Hoover Digest, 2011, No. 3, Summer

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HOOVER DIGESTpeter robinsonEditor

charles lindseyManaging Editor

e. ann woodInstitution Editor

jennifer presleyBook Publications Manager

HOOVER INSTITUTION

herbert m. dwightChairman, Board of Overseers

robert j. osterboyd c. smithVice Chairmen, Board of Overseers

john raisianTad and Dianne Taube Director

david w. bradyDeputy Director, Davies Family Senior Fellow

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david davenportCounselor to the Director

ASSOCIATE D IRECTORS

douglas bechlerstephen langloisdonald c. meyereryn witcher

ASSISTANT D IRECTORS

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On the CoverA propaganda poster from the 1930s hints at China’s twentieth-century struggles for autonomy. This scarlet-and-gold image of a rising phoenix promotes not republican China, born after the Wuchang rebellion of 1911, but a brief, Japanese-controlled collaborationist regime called the Provisional Government of the Republic of China. A new exhibit at the Hoover Institution explores this and other milestones in China’s century of change, as well as one of its most significant agents of change, Sun Yat-sen. See story, page 206.

Hoover DigestResearch and Opin ion on Publ ic Po l icy

2011 • no. 3 • summer www.hooverdigest.org

HOOVER DIGESTpeter robinsonEditor

charles lindseyManaging Editor

e. ann woodInstitution Editor

jennifer presleyBook Publications Manager

HOOVER INSTITUTION

herbert m. dwightChairman, Board of Overseers

robert j. osterboyd c. smithVice Chairmen, Board of Overseers

john raisianTad and Dianne Taube Director

david w. bradyDeputy Director, Davies Family Senior Fellow

richard sousaSenior Associate Director

david davenportCounselor to the Director

ASSOCIATE D IRECTORS

douglas bechlerstephen langloisdonald c. meyereryn witchersusan wolfe

ASSISTANT D IRECTORS

denise elsonmary gingelljames grossjeffrey m. jonesnoel s. kolakkathy phelan

visit theHoover inStitUtion

online atwww.hoover.org

Hoover Digest N 2011 · No. 3

ContentsHOOVER D IGEST · 2011 · NO . 3 · SU M M ER

DEMOCRACy IN THE ARAb WORlD

9 Like Striking a MatchThe spark seemed so small. But the Arab autocrats had spent decades heaping up the fuel. By fouad ajami.

16 An Unpredictable WindThe causes, the players, and the likely consequences of the Arab eruptions. A conversation with Hoover fellows peter berkowitz, victor davis hanson, and peter robinson.

28 The Roots of a Freedom AgendaThe Arab struggles may be new, but American goals are not. Three recent presidents laid the groundwork. By peter berkowitz.

33 Lands of Little RainDrought may not be destiny, but a critical ingredient for democratic societies does seem literally to fall from the skies. By stephen h.

haber and victor menaldo.

38 The Enemies of Our EnemyWe may not yet know what to do about the Islamists fighting in Libya, but we do know not to repeat certain mistakes. By joseph

felter and brian fishman.

43 Tigers of a Different StripeAfter their revolutionary fever cools, Arabs will have work to do. They could do worse than to emulate the booming Asian nations. By william ratliff.


I S lAM ISM

51 Trial of a Thousand YearsBehind the headlines lies an old and basic question: in the clash between Islamism and the nation-state, who will win? By charles

hill.

THE ECONOMy

61 How Could Inequality Be Good? If it prodded people to seek greater productivity, higher pay, and a better standard of living. By gary s. becker.

65 Sweet-Talking the “Fat Cats” Why businesspeople aren’t banking on Washington’s supposedly pro-business overtures. By stephen h. haber and f. scott kieff.

HEAlTH CARE

69 Doctored NumbersThe key justification for ObamaCare is “cost shifting”—that the insured pay a hidden tax to support the uninsured. But for the most part, such a shift does not, in fact, take place. By john f. cogan,

r. glenn hubbard, and daniel p. kessler.


lAbOR

73 Tear Up That Lousy Contract The economic crisis did at least one good thing: it forced us all to take a long, hard look at the enormous power of public-employee unions. By robert j. barro.

FORE IGN POl ICy

77 America’s Democratic CredentialsHoover fellow michael mcfaul, who has the president’s ear on Russia, argues that promoting freedom is both moral and wise.

84 Wishing Away the WorldForeign policy doesn’t mean righting every wrong. It means acting in our national interest. By bruce s. thornton.

EDUCAT ION

89 The Staggering Power of the Teachers’ UnionsA look at the most powerful force in American education—and it isn’t a force for good. By terry m. moe.

102 The States Are Back Whether racing to the top or sinking in debt (or both), some governors are taking the school-reform baton back from Washington. By chester e. finn jr.

ENERGy

107 Gone FissionUnreasoning fear is the wrong reaction to the Japanese reactor crisis. We can master the risks and reap the benefits of nuclear power. By

richard a. epstein.


I RAN

113 It Started with the ShahHoover fellow abbas milani on the rebellions in the Muslim world—and the monarch who set them off. An interview with charlie rose.

SAUD I ARAb IA

122 Will Change Come to the House of Saud?Reforms, if any, will depend on how modernizers and hard-liners settle their differences. By daniel pipes.

125 The Kingdom of CautionThe land where stability vies ceaselessly with stagnation. By joshua

teitelbaum.

139 Extending an Invitation to ReformThe United States has always been among the kingdom’s best friends. Who better to help it change? By leif eckholm.

RACE

147 Race and EconomicsWhat do black Americans need in order to get ahead? A truly free market. By walter e. williams.


I NTERV IEWS

154 Robert Conquest’s Five BooksThe eminent historian and Hoover fellow contemplates the communist mind. By alec ash.

160 “A Radical, a Troublemaker . . . ”As a scholar and a black American, walter e. williams has always been his own map. By nick gillespie.

VAlUES

170 The Core of Civic VirtueEither we teach the young to understand and appreciate their freedom, or we cheat them of their birthright. By william damon.

181 Honor in the TaskHow can we shore up the American work ethic? By honoring good work. By russell muirhead.

H ISTORy AND CUlTURE

187 Today’s Liberation TechnologiesA Cold War lesson that’s entirely relevant today: free people need free information. By a. ross johnson.

194 On the Road with AlexisNew insights into Alexis de Tocqueville, the genius who journeyed into the heart of American exceptionalism. By harvey c. mansfield.


HOOVER ARCH IVES

200 Tyranny 101Who better to coach a would-be dictator than Stalin? The curious episode of a foreign comrade who sought Stalin’s advice—which, of course, came at a cost. By paul r. gregory.

206 The Revolutionary RepublicIn 1911, China rejected feudalism to enter the modern era. A new Hoover exhibit on a century of change. By hsiao-ting lin and lisa

nguyen.

Hoover Digest N 2011 · No. 3 9

Like Striking a MatchThe spark seemed so small. But the Arab autocrats had spent decades

heaping up the fuel. By Fouad Ajami.

