Think Progress notes that, while the Romney camp is technically correct on how the Post article confused the two terms, it “doesn’t change the fact that Bain, under Romney, invested in companies whose sole purpose was to move jobs to other countries, directly countering the narrative that Romney has been trying to set.”

However, at Forbes, Dan Ikenson writes that Romney should defend himself and delve into the economics of  “U.S. direct investment abroad” versus “shipping jobs overseas.”

“The vast majority of U.S. direct investment abroad (what the president calls “shipping jobs overseas”) goes to other rich countries (European countries and Canada), where the rule of law is clear and abided, and where there is a market to serve,” Ikenson said. “The primary reason for U.S. corporations establishing foreign affiliates is to serve demand in those markets – not as a platform for exporting back to the United States.”

The Atlantic’s David A. Graham says that outsourcing was a potent issue in the 2004 election and could hurt Romney in 2012, especially in Rust Belt swing states that have been hit hard by a bad economy and account for many electoral votes.

President Barack Obama’s campaign seized on the news, deploying senior campaign strategist David Axelrod on a conference call with reporters (The Hill), adding outsourcing criticism to stump speeches (USAToday), and churning out ads on the issue to run in swing states starting Tuesday (HuffPost).

For more on the candidates’ stances, check this issue tracker on The Candidates and the Economy.

Suggested Other Reading:

In a May report, the Brookings Institution looks at the slow growth of U.S. manufacturing jobs during the last two years, related geographic implications, and if it signals a renaissance for U.S. manufacturing and recovery from years of outsourcing or represents just a temporary respite from long-term decline.

In March, CFR’s Edward Alden looked at why big companies are not investing in the United States and how to attract them at the Renewing America project.

– Gayle S. Putrich, Contributing Editor

It is high time the United States joined 162 other states and the European Union in becoming party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)—thirty years after the Reagan administration first negotiated the treaty.

On May 23, the White House dispatched its big guns to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator Kerry is holding hearings on UNCLOS. The message from Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, was unequivocal: Acceding to the treaty is profoundly in the U.S. national interest.

That, of course, is the unanimous view of every one of their predecessors, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

And yet the treaty continues to face stubborn opposition from a vocal conservative minority of purported defenders of U.S. sovereignty, still trotting out long-discredited talking points.

All of the uniformed services—and especially the U.S. Navy—are solidly behind UNCLOS. American military leaders have always been discriminating when it comes to treaties, traditionally resisting those (like the Rome Statute of the ICC) that might put U.S. servicemen and women at risk. But they support UNCLOS because it will enable, rather than complicate, their mission. Because the United States was the principal force behind the negotiation of UNCLOS, it contains everything the U.S. military wants, and nothing that it fears.

The treaty’s primary value to the U.S. military is that it establishes clear rights, duties, and jurisdictions of maritime states. The treaty defines the limits of a country’s “territorial sea,” establishes rules for transit through “international straits,” and defines “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs) in a way compatible with freedom of navigation and over-flight. It further establishes the “sovereign inviolability” of naval ships calling on foreign ports, providing critical protection for U.S. vessels. More generally, the treaty allows states party to exempt their militaries from its mandatory dispute resolution provisions—allowing the United States to retain complete military freedom of action. At the same time, the treaty does nothing at all to interfere with critical U.S.-led programs like the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Nor does it subject any U.S. military personnel to the jurisdiction of any international court.

Some have argued that UNCLOS has already become “customary international law,” and thus the United States has little to gain from formal accession. But custom and practice are far more malleable and subject to interpretation. Other states may soon push the Law of the Sea into new, antithetical directions if the United States does not ratify the treaty. China, a party to UNCLOS, rejects U.S. interpretations of the treaty’s freedom of navigation provisions, and continues to assert outlandish claims to control over virtually the entire South China Sea. But it is hardly alone. Countries as diverse as Brazil, Malaysia, Peru, and India have resisted freedom of navigation within their EEZs, in contravention of their obligations.

As it has for years, the United States Navy regularly conducts Freedom of Navigation Operations (so-called FONOPS) to challenge excessive claims of territorial exclusivity. But as non-party to the treaty, the United States lacks any legal standing to bring its complaints to an international dispute resolution body. More broadly, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard officials complain, non-membership complicates everyday bilateral and multilateral cooperation with scores of international partners.

If these security benefits were not enough, the U.S. business community is unified in its support for the treaty for two reasons. First, UNCLOS would protect U.S. rights to sole commercial exploitation to all resources on and under its extended continental shelf (that is, beyond two hundred miles). This area—estimated to be twice the size of California—is rich in oil, gas, and other exploitable resources. Second, accession to the treaty would allow the United States to sponsor its own national companies to engage in deep sea-bed mining. Last week, the chairman of Lockheed Martin sent a strongly worded letter to the Senate saying his company wanted to join the race for undersea riches, but could not assume investment risks until it was clear that it would have a clear legal title to its findings.

This coming week, Senator Kerry will hold a second round of hearings on UNCLOS, featuring an array of military commanders, treaty champions like John Bellinger–former legal counselor to the State Department and National Security Council under the George W. Bush administration–and critics, like Steven Groves of the Heritage Foundation. The hearings offer a golden opportunity to put to rest the canards of treaty opponents.

Securing a two-thirds Senate majority will not be easy. Opponents are pulling out all the stops, invoking the GOP’s patron saint to scuttle its prospects. According to Edwin Meese, former attorney general for Ronald Reagan, the Gipper abandoned the treaty as “a direct threat to American sovereignty”—conveniently ignoring that the offending provisions were written out of the current treaty in a 1994 negotiation, precisely to alleviate U.S. concerns.

One enduring shibboleth is that the International Seabed Authority (ISA) created under UNCLOS is an unaccountable supranational bureaucracy that will defy U.S. wishes and redistribute undersea wealth to developing countries. This is pure nonsense, since the United States is the only country guaranteed (if it accedes to the treaty) a permanent seat on the ISA, a body that takes decisions by consensus—giving the United States an effective veto over its decisions. It is true that the ISA collects royalties for deep sea mining, but these remain extremely modest—as one would expect from an arrangement that was effectively negotiated by U.S. oil companies.

Nevertheless, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona has proposed an enticing but misguided “compromise,” whereby “Congress could enact a statute that makes the navigational parts of the treaty…the law of the land,” and thereby “separate the wheat from the chaff.” This purported solution is a sheer mirage. It would secure no diplomatic or international legal benefits for the United States. Nor would it secure maritime exploration rights to which Lockheed Martin referred. Still, Kyl has already obtained the signatures of twenty-seven colleagues, just seven short of the number needed to scuttle the treaty. Treaty defenders must expose this gambit as an alluring but ultimately destructive siren song.

Senator Kerry has promised that he will delay any vote on UNCLOS until after the election, to avoid the “hurly-burly of presidential politics.” This is a calculated gamble, given the potential constraints of a lame duck congressional session. Champions will need to keep the pressure on, and hold Congress’s feet to the fire to disregard the absurd objections of treaty skeptics.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) survived a recall vote Tuesday, nearly one year after he sparked a controversial, national debate (WSJ) by pushing a state budget through the legislature that significantly curtailed the benefits and collective bargaining rights of public sector employees.

In the past year, state-based fights over the unionization rights of public workers have spilled over into the presidential race, especially in swing states like Wisconsin and Ohio–both potentially decisive battleground states for President Barack Obama and presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

Romney congratulated Walker on his win and his strict budget-cutting measures in a statement Tuesday night. “Governor Walker has demonstrated over the past year what sound fiscal policies can do to turn an economy around, and I believe that in November voters across the country will demonstrate that they want the same in Washington, D.C.,” Romney said.

Writing for The New Republic, political theorist William Galston paints yesterday’s vote as a preview of what to expect from the presidential campaign as it unfolds in the coming months. “The Wisconsin recall election is to the 2012 general election as the Spanish Civil War was to World War Two–not necessarily a harbinger of the final outcome but rather a preview of strategies and tactics,” he writes.

Other analysts cautioned that a June gubernatorial recall is not an accurate indicator for a fall presidential race. Slate’s Will Oremus argues that not all politics is national, and that the outcome in Wisconsin will have little resonance by November. “Drawing inferences about a national election on the basis of a state election is almost always tenuous, but it’s particularly so in the case of a gubernatorial recall, where the main issue is not the U.S. economy, health care, or national security, but the character and specific track record of the individual in office,” Oremus writes.

For more on the candidates’ stances, check out CFR’s Issue Tracker on the Candidates and the Economy.

Suggested Other Reading:

In the Weekly Standard, Jay Cost looks at the increasing importance of unions for government workers, and their impact on Democratic party politics.

David Gergen and Michael Zuckerman argue at CNN that the public sector union fight at the center of the Wisconsin recall vote will resonate beyond this month.

– Gayle S. Putrich, Contributing Editor

As part of their series on twelve campaign issues facing the next president, the Brookings Institution recently hosted a panel discussion examining the U.S role in the world.

Despite the United States’ longstanding status as the world’s biggest superpower, rapid globalization and new security threats have raised questions about its role in the international order, and how President Barack Obama or GOP rival Mitt Romney will deal with these new global challenges while protecting U.S. interests at home and abroad is of great concern.

Here are some highlights from remarks by Brookings fellows:

Bruce Jones said debating whether the United States is in decline is the wrong way to look at the current global situation. “The simple fact is there are new factors in the world, there are new actors or new economic relations and we have to adjust our policy to deal with those,” he said. He also points out that for the last sixty-five years, the international system was built, protected, and promoted by U.S. power with a series of alliances that allow for global cooperation and multilateralism. “I don’t see anything in either campaign, anything in the policy of the president or anything that Romney has said, that is going to change either of those two fundamental realities,” Jones said. “I think they are core tenets of the relationship between American power and international order and are very likely to remain true over a long period of time. But the reality is that we confront mew challenges.”

Strobe Talbott said “there is not a great deal of difference” between what is emerging as a Romney platform on foreign policy and the actual
foreign policy of the Obama administration thus far. The one glaring difference in approaches, which Talbott said he thinks will fade as Romney moves from a primary-driven stance to a more center, general-election position, is Romney’s “cheap bashing of other countries” from the campaign trail, particularly Russia and China. Talbott’s big question for a second Obama term is if it will be more ambitious and successful than the first, delivering agreements on a nuclear test ban treaty or climate issues that were discussed in 2008 campaign but have not materialized.

Homi Kharas said that the campaign has remained focused on the economy and that the global economy will continue to be of major importance in the next  four years. Throughout the current global economic crisis, the traditional U.S. leadership role “has been very limited and it is posing a problem,” he said. Kharas said his big question for the campaign trail is, which candidate is more likely to pursue a multilateral approach to global economic governance?

For more on the candidates’ stances on major foreign policy issues, check out all of CFR’s Issue Trackers.

CFR’s Renewing America project looks at six domestic issues challenging the ability of the United States to project power abroad including U.S. debt and deficits, trade, and corporate regulation.

At the inaugural meeting of of the Council of Councils in March, CFR President Richard N. Haass and World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick discuss the changing global economy and the U.S. role in it.

Romney adviser and Brookings fellow Robert Kagan discussed the idea of a U.S. decline and rising China earlier this year.

– Gayle S. Putrich, Contributing Editor

The New York Times ran a fascinating article yesterday on soaring student college debt. To make a long story short—and at 4,500+ words it was a long story—students are taking on a lot more debt to get themselves through college and finding it harder to pay back what they borrowed. That trend is worrying. Because if the system for financing American higher education breaks down, one of the country’s primary mechanisms for generating social mobility, lessening income inequality, and stimulating economic growth will be lost.

Here are some of the eye-opening statistics the Times offers up:

• 94 percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education—up from 45 percent in 1993.
• The average debt in 2011 for all student loan borrowers was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000. (These figures do not include money that parents borrow by, say, taking out a second mortgage on their homes or maxing out credit cards.)
• The total amount of federal student loans has grown by more than 60 percent over the past five years.
• Nearly one in ten student loan borrowers who started repayment in 2009 defaulted within two years—a rate roughly twice that in 2005.
• According to data from the College Board, state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent nationally between 2001 and 2011.
• Again according to the College Board, tuition and fees at four-year state colleges jumped 72 percent between 2001 and 2011, while they were up 29 percent for nonprofit private institutions.

Soaring tuition has sparked political fights over how to provide more student loans at lower interest rates. But easier access to money just encourages people to borrow more and colleges to charge more. The critical task is to get costs under control, as the Times notes in a follow-up article. That will be hard do in part because it’s not how most college administrators think:

“I readily admit it,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, who has also served as president of Vanderbilt and Brown, among others. “I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.”

President Gee knows of what he speaks. He racked up more than $550,000 in travel charges over the past two years and nearly $850,000 over the past five. And his total compensation package runs about $2 million. That’s far more than what your average full professor makes.

Getting soaring college costs under control is going to be hard to do because it reflects more than inflated presidential salaries or overpaid football coaches and sumptuous facilities for varsity sports (to name two other factors I hear mentioned frequently). It also owes to things like escalating parental and student demands for services. With one kid in college (Wahoowa!), another set to start in the fall (Go Blue!), and two more in high school, I have been on my fair share of college tours. And what I hear parents and students saying is that they want more small classes, personalized instruction, extensive personal and career counseling services, state-of-the-art recreational facilities, and dorm food that tastes like a three-star restaurant. Those things all cost money. But schools that let their average class size grow or say no to building an indoor rock climbing facility risk seeing prize students head over to Rival U.

Sadly, there aren’t any easy fixes for the college cost problem. But the current cost growth simply isn’t sustainable. And as the late economist Herb Stein liked to remark, “if a thing cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

Above the Fold. President Obama got himself into hot water this week when he was overhead telling Russian president Dmitri Medvedev he would have “more flexibility” on issues like missile defense after the November election and that incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin should give him “space.” The incident added to a long list of presidential and vice presidential “open mic” gaffes. During a sound-check before a 1984 radio interview, Ronald Reagan warmed up by saying,  “My fellow Americans, I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” That got people’s hearts pounding. Vice President Biden famously called the signing of Obama’s health-care bill in 2010 “a big f***ing deal.” Parents of young children were not pleased.

Obama’s critics have blistered him for this week’s gaffe, because, well, that’s what critics do. Mitt Romney says he is “very, very concerned” that the president is “looking for greater flexibility where he doesn’t have to answer to the American people.” Rick Santorum sees Obama’s comments as “suggesting that he is willing to sacrifice American security.” Newt Gingrich said the conversation amounted to an “extraordinary moment caught on tape where the president basically said to a Russian leader, ‘Please wait until after the election so I can sell out.‘” Speaker of the House John Boehner chimed in, sending the president a letter saying he was “alarmed to learn of the message you sent to incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin while in South Korea Monday.” The open mic moment so upset Senator Marco Rubio that he promptly endorsed Mitt Romney for president. (That presumably was not the outcome that Senator Santorum or Speaker Gingrich wanted.) So be prepared for tough campaign ads this fall showing Obama talking to Medvedev with ominous music in the background. The ads won’t change many votes, but they will give campaign consultants something to do.

A remarkable thing about the open mic contretemps has been the near uniform assumption that President Obama is misleading the American public and telling the truth to the Russians. But what if that assumption is exactly backwards? Obama wouldn’t be the first president to use elections as an excuse to avoid giving a foreign leader what he or she wants, or to buy some much-needed time for his own policies. The tactic might even be considered the hallmark of the statesman; successful politicians know that is frequently better to dissemble than be to blunt. In any event, you can bet dollars-to-doughnuts that some of Putin’s advisers are debating the possibility right now that they, and not American voters, are the ones being played.

CFR Event of the Week. President Obama created the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness to “ensure that business can take root and folks can find good jobs and America is leading the global competition that will determine our success in the 21st century.” On Thursday, two members of the Council—DuPont CEO Ellen Kullman and UBS president Robert Wolf—along with Office of Management and Budget acting director Jeffrey Zients, joined Garrick Utley in CFR’s New York office to discuss the Council’s recommendations. Zients says that “about two-thirds of” the Council’s ninety specific recommendations “are things that we as an administration can do on our own through executive action, and thirty are legislative proposals.” What are some of those ninety recommendations? Kullman believes that “from a U.S. standpoint, we have to get back to advanced manufacturing…it is a huge job creator.” Wolf argues that “infrastructure” is “our best engine of growth” because “for every dollar spent it’s a multiplier of 1.6 times.” You can see the full discussion on video here or below, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.

Read of the Week. Edward Luce, the chief U.S. columnist for the Financial Times, is out with a superb new book, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent. As you might gather from the subtitle, Ed is a bit glum on America’s future. (Just to make sure that readers don’t miss his point, Ed titled his concluding chapter, “An Exceptional Challenge: Why the Coming Struggle to Halt America’s Decline Faces Long Odds.”) I am much more upbeat on America’s ability to adapt and adjust to a changing world. But that process of reinvention and recreation only happens because books like Ed’s force us to look at ourselves as we are rather than as we pretend to be. So in taking readers on a tour of blighted neighborhoods in Flint, Michigan and past the empty parking lots at once bustling Bell Labs in New Jersey, Ed has done a far greater public service than all speeches touting America’s greatness that will be given during this campaign season.

Blog Post of the Week. This is a week that brings elation—and a good dose of disappointment—to high schools around the United States and beyond. By now most college-bound students have learned whether they have been accepted, denied, or waitlisted. The highs and lows that the kids are experiencing pale in comparison, though, to the sticker shock that their parents are undergoing. College costs a bloody fortune! So to all those parents suddenly frazzled because the real cost of a college education has tripled over the past three decades, Derek Thompson offers up the perfect antidote. Although going to college is expensive, he notes that not going to college is even more expensive.

Poll Question of the Week.  Egypt will be holding presidential elections in May, and the Muslim Brotherhood is trying to decide whether to run a candidate in the race. The prospect of the Brotherhood taking over the Egyptian government has some foreign policy experts saying “beware.” After all, the Brotherhood’s rhetoric toward Washington has been unkind. To judge from the results of a new Gallup poll, that’s perfectly fine with many Egyptians. When asked “are closer relations with the United States a good thing or a bad thing for Egypt,” 56 percent of Egyptians says it is a “bad thing” and only 28 percent say it is a “good thing.” Back in December, 41 percent of Egyptians thought that better relations with the United States were a good thing. Why the thirteen-point drop in four months? It probably has something to do with the spat over the operations of foreign pro-democracy groups in Egypt and with many Egyptians feeling that their status in the world is rising. Put the two together, and it is hardly surprising that “anti-Americanism is thriving in Cairo.” Before you despair, however, keep this in mind. Public opinion can be fickle, as the movement in America’s favorability ratings in Egypt over the four months shows. If Washington pursues smart policies, its Egyptian popularity problem will solve itself.

Chart of the Week. Bashar al-Assad has accepted a six-point plan put forth by UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan to “end” the crisis in Syria.  We’ll see how that goes. Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has vowed support for the plan. This marks a change of tone if not substance in Russian policy. Moscow vetoed a toothless UN Security Council resolution on Syria just last month, claiming it was another Western attempt at “regime change.” Some critics argue that Russia’s opposition had a more base motive: a desire to continue selling weapons to Syria. Which leads to a question: Who are the market leaders in the international arms trade? Thanks to the Economist, we know the answer—and it’s not China. The United States and Russia top the charts of arms dealers, with Germany, France, and Britain far behind. Not surprisingly, countries sell more to their friends. The number one destination for U.S. arms exports is South Korea. Germany sells a lot to Greece (and gives it a lot of money as well); France is cozy with Singapore, and Britain has a friend in Riyadh. Don’t expect the international demand for weapons to ease any time soon.

Chart Source: The Economist

Too Good Not to Note. Elliott Abrams found the Pope’s trip to Cuba “sad”; I think he is being kind. Joshua Kurlantzick wonders what will happen on Myanmar’s by-election day. Ron Rosenbaum sits down with my old boss Richard A. Clarke and discovers that RAC believes that the United States and not Israel was behind the Stuxnet virus. Robert Kelly thinks that the United States won’t pivot much to Asia. Peter Bergen has charts to show what we pretty much already suspected: the Afghan army and police pose a growing threat to U.S. and NATO troops. Matt Bai tries to figure out who killed last year’s “debt deal,” Barack Obama or John Boehner? Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisers don’t think much of Obama’s handling of foreign policy, and Obama’s advisers don’t think much of what Romney’s foreign policy advisers have to say.

Perils of Prediction. “Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance.” Johannes Trithemius, German abbot and scholar, “In Praise of Scribes,” 1492. Actually, printed books did alright for themselves for 500 years.

Quote to Ponder. “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

A Reason to Smile. Accepting an offer of admission from your favorite school. Congratulations, Cameron! #HTTV

This week on highlighting interesting stuff related to the campaign from our sister project, Renewing America, which looks at six domestic issues that could harm projection of U.S. power internationally, we will start with a post  from CFR’s Michael Spence.

With gas prices gathering strength as an issue on the campaign trail, Spence sees little sense in recent news coverage blaming the Obama administration for the problem and says the current sentiment has to do with failing to educate voters on the challenge of non-renewable fuel production. He says when oil prices were high in the 1970s, the United States embarked upon a policy to reduce consumption and improve energy security, only to have those policies undermined when prices dropped a decade later, and now “having underinvested in energy efficiency and security when the costs of doing so were lower, America is poorly positioned to face the prospect of rising real prices.” Spence also argues:

Obama is correctly attempting to explain that effective energy policy, by its very nature, requires long-term goals and steady progress toward achieving them.

One frequently hears the assertion that democracies’ electoral cycles are poorly suited to implementing long-term, forward-looking policies. The countervailing force is leadership that explains the benefits and costs of different options, and unites people around common goals and sensible approaches. The Obama administration’s effort to put long-term growth and security above political advantage thus deserves admiration and respect.

If criticism of democratic governance on the grounds of its “inevitable short time horizon” were correct, it would be hard to explain how India, a populous, complex, and still-poor democracy, could sustain long-term investments and policies required to support rapid growth and development. There, too, vision, leadership, and consensus-building have played a critical role.

The good news for US energy security is that in 2011, the country became a new net exporter of petroleum products. The price of fossil fuels, however, is likely to continue to trend upward.

Also on Renewing America, CFR’s Edward Alden looks at new tariffs to be levied on solar panels imported from China, a country that has been a staple on the campaign trail particularly its trade practices. Alden says the tariffs are relatively low and offers this as a possible scenario for why:

The Obama administration has absolutely no desire to impose punitive duties that would actually impede the sale of Chinese solar modules. The power generated by new solar installations in the United States last year was twice the level added in 2010, largely due to falling panel prices, as well as U.S. government production subsidies and consumer tax breaks that have made solar more competitive with conventional sources. Expanding the use of renewable energy is among the administration’s highest priorities. Indeed, when the duties were announced last week by the Commerce Department, President Obama was touring a Nevada solar facility that is the largest PV plant in the United States. Slapping hefty tariffs on Chinese PV imports would undermine that policy.

At the same time, however, the Obama administration does not want to see the few remaining U.S.-based panel  makers driven out of business by cheap imports, and key administration allies like Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and House Ways and Means Committee ranking member Sander Levin (D-MI) have been pressing for aid to the industry.

Above the Fold. Washington, DC, owes a huge debt of gratitude to Tokyo. It was one hundred years ago next Tuesday that Japan’s largest city gave our nation’s capital 3,000 cherry trees to plant along the banks of the Tidal Basin. (No, George Washington did not plant them, and no, he did not cut down any cherry trees. That story was invented by Parson Mason Weems who wrote a not-quite-accurate biography of Washington shortly after America’s greatest president died.) First lady Helen Taft and Viscountess Chinda, the wife of the Japanese Ambassador, planted the first two trees. Thanks to the splendid caretaking of the National Park Service, the trees have thrived. Seeing them in full bloom brings to mind the lovely words that Henry Wadworth Longfellow wrote long ago:

Sweet is the air with the budding haws, and the valley stretching for miles below
Is white with blossoming cherry-trees, as if just covered with lightest snow.

Washington’s cherry trees are so spectacular that the city has held a National Cherry Blossom Festival  every year since 1935. The average date for the peak bloom is April 4, and this year’s festival runs until April 27. But the National Park Service says that this year the peak bloom came two weeks early, on March 20^th to be exact, which happens to have been the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. But even if the peak bloom has already passed or you don’t live anywhere near Washington, and especially if you are struggling to decide whether to take that job overseas or to pick which college to attend, get outside this weekend to enjoy Spring’s beauty. It’s something to behold.

CFR Event of the Week. Are America’s schools good enough to keep the U.S. economy competitive and the country safe? A CFR Independent Task Force issued a report this week, entitled “U.S. Education Reform and National Security,” that suggests that the answer is no. Former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice chaired the task force. They stopped by CFR’s Washington, DC, office to discuss the report with Nightline anchor Terry Moran. Klein and Rice’s concern is backed up by plenty of statistics, such as the fact that only 24 percent of high-school graduates are ready for college courses and three-quarters of young Americans cannot qualify to join the military. Klein argues that the problems bedeviling American education will require work to fix: “We need significant change. Small-bore tinkering is not going to get us where we need to go.” To hear more about the report and its findings directly from the task-force chairs, you can watch the video here or below, listen to the audio, or read the transcript.

Read of the Week. The CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force Report, “U.S. Education Reform and National Security,” is worth reading. I don’t know that I agree with all of the Task Force’s findings and recommendations. You may not either. So feel free to use the comment boxes below to tell me how the report gets things wrong and what you think Americans and their government should be doing to improve our educational system. Of course, feel free to note where you think the Task Force report gets things right as well.

Blog Post of the Week. India is emerging as a global power, but South Asia remains among the least economically integrated regions of the world. That lack of integration is both a hindrance to India’s economy and a substantial opportunity. Evan Feigenbaum writes that Indian officials understand the problem and are seeking to emphasize the economic dimensions of their national strategy. Evan thinks that this could be a good thing for both India and its neighbors.

Poll Question of the Week. It’s not just Washington, DC, that has had a warmer than usual winter and flowers blooming when it’s normally snowing. The same thing is true of most of the country. (It was 82 degrees when I visited the University of Illinois earlier this week. The locals told me that students typically aren’t lounging around on the quad in shorts and bathing suits in early March.) So what do Americans think accounts for the warmer weather? The answer looks to depend on the party affiliation of the person you are asking. Gallup reports that 51 percent of Republicans and Independents say that the warmer weather reflects normal temperature variations. In contrast, 43 percent of Democrats blame global warming. Is there anything the Democrats and Republicans do agree upon?

Chart of the Week. In the last few months, CFR has been doing more videos. Some of these are one-off interviews with government officials, business leaders, and subject experts who have participated in CFR meetings. Others are parts of series we have been doing on Lessons Learned, Global Governance, and Campaign 2012. These efforts got me wondering how much video has grown over the past few years. So I checked out the latest YouTube statistics. The answer, as you can see in the chart below, is a lot.  (YouTube’s crack research team has put together a fun and clever website that makes it easy to visualize video’s growth.) But looking at the skyrocketing rate of videos being posted to YouTube left me wondering about a different question: Will we reach the point a few years down the road that we are all too busy recording and posting videos to have any time left over to watch them?

Too Good Not to Note. Adam Segal reports on China’s Twitter War. Elizabeth Economy goes into full Kremlinologist mode to tease out the meaning and consequences of Beijing’s decision two weeks ago to oust Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai. Ed Husain urges France’s Jews and Muslims to show solidarity against jihadis. CFR’s Geo-Graphics blog says that Karl Marx knows who has gotten the benefits of the economy’s recovery. Ted Alden argues that Americans need to learn how to win in the global economy when ideas aren’t invented here. Stewart Patrick fears that South Africa is abandoning its idealistic aspirations about protecting fundamental human rights and embracing a foreign policy that defends absolute sovereignty and nonintervention above all else. Walter Russell Mead examines how India hedged its vote at the UN Human Rights Council on credible allegations that Sri Lanka committed atrocities against its Tamil minority. Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou sees Libya as following Iraq’s lead, and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment. Christopher Hill worries that none of the Republican presidential candidates “is particularly interested in the details of any of America’s relationships around the globe.” Ryan Lizza looks at Mitt Romney’s problem with evangelical voters and his road ahead to the GOP presidential nomination. John Cassidy assesses what the nomination of Jim Yong Kim means for the future of the World Bank. Mike Moran thinks that Obama made a mistake in nominating an American for the World Bank presidency.

Perils of Prediction. “2012 NCAA Men’s Basketball March Madness Bracket Predictions: Florida State Surprises, Syracuse Disappoints, Michigan State wins 2012 NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship.” – Mark Donatiello, March 14, 2012. Let’s see. Florida State is contemplating exam finals rather than basketball finals after losing to the lower-ranked Cincinnati Bearcats. Syracuse’s dreams of another national championship are still alive after a heart-pounding victory over Wisconsin. And Michigan State won’t be cutting down the nets in New Orleans after getting steamrolled by Louisville. The upside to Michigan State’s loss is that sofa stores in East Lansing should be doing a brisk business in the coming weeks.

Quote to Ponder. “If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.” Anne Bradstreet

A Reason to Smile. The Face-off for the Frozen Four. #HTTV

Education has cropped up as an economic sleeper issue for U.S. voters with a debate ensuing about the types of degrees college graduates need to have in the current economy as well as the availability of apprenticeship/training programs necessary to meet the needs of U.S. employers.

Over at our sister project Renewing America, CFR’s Edward Alden discusses a new CFR Task Force report on education released earlier this week:

It makes a compelling case that the failure of the United States to maintain its leadership in education ultimately threatens not just U.S. prosperity but its national security. It concludes that too many of our K-12 schools are simply failing to give students the basic preparation they need to engage in a modern, technologically sophisticated economy.

There are a number of striking illustrations in the report, but perhaps the most telling are three charts that look at the percentage of Americans attaining a college degree, broken down by age group. Among those aged 55 to 64, some 40 percent have a college degree, which is tied for the highest in the world along with Canada. Among those aged 45 to 54, the college completion level is also 40 percent, in 3^rd behind Canada and Japan. Among Americans aged 25 to 34, the college completion rate remains just above 40 percent. But that now puts the United States in 10^th place, behind such countries as Korea, New Zealand and Australia.

The story is not so much one of the United States falling back, but of standing still while others move ahead. The education advantage has clearly been lost, as is demonstrated by the more familiar statistics on K-12 education, which show American students in the middle or lower ranges among developed countries in reading, math and science achievement.

On the blog The Water’s Edge, Anya Schmemann, who directs CFR’s Task Force Program, explained some of the stark findings of the education task force, including that many students graduating from U.S. public schools are unprepared to succeed in college or the workforce:

—    They are not ready academically. Almost a third of college freshmen require remedial education. ACT, Inc. found that only 24 percent of high school graduates (and just four percent of African-American graduates) who took the ACT in 2010 were ready for college-level classes.

—    They are not ready for work. A recent survey of American employers rated 81 percent of high school graduates “deficient” in written communications, and many employers are already complaining that despite sustained unemployment, they are not able to find qualified young Americans to hire.

—    They are not ready for military service. In a recent report, a coalition of retired generals noted that 75 percent of American young people could not join the military because they were either physically unfit, had criminal records, or had failed to graduate from high school. Even students who did graduate from high school are not all academically fit to serve.

For more information read:
CFR’s Task Force Report on Education

Interview with Task Force co-chair Joel Klein

I had the great pleasure to spend the past two days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  (Oskee Wow Wow!) To walk the Illinois campus is to see American education at its best. Whether it’s the work being done at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology on electronic nanostructures, or the high-end software being developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or the efforts by the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Program to turn biomass into fuel, to name just a few outstanding research initiatives underway at Illinois, it’s easy to see how education improves our lives, creates jobs, and keeps the United States competitive.

Unfortunately, as a new CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force report released today points out, America’s overall educational system is lagging in its ability to produce students who can take advantage of the opportunities that exist at Illinois and America’s other excellent colleges. This “educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk,” according to the Task Force, which was chaired by Joel I. Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state. The country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.”

My colleague Anya Schmemann directs CFR’s Task Force Program. I asked to her explain the Task Force’s reasoning and conclusions. Here’s what she had to say:

 The Task Force report notes that many students graduating from American public schools today are not prepared to succeed:

—    They are not ready academically. Almost a third of college freshmen require remedial education. ACT, Inc. found that only 24 percent of high school graduates (and just four percent of African-American graduates) who took the ACT in 2010 were ready for college-level classes.

—    They are not ready for work. A recent survey of American employers rated 81 percent of high school graduates “deficient” in written communications, and many employers are already complaining that despite sustained unemployment, they are not able to find qualified young Americans to hire.

—    They are not ready for military service. In a recent report, a coalition of retired generals noted that 75 percent of American young people could not join the military because they were either physically unfit, had criminal records, or had failed to graduate from high school. Even students who did graduate from high school are not all academically fit to serve.

Many students are completing high school unprepared; many others do not even make it to graduation. Today, too many U.S. students drop out of school every year. A report released Monday noted that the national graduation rate is now 75.5 percent (with lower rates for Hispanic and African-American students). Those without high school degrees are increasingly likely to be unemployed and earn less than high school and college graduates.

U.S. students are increasingly falling behind their international peers. The 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)—a report published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—found that the United States scored just “average” in reading and science and “below average” in math.

Test scores are only part of the story, of course. U.S. schools must also prepare students with the critical thinking, language, creative, and technical skills necessary to help the United States maintain a political, diplomatic, and military advantage in addition to economic and innovative prowess.

Despite rising levels of investment in education in recent decades, results have shown scarce improvement, and achievement gaps have been persistent.

The Obama administration has tried to spur competition through the “Race to the Top” competition. “Our future is on the line,” President Obama has said. “The nation that out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow. To continue to cede our leadership in education is to cede our position in the world.”

There are also significant reform efforts at the state and local levels. Notably, more than forty states have adopted common core state standards in math and reading. Local school districts across the United States have implemented innovative strategies focused on choice, accountability, and human capital. And more school systems are focusing on recruiting, training, and rewarding good teachers and effective administrators.

There are positive developments and cause for optimism, but more people need to acknowledge the problems and press for change. The nation also must take bolder actions to improve education for all children in the United States.

A failure to educate will affect all Americans; it is time for all of us to play a role in demanding change and implementing solutions.

Jobs and how to create more of them remain a top issue on the campaign trail. At a Houston campaign stop, President Barack Obama touted last week’s jobs report for February – and plans to continue recovery and a path for the United States to resume its position as a manufacturing and exporting leader.

“[Our] ability to bounce back and then thrive is also going to depend on some choices that we make right now,” he said, ”I strongly believe that we’re going to have to invest in American manufacturing.” Obama cited a nation-wide pilot program designed to connect colleges and universities with manufacturers and businesses to ensure that the country is “innovating and making things and building things right here in America.”

Boosting dwindling manufacturing jobs has also been a focus of GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who has said he wants to attract high-paying manufacturing jobs by way of tax incentives. “I’d cut the corporate tax for manufacturing to zero so we’d create a real incentive for people to invest money in the manufacturing sector of the economy,” Santorum told CBS. “I’m not interested in attracting low, sub-minimum wage jobs back to America.”

Congress is attempting to do its part with the House giving bipartisan approval of the Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups bill, or JOBS Act, a legislative package aimed at helping new companies navigate regulations put in place after the 2000 tech-stock bust and kick-starting the market for initial public offerings and other financing for start-ups. The Senate is expected to vote on the measure soon.

CFR’s Renewing America project has also been looking at ways to improve prospects for the U.S. manufacturing sector. Recent blog posts suggest that in addition to the attraction of cheap labor, one of the reasons companies leave and don’t come back is a lack of necessary skills in the U.S. employee pool.

For more on the candidates’ stances, check out CFR’s Issue Tracker on the Candidates and the Economy.

Suggested Other Reading:

CFR’s Edward Alden looks at U.S. competitiveness, jobs and what the government can do versus the responsibility of the private sector.

A recent Brookings Institution report looks at how changing demographics will affect the U.S. workforce over the next few years and what it means for the job market. It says that  overcoming the “jobs gap,” or the number of jobs that the U.S. economy needs to create in order to return to pre-recession employment rates, while also absorbing the people who enter the labor force each month—will take years even with robust job creation.

—Gayle S. Putrich, Contributing Editor

The economy is the biggest issue voters care about, as evidenced by Super Tuesday exit polls with an eye toward job creation as unemployment remains high.  So this week’s revisit of good stuff from our sister project Renewing America, which looks at six domestic issues that impede U.S. power abroad, starts with a blog post from Senior Fellow Edward Alden, who notes the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the United States has created a skills shortage:

The United States has been in a vicious circle in which companies shed workers and shut down training programs, and the educational system responds by not preparing young people for jobs that no longer exist. And now as companies are again looking to expand, they cannot find the workers they need. Creating a virtuous circle will require a longer term view. A clearer commitment by the big manufacturing companies to expand production in the United States (even as they may also be expanding abroad) would have positive ripple effects. Rising demand for skilled workers will encourage young people to pursue manufacturing careers, in turn encouraging community colleges and other educational institutions to step up training.

Alden then looks again at why companies leave the United States and go elsewhere. A perennial issue is corporate taxes, made much of on campaign trail in the past couple of weeks. Alden notes that “intriguingly the complaints were primarily about the complexity of the U.S. tax code rather than the level of corporate taxation.” He finds another reason is lower wages:

This is not a competition that the United States can, or should want to, win. Wages have already been falling for most U.S. workers over the past decade, but they would have to fall a lot farther to offset the advantages of a China or Mexico. As Michael Porter put it to the New York audience: “Having companies succeed while wages fall…is not competitiveness.”

And yet another is education:

Astonishingly, 31 percent of executives cited “better access to skilled labor” as a rationale for moving overseas, versus just 29 percent who cited it as a reason for staying. That is a serious indictment of U.S. education and immigration policies.

Whether it is jobs, trade, taxes, business competitiveness, or energy prices, economic issues dominate the campaign trail. This past week on Renewing America, a project which looks at six major domestic issues that affect U.S. influence abroad, CFR Senior Fellow Edward Alden’s blog posts hit on several topics pertinent to the campaign trail.

Alden’s Monday post on the Renewing America blog focuses on trade and jobs. Possibly the most salient point on the mood of voters:

The skepticism over trade is not terribly surprising. The past decade has been a hard one on many U.S. workers, and it has coincided with a rapid expansion of global trade, especially China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. While we all benefit from the cheaper television sets and higher-quality imported electronics that come from an integrated global economy, they are no substitute for a steady job and a reasonable paycheck.

Also possibly affecting the U.S. job market is job offshoring, which some link to U.S. corporate tax rates. President Obama, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum have all released visions for reforming corporate tax structure, mostly by cuts to the statutory rate–though Obama also seeks to close most tax loopholes. Alden notes in a post last Thursday:

There is no morally defensible reason for cutting corporate taxes at a time of deepening national debt that will require greater burdens for all Americans, either through higher taxes on income and consumption or lower spending on entitlements, defense, or other government programs. Unfortunately, it is a practical necessity. Technology and trade liberalization have created a global competition for investment. Multinational companies considering their investment alternatives weigh many factors, but the tax burden is high on the list.

Alden also posted on the gas tax Friday. Fuel prices are another issue that has gotten special attention from Gingrich and Santorum on the campaign trail, who have argued for lowering regulatory barriers to domestic drilling. On the gas tax and road infrastructure, Alden notes that three quarters of Americans oppose higher gas taxes (which obviously represent a portion of overall price at the pump). But he goes on to say:

The gas tax is perhaps the clearest, most understandable example of that old maxim: you get what you pay for. People understandably do not like taxes where it is unclear what they are getting in return. The gas tax is the opposite: it pays for the roads we all drive on. Pay more, and the result is less congestion and fewer potholes; pay less and, well, don’t complain over flat tires and traffic jams.

CFR’s Renewing America project focuses on six challenges the United States faces domestically that impinges on the country’s ability to project power globally. The country’s economic woes are certainly front and center as the presidential campaign heats up and candidates debate the debt and deficits coming  out of Washington as well as how to make the economy thrive.

Two items from the project tackle economic issues from different angles. On the Renewing America blog, CFR’s Edward Alden discusses the challenge of defining U.S. global competitiveness:

The debate over competitiveness is often muddied because the word is used in so many different and often incompatible ways. Economist Paul Krugman famously dismissed the notion entirely as a “dangerous obsession” in a 1994 Foreign Affairs piece, arguing that “the world’s leading nations are not, to any important degree, in economic competition with each other.” Krugman doesn’t appear to have changed his mind recently, but perhaps a careful reading of this issue will cause him to reconsider.

Michael Porter, who has led much of the Harvard Business School’s work on this issue, offers the best definition I have seen. He writes: “The United States is a competitive location to the extent that companies operating in the U.S. are able to compete successfully in the global economy while supporting high and rising living standards for the average American.” What this means is that “competitiveness” is not a synonym for “economic growth.” It refers only to the ability of the United States to succeed as a high-wage location for operations in internationally-traded sectors.

Competitiveness so defined is not an issue for much of the U.S. economy. Most jobs are still in non-tradable sectors (health care, retail trade, government) that do not face significant import competition. But the share of the U.S. economy exposed to international competition–not just in manufacturing but in service sectors as well–has grown immensely over the past several decades, and the pace will only accelerate. And these sectors really matter.

Meanwhile, a new CFR Backgrounder released  at the beginning of the week looks at the debt and deficit debate itself:

At some point in the not-too-distant future, analysts say, investors may decide the lack of effective governance constitutes an increased risk of default and will no longer be willing to hold U.S. Treasuries at normal interest rates. Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. debt rating in August 2011 indicated as much: “America’s governance and policymaking [has become] less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.” If many investors begin fleeing to alternatives, it may become prohibitively expensive for Washington to attract new buyers of debt, resulting in even larger deficits, increased borrowing, or what is known as a “debt spiral.”

Global investors may continue to fund high U.S. deficits for several years, but the recent experiences of several advanced economies in Europe–Greece, Iceland, Ireland, and Portugal–indicate the unpredictability and speed at which fiscal crises can come. Several factors have thus far helped insulate the United States from such a fate–a floating exchange rate, reserve currency status, lower borrowing costs, a higher capacity for growth, and no record of default. But there are also some striking similarities with the situation faced by some European states, including a rising debt to GDP and a reliance on foreign capital to finance debt.

Last week President Obama held a science fair at the White House. More than 100 students showed up. So too did Bill Nye the science guy. The student-crafted projects ranged from a new cancer therapy to a marshmallow cannon.

So why is the leader of the free world hosting a science fair, his second so far in office? To help celebrate young people who excel in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects and to encourage more kids to follow their lead. As the president said at the fair, educating today’s students in STEM subjects will help “America compete for the jobs and industries of the future.” Indeed, a just released report by the president’s Council of Advisers in Science and Technology concluded that American businesses will require one million additional graduates with STEM degrees over the next ten years to stay competitive internationally.

Obama and his advisers are not alone in calling for more STEM education. Bill Nye says the United States must invest in STEM to “remain the world leader in technological innovation.” Silicon Valley Congressman Michael Honda (D-CA) is working to create an Office of STEM Education in the Education Department. Florida Governor Rick Scott has promised to make STEM education a priority at all levels in Florida institutions.

What worries this diverse array of opinion leaders is captured in the story told about Steve Jobs’s reply when President Obama asked why Apple had located a plant in China rather than in the United States. After noting that Apple needed 30,000 engineers to run the factory, Jobs said, “You can’t find that many in America to hire.”

So how is America doing at turning out STEM majors? Any signs of significant improvement? As the two charts below suggest, no.

The total number of engineers has risen in recent years, but it remains below the peak number reached in the early 1980s (Chart 1). But when you take into account the fact the number of college students has grown sharply over the past three decades—in large part because of demographic trends—the relative number of undergraduates majoring in engineering has declined (Chart 2). Meanwhile, computer science majors have followed a boom-and-bust cycle over the past three decades, no doubt reflecting the boom-and-bust cycle in the high-tech industry.

So if political leaders from both political parties are banging the drum on the importance of producing more graduates in STEM majors, why aren’t we seeing more? It’s not that entering college students aren’t trying STEM majors. They are. It’s that once they get a taste of college-level STEM work, many of them opt for different majors.

Why the high attrition rates in STEM fields? Lots of reasons are offered: STEM courses are hard; teacher quality is often sub par; grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences attracts students looking to maximize their GPA; and mathematically inclined students see bigger paychecks to be had by majoring in fields like finance and consulting.

In all, we have three decades of experience that suggests that hosting science fairs and praising the virtues of STEM subjects isn’t likely to produce more STEM majors. Changing the trends in these two charts will require investing significantly more in grants and financial aid for students who chose to major in STEM subjects. That will cost a lot of money, something that cash-strapped local, state, and federal governments don’t have in abundance. But it is the kind of investment the United States will need to make if it wants to stay competitive.

"United : the United Nations fight for freedom" WWII poster by Leslie Ragan, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, public domain. (Image: Courtesy Northwestern University Library)

The “Joint Declaration” committed its signatories to promote human liberty and embrace multilateral cooperation. At the time, the U.S. Office of War Information released a poster to inspire confidence in the new alliance. Emblazoned with the word “UNITED,” it displays a riot of allied flags breaking through the fire and fog of war, above allied ships and tanks speeding to victory. The subtitle proclaims: “The United Nations Fight for Freedom.”  A copy hangs on my wall.

It’s an inspiring symbol of unity. But the number of flags highlights just how heterogeneous these “united” nations were—and how difficult it would be for the alliance to endure. Alongside the Stars and Stripes, there flies the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union, the Union Jack of Imperial Britain, the colors of Britain’s overseas dominions (including anti-imperialist India), the standard of Nationalist China, and the flags of Latin American countries from Brazil to Nicaragua. How could the United States hope to forge a functioning structure of postwar peace, where the League of Nations had failed?

FDR’s approach was to create a two-tiered United Nations Organization. A universal forum based on the principle of sovereign equality would provide “a meeting place of all nations,” in the form of a General Assembly. But Roosevelt insisted that real authority to guarantee international security be vested in the “Four Policemen”—the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China. (By late 1944, France had been added as a fifth permanent member of the proposed Security Council). Each policeman would be endowed with a veto over proposed enforcement action—an essential requirement for great power support. Indeed, as Secretary of State Cordell Hull told a group of congressmen in May 1944, “Our government would not remain there for a day without retaining its veto power.”

FDR’s vision was a sober synthesis of Wilsonian universalism and power politics. But it came with a caveat. The Security Council could function only if its permanent members agreed on the desirable shape of world order and proved willing to defend it. Left unanswered was who would police the policemen, if one or more declined to discharge its responsibilities or abused its position.  More fundamentally, FDR’s plan presumed a basic normative consensus among the great powers that would falter after the war, when the alliance’s common enemies had been vanquished.

Soon after the Axis fell, Soviet and Western values collided. As Moscow sought to impose its own system on states on its periphery, the fundamental incompatibility between U.S. and Soviet world order visions became apparent. The outbreak of the Cold War prevented the Security Council from functioning as a great power concert, leaving it paralyzed and often irrelevant for much of the next four decades.

The sudden end of the bipolar confrontation and collapse of the Soviet Union launched a historic era in Security Council activism, making the past two decades the most productive in the Council’s history. Of the 2034 UNSC resolutions since 1945, a full 1351 of them have been passed since 1991, and use of the veto has declined precipitously. Yet the veto remains always in the background—as Russia has reminded the world in threatening to block an Arab League-sponsored resolution calling for Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to step down in favor of a transitional government.

This historical perspective should temper our expectations for the Security Council and tame some of our frustrations with its current, mixed performance. The Council remains a powerful instrument, capable of delivering, as in the case of North Korea and Iran, crippling sanctions. But the Council’s work has become increasingly controversial, as it is asked not only to address matters of interstate conflict but also to redress massive human rights violations within states. With the veto built into the structure of the UN Charter, we cannot expect the Council to function smoothly at times of great power friction, especially when one of the P5—Russia in this case—declares a vested national interest in an issue under debate. If in the case of Syria Washington ultimately deems decisive action imperative, it may need to act outside the United Nations, as it did in Kosovo and Iraq. But it must weigh the costs prudently, since foregoing UNSC authorization will undermine the Council’s credibility and alienate influential nations, including emerging powers it seeks to cultivate as partners, like India and Brazil.

Above the Fold. A dinner obligation kept me from watching last night’s GOP presidential debate in Jacksonville, Florida, breaking my streak of eighteen straight debate viewings. From what I can tell from reading the debate transcript this morning, I didn’t miss much, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum grumbled a bit about President Obama’s supposed lack of support for Israel, and they pledged to increase the pressure on Castro’s Cuba. (The irony here is that Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum look to be taking a tougher line on Cuba than many Cuban-Americans in Florida do.) But that was about it. And in that sense the debate was a metaphor for the campaign as a whole. Although events overseas could scramble things in heartbeat, for now foreign policy is way down the list of issues that Americans are worried about. A Pew Research Center poll out this week finds that Americans think that domestic policy should take priority over foreign policy by a a margin of 81 percent to 9 percent. All the other polls I have seen show the same lopsided tilt in favor of domestic issues. No wonder Obama devoted only about a tenth of his State of the Union address to discussing foreign policy. In politics it pays to talk about what people want to hear.

 CFR Event of the Week. The political turmoil roiling the Arab world over the past year has unseated leaders in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, and has rulers in Bahrain and Syria under the gun. But so far Saudi Arabia looks to have escaped the winds of change sweeping the region. To help explain why, F. Gregory Gause III of the University of Vermont and Toby C. Jones of Rutgers University sat down with CFR’s Paul B. Stares in Washington, DC. The three offered their takes on what to expect from the Saudi kingdom in the near future. You can read the transcript, download the audio, or watch the video here or below.

http://youtu.be/mUh_rZQDLZE

Read of the Week. Apple is arguably America’s best-known, most-admired, and most-imitated company. It is certainly the largest company in the United States by market capitalization, and it just reported blow-out earnings on the strength of sales of the iPhone. But as Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher write in the New York Times, most of the people that manufacture and assemble Apple products live outside the United States and especially in China. And therein lies a problem for U.S. manufacturers. In the electronics business especially, but in other industries as well, the Chinese have succeeded in creating clusters of related, specialized industries working in close proximity. These industrial clusters give Chinese manufacturers a competitive cost advantage that could become self-perpetuating.

Blog Post of the Week. Egypt just marked the one-year anniversary of January 25, the start of the political protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak’s regime and ushered in a new and uncertain era of Egyptian politics. Steven Cook, author the superb book, The Struggle for Egypt, looks at where things stand after a tumultuous year in Egyptian life. Mubarak’s cronies despair that their countrymen did not forget his accomplishments, the Army fights to preserve its privileges and authority, and the Muslim Brotherhood struggles to meet the demands of a public that expects better days ahead.

Poll Question of the Week. What to do about Iran’s nuclear programs figures to be one of the top issues in the 2012 presidential campaign. So where does the American public look to be slightly more than nine months out from Election Day? According to a Pew Research Center Poll released this week, the percentage of Americans who view Iran as “the greatest danger” to the United States has more than doubled over the last year, jumping from 12 percent in 2011 to 28 percent today. (China comes in second at 22 percent, up two percentage points from last year.) As for how to respond to Iran’s nuclear activities, Pew found that 54 percent thought that it was more important to “take a firm stand” while 39 percent said it was more important to “avoid military conflict.” Don’t read too much into the latter finding. First, Pew asked it only of the 42 percent of respondents who said they had heard a lot about recent tensions with Iran. The people who haven’t been paying attention almost certainly have different views. Second, poll questions like these are extremely sensitive to how the question is worded. Pew would have gotten a different result had it asked respondents if they thought the United States should go to war with Iran.

Chart of the Week. Economists and journalists like to refer to Japan’s woeful economic performance in the 1990s as the “lost decade.” Have the past ten years been a lost decade for the United States? That’s a reasonable conclusion to draw when you look at the growth—or to be more accurate, the lack of growth—in payroll jobs in the United States in recent years. In 2011, the U.S. economy generated 131.9 million jobs, that’s not only below the peak number of 138 million jobs reached just before the 2008-2009 financial crisis, it’s below the 132.5 million jobs that the economy generated in 2000. These numbers explain a good part of the dissatisfaction currently roiling American politics.

Too Good Not to Note. Elizabeth Economy assesses whether China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan will ever come to terms. Michael Levi looks at how not to argue that we’re running out of oil. Elliott Abrams asks if Turkey is purchasing Hamas from Iran. Stewart Patrick dispels myths about American foreign aid. Julian Borger wonders if the European embargo on Iran oil means war. Josh Rogin recaps what Jake Sullivan, the director of Policy Planning at the State Department, had to say recently about the Obama administration’s foreign policy priorities for 2012. Gideon Rachman thinks that the rise of China is really bad for America. R. Jeffrey Smith ponders whether defense budget cuts will leave America at risk. Shadi Hamid argues that we have a responsibility to protect Syria.

Perils of Prediction. “I want us to end this in South Carolina…Give it up for who I know is going to win South Carolina, the next president of the United States, Mitt Romney.” Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina, January 20, 2012. Well, not exactly. Romney finished more than a dozen percentage points behind the winner of last Saturday’s GOP primary, Newt Gingrich. But the upside for Governor Haley is that Romney still has a good shot at winning the nomination and proving her prediction right that he will be the next president of the United States.

Quote to Ponder. “All I know is that I know nothing.” Socrates.

A Reason to Smile.  Groundhog Day.

With Iran threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, energy security is once again at the top of the global agenda—and not just in Rick Perry’s debate talking points. But true “energy security” will require more than independence from unreliable or unstable suppliers. It will also oblige governments and companies to invest in a wider range of energy sources—many of them renewable. That is the message of the World Future Energy Summit, which opened in Abu Dhabi this week. In his keynote address, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for the world to double its use of renewable energy by 2030. Ban’s words should resonate strongly in the United States, according to a new digest of polls on energy security released by the International Institutions and Global Governance program and worldpublicopinion.org.

Americans, it turns out, are deeply anxious about energy security. An overwhelming majority (85 percent) consider it important (67 percent “very important”) to “decrease American dependence on oil imported from the Middle East”. Nearly two in three Americans (64%) favor creating a new international institution to “monitor the worldwide energy market and predict potential shortages.” Large majorities worry that energy shortages and higher prices could lead to destabilization of the world economy, that energy competition could lead to international conflict (or even war), and that current energy production is causing unacceptable environmental damage.

To ameliorate these dangers, Americans overwhelmingly support greater investments in renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and hydropower. They favor requiring utilities to use more alternative energy (even if this proves more expensive) and providing tax incentives to encourage the development and use of such technologies. Americans recognize the costs of these steps. But they’re convinced such investments will pay off in the long run—and are critical to long-term U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.

There are a few wrinkles in the polling data. Americans generally support conservation as a means to reduce U.S. energy dependence. Among other steps, they favor retrofitting old buildings, elevating efficiency standards for U.S. companies, and raising fuel standards for automobiles—even if this causes the price of cars to rise. When it comes to increasing energy taxes to encourage conservation, Americans initially express skepticism. But when told that the revenues would be earmarked to developing alternative energy (or offset by other tax reductions), a majority supports higher taxes.

Still, U.S. public support for conservation has slipped. Until recently, the Gallup organization found consistent majority preference in the United States for promoting “more conservation by consumers of existing energy resources”, as opposed to the “production of more oil, gas, and coal supplies.” But the percentage taking this view fell from a peak of 64% in March 2007 to only 48% in March 2011, as the percentage favoring greater production rose to 41%. For a significant minority, “drill, baby, drill” is the strategy of choice.

Other Americans are looking beyond oil. Three-quarters of the U.S. public say the U.S. government should assume that oil is running out and will need to be replaced as a primary source of energy. The public seems less certain what should replace it. Coal, which the United States has in abundance, is one obvious option, but Americans remain lukewarm on building new coal-fired plants. Nuclear power is another, but in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, a clear majority of Americans opposes building new nuclear power plants. (It remains uncertain whether U.S. anti-nuclear sentiment will prove enduring or transient. Earlier polls have shown that Americans do not want to abandon nuclear power altogether, but rather favor it as part of a broad matrix of energy sources—and a way to reduce reliance on coal and oil.).  Globally, as the International Energy Agency predicts, Fukushima should lead to a surge in coal usage—and emissions. But perhaps not in United States.

The answer, increasingly, is natural gas—which is the biggest change in the US energy matrix. As The Economist describes:

“This is because, even were it not cheap and plentiful, gas would be attractive simply on the grounds of cleanliness. It is true that there are questions about the harm that may be done by the “fracking” process that liberates shale gas; there is an urgent need for systematic before-and-after environmental audits. But once the gas is out of the ground, it is a great deal cleaner than coal. It does not distribute neurotoxic mercury around the planet; it does not clog city air and the lungs of those who breathe it with soot and sulphur. Gas is a boon to public health.”

Controversy has erupted over natural gas, with both sides spewing legitimate and fabricated concerns. But last August, the Natural Gas Subcommittee of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board published a “compromise” report, which as my colleague Michael Levi describes, could serve as a basis for a future middle-ground path that incorporates natural gas, “if sensible people on all sides look past the fact that they don’t like everything in the report.” With the nation’s politicians deadlocked on so many issues, I’m not optimistic that natural gas will miraculously inspire cooperation.

View the entire digest of World Opinion on Energy Security at www.cfr.org/public opinion. View key findings and a short introduction at worldpublicopinion.org.