Dalai Lama Leaving the White House

If ever a picture were worth more than a thousand words, this is it.  And the Chinese, in particular, can relish and appreciate its message.  Here is the Dalai Lama, last week escorted from the White House past a heap of garbage.  No White House Guards snapping to attention; no famed sparkling white portico; no flags fluttering; no red carpet; no bugles; no smiling President and First Lady waving.  Nothing but a side door and those huge stuffed plastic garbage bags.

Is this the way to treat, to use his formal title, “His Holiness” the Dalai Lama?  It sure is. If the White House staffers who choreograph such visits planned it this way, they deserve our kudos.  If it just happened, well, then we were just lucky.  What’s puzzling is that many conservatives, including prominent pundits, have been rallying to Mr. Lama and criticizing the Obama White House.  They are, to be blunt, wrong and seem unaware of how to pursue our national interests.

Being clever.

Barack Obama’s treatment of the visit signals that we understand that Beijing is unhappy that the saffron-robed monk was allowed in the White House at all and that China views him (exaggeratedly, for sure) as a dangerous advocate of autonomy for Tibet, thus threatening China’s territorial integrity. The careful tone of the visit (in the White House Map Room, not the stately Oval Office; no press allowed; no joint TV appearance) signals too that while a Lama sit down with our president regrettably has become de rigueur (there have been four since 1991), it’s not really an important event and China need take no offense.

This does not mean that the Obama White House is kowtowing to Beijing (as some conservatives charge), but merely that we are being clever in handling our increasingly challenging relations with China, a nation now our competitor on many fronts, certain to become our rival on some fronts but, if we and the Chinese are smart, not at all destined to become our adversary or enemy.  Obama’s handling of his meeting with the Dalai Lama was smart.  Though we certainly shouldn’t care about what does or doesn’t rub China’s prickly rulers the right or wrong way, we should carefully pick what irritants we deploy.  The Dalai Lama is an unnecessary irritant in American-Chinese relations.

Theocratic dictatorship.

Who is this Lama guy anyway?  For Americans, he’s mainly the creation of the left-wing Hollywood set – Richard Gere, Barbara Streisand and all those folks whose political and policy judgment we rightly mock, ridicule and often hold in contempt. Mr. Lama has no significant status or stature – except, of course, for his Nobel Peace Prize, hardly a credential that should impress a conservative. The Lama rule of Tibet for centuries was catastrophic for Tibetans, a pure theocratic dictatorship, even winking at a kind of slavery.  To be sure, China invaded and has occupied Tibet since 1950.  But, actually, China’s claim to Tibet is at least as solid as our claim to Hawaii. What would we think if Beijing started protesting our “occupation” of Hawaii and if President Hu Jintao welcomed to the Great Hall of the People the descendants of Hawaii’s Kamehameha Dynasty – whose kings and queens ruled those islands until we ousted them?  In fact, China’s historical claim to Tibet, however shaky, is much better than our claim to Hawaii.

We’re going to have many problems with China in the coming decades.  Managing our relations with Beijing is the greatest foreign policy and security challenge facing our presidents.  How they handle it will determine the shape of the 21^st Century and whether America remains the globe’s dominant power. We will prevail only if we keep our priorities right. The Dalai Lama is not nor should be anywhere on our priority list, not even at the bottom.  For the foreseeable future, what we want from China are two big things: 1) help in restraining Iran, North Korea and other rogue nations, and 2) opening China’s vast and – more important – growing domestic market to American goods, services and processes. Conservatives, heirs to the sensible hard-headed policies of Ronald Reagan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick, above all, should understand this. We conservatives should not be championing the Dalai Lama. Side doors and garbage are what he merits – and what he got.

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America’s headlong rush towards a sweeping climate change “solution” appears to be on hold as Democrats regroup after losing the Senate seat from Massachusetts.  That’s very good news.  It’s time to catch our breath and look beyond both the climate-change Alarmists and the climate-change Deniers to inject a heavy dose of American–style agnosticism.  “Show Me” should become our constant rejoinder to anyone arguing either side of the climate change debate.  If not, we may saddle ourselves and future generations with a near-crippling burden.

That is no exaggeration. The pending “cap and trade” proposals on Capitol Hill and from the White house would impose huge long-term costs and massive inconveniences on America’s households.  It will change our life styles and lower our living standards. It would load America’s industries, businesses, laboratories, farms and other productive enterprises with costs and regulations tamping productivity, stunting job-creation, curtailing innovation and undermining their ability to compete with foreigners.  Some say that this all is a price worth paying to spare our civilization the ravages of inexorable global warming. They may be right – but only if their assumptions are right: (1) That the earth is steadily warming and (2) That human activity (such as industrial production and burning gasoline in autos) causes this warming.  If the assumptions are flawed, then so are the solutions.  And then unwarranted is the price we’re being asked to pay.

  Cascading recent revelations. 

The assumptions are looking increasingly shaky – shaky enough to require more probing, more analysis before using them as basis for sweeping policies.  We don’t have to be climate change experts to be troubled by cascading recent revelations about the climate change debate, all of which weaken the assertion that we must change our behavior to stop and reverse global warming.  Examples: 

• As respected scientists continue to disagree about key aspects of climate change and its putative consequences, it is becoming clearer that no consensus exists on the issue.  Despite this, those warning of climate change dangers continue claiming that there is such a consensus.  There isn’t.

• Questions have been raised in recent weeks about the soundness of key data cited by those alarmed by climate change. Under fire for producing flawed data, for instance, is the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  It is the IPCC which, with huge fanfare, produced the 2007 study used by former Vice President Albert Gore and others to make their cases for drastic actions to curb global warming. If IPCC data and conclusions are untrustworthy, so then are the arguments by those using them.

• It is increasingly apparent that scientists and their studies are ignored if they question the prevailing assumptions in the climate change debate.  Solid proof of this surfaced last November when thousands of purloined emails and documents from the influential Climatic Research Unit at England’s East Anglia University revealed that data were suppressed and numbers fiddled to make the case, in the Unit’s widely-used studies, that the earth is warming and that humans are responsible for it. The resulting scandal, dubbed “Climategate,” forced the Unit’s director to resign under fire. If East Anglia University suppresses data and cooks numbers, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s happening elsewhere. We need not invoke images of Galileo, harshly penalized for dissenting from early 17^th century science’s orthodoxy, to point out the folly of crushing dissent and to insist that the climate debate be open to all qualified scientists.  So far, it apparently isn’t.

• It remains inconclusive whether earth’s warming (if there is warming) is caused by human actions or by natural phenomena over which we have no control.  It is troubling, for example, that the studies and graphics used by Albert Gore and most others supporting his view use climate data beginning about 1400 AD. These data indeed show a warming earth. Yet data from analyzing ice cores going back millennia reveal at least four other global warming periods since 2000 BC, including the well-documented “Roman Warm Period” and “Medieval Warm Period.” Temperatures climbed so much between 800 AD and 1300 AD, for instance, that contemporaries chronicled that Europe’s farmers were shifting from growing rye to wheat, that Egyptians were planting five crops per year and that Pacific Northwest natives were migrating southward.  This is no small matter. If the earth is warming because of natural, rather than man-made, phenomena, then we can do nothing to stop it. Our challenge will be to adapt to it.  Resources futilely spent on trying to halt warming thus will be squandered woefully, unavailable for what will be desperately needed actions to adjust to warming, including rising ocean levels.

• It remains similarly inconclusive whether the earth is still warming.  For the past decade, in fact, average global temperatures have been flat. Oceans, meanwhile, for five years actually have been cooling slightly. Those fearing warming insist that the numbers reflect a “pause” not a “halt” in warming.  They may be right.  They also may be wrong; warming may have ceased already.
   

Slight cost. Rich payoff.

What are we to make of all of this?  Obviously, we need more information.  In getting it, we should require conflicting climate data and analyses to submit to the same open, free-wheeling processes we require in other key matters when information and assumptions conflict.  In science, there should be no orthodoxy, no ideology and those who have been imposing orthodoxy should be publicly shamed. To be sure, we will not attain perfect knowledge, but we will have a much better basis upon which to formulate policy. If the prevailing climate change assumptions survive the probing, then the sweeping proposed painful policies may be necessary.  If, however, the probing finds deep flaws, then assumptions must be reformulated, as must the policies resting on the assumptions.

The cost of our agnosticism will be slight. It will delay policies by just a few years, a mere blip in what those highly concerned about global warming tell us has been a more than century-long process. Yet, the payoff of agnosticism is rich.  It will make us more certain that the policies we adopt are solid, are warranted, are based on the best unbiased knowledge we can mobilize.

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Uncensored fount of creativity - inventiveness - unorthodoxy

 Hacking into Google email account servers. Intimidating blogsters. Erecting filter walls to block website access and remove words from search engines.  Interfering with text-messaging, “You-Tubing,” “Twittering” and “Facebooking” transmissions. All this and much more testify to China’s authoritarian government’s increasing determination to censor its citizens’ access to information and ideas.

How much should we care? It should bother us, of course. But certainly not enough to influence our policy on China. That  must remain focused sharply and narrowly on issues that protect and advance America’s interests.  Rather, we should view China’s censorship offensive as a strong reminder, at a time when it’s increasingly common to hear dire warnings that this will be “China’s Century,” how far China yet has to go to sustain its stunning economic growth.  Censorship, while possibly ensuring China’s rulers’ a bit longer control over their people, will impose huge penalties on China’s development, retarding China’s emergence as a true economic (and thus, political) superpower.  

Beyond a reflexive response.

Chinese censorship is a self-inflicted wound.  Nothing we say or do can increase the severe damage China is doing to itself.  In some ways, the Obama Administration realizes this.  Speaking on January 21 to a media group in Washington about internet freedom, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to measure her words carefully, only obliquely slapping Beijing for internet censorship and not at all singling out China, instead lumping it together with Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia.  Still, when she made her strong and sound case for internet freedom, she won headlines (catching Beijing’s angry attention) by sharply invoking Cold War images, asserting that the emerging “virtual [internet] walls” differed scantly from the Berlin Wall.

Clinton’s rhetoric certainly captures the reflexive dismay and disgust of Americans at even a whiff of censorship.  Free speech and free access to speech, after all, not only are at the heart of but were and remain a major reason for America’s unique historical experience.  But beyond a reflexive response, beyond declaring our disdain for any regime or group (external and, we should remind ourselves, internal) advocating censorship, we should not allow our feelings about China’s censoring its own people to affect our policy with China. 

What, anyway, is to be gained by harshly attacking Beijing?  Surely, our centuries in dealing with China teach us that the more China (whether ruled by Emperors or Kuomintang or Communists) is criticized from abroad, the more stubbornly China refuses to bend.  Clinton’s Cold War allusions may make her (and us) feel good, but certainly will not soften China’s censors.  And tougher rhetoric (the kind demanded by many U.S. critics of China, on the left and right) foolishly would spend some of our finite political capital with China on a matter far from central to U.S. interests.  We would be squandering that capital if it makes it more difficult for us to pressure Beijing on the two issues counting most for us: (1) gaining China’s (so far distressingly reluctant) cooperation in restraining Iran, North Korea and similar rogue nations and (2) opening China’s market to American goods and services and, at the same time, encouraging China to boost its domestic living standards so that market grows. [See: The 21^st Century Takes Shape.] 

Undermining creativity and inventiveness.

As for opposing China’s censorship, we need do no more than warn China of how deeply it is wounding itself.  We should explain that China’s great economic strides so far rest solely on imitating and doing cheaper what the West and Japan already have done. To be sure, China’s has been a fantastic feat. No doubt about that.  And faster than any of us expected.  In recent months, China has overtaken Germany as the world’s #1 exporter (the U.S. is #3), and is about to overtake Japan as the #2 economy, second only to us. 

But little of what China has been doing is enough to sustain its growth.  For that, it must move beyond imitating our goods and processes.  If it remains simply a supplier of cheaper copies of American and western products, it stagnates.  Just look at Japan.  Going beyond copying, however, requires creativity – and inventiveness – and unorthodoxy.  None of that sprouts from a China-like command economy.  They come only from one thing: Freewheeling competition of ideas and actions. It is this, recognized and admired by the world, that has kept America for decades at the peak of the globe’s economy and will keep us there deep into the future as we unleash one pioneering idea after another, with the rest of the world perpetually playing catch-up.  And by the time others do catch-up, we’re on to the next pioneering breakthrough.  

Enemy #1 of such inventiveness is censorship.  It suffocates ideas and aborts creativity.  This is the danger rooted in China’s new wave of censorship; it threatens China itself and its prospects for continued economic growth.  What should frighten China’s insecure rulers is that by slowing growth, censorship will unleash that which these rulers most fear – popular discontent.

So, how much should we care about China’s censorship?  We should care enough to craft a sensible response.  Let’s not beat up on China with futile rhetorical fusillades.  Let’s not squander political capital on telling China what it’s internal policies ought to be. But let’s warn China of the enormous damage it does to itself by censoring creativity and censoring inventiveness.  Without that, China’s growth will slow and then stagnate, preventing China from becoming the “great” power its leaders seek.

Further discussion of U.S. China Relations see:

The 21^st Century Takes Shape.

Obama in China

China & Conservatives

 Obama is No Jimmy Carter

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Scott Brown Campaigning. A Specter of November 2.

Massachusetts’ new U.S. Senator Scott Brown has landed in Washington swathed in well-deserved mantle of triumph. His win is doubtless a huge personal political achievement. An even bigger winner is America, demonstrating again that its fractured, disjointed, decentralized and messy political process renders, when provoked, sharp, decisive, quick verdicts. Winning big also, of course, is the GOP, giving it renewed life if it draws the lesson that big-tent, inclusive Republican candidates can win even in heavily Democrat constituencies.

The big loser, obvious from its reeling disarray since election night, are the Democrats, on Capitol Hill and in the White House. At first glance, it’s hard to fathom why they should be in such pain. After all, just one Senate seat switched hands, leaving them with a still whopping Senate majority of 59-41 (the biggest for any party in more than three decades, though far short of the legendary 76 seats they held after Franklin Roosevelt’s second term sweep in 1936) and an even more whopping House majority of 256 to 178 (biggest since 1993). How then can the loss of this single Senate seat plunge Democrats into such introspective despair? 

Bush is gone.

 Of course, as has been noted widely, the Democrats last Tuesday lost the 60 vote majority needed to shut down GOP filibusters that could block Democrat proposals. This merely means, however, that Democrats will have to make concessions to win over a couple of Republicans to pass legislation. What’s really spooking Democrats is the specter of this November 2 – the fearsome first off-year congressional election in a presidents first term which historically gives voters a chance to take a second look at and revise their opinion of the party for which they voted in the presidential election. Staring Democrat leaders in the face is a rerun of 1994, the first congressional elections after Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, when Republicans ran the board, grabbing control of both Senate and House. In the wake of Brown’s election, what some Democrats are calling the “Boston Massacre” and Republicans are calling the “Boston Miracle,” Democrats are realizing just how out of step they are with the public and that this November could bring catastrophe.

What now seems clear, though it was far from clear just two years ago, is that in November 2008 many of the voters who gave Obama his great victory margin and sent Democrats to Washington from solid GOP districts and states were voting less for Obama, less for congressional Democrats, less against John McCain, but mainly against George W. Bush (for good reason) and against a GOP establishment seemingly bent on excluding and antagonizing huge segments of the polity. In the days following that huge 2008 Democrat victory, it was easy and even reasonable to talk about a national tectonic shift to Democrats and even to the left.

That, in sharp retrospect, now seems a very flawed reading of what happened. With Bush gone, gone too is most of the tinder igniting anti-GOP anger. This is one message of the startling Brown victory. Meaning: This November 2, Democrats hoping to hold 2008-won seats in GOP areas are extremely vulnerable. Vulnerable enough to flip the House to GOP control? Very unlikely, though several GOP analysts (and, I bet, Democrat analysts too) are running scenarios in which tweaked assumptions do yield just that. Vulnerable enough to flip the Senate? Also very unlikely, though no Washington politico can forget the GOP’s massive, unexpected Senate gains of 1980 and 1994.

The November vulnerability, confirmed by the Brown victory, is what will prevent Democrats from using their otherwise solid Capitol Hill majorities to push the far-reaching health care, environment, financial regulation and other sweeping programs with which they want to shove America much closer to a government-run, bureaucrat-dominated society. Instead, Democrats – as we’ve already been hearing in their talk about diluting or even delaying the health care juggernaut – will tack to the center. Doing so, in fact, well may spare them the massive November losses they otherwise could have suffered had not the Brown victory alerted them to their impending disaster. In that important sense, Brown is doing the Democrats a great favor – if they correctly read the message of his win.

An inclusive big tent.

He also is doing the GOP a great favor – if it correctly reads the message. It is: If the GOP intends to be a national party, it must reflect our nation, all 300,000,000 plus of us. It must be, as Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp repeatedly reminded the party, inclusive, not exclusive. It must be a tent big enough for many (sometimes annoyingly conflicting) views on social and even economic issues. A small tent, exclusive party, rooted in just one or two regions of the nation may make purists feel virtuous, but it cedes to the Democrats and the left the control of national policy.

Brown, after all, certainly is no purist, as social conservatives and the religious right have defined purity and used it as a litmus to test whether aspiring candidates merit support. Example: Brown recognizes broad women’s rights to abortion (opposing only what’s called “late term” abortion), something that typically would have banished him from a GOP ballot. He’s also no economic purist, supporting, as he has, Massachusetts’ sweeping health care programs. Rather, he seems a solid, sensible Republican, just the kind that can get elected from Massachusetts.

If the GOP wants to seat New Englanders and those with similar political complexions on the GOP side of Capitol Hill aisles, then it must be ready to welcome the Scott Browns. And, maybe it now is. “He’s the kind of Republican who will give conservatives heartburn, but it’s better than the other side,” Erick Erickson, a strong opponent of abortion and editor of RedState.com, told the New York Times this week. Indeed, Erickson’s website was telling its readers to contribute to Brown’s campaign. That’s the kind of common sense that once gave the GOP a governing majority. In fact, few political documents were as big-tent and inclusive as the 1994 “Contract With America,” crafted by Newt Gingrich, which swept the GOP to House and Senate majorities. If Brown’s victory signals a return of the big-tent GOP, if it signals the waning of self-destructive culture wars and litmus tests, then indeed his victory is a victory for the GOP and America.

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Dealing with the world in a way that gives Americans reasons to be pleased.

So much sniping at Barack Obama’s handling of foreign affairs.  Such low grades for his foreign policy.  By reading op-eds and blogs, by listening to some radio and TV commentary, one would think that we’ve lapsed back to the dark dismal days of Jimmy Carter when, in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s biting words, America was walking around with a “kick me” sign on its back.  That, we’re clearly not now doing. Obama’s foreign policy performance, on whole, isn’t bad at all.  For the first year of a presidency, with much still unfolding, with an actual “policy” still not in shape, it’s actually been pretty good. All too easy is it to forget how severely Ronald Reagan was criticized for not being bold enough in his first year – for not sufficiently backing Poland’s Solidarity Movement, for example, or for moving too timidly to reverse Communist gains in Central America.  It’s just as easy to forget how catastrophic was John Kennedy’s first year – bungling the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, watching passively as a wall split Berlin, withering in his Vienna encounter with the Soviet’s blustery Nikita Khrushchev.

Why, then, such criticism of Obama’s handling of our affairs on the world’s stage?  The only possible answer: It’s simply political partisan sniping, aimed at wounding a Democrat president.  One former mid-level official in the recent Bush State Department, for instance, derisively labels Obama’s foreign policy as “Bumble, Stumble and Skid” (That’s cute, but he fails to give examples.)  Such partisanship is understandable. Liberals and Democrats did the same and more to Reagan and to the Bush duo.  It’s also acceptable, fueling the fiery Washington exchanges from which some enlightenment ultimately leaks. And, anyway, it’s the way our system works, which, despite a messiness that puzzles (and at times infuriates) foreigners and dismays political scientists, works pretty well. 

Still, sniping is not the same as assessment.  An assessment would find, at this still early date, Obama’s foreign policy a mixed bag which, in balance, should give Americans more reason to be pleased than alarmed.

No progress.

There are, of course, huge, festering problems against which Obama has made no progress: Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs have not been slowed; Israelis and Palestinians, whose clashes inflame the whole Middle East and limit our policy options there, are no closer to (indeed, may be farther from) some sort of genuine peace deal; insurgents still blow up marketplaces and government offices in Iraq and Afghanistan in their attempts to thwart America’s efforts at what we once grandly called “nation building;” al Qaeda and other terrorists still use Pakistan’s frontier regions as bases for attacks against us and against Pakistan itself, a nuclear-armed state that too long has verged on collapse.

All these pose excruciating threats to our security and to our global interests.  Yet, truth be told (though Obama critics don’t tell it this way) eight years of Bush foreign policy also failed to slow Iranian and North Korean weapons programs, failed to embolden Pakistan to suppress al Qaeda, failed to bring a Palestinian-Israeli peace and left Afghanistan and Iraq in the messes inherited by Obama. That Obama in 12 months has not yet succeeded where Bush in eight years had failed is hardly cause for giving Obama foreign policy low grades.  An “Incomplete, But Shows Promise” would be more warranted.

Sucker-punch.

What are unwarranted are the criticisms that transparently are no more than partisan biting.  It’s become almost a mantra among critics, for instance, that Obama is going around the world apologizing for America.  That’s simply not true; worse, it fails to recognize the powerful sucker-punch structure of the Obama rhetoric.  To be sure, Obama abroad has admitted that America has made mistakes (as it, after all, has). By this, he wins his audience’s sympathies; then, pivoting, he demands that the audience also admit its own mistakes and change its behaviors.  Take his Cairo speech.  He wins applause by conceding that America has held unfair negative stereotypes of Muslims and that he will fight to change these; he then demands “that same principle must apply to Muslim perceptions of America.” Similarly in South America in April, he first (correctly) acknowledges America’s often high-handed treatment of that region, but then demands that South Americans stop blaming America for all of their own problems. Ditto in Africa.  There, after recognizing (correctly, after all) the pain inflicted by colonial rulers, he demands that Africans must stop blaming colonialism for all of their problems and start taking responsibility for themselves. 

Far from being a series of apologies, these Obama statements are a steady barrage of direct, tough talk, making demands of his Third World audiences that no previous American president ever has. That’s not only refreshing, it’s good for America, possibly creating, at last, a useful framework for our relations with developing nations.

Getting priorities right.

What’s even better for America is that Obama seems to have his foreign policy priorities right, erasing concerns about him that legitimately were raised by his presidential campaign rhetoric. In his meetings with Canadian and Mexican leaders, for example, Obama assured that he had no plans to reopen for negotiation Bill Clinton’s landmark North American Free Trade Agreement – NAFTA – which has boosted all three North American economies, even though Obama in 2008 had campaigned furiously against it. 

More important – much more important – he has handled with skill our relations with China and India.  As readers of this blog by now know, I regard our management of the rise of China and India as major powers as our most important foreign policy challenge of the next half-century.  How we handle it not only will shape this century and will not only determine whether our inevitable rivalries with these two countries degrade into hostility  but also will determine whether we remain the world’s commanding power. While there have been some Obama mistakes, most notably bowing to pressure from U.S. labor unions (major Obama political backers) and imposing tariffs on Chinese exports, thus risking a trade war with China, he has continued George W. Bush’s excellent policies towards both Asian giants. This policy, more than anything else, will determine how history judges Obama on foreign affairs.

Encouraging too, especially to a common sense conservative, is how Obama views his presidential foreign policy-making responsibilities.  Missing, mercifully, is the kind of crusading moralism that seemed to possess Bush.  For a conservative, after all, the sole purpose of our foreign policy is to defend and advance our interests.  Jimmy Carter never understood that for a moment; at crucial moments, such as when dispatching U.S. troops into harms’ way in Iraq, the second Bush seemed to forget it. Of course, for Obama, the jury is still out.  Still, it is significant that when he went to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, instead of using his lectern to spout the world peace bromides so beloved by leftwing Democrats, he made a strong case for America’s right to wage war and declared unequivocally that he has a “sworn [duty] to protect and defend my nation.” His record – so far – points to him doing just that.

[See previous posts:

“China and Conservatives,”    

“Obama is No Jimmy Carter”]

The 21st Century Takes Shape 

Obama’s China Blunder

Obama conducting American foreign policy, meeting world leaders.

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The terrorist’s fumbled Christmas attempt to blow up the Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane certainly has been a homeland security wake-up call. But to what is this call awakening us?  To be sure, we’ve been startled into recognizing that we must deploy more – or different – measures to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks.  But we also should be awakened to the effectiveness of security measures since September 2001. Most important, we should be waking-up to the reality that there’s nothing we can do to shield ourselves 100 percent and that by trying to do so, we unacceptably may erode our freedoms and liberty.

Perhaps we expect our President to demand, as Barack Obama did Wednesday, that we must erect a security system that will “save innocent lives — not just most of the time, but all the time.” Yet the tough reality is that any attempt to create an impervious shield either will fail or will impose what should be unacceptable burdens on our lives, freedoms and living standards.  In the eternal tensions and trade-offs between security and liberty, America’s tilt always should be to liberty. 

Clumsy & awkward bombs.

First, a nod to what we’ve been doing that works. The Nigerian terrorist’s clumsy attempt to detonate himself as a bomb testifies to actually how effective we’ve been.  Surely, scores of plots have been hatched by this or that al Qaeda cell and other terrorist bands since 9/11.  We’ve stopped every one of them. We’ve erected so many barriers and checkpoints that they can’t sneak powerful and easy to explode weapons onboard planes, reducing them to deploying lone jihadists with clumsy, hard to assemble and awkward to detonate devices stuffed in underwear.  When the Nigerian aboard Northwest Flight 253 fumbled, courageous passengers attacked and subdued him, preventing disaster.  Yet passengers would have no chance to react courageously were terrorists able to sneak powerful grenades, pipe-bombs and other easily-exploded weapons onto planes. Thus, in answer to the question now widely and loudly asked, “What have we got for our billions spent to stop terrorists?” we confidently can answer, “Quite a bit.  Quite a bit.”

That’s not to say, of course, that we can’t do more. There are holes to be plugged, new techniques to be tried. Every intercepted terrorist threat teaches us something and these lessons must be applied.  Tuesday’s hastily assembled White House meeting of anti-terrorist officials undoubtedly will yield a long list of changes. Undoubtedly too there will be calls for more effective data sharing by our intelligence agencies – though they already are cooperating at a level once unimaginable.  And, as intelligence veterans all know and as Obama acknowledged Wednesday when he said that the failure to detect the Christmas terrorist was the failure “to connect the dots,” the problem seldom is insufficient data.  The problem is so much data that they overwhelm the threat-evaluation process (just ask the Israelis, who failed to appreciate the Arab forces’ build-up on their border just before Israel was invaded in the 1973 Yom Kippur War).

No strangers to trade-offs.

There are other limits to what we can do.  Some urge that we emulate the impressive Israeli approach to air travel security.  But Israel is a tiny speck of a place.  We are just huge.  Massive. We’re the planet’s third most populous country, with a 7,458-mile land border plus 12,479 miles of coastline. In last year’s first nine months (the latest figures from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics), 533,000,000 passengers flew on 7,242,000  flights operated by U.S. airlines; of these, the 612,000  international flights, from whence come the greater security danger, carried 65,900,000 passengers into or out of America.  And that’s just on our own airlines, not counting flights and passengers on planes operated by other countries.  Daily, America’s air traffic controllers handle 28,000 commercial flights, with 5,000 planes filling America’s skies at any moment.

Yikes. Such staggering numbers mean that even if we perpetually are at the highest alert, some threats can slip through – and we can become victims of a terrorist attack.  This reality should force us to be prudent and reasonable in forging our response to the Christmas terrorist.  We must look hard at what proposed new measures will cost us in dollars, in invasiveness of our lives, in inefficiencies, in erosion of freedoms.  We must recognize the tradeoffs we will be asked to make. As it is, we’re no strangers to such trade-offs.  All the time we willingly trade lives for freedoms.  After all, we could prevent our 37,000 annual traffic deaths by imposing a 5 mph speed limit on all of our roadways.  Yet we don’t.  We all realize the huge cost this would inflict on our freedom of mobility, our living standards and our commerce.  To be sure, losing lives to a terrorist is not exactly the same as losing lives in a traffic accident.  What is the same, however, is the notion of tradeoffs. [Click for my earlier post on Highway Fatalities and Terrorists.]

In the near-term, Tuesday’s White House meeting and Wednesday’s Obama statements suggest that we’re likely to ignore tradeoffs and instead react sweepingly to the attempted Christmas attack. That’s unfortunate, but probably unavoidable. Obama politically needs to be perceived as being very tough, smarting, as he is, from GOP accusations that he has not taken terrorists threats seriously. This echoes charges throughout 2008’s presidential campaign, when it was not only Republican John McCain, but Democrats Joe Biden (now, of course, vice president) and Hillary Clinton (now, again of course, secretary of state) who repeatedly attacked him for lacking national security experience, warning that he could not stand up to America’s enemies. The GOP already is sniffing its likely gains from making Democrats, once again, as they were for decades after the late 1960s, vulnerable on national security.

Paying the price.

Politics, thus, understandably will drive the immediate response to the Christmas terrorist.  Beyond that, we should slow down enough to recognize that it is not a matter of being tough or weak.  It’s a matter of waking up to the tradeoffs – to the price that too tight a security regime can exact from our freedoms. We often intone our willingness to pay the “price for liberty.” Accepting an imperfect security shield is part of that price.

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Deserving our thanks. India Prime Minister Singh (left) & China Prime Minister Wen

Whew. The much-ballyhooed Copenhagen Conference on climate change is now over. The verdict is in: The conference was a flop. Meaning: We Americans dodged a bullet. For that we must say, “Thank you China. Thank you India.” These two fast developing nations dug in their heels, refusing to be stampeded by the Europeans and the Obama Administration into signing onto an agreement imposing huge restraints on their economic growth and massive intrusions into their sovereignty. Sad to say, the U.S. delegation, headed by our President himself, apparently cared little about how much an agreement would reduce American living standards, would cost taxpayers and would allow other nations to meddle in our affairs. We were ready to sign and, indeed, actually had become breathless cheerleaders of almost any kind of agreement. But China and India, concerned mainly (and rightly) about their own well-beings, saved us from ourselves. So, again, “Thanks Beijing, thanks Delhi.”

I am not an expert on what is called “climate change” or “global warming,” but there are a few things that we non-experts do know. We know, for example, that because the putative issue of global warming and what to do about it can inspire proposals that drastically overhaul the way Americans live their lives and dream for their futures, we cannot simply leave the matter to those claiming expertise. Scientists strongly disagree among themselves about every aspect of the global warming issue. And, we have learned only too well in the past month, in a still-festering scandal popularly called “Climategate,” that those “experts” expressing most alarm about global warming blithely distort data, muzzle dissenters and use the power of lush government grants and funding to enforce orthodoxy.

What we American non-experts also know about climate change and should demand that our lawmakers consider before enacting sweeping regulations, are:

• Senseless unilateral action.
If human activity and the production of carbon dioxide really are warming the planet (and there is no scientific consensus that they are), then unilateral American action will not halt or even slow the warming. We may feel virtuous by denying ourselves and future generations the opportunities and comforts synonymous with the American way-of-life, but our sacrifices will be meaningless unless those developing nations that actually now produce (the technical term is “emit”) the most carbon dioxide also limit themselves. These nations, China and India being the most prominent and excessive “emitters,” absolutely will not slash their economic growth. They will not. Period. They have been waiting too many centuries for their chance to grow. Therefore, whatever unilateral actions we take will have no measureable impact on global warming. The only impact will be to make us poorer.

• Massive cost.
Every proposed global warming “solution” imposes massive costs which will reduce our growth and hence cut our ability to innovate, curb our hallmark social upward mobility which long has given us our great competitive advantage over every other nation and consign future generations (for the first time in our history) to be poorer than their predecessors. India and China greatly fear the staggering price tag of global warming “solutions.” So should we. And we should thank China and India for raising the issue of cost, a matter conveniently absent from most climate change discussions.

• Protecting our sovereignty.
China balked at any agreement or “protocol” establishing an international mechanism to monitor compliance. This, insists Beijing, would “infringe on China’s sovereignty.” As it would. We should be as protective of our sovereignty as China is of its.

• Paying poor nations.
We will be throwing away money if we pay poor nations to accept our climate change view. Yet this is what we were proposing (and still propose) in Copenhagen. There, the U.S. reversed a long-held position and went along with the Europeans’ plan to pay poor nations $10 billion a year for the next three years and $100 billion a year by 2020, ostensibly to help them deal with the consequences of global warming. (In exchange, these nations would support the American and European climate change proposals.) This money will be wasted. Leaving aside the matter that both the extent of global warming and its consequences are hugely controversial, a sad half-century history of foreign aid teaches us that almost all of what we give such nations will end up in the foreign bank accounts of their enormously corrupt rulers. None of this money will have any impact on global warming or on those nations’ abilities to deal with its presumed consequences. Anyway, this money will hardly satisfy the poor nations. When asked what he thought about the $100 billion-a-year handout, the chief negotiator for the poor nations bloc, a Sudanese diplomat, actually told the Wall Street Journal: “It’s still insufficient. We need more money.”

What now?
America survived Copenhagen. So, what do we do now about climate change? First, we buy time to allow serious, unbiased scientific investigation and unfettered debate about whether there is global warming and, if there is, whether it is caused by human activity rather than by the kinds of massive climate shifts the planet has experienced many times in its long history. Before we rush to impose measures that will transform and degrade our way of life for generations, let’s make sure there truly is a problem – and that, if there is a problem, we can do something to solve it.

Second, we hedge our bets by researching ways of dealing with the effects of global warming. After all, if we conclude that global warming is indeed serious but not caused by human activity, then there is nothing we can do to slow or halt it. All of the resources we will be spending on halting warming will have been wasted. We thus must be ready to confront and adapt to the warming – as humans have adapted to changing climate throughout the eons. If oceans will rise, let’s explore what we can do to protect coastal cities. If rain patterns will shift, let’s explore how food production can be sustained. Dealing with the effects of global warming will be vastly less costly and punishing to our society than attempts to reverse global warming – and it’s also something we can do ourselves, without the need for international agreements or intrusion on our sovereignty or payoffs to poor countries.

Perhaps the welcome collapse of the Copenhagen conference is giving us a new opportunity to be more sensible and calm in addressing the contentious climate change issue. Maybe the Copenhagen failure will put our discussions on a productive track. If that happens, Copenhagen will turn out to have been a great success. For that we will thank China and India.

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Such refrains are sung by a growing chorus which denies that America and the global economy were facing tsunami-scale dangers in September 2008 that only drastic, sweeping and unprecedented actions could prevent. Clearly, it is not only the Nazi’s widely-documented campaign to exterminate Europe’s Jews that can be denied by those ignoring just about every available solid fact, it is also something as current as the economic crisis of 2008, whose aftershocks we’re still painfully feeling.

Few facts.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. History testifies that there is always an audience ready to listen to contrarians and conspiracy spinners. Moreover, it’s easy (often ridiculously easy) and usually rewarding to be contrarian. A contrary argument typically needs few new facts of its own; it’s simple enough to poke holes in existing facts (though the holes are irrelevant) and to second guess decisions months after they’ve been made, when the fog of crisis has lifted and fear has faded. At that moment, of course, contrarians ignore that crisis and fear both have waned specifically because of the actions that were taken. Not ignored by them is the soapbox attention they receive for their accusatory, contrary views. A denier’s assertion almost always guarantees headlines and six-digit You Tube views.

The only antidote to the denier is repeated recollection of history and facts. While facts won’t convert or silence the denier, they do keep the rest of us anchored solidly in reality. It is thus important to recall what was happening 15 long months ago, in September 2008, when we were tossing violently about in the center of “a perfect storm,” to use Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s vividly accurate term, as quoted this week in his “Man of the Year” interview with Time Magazine.

In the "perfect storm," Lehman Bros workers pack-up and clear-out.

• The American and global banking system was verging on near-complete freeze-up. Not only were banks extremely reluctant to lend to even the most credit-worthy firms, they were balking at lending to each other – even overnight. Short-term loans that firms used for payrolls and to pay suppliers were drying up.

• A panicked run had begun on the $3.5 trillion money market fund industry as account holders frantically began withdrawing money. To meet this soaring demand for redemptions, money market funds would have to sell their holdings, thus driving down asset prices that already had fallen sharply.

• Lehman Brothers, the iconic investment bank, shockingly had collapsed, sending destructive waves of plummeting confidence throughout the global financial system. Potentially much worse, American Investment Group (AIG), the world’s largest insurance company, seemed poised to follow Lehman. With offices in 130 countries, with 30 million American customers and another 44 million abroad and with $500 billion in obligations (credit-default swaps) to banks and financial institutions around the world, the likely devastation was beyond calculation.

• Merrill Lynch, hemorrhaging from its huge holdings of what came to be called “toxic assets,” mainly subprime mortgages heading for default, was only at the last minute rescued from collapse by Bank of America.

• The stock market seemed to plummet endlessly, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average frequently posting triple-digit daily drops, obliterating investor portfolios and retirement accounts across the nation.

• The U.S. Federal Reserve bank and European central banks were pumping unprecedented tens of billions of dollars into the system, with little visible impact.

• The commercial-paper market, used by corporations to fund daily operations, seemed about to freeze.

• Investors were pulling so much money out of ordinarily safe (and boring) investments and parking it in short-term U.S. Treasurys that the yield on three-month Treasurys first hit zero – and then actually fell below zero. Fed Vice-Chairman Donald Kohn later told James B. Stewart, whose account of the September crisis appears in the September 21, 2009 New Yorker: “You knew there was complete panic, and it was spreading.” Adds then-New York Federal Reserve Bank president and now Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in his interview with Stewart: “It’s hard to describe how bad it was.”

“Catastrophic.”
In short, as Bernanke told Time Magazine, “Virtually every large financial firm in the world was in significant danger of going bankrupt…I knew that the implications of that for the global economy would be catastrophic. We would be facing, potentially, another depression of the severity and length of the Depression in the 1930s. And that this was not at all hypothetical.”

Nonsense, retort the deniers, remaining steadfast in their heated denials. There was no Holocaust. Roosevelt knew all along about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Eisenhower botched D-Day. Last year’s economic crisis wasn’t really a crisis and certainly didn’t need massive government intervention.

Wrong, declares history. Wrong. Wrong. And again wrong

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Heading for Afghanistan. Are we prepared to win?

Barack Obama has made his case for sending 30,000 more American fighters to Afghanistan. His proposal is contentious. Some critics say that 30,000 are not quite enough, others that they are too much. Who’s right? It’s a close call. Surely, if we up our ante in Afghanistan, we should do so only if we are prepared to win – meaning, as Obama powerfully said in his West Point speech to the nation early this week, we must deny al Qaeda an Afghan (and Pakistani) haven from which to scheme attacks on us. If 30,000 will prove not enough to do that, will we then be willing to up our ante further? Whatever damage we may do to our international credibility and to our relations with Pakistan by pulling out of Afghanistan now, we will do to an even greater degree by leaving the job unfinished (to use Obama’s words) and pulling out later. Therefore: Are we in Afghanistan to win? That is the most critical – in fact, the only – question. If victory is not our goal, then we certainly should not send more troops.

Only the American people can answer this question.. If they are not ready to do what it takes to win in Afghanistan, then clearly we should not get in any deeper and, in fact, should start withdrawing and focus on fighting al Qaeda elsewhere. How do we determine whether Americans really back this war? We ask them to pay for it. We tax them for the added troops. Neither polling, nor op-eds, nor town hall meetings can measure public support reliably. Only a tax can do that. Had Americans been asked to pay – explicitly – for our battle in Viet Nam, we would have been forced, early on, into the realistic debate about what we sought to achieve there and what it would take to do so. Instead, American leaders assured us that we didn’t have to choose between what then was quaintly called “guns and butter.”

Let’s not repeat that mistake. If we want to fight in Afghanistan, we should pay for it.

Rightly opposing new taxes.
Yikes. I already hear the howls of protest and, worse, derision. I know the arguments against a tax – and, ordinarily, enthusiastically would endorse them. First, as conservatives, we rightly reflexively oppose just about every tax, especially new taxes, because taxes produce the income that swells government’s size and intrusiveness. Second, still deep in recession, what we need now are tax cuts, not increases. Third, cutting existing Federal programs, not new taxes, should pay for our Afghan troop surge.

All of these are sound arguments. All of these, in this instance, I reject. First, while every tax is dreadful, conservatives long have argued that less dreadful are what we call user-fees, a tax linked to a specific purpose or service. To be sure, a “war tax” is an unorthodox user fee, yet it can qualify because it is linked directly to the surge in troops. Second, the $30 billion in new taxes to cover the estimated cost of the new troops, relatively, are not a huge sum and thus should inflict limited economic drag, particularly since three-quarters of the nearly $800 billion stimulus program has not yet entered the economy’s pipeline. The third argument is, of course and in theory, irrefutable; trimming other government programs is, by far, by far, the best way to finance war or any other exceptional program or emergency. Yet, reality is – as is well known by anyone who ever has worked in Washington – that at the end of the day, no programs will be cut. Instead, the surge’s cost will be invisible to the public and simply will swell the national debt.

Main case for a tax.
These counter-arguments to the war tax opponents may or may not be persuasive. Maybe, at least, they will dull their case somewhat. At any rate, my main case for the tax relies not on those arguments but on the unavoidable eruption of the heated, contentious debate over a new tax that will force Americans to confront our war in Afghanistan and force them to decide whether or not they support it enough to fight to win.

Our battle against al Qaeda and other terrorists must be waged. Whether Afghanistan remains the place to wage it is not absolutely certain. What is certain is that we cannot wage it successfully without broad public backing. Let’s not replay our Viet Nam mistake. Let’s ask Americans to pay for the war in Afghanistan. If they refuse, let’s get out and fight al Qaeda elsewhere.

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Obama greeting India's Singh. More than a fortuitous coincidence.

Neither Henry Kissinger nor Prince Metternich could have written a better script. In just a brief ten days, America deftly demonstrated how it plans to remain the globe’s most powerful strategic player well through the 21st Century. In these ten days, an American president, first touching down in Shanghai and Beijing, solidified U.S. relations with China, the world’s most populous country and soon-to-be #2 economic power, and then, back in Washington barely 100 hours, lavishly and effusively welcomed the leader of India, on track to exceed China in population by mid-century and on-track too to become the world’s #3 economic power. For both China and India, the U.S. has become the most important relationship – and, significantly, vice versa.

Whether Barack Obama’s China/India meetings were deliberately planned to be breathtakingly back-to-back or whether the scheduling merely was fortuitous coincidence, the result is the same: A subtle diplomatic master-move showing how Washington, in the decades ahead, if it is smart, sensitive and perceptive, can use its unique relations with each Asian giant to keep America at the center of global power and, as critical, to keep unavoidable U.S.-China, U.S.-India, China-India differences and rivalries from degenerating into conflicts.

Shifting gravity.
Some may scorn that this is a return to “balance-of-power” calculations. Scorn or not, the reality of the 21st century geostrategic landscape will be its shifting center of gravity away from the Atlantic and Europe (where it has been for centuries) to the Pacific and Asia, dominated by America and the two huge Asian powers. In this landscape, it will be America, with its ability to pivot economically and militarily, which can keep the forces in balance. To be sure, it will not be a crass, simplistic matter of Washington playing an “India card” against Beijing or a “China card” against Delhi. Rather, it will be a matter of the U.S. being so actively engaged that, at critical moments of tensions, neither Beijing nor Delhi would want to risk souring its indispensable relationship with America.

And actively engaged was America these past two weeks. In China, from November 15-18, Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao built solidly on the maturing U.S.-China relationship. [See my previous  posting, “Obama in China: An Unwise Rush to Judgment”]. The visit’s tone was warm and friendly. At the end, each president highlighted how special they viewed the ties with each other. Hu talked about a U.S.-China “partnership.” And Obama declared that “the relationship between the United States and China has never been more important.”

Then, on November 22, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived in Washington. If the mood of the Obama-Hu meeting had been warm but button-down proper, with Singh it was overdrive lush and effusive. He was treated to Obama’s first State Dinner; no small honor. The sparkling setting, elegant protocol and star-studded guest list all were designed to flatter. And, according Indian press reports, flatter they did. To Indian reporters Singh later gushed: “It was a unique experience. The dinner was lavish and extravagant. The atmosphere and the layout were outstanding…President Obama and his wife laid out one of the best dinners and went out of the way. The people who had come in and the gathering in itself is a statement…It was a great experience and I enjoyed being there. It was one of the best dinners that I have attended.” Writes the Hindustan Times: “The grand and glamour-filled State dinner was choreographed to send the powerful message that the U.S. saw India as an ‘indispensable partner’ in handling global challenges of the 21st century.”

Relations transformed.
This, indeed, is the message that Obama and Singh repeated throughout the visit. Obama emphasized how much the U.S. and India, “the world’s largest democracies,” had in common, talking about “two proud people who struggled to break free from an empire and declare their independence,” about how both countries are “entrepreneurial” and “multiethnic” and “believe in human rights and core freedoms.” Flatteringly, he referred to India as “a rising and responsible global power,” a “leading economy” and “as nuclear powers…full partners” with the U.S. Several times he hammered home the key bottom-line: “As we work to build the future, India is indispensable [and]…the relationship between the United States and India will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century.”

It doesn’t get more effusive than that. And it almost left Singh breathless. He thanked Obama for his “strong commitment to the India-U.S. strategic partnership” and expressed his delight that “our relations have been transformed.”

Transformed they are. Just a decade or so ago, the embracing warmth of the Singh visit would have been inconceivable – even shocking. Throughout the Cold War, after all, India, despite pious professions of “nonalignment,” had aligned closely with Moscow and was nasty and hostile to the U.S. This began changing when India, turning its back on its failing socialist policies, recognized the huge advantages of a free market economy. Improving relations accelerated dramatically when the recent Bush Administration gave a top priority to improved ties with Delhi. So warm, in fact, had U.S.-India relations grown under Bush, that India recently actually was expressing concern that Obama was focusing too exclusively on China and that India was slipping among America’s priorities. Well, the Washington-welcome Singh received has allayed these concerns. Stated the Times of India on its front page: Obama “hit all the right buttons … to erase any impression that he had downgraded ties with New Delhi in deference to China.”

One plus two.
Indeed. It greatly serves our interests to keep upgrading our ties with India and China. As the 21st century takes shape, they, along with America, will dominate the world’s stage. Foreign affairs experts and observers already are saying that the term “G-20” (referring to the “group” of the 20 most influential nations) is outdated, overtaken by a “G-2” – the U.S. and China. In short time, India will make it a “G-3.” More accurately, however, if future U.S. actions will be as skilled and deft as they were these past two weeks, it will be a G-1 plus 2, with America remaining the world’s leading power.

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