Historians of revolutions are never sure as to when these great upheavals in human affairs begin. But the historians will not puzzle long over the Arab revolution of 2011. They will know, with precision, when and where the political tsunami that shook the entrenched tyrannies first erupted. A young Tunisian vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, in the hardscrabble provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire after his cart was confis-cated and a headstrong policewoman slapped him across the face in broad daylight. The Arab dictators had taken their people out of politics, they had erected and fortified a large Arab prison, reduced men and women to mere spectators of their own destiny, and the simple man in that forlorn Tunisian town called his fellow Arabs back into the political world.

From one end of the Arab world to the other, all the more so in the tyr-annies ruled by strongmen and despots (Libya, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Alge-ria, and Tunisia), the Arab world was teeming with Mohamed Bouazizis. Little less than a month later, the order of the despots was twisting in the wind. Bouazizi did not live long enough to savor the revolution of dig-nity that his deed gave birth to. We don’t know if he took notice of the tyrannical ruler of his homeland coming to his bedside in a false attempt at humility and concern. What we have is the image, a heavily bandaged man and a tacky visitor with jet-black hair, a feature of all the aged Arab

Fouad ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-chairman of Hoover’s

Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International

Order, and the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School

for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

DEMOCRACY IN THE ARAB WORLD


rulers—virility and timeless youth are essential to the cult of power in these places. Bids, we are told, were to come from rich Arab lands, the oil states, to purchase Bouazizi’s cart. There were revolutionaries in the streets, and there were vicarious participants in this upheaval.

A silent Arab world was clamoring to be heard, eager to stake a claim to a place in the modern order of nations. A question had tugged at and tormented the Arabs: were they marked by a special propensity for tyr-anny, a fatal brand that rendered them unable to find a world beyond the prison walls of the despotism? Better sixty years of tyranny than one day of anarchy, ran a maxim of the culture. That maxim has long been a prop of the dictators.

There is no shortage of autopsies of the Arab condition, and I hazard to state that in any coffeehouse in the cities of the Arabs, on their roof-tops that provide shelter and relief from the summer heat, the simplest of men and women could describe their afflictions: the predator states, the fabulous wealth side by side with mass poverty, the vanity of the rulers and their wives and their children, the torture in countless prisons, and the destiny of younger men and women trapped in a world over which they have little if any say.

No Arabs needed the numbers and the precision supplied by “devel-opment reports” that told of their sorrows, but the numbers and the data were on offer. The Arab Human Development Report of 2009—a United Nations project staffed by Arab researchers, the fifth in a series—provided a telling portrait of the world of 360 million Arabs. They were overwhelm-ingly young, the median age twenty-two, compared with a global average of twenty-eight. They had become overwhelmingly urbanized: 38 percent of the population lived in urban areas in 1970; it was now close to 60 percent. There had been little if any economic growth and improvement in their economies since 1980. No fewer than 65 million Arabs were living below the poverty line of $2 a day. New claimants were everywhere; 51 million

Why did the Arabs not rage last year, or the year before that, or in

the past decades? Because tyranny and state terror had yielded huge

dynastic dividends.


new jobs have to be created by 2020 to accommodate the young. Tyranny kept these frustrations in check. Eight Arab states, the report stated, prac-ticed torture and extrajudicial detention. And still, the silence held. Bouazizi and his deed of despair brought a people to a reckoning with its maladies.

A CHILL ING EXAMPLE OF DESPOT IC POWERWhy have the Arabs not raged before as they do now—why has there not been this avalanche of anger that we witnessed in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and Syria? Why did the Arabs not rage last year, or the year before that, or in the last decades? An answer, one that makes the blood go cold, is Hama.

In retrospect, the Arab road to perdition—to this large prison that the crowds have set out to dismantle—must have begun in that Syrian city

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in 1982. A conservative place in the central Syrian plains rose in rebel-lion against the military regime of Hafez Assad. It was a sectarian revolt, a fortress of Sunni Islam at odds with Assad’s Alawite regime. The battle that broke out in February of that year was less a standoff between a gov-ernment and its rivals than a merciless war between combatants fighting to the death. Much of the inner city was demolished, and perhaps twenty thousand people perished in that cruel fight. The ruler was unapologetic; he may have bragged about the death toll. He had broken the old culture of his country and the primacy of its cities.

Hama became a code word for the terror that awaited those who dared challenge the men in power. It sent forth a message in Syria, and to other Arab lands, that the tumultuous ways of street politics and demonstra-tions and intermittent military seizures of power had drawn to a close. Assad would die in his bed nearly two decades later, bequeathing power to his son, Bashar, who wields it today. Tyranny and state terror had yielded huge dynastic dividends.

The heart went out of Arab dissent and ideological argumentation. A new despotic culture took hold; men and women scurried for cover, lucky to escape the rulers’ wrath and the cruelty of the secret police, and the informers. Terrible men, insulated from their subjects (the word is the right one), put together regimes of enormous sophistication when it came to keeping their tyrannies intact. State television, the newspapers, mass politics, and the countryside spilling into the cities aided the despotisms. The tyrants, invariably, rose from modest social backgrounds. They had no regard for the old arrangements and hierarchies and for the limits a traditional society placed on the exercise of power.

Men like Muammar Gadhafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, like Hafez Assad of Syria, were children of adversity, and they were crueler for it, because traditional Arab society exalted pedigree and high birth. As the Arabs would put it—in whispers, in insinuations—no one knew the names of the fathers of these men who fell into things and acquired

No script was on offer—no revolution has ever followed a script—but the

people of Egypt were more than willing to trade tyranny for uncertainty.


political kingdoms of their own. The details varied from one Arab realm to another, but at heart the story was the same: a tyrant had emerged and restructured the political universe to his will. Milder authoritarianisms gave way to this “sultanist” system.

When the Egyptian rebellion erupted, it was foreordained that it would focus on the ruler and his family. Egyptians had grown weary of Hosni Mubarak, and the prospect of another Mubarak waiting in the wings was an affront to their dignity. The tyranny had sullied them, and they wanted to be done with the despot: “Irhall” (“Be gone”), the crowd would chant in unison. No script was on offer—no revolution has ever followed a script—but the people of Egypt were willing to trade this tyranny for the uncertainty of what was to come. Now the world-weary could tell them that their revolt may yet be betrayed, that they will break their chains only to forge new ones, that the theocrats are destined to replace the autocrats. But grant the Egyptian people their right to swat away these warnings.

Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia was shaped of the same mold as Mubarak. He had been a man of the police and the security services. True, his predecessor, the legendary Habib Bourguiba, hero of Tunisia’s indepen-dence, had ruled uncontested for three decades until Ben Ali pushed him aside in 1987. But Bourguiba was a cultured man; he knew books and literature; he had high aspirations for his country and its modernity. His political history placed him above his contemporaries, and he could take his primacy for granted. It would have appalled him to think of himself as a warden of his people—a thought and a reality that never troubled Ben Ali.

The greed of Ben Ali’s family and his in-laws, the speed with which they all clamored out of the country at the first sign of danger, told vol-umes about this despotism. There was no patriotism and love of home here: a predator and his ambitious wife, the hairdresser who had come out of nowhere to the pinnacle of power, made a run for it. It had been quite a racket for them, and it was now time to quit the land they had plundered and enraged.

Men like Muammar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad were

children of adversity, and they were crueler for it.


This, too, the plundering, marks a great discontinuity with the past. The despots of the day dispose of enormous wealth. The fortunes of the rulers, an Arab businessman once said to me, are the real weapons of mass destruction in the region.

REJECT ING THE RUL ING CASTEOne way or the other, the men at the helm became a ruling caste. They harked back to a pattern of rule that had befallen the world of Islam after the demise of the Baghdad caliphate in the thirteenth century to the rule of the Mamluks, soldiers of fortune who carved out kingdoms of their own and kept apart from the populations they ruled. Gone was the conti-nuity between the ruler and the ruled that had been the hallmark and the promise of the advent of nationalism. The autocrats were now feared and reviled. A distinguished liberal Egyptian formed in the liberal interwar years, the late scholar and diplomat Tahseen Basheer, said of these men that they became “country owners.”

The rulers grew older and obscenely wealthy, their populations younger and more impoverished. These autocrats in the national-security states put to shame the old monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Emir-ates. In the monarchies and principalities there has always existed a “fit” between monarchs and princes, and their people. There has never been a cult of personality in these monarchies: the Stalinist cult that afflicted Sad-dam’s Iraq, Hafez Assad’s Syria, and Gadhafi’s Libya is abhorrent to them. The Bedouin ethos that still legitimizes the monarchies has no room for such deference to the ruler.

Monuments to kings are heresy to the Saudi rulers. The affection and concern displayed by ordinary Saudis for the ailing King Abdullah stands in sharp relief against the animus toward Mubarak and Ben Ali and Assad and Gadhafi. The Sabahs of Kuwait, the ruling family in that city-state since the mid-eighteenth century, inspire no fear in Kuwaitis; no “visitors at dawn” haul off Kuwaitis to prison, as is the norm in the republics of ter-ror. Before the age of oil, the Kuwaitis had been seafarers and pearl divers, and the Sabahs were the ones who stayed behind to look over the affairs of the place. They had respect and privilege, but there was no space for grand ambitions and pretensions. The merchants held their own and still do: the


wealth of the merchant families is more than a match for the revenues of the Sabahs. Nor do the other principalities differ in this regard. State ter-ror is alien to them.

Tiny Bahrain is something of an exception, afflicted as it is by a sec-tarian split between a Sunni ruling dynasty and a restive majority Shia population. But on the whole, the monarchies have always ruled with a lighter touch. Who in today’s republics of the whip and of state terror would not call back the monarchs of old? Nasab, or genealogy—inher-ited merit—is revered in the practice and life of the Arabs. It reassures people at the receiving end of power and hems in the mighty, connect-ing them to the deeds and reputations of their forefathers.

So three despots have fallen: Saddam Hussein in 2003; Ben Ali; and Mubarak. Saddam’s regime was of course decapitated by American arms. Ben Ali and Mubarak were brought to account by their own pop-ulations. This revolt is an Arab affair through and through. It caught the Pax Americana by surprise; no one in Tunis and Cairo and beyond was waiting on a green light from Washington. The Arab liberals were quick to read Barack Obama, and they gave up on him. They saw his comfort with the autocracies, his eagerness to “engage” and conciliate the dictators.

From afar, the “realists” tell the Arabs that they are playing with fire, that beyond the prison walls there is danger and chaos. Luckily for them, the Arabs pay no heed to these realists, and can recognize the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that animates them. Arabs have quit railing against powers beyond and infidels and foreign conspiracies. For now they are out making and claiming their own history.

Reprinted by permission of Newsweek. © 2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Islamism and

the Future of the Christians of the Middle East, by

Habib C. Malik. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit

www.hooverpress.org.


An Unpredictable WindThe causes, the players, and the likely consequences of the Arab

eruptions. A conversation with Hoover fellows Peter Berkowitz, Victor

Davis Hanson, and Peter Robinson.

Peter robinson: In Tunisia a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi protested the harassment he had suffered at the hands of local police by committing suicide, setting himself ablaze. Shortly afterward, the govern-ments of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, president of Tunisia for twenty-three years, and of Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt for some thirty years, had been overthrown. A civil war broke out in Libya; the king of Jordan dismissed his cabinet; and protests took place in Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. How do we understand this?Victor DaVis Hanson: Well, there are two things going on. One is we live in an age of Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet, so something that would be local in Tunisia now resonates all over the world. And in the case of the Middle East, whether it is monarchy, theocracy, or military dictatorship, they all have one common denominator—they deny people

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover

Institution, the chairman of Hoover’s Koret-Taube Task Force on National

Security and Law, and co-chairman of Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force

on Virtues of a Free Society. Victor DaVis Hanson is the Martin and Illie

Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Peter roBinson is the editor

of the Hoover Digest, the host of Uncommon Knowledge, and a research fellow

at the Hoover Institution.



freedom, they have ruined the economy, and they have stolen from the people. There has been this seething anger, and in some part the demon-stration of democracy in Iraq was the model. What would have been a local prairie fire has turned into a conflagration.robinson: Contrast what is taking place in the Arab world in 2011 with the Velvet Revolution, the anti-communist revolution that swept Eastern Europe in 1989.

Peter berkowitz: For one thing, in the Arab world you have the impact of Islam, which of course we did not have in the European revolutions. And we really do not know what the consequence is going to be. One of the important developments in recent months that you left out is that Hezbollah has taken over the government of Lebanon, ousting pro-West-ern Prime Minister Saad Hariri and installing what looks to be a Hez-bollah puppet who is certainly good friends with the Syrians. This is a tremendous threat to freedom. What you had in Europe was a clear and definite overthrowing of the alternative to Western-style liberal democra-cy and a clear determination to embrace Western-style liberal democracy. What we see in the Arab Middle East is a definite determination to get rid of authoritarian dictators, partly because people are living in grinding poverty. What we don’t know in this case is what the people want.robinson: Let us stay with Egypt for a moment because it is overwhelm-ingly the largest in population, historically the center of the Arab world, cultural center of the Arab world. The historian Bernard Lewis noted in a recent interview that the Arab world has no history of democracy. Thirteen hundred years of Islam in the Arab world has produced zero democracies except for the 1970s in Lebanon, and the Christian minority played a central role in that brief democracy. All right, Bernard Lewis: “In Egypt, the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar

“Here we have a potpourri of Iranian theocracy, Libya’s crazy

authoritarianism, Mubarak’s pro-American military dictatorship,

the Baath Party in Syria.”


language; the language of Western democracies is for the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses. In genuinely fair and free elections, the Muslim parties are likely to win, and I think that would be a disaster.” What is going to happen in Egypt?

Hanson: I do not think we know, but we have a lot of paradoxes that are going on in the region. One is that these odious dictators like Mubarak tend to be more liberal in classical terms than the population. So if we were to have a plebiscite, the people might reflect a level of religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and oppression against women that would not be true of the Mubarak government, despite its horrific human rights record. Another paradox we have in the region is that, unlike Eastern Europe, where they were rebelling against monolithic communism, here we have a potpourri of Iranian theocracy, Libya’s crazy authoritarianism, Mubarak’s pro-American military dictatorship, the Baath Party in Syria.

TWITTER TO FREEDOMrobinson: One of the principal figures in the Egyptian revolution was a young Egyptian Google executive. Protesters throughout the Arab world have been in touch on Twitter, they are keeping in touch by e-mail, they are posting events on YouTube. Is what has taken place conceivable with-out high tech? Is the political revolution we are witnessing now conceiv-able absent the high-tech revolution of the past decade and a half or so, the communications revolution?Hanson: I do not think so, but I think we are seeing the veneer of the revolution. I think that the radical Islamists know about social networking and electronic information and so does the Westernized upper and smaller middle class. They galvanize people. But to the degree that somebody who is a peasant farmer in a village on the Nile is getting up every morning and looking at Twitter, I am dubious that that is happening. So what I am suggesting is that they cause the initial revolt. They got rid of Mubarak

“The Muslim Brotherhood, the forces of radical Islam, they not only know

how to use [social media], they are using them very effectively even as

we speak.”


and now the social networking may or may not be effective. What is going to capture the majority are the mosques and state-run television, people getting a little bit more mundane messages who do not participate. Every-body in Washington and New York and at Harvard and Yale, they do Twitter and Facebook, but people out in Fresno or working in a factory are not tweeting every day.berkowitz: The rise of the Internet, e-mail, and social networking is very much a double-edged sword. In this country the great beneficiary in the 2008 election was Obama, whose campaign expertly used social network-ing. In the past two years the real beneficiary of the new technology has been the tea party movement. This is neutral, it is a double-edged sword, and just as Victor says, the Muslim Brotherhood, the forces of radical Islam, they not only know how to use them, they are using them very effectively even as we speak.

Hanson: Just an accelerator, a catalyst . . . so all these movements might have happened, but they are happening at lightning speed now. robinson: We know that one of the aims of at least some branches of the radical Islamic movement is a restoration of the caliphate. They are talk-ing about something like what you can glimpse most recently in 1918, before the fall of the Ottoman Empire. And what you see when you look at a map is all kinds of places that we now think of as nations simply did not exist. Iraq was not there; Lebanon was not there; Israel was not there; Egypt was not. It was an undistinguished region. All right, so the question is: does the new communications technology tend to play into this dream of a restoration of somehow transcending or eliminating the nation-state, which is an artifact of the twentieth century, and play into the dream of a pan-Arab movement?berkowitz: For sure. Just as Western progressive liberal internationalists are delighted by the rise of the Internet because they think it helps lay the foundations for a one-state world and global governance. There is some reason for that.

“I do not see a monolithic Muslim nation appearing because it is no more

monolithic than the European Union, and the EU is shattering as we speak.”


robinson: It does tend to act as a solvent of the nation-state.berkowitz: By the way, just as Marx said in The Communist Manifesto that the rise of the telegraph helped lay the foundations for universal revo-lution of the proletariat, so too the radical Islamists certainly use this tech-nology in the hope that it is laying a foundation.

By the way, with the caliphate we can be even more precise. The caliph-ate means a single government under Islam, under all territories that have previously been held by Islam. In other words, stretching from Spain in the west to somewhere beyond Iran in the east. One government, and it is a Muslim government. That is what the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is committed to.robinson: The New York Times in February: “Officials responded with a mass show of force across China. After anonymous calls for protesters to stage a Chinese Jasmine Revolution went out over social media and microblogging outlets, the words Jasmine Revolution, borrowed from the successful Tunisian revolt, were blocked on sites similar to Twitter and Internet search engines. In recent days, more than a dozen lawyers and rights activists have been rounded up and more than eighty dissidents have reportedly been placed under varying forms of house arrest.” Why do all three of us know that the Chinese won’t let it happen?Hanson: Because they are willing to use a level of coercion that essentially says to the West: “We do not really care what you say, you have no influ-ence over us, and if I could be blunt, you are borrowing a trillion dollars for health care when 400 million of us have never seen a Western doctor. So do not give us any lectures because you have no influence over us.” I would say, though, on your interest about the caliphate, I do not see a monolithic Muslim nation appearing because it is no more monolithic than the European Union, and the EU is shattering as we speak. The idea that Canada and the United States and Britain are going to have an Anglosphere again is ridiculous. There are so many fissures within the Arab world: Shiite, Sunni, Alawite, tribal, geographical, economic sys-tems. And remember, for all of the PC anti-Americanism, Saddam Hus-sein and Khomeini—and throw in Hafez Assad and Libya—have killed more of their own people than we did in Iraq in the first Gulf War trying to liberate them.


berkowitz: If I may say so, I think that Victor is right; the likelihood of a caliphate emerging is extremely remote. However, it is a real aspiration for lots of people and lots of leaders, and it is reasonable to worry that there will be a great deal of death and destruction as these people unsuccessfully seek to bring about a caliphate.

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ISRAELrobinson: What is the thinking in Israel about the meaning of this Arab revolution for Israel?berkowitz: Needless to say, the Israelis are very concerned. The wisest among the Israelis made clear that when people cry out for freedom and democracy, Israel should stand with them. But they also made clear, con-cerning the people in Egypt, that’s a long-term aspiration, and the path to freedom and democracy might be very bumpy for the Egyptians and very dangerous for the Israelis. In terms of actual threats, the Israelis don’t fear conventional warfare. robinson: Tanks are not going to roll across the Sinai.

berkowitz: They are not going to roll across the Sinai; it is a long way across the desert and those tanks are extremely vulnerable to the Israeli air force. So that is not a short-term or intermediate-term threat. What is the near-term threat is even worse security in the Sinai Peninsula than the security provided by Hosni Mubarak’s regime. There are now mis-siles in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and they are real missiles, not crummy rockets, which can reach Tel Aviv and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Every single armament in the Gaza Strip got there from Iran through the Sinai Peninsula, smuggled in, illegally with the help of Bed-ouins, maybe Egyptian forces were bribed. If this security breaks down even more, this is a tremendously significant threat to Israel. Moreover, it is not just Gaza; Israel shares a long border on the Sinai Peninsula. There is no force there, no security barrier there. There is a very serious threat of greater infiltration through the Sinai Peninsula into Israel; it is very worri-some from the Israeli point of view.robinson: Over the last decade roughly—correct my timing—as best I can tell there have been two big trends in Israel. One is tremendous economic buoyancy. That is a happening place: lots of high technology, levels of education, the sense of simply leading a good life is everywhere

“They need to go back and reset the ‘reset diplomacy’ and have a

principled position that is not contingent on individual countries or

personalities.”


to be seen. Trend two—things have gotten more and more dangerous. Iran in pursuit of nuclear weapons under a leader who has spoken open-ly about driving Israel into the sea; the Turkish government becoming more Islamic and supporting that fleet of civilian ships that attempted to break the Gaza blockade; the victory of Hezbollah in Lebanon; unrest and uncertainty in Egypt. The two Arab countries that have made peace—Egypt, government overturned; Jordan, king under pressure. Just looking at it objectively, doesn’t one have the sense that the existential moment is approaching? How does Israel cope with that? berkowitz: I wish I could tell you how they cope with that, where they find the fortitude. Of course there is a kind of schizophrenia in Israel. And your description is absolutely right. Extraordinary prosperity: the greater Tel Aviv area has become one of the great Mediterranean beach towns. At the same time, you hear a term among national-security people and ordi-nary citizens that I did not hear before, and that is, I am speaking about Iran, a threat to our very existence, an existential threat. All the previous wars, with the exception of the war of independence, were fought outside Israel, very close to Israel, but urban areas were not targeted. What is going to be different, and it already began to be different with the 2006 second Lebanon war, is that all the enemies you mentioned have interme-diate-range missiles that will reach Tel Aviv. They will do terrible damage.

THE UNITED STATES AND THE ARAB MOMENTrobinson: Historian Niall Ferguson on the Egyptian situation as it was unfolding: “President Obama faced stark alternatives. He could lend his support to the youthful revolutionaries or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail. He did both, some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, other days drawing back and recom-mending an orderly transition. The result has been a foreign policy deba-cle. The president has alienated everybody, not only Mubarak’s cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo, and America’s two closest friends in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are both disgusted.” He is going over the top a little, don’t you think?Hanson: No, I don’t. I agree with him, because he carefully—as a lot of us did—collated what Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton


said over an eighteen-day period . . . how they addressed the Egyptian situation and the relative silence about Libya. And he’s also collating what happened in Iran in 2009 (the sermon about meddling in internal affairs), the silence about Syria, and then some gratuitous remarks about Tunisia. And you put it all together and one wants to know: is the United States pressuring governments that are autocratic? Kind of, sort of, but not until they think that the demonstration is going to succeed. Do they have a principle of support for human rights, democracy, constitutional-ity, legality, an independent judiciary? Can’t see it. We don’t have any broad principles that we apply to everybody. So what is the policy now? The policy is this: if there is a monarchy, a theocracy, a military dictator-ship, or a brutal, savage Baathist, or whatever they are, and their people revolt against them, we [hold our finger up in the wind] and we wait, and we try to see what are the chances that the people in the street are going to prevail. And at some critical mass when they prevail, then we are going to go back and support them and then retroactively we are going to say we always did say that we supported you. And if they look like they are going to fail or they are quiet, then we back off and say we want to transition it quietly.

Then there is one other policy, and this is why Niall Ferguson is so upset. If you say that you cannot meddle in Iranian affairs and if you say that this horrific regime in Syria we have to reach out to as we did not in the Bush administration, and if you do not say anything about utter sav-agery in the streets of Libya, but you do say that you think that Mubarak and the Tunisians and the Jordanians have to reform, then what you are essentially saying, whether you meant to or not, is to the degree that you do not like the United States, you butcher lots of people, and you keep the press from watching it, we are indifferent; perhaps we are even support-ive. To the degree that you like us, you bring in the cameras, and you are pretty soft about the way you put down unrest, then we’re going to be very angry at you. And it makes no sense. So they need to go back and reset the “reset diplomacy” and have a principled position that is not contingent on individual countries or personalities but is more abstract.robinson: You’re secretary of state—what should the American policy be?


berkowitz: The American policy in my judgment should have been rooted in the great tradition that began with Harry Truman in 1947, in the wake of communist conquests in Eastern Europe. He said that it will be the policy of the United States government to promote the conditions of freedom everywhere around the world; a policy that was reaffirmed by Ronald Reagan in his great Westminster speech, in which he outlined the conditions under which freedom flourished, which had to do with a strong civil society and freedom of press, and an independent judiciary. It was then reaffirmed by George W. Bush in 2003 at his great NED speech when he announced the freedom agenda and became the first president to say that now the freedom agenda must focus on the Arab/Muslim world. That should have been our policy, but the Obama administration has systematically distanced itself from the freedom agenda.

robinson: Worth noting that the first president you named was Harry Truman, a Democrat. This can be a bipartisan policy.berkowitz: You have an excellent point; it has bipartisan roots.robinson: Last question, a hard one I think. Two quotations. First, polit-ical scientist Paul Rahe: “I believe we are witnessing a strategic shift in the Mediterranean. The younger generation of Arabs is turning to the only cultural force that has purchase in the post–Cold War world; they are turning to Islam. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Bahrain will become more hostile to us, to our European allies, and of course to Israel.” Quota-tion two, Natan Sharansky: “The democracy that hates you is better than the dictator who loves you.” Who is right?Hanson: Well, it is a little bit more complex because we have two theo-cratic regimes that give everybody as much Islam as they can handle. One of them is the Sunni version in Saudi Arabia, and one is the Shi-ite version in Iran, and neither one of them is popular. And there are people protesting both because they are authoritarian and corrupt and they do not see life as so good under the Quran. So, what we are trying

“Everybody realizes this is the Arabs’ moment. This is grass roots; the

world is watching. . . . We will see what the aspirations of the Arab

people are.”


to figure out is how do you warn people who are throwing out military dictatorships and secular strongmen and say to them, this is the path to consensuality, because if you really want the Muslim Brotherhood and you want theocracy, you have two good examples—Saudi Arabia and Iran—and the people there are not happy. So I think that this is the Arabs’ moment.

I just would finish by saying for fifty years we have been told by the Arab street and its intellectuals, especially in Europe, that “they brought the Baathists to us, they put Nazis into us, they brought the Soviet-style paradigm, they brought the corrupt American dictatorship. All these -isms and -ologies were forced on us and we did not have any choice.” You go to Libya and somebody will tell you, “You put Gadhafi on”; somebody will tell you, “You put Khomeini on.” robinson: That persistent sense of victimhood. Hanson: Exactly. Now everybody realizes this is the Arabs’ moment. This is grass roots; the world is watching. You guys don’t have to put theocracy, monarchy . . . it is yours. And we will see what the aspirations of the Arab people are. Because everybody is staying out of it, and it is up to them to make a government that reflects what the people want, and we will see what the people want.berkowitz: Neither Sharansky nor Rahe is right, but there is a kernel of truth in each. You need to put them together. There are two forces that have purchase on people’s souls in the contemporary Middle East. One force, as Paul Rahe says, is Islam. But the other force is a real force, it also has purchase on people’s souls, it is what Natan Sharansky writes about: the spirit of democracy, the desire to be free, the desire to live under laws that you yourself have a hand in making, to call the shots for yourself. The question is which of these two is going to be the victor. We don’t know which is going to be the victor; therefore, we should pursue things in the spirit of Truman, Reagan, and Bush, and what we should work on is not in the first place getting elections up and running, whose results can be not just uncertain but quite hostile to our interests and to international interests. What we should work on is promoting with care, caution, and judiciousness the conditions under which freedom flourishes. That means helping people who want freedom to build independent judiciaries,


expand the freedoms of the press, create economic opportunity, and cer-tainly not least, improve the opportunities for girls to be educated and for the protection of women’s rights. That’s what we can do to make things better.

Excerpted from Hoover’s webcast series, Uncommon Knowledge (www.hoover.org/multimedia/uncommon-knowledge). © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Torn Country: Turkey

between Secularism and Islamism, by Zeyno Baran. To

order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.


Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover

Institution, the chairman of Hoover’s Koret-Taube Task Force on National

Security and Law, and co-chairman of Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force

on Virtues of a Free Society.

The Roots of a Freedom AgendaThe Arab struggles may be new, but American goals are not. Three

recent presidents laid the groundwork. By Peter Berkowitz.

What is genuine democracy? What are its foundations, and which beliefs, practices, and associations nourish it? It’s a pressing question for the United States, whose experts were caught flat-footed by the popu-lar uprisings sweeping the Arab world and whose intelligence agen-cies, Defense Department, State Department, and National Security Council remain woefully understaffed with officials who know Arabic and understand Islam. We need to understand what is within the com-petence and commitment of the United States to bring about genuine democracy.

When Muammar Gadhafi threatened to use his armed forces to gun down antigovernment protesters across the country, President Obama at first seemed tongue-tied—at a loss for a clear view of America’s interests in the Libyan uprising and the obligations imposed by American ideals. Yet weeks earlier, his tongue had been freer and his vision clearer. Shortly after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned and transferred his powers to the military, Obama declared that “nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”



Genuine democracy, he explained, “means protecting the rights of Egypt’s citizens, lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution and other laws to make this change irreversible, and laying out a clear path to elections that are fair and free.” And it must be inclusive: “Above all, this transition must bring all of Egypt’s voices to the table.”

Such enthusiastic demands were an understandable reaction to the stir-ring images broadcast around the world from Cairo. It was right and fit-ting for the president to stand with those demanding an end to authori-tarianism and a voice in the making of the laws under which they live. Nevertheless, his rhetoric risked inflating expectations and confusing pri-orities. With the ground continuing to shift in the Arab world—NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war, the return of influential radical Sunni Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi to Egypt, the persistent demonstrations in Bah-rain, Syria, and elsewhere—it’s critical to establish reasonable expectations and clear goals.

Our own constitutional tradition, while uncompromisingly grounding government in the consent of the governed, maintains a lively awareness of the tyranny of the majority. That’s why the founders built into the Con-stitution substantial limits on government. And that’s why our constitu-tional tradition teaches that democracy is not the highest aim of politics, but rather the regime best suited to securing individual freedom for all. This is the leading goal of legitimate and lawful government.

Free elections are sometimes not enough to reach that goal. For exam-ple, within eighteen months of its victory in the January 2006 Gaza elec-tions determinedly sought by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Hamas staged a bloody coup in which it threw out the rival Fatah movement and forcibly imposed one-party rule. And earlier this year, even as the people of Tunisia and Egypt banished their dictators, Hezbollah dealt a serious blow to the prospects for freedom in Lebanon and stability in the region by unseating a pro-Western prime minister, Saad Hariri, and replacing him with Hezbollah puppet Najib Mikati.

Among modern presidents, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and George W.

Bush were the most consequential advocates for this defining principle.


The powerful waves of discontent washing over the Middle East will continue to oblige the White House to focus on long-suppressed Arab demands to determine their own destinies. Meantime, Obama and his team can draw inspiration and guidance from three Oval Office forebears: Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. They are the most consequential advocates among modern presidents for the preservation and extension of democracy and freedom abroad as a defining principle of American foreign policy.

On March 12, 1947, with communism on the march, imposing totali-tarian government throughout Eastern Europe, and with Greece and Tur-key tottering, Truman addressed a joint session of Congress. Communist aggression, the president declared, had forced the free world into a global struggle between “alternative ways of life.”

In response, Truman announced the doctrine to which his name became attached: “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion.” America should concentrate on creating the material conditions of freedom, which meant providing “economic and financial aid which is essential to eco-nomic stability and orderly political processes.”

Reagan took up the baton more than three decades later. On June 8, 1982, with intellectual and political elites on the left believing that Western liberal democracies had much to learn from communism about social jus-tice and not a few on the right thinking that in world affairs America should mind its own business, Reagan addressed members of the British Parlia-ment to warn of “threats now to our freedom, indeed to our very existence, that other generations could never even have imagined.” Prominent among them were “global war” in which the use of nuclear weapons “could mean, if not the extinction of mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it,” and “the enormous power of the modern state” which, readily abused, worked “to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.”

President George W. Bush insisted that Middle East freedom must be

“a focus of American policy for decades to come.”


To defeat these novel threats to freedom, Reagan announced a long-term undertaking “to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, and universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to rec-oncile their own differences through peaceful means.” Out of this man-date, which broadened Truman’s understanding of the conditions under which freedom flourished and posed a task Reagan recognized would “long outlive our own generation,” was born the National Endowment for Democracy.

On November 6, 2003, to honor NED’s twentieth anniversary, George W. Bush, addressing the United States Chamber of Commerce in Wash-ington, D.C., became the first U.S. president to focus what he called “the freedom agenda”—an elaboration of the Truman doctrine and the prin-ciples Reagan expounded in his speech at Westminster—on the Muslim Middle East. His perspective, like that of Truman and Reagan, looked not merely to the moment but beyond the horizon. Securing and extending freedom in the Middle East, he insisted, must be “a focus of American policy for decades to come.”

The universal claims of human freedom do not dictate a single set of political institutions, Bush observed, but all democracies that protect free-dom, he insisted, must conform to certain “vital principles.” They must “limit the power of the state”; establish the “consistent and impartial rule of law”; “allow room for healthy civic institutions—for political parties and labor unions and independent newspapers and broadcast media”; “guarantee religious liberty”; “privatize their economies, and secure the rights of property”; “prohibit and punish official corruption, and invest in the health and education of their people”; “recognize the rights of wom-en”; “and instead of directing hatred and resentment against others, suc-cessful societies appeal to the hopes of their own people.”

Truman, Reagan, and Bush were right.In proclaiming support for those demanding freedom and democracy

in Egypt, Obama aligned himself with a proud American foreign policy tradition with both progressive and conservative roots. He should claim that tradition as his own and reaffirm it. At the same time, and in the same spirit, the president should adopt a long-term perspective. In that


way he can contribute to the advancement of democracy abroad by recommitting America to the arduous, gradual, patient work of cultivat-ing the conditions—material, moral, and political—under which free-dom flourishes.

Reprinted from Peter Berkowitz’s blog (http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/author/peterberkowitz).

Available from the Hoover Press is Never a Matter of

Indifference: Sustaining Virtue in a Free Republic, edited

by Peter Berkowitz. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



Stephen h. haber is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover

Institution; a member of Hoover’s John and Jean De Nault Task Force on

Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity; co-director of Hoover’s Project on

Commercializing Innovation; and the A. A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor

in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Victor

Menaldo, a former W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National

Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is an assistant professor of political science at the

University of Washington, Seattle.

Lands of Little RainDrought may not be destiny, but a critical ingredient for democratic

societies does seem literally to fall from the skies. By Stephen H.

Haber and Victor Menaldo.

We wish we could say that democracy is coming to the Middle East and North Africa, but there are good reasons to curb our optimism. It is one thing to force a tyrant from the presidential palace. It is quite another to create a durable, democratic political system.

Popular uprisings continue to sweep the Middle East and North Afri-ca. Soon after the year began, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled Tunisia since 1987, and Hosni Mubarak, ruler of Egypt since 1981, were rapidly—and almost bloodlessly—forced out of power. The following months have witnessed protesters taking to the streets in Bahrain, Iran, Syria, and Yemen, and civil war erupting in Libya. In all these move-ments the participants demand democracy, an end to corruption, and economic opportunity.

The states that make up the Middle East and North Africa are among the world’s oldest, and since their creation they have persistently settled into



patterns of autocratic rule. Egypt has been a territorial state since the first pharaoh in 3150 BC, but it has never once in five millennia experimented with democracy. The overthrow of the Alawiyya dynasty in 1952 did not produce a republic; it resulted in the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Contrary to popular belief, present-day Iraq has been a recognizable political entity since Sargon of Akkad united the city-states of Mesopota-mia by conquest in the twenty-third century BC. Although the last Iraqi monarch was overthrown in 1958, he was eventually replaced by Saddam Hussein. Iran has been a state since the creation of the Persian empire in the sixth century BC. Its last monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was overthrown in 1979 but replaced by yet another autocrat, the Ayatol-lah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Syria also has a long history. Damascus, in fact, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet. Even before Bashar Assad and his father, Hafez Assad, created the dynasty that has endured since 1970, Syria was governed by a succession of tyrants. When King Idris of Libya was overthrown in 1969, Muammar Gadhafi came to power. Yemen, too, deposed its monarch in 1962, but he was replaced by the brutal dictator-ship of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Why is autocracy so persistent in this part of the world? Some pundits suspect the region’s oil wealth is the cause. Yet the countries of the Middle East and North Africa were autocracies for centuries before they found oil; moreover, some of them, like Bahrain and Libya, have lots of oil, while others, such as Yemen and Egypt, barely have any.

Others suggest Islam. Yet Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Mus-lim population, has become a democracy. Moreover, many of the persis-tent autocracies of the Middle East and North Africa—most notably Iran, Iraq, and Egypt—antedate Islam by more than a millennium.

We see a clue in the protesters’ demands for both democracy and economic opportunity. Briefly stated, societies characterized by extreme inequality tend not to provide fertile ground for representative political institutions. Not surprising, the first democracies—both in antiquity and in the modern era—emerged out of societies whose citizens not only had attained high average levels of education but were relatively equally matched in education and sophistication.

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Colonial New England is the archetype: a society of highly literate family farmers. What was true about New England was also true about ancient Athens, seventeenth-century Holland, eighteenth-century Eng-land, and nineteenth-century Canada. By the standards of the time, they had social structures with a sizable middle class. There is a good reason why democratic political systems tend to flourish in these kinds of societies: any incentive to rip the society apart to redistribute wealth is weak.

Such is not the case in societies where income, education, and oppor-tunity are concentrated in a tiny elite. There, “free and fair elections” become a way for the poor to redistribute wealth. Indeed, there is little to stop the vast, impoverished majority from stopping at wealth; why not deny the elite life and liberty as well?

The huge Merowe Dam in Sudan is part of a centuries-long effort to tame the Nile River.

Save for valleys fed by rivers like the Nile, agriculture is virtually impossible in countries of

the Middle East and North Africa, which are among the driest places on earth. From ancient

times to the present, access to irrigation has been a natural candidate for concentrated

ownership and a barrier to democracy.


ROOTS OF INEQUAL ITYReaders may wonder why new, democratic governments cannot simply remake social structures, such that populist calls for redistribution fail to find a large audience. They may also wonder why the Middle East and North Africa have such inegalitarian social structures in the first place.

Research we are conducting into the long-run determinants of demo-cratic and autocratic political systems suggests that social structures are the outcomes of long historical processes; they are not created by the stroke of a pen. Our research also suggests that those processes originate in the basic organization of the economy—not just now, but over the course of an economy’s long history.

Here is a brief description. The world’s first and most long-lived democracies were built out of societies of family farmers growing grains and legumes. Such societies gravitated toward family farms because grains and legumes are characterized by modest-scale economies in production. These foods can also be stored almost indefinitely; a society built upon them can generate an economic surplus. Finally, they can be grown using rain-fed methods of production. This last point is crucial: because there is no need to obtain access to an irrigation system, the right to water can neither serve as a barrier to entry nor increase the minimum efficient scale of production. The optimal scale of production is the family farm.

A glance at a world precipitation map quickly reveals why the coun-tries of the Middle East and North Africa have social structures that are not conducive to democracy: they are among the driest places on earth. Except in a few very narrow strips along the Mediterranean, and the river valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Nile, agriculture is virtually impossible. As a result, these societies did not evolve out of family farm-ers who accumulated surpluses that could fuel a long-run process of eco-nomic growth, investment in education, and democratization.

Instead, they were populated by tribal, nomadic peoples, such as the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula or the Berbers of North Africa, whose economic raison d’etre was to provide long-distance transport across the desert. Grain agriculture was possible only in a few places where a river like the Nile could be harnessed. The economies of scale and barriers to entry imposed by the need to obtain property rights to water gave rise to


societies composed of a wealthy elite and a vast, impoverished peasantry. No one owns the rain, but access to irrigation is a natural candidate for concentrated ownership.

A S INGLE EXCEPT IONA simple exercise helps support our hypothesis. The Middle East and North Africa are part of a much vaster area of low precipitation, the Afro-Asian Dry Belt, which extends from Mauritania (on Africa’s Atlantic Coast) eastward across Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan, and northwards across Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt. It then continues east-ward, encompassing all of the nations of the Middle East, Central Asia, Northwestern China, and Mongolia.

Across that vast stretch of the earth, encompassing a broad range of ethnicities, language groups, and colonial experiences, only one country has managed to sustain a democracy: Israel. As an exception it suggests the power of our rule: Israel broke the pattern by means of an immigrant population that brought its human capital along, allowing those immi-grants to transform deserts and briny marshes into farmland.

The observations of social scientists, unlike the inscriptions at Karnak and Luxor, are not written in stone. They do, however, provide a guide to the likely outcome of events in the Middle East. And they suggest that political science, not economics, is the true dismal science.

Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas). © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Political Institutions

and Economic Growth in Latin America: Essays in Policy,

History, and Political Economy, edited by Stephen

H. Haber. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.

hooverpress.org.


Colonel Joseph Felter (U.S. Army) is a research fellow at the Hoover

Institution. Brian Fishman is a counterterrorism research fellow at the New

America Foundation and a fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S.

Military Academy.

The Enemies of Our EnemyWe may not yet know what to do about the Islamists fighting in Libya,

but we do know not to repeat certain mistakes. By Joseph Felter and

Brian Fishman.

In September 2007, U.S. soldiers raided a desert encampment outside the town of Sinjar in northwest Iraq, looking for insurgents. Amid the tents, they made a remarkable discovery: a trove of personnel files—more than seven hundred in all—detailing the origins of the foreign fighters Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had brought into the country to fight against coalition forces.

The Sinjar records, which we analyzed extensively in a series of reports for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Cen-ter, revealed that at least 111 Libyans had entered Iraq between August 2006 and August 2007. That was about 18 percent of AQI’s incoming fighters during that period, a contribution second only to Saudi Arabia’s (41 percent) and the highest number of fighters per capita of any country noted in the records.

Three and a half years later, the Libyan data in the Sinjar records have become a subject of renewed interest, for obvious reasons. We still have only a fuzzy idea of who the rebels fighting Muammar Gadhafi actually



are. On March 29, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that “we’re still getting to know those who are leading the Transitional National Council,” the rebels’ putative political organization. Gadhafi, meanwhile, insisted his rebel enemies are tied to Al-Qaeda, and both American critics and supporters of the international campaign have expressed concern that the old dictator might have a point.

In a congressional hearing in Washington on March 29, Senator James Inhofe pointedly questioned James Stavridis, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, over “reports about the presence of Al-Qaeda among the rebels”; Stavridis replied that he believed the rebels were, in the main, “responsible men and women who are struggling against Gadhafi,” but that the military had “seen flickers of Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.”

How should policy makers deal with this ambiguity? First and foremost, they should weigh the presence of jihadi-affiliated social networks in Libya, while realizing it would be unwise to exaggerate the threat based on the rela-tively limited evidence in the Sinjar records. And as the international com-munity pressures the Gadhafi regime, it should avoid policies that increase the likelihood that jihadi groups can capitalize on the chaos in Libya.

So what do we know about Libyan jihadists from the Sinjar records? Aside from the overall numbers, we know that the vast majority of Libyan fighters profiled in the documents hailed from northeastern Libya, where today’s rebellion is centered. Half of them came from Darnah, a town of eighty thousand on the Mediterranean coast that has played an active role in the rebellion; another quarter were from Benghazi, the heart of the cur-rent uprising. The Libyan fighters also seem to have arrived in Iraq over a short period of time, from March to August 2007. That abrupt surge sug-gests that tribal or religious networks were suddenly spurred to send fighters abroad. And those fighters seem to have been extremely dedicated. Most of the fighters entering Iraq registered their “work” upon arrival. Eighty-five percent of the Libyans in the Sinjar records registered as suicide bombers, a larger percentage than any other nationality other than Morocco.

That is good and bad news. On the one hand, it is disconcerting that social networks sympathetic to Al-Qaeda were able to mobilize a force of

In Libya, the enemies of our enemy may not be our friends.


such size and determination in a matter of months; it suggests that they could do the same thing today. On the other hand, the fact that the surge was the work of a small number of distinct networks may indicate that sup-port for Al-Qaeda is concentrated in particular tribal, religious, or social communities, rather than dispersed throughout a broader swath of Libyan society.

That said, analyzing a complex society primarily through the lens of its most virulent elements is a dicey business. Libyans may have been dispropor-tionately represented among Iraq’s Islamist radicals, but that doesn’t mean that such radicals are disproportionately represented in the anti-Gadhafi rebellion. Reporting from the front lines of the current conflict indicates that the rebels reflect a complex cross-section of society. In short, there is little reason to believe that jihadists are poised to seize broad political control of Libya should the rebels come to power—though it is probably true that they will operate more overtly if relieved of Gadhafi’s iron-fisted rule.

The more likely scenario than a clean rebel victory, however, is also more dangerous: that either military stalemate or internal divisions among rebel groups will lead to a civil war in which a small jihadi faction can flourish amid lawless conditions. History shows us that even a small band of deter-mined extremists, if well led, armed, and equipped, can wreak havoc and challenge efforts to bring stability and order to a weakened state. Algeria suffered a decade of brutal civil war at the hands of extremists such as the Armed Islamic Group and its splinter faction, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. Other examples include the Abu Sayyaf group in the southern Philippines, Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, and Islamist extremist groups that fuel the insurgency in Chechnya. And Al-Qaeda in Iraq still kills on a scale that would be deemed completely unacceptable in a country where the recent past had not been so tremendously violent.

Where would dangerous jihadi factions in Libya come from? In our original analysis of the Sinjar records, we suggested that the Libyan rebel recruitment pattern might indicate that networks related to the largely

Eighty-five percent of the Libyan jihadists who arrived in Iraq registered

as prospective suicide bombers. Only Moroccans had a higher figure.


defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a jihadi organization pri-marily dedicated to overthrowing the Gadhafi regime, are still functional. This notion is bolstered by recent reports that former LIFG members fun-neled fighters to Iraq. After all, exiled LIFG members in South Asia joined Al-Qaeda officially in November 2007, aligning themselves with other senior Libyan jihadists already among the terrorist group’s ranks. But other scholars have questioned LIFG’s role, suggesting that such recruitment pat-terns are more likely the result of ad hoc tribal or mosque networks. Those explanations are not mutually exclusive, but it is worth noting that many of LIFG’s leaders, imprisoned in Libya by Gadhafi for years, renounced Al-Qaeda in 2009. Whether these individuals—or those potentially released in the future—will rekindle their old sympathies remains to be seen.

But though the Sinjar documents present more questions than answers about Libya’s rebels, they do suggest some ideas for how we might best respond to the country’s civil war and its aftermath. For one thing, there should be little doubt that the rebellion includes at least some jihadists sympathetic to Al-Qaeda. Those networks, however, are discrete from the broader rebellion, and would have existed with or without the no-fly zone now imposed by NATO forces. The challenge is to contain the ability of such troublemakers in the rebel coalition to capitalize on chaos—not with platitudes, but with pragmatism.

This is a tall order. A key problem is to identify the jihadi networks inside Libya and measure their strength within the broader rebel coalition. The Sinjar records offer a strong starting point, enabling intelligence agencies to ask good questions about such networks, but they alone do not provide sufficient answers. Undervaluing knowledge of the complexity of tribal and social networks proved disastrous when the United States first entered Iraq. An armed intervention in Libya of that intensity would be extraordinarily counterproductive, but the principle is still valid: NATO forces ignore the imperative to understand Libya’s social terrain at their own peril.

The international community can also leverage the most striking fea-ture of its intervention in Libya: the breadth of its diplomatic support. Keeping that coalition intact—particularly the Arab contingent—lim-its the resonance of Al-Qaeda’s persistent claim that the West is waging war on Muslims. The initial backing of the Arab League provided critical


political space for the United Nations and the coalition implementing the Libya no-fly zone. If the mission shifts toward a more aggressive effort to depose Gadhafi, public support from Arab states will be crucial.

The international community also is pondering how to aid the rebels, including whether to give them weapons. Doing so would offer obvious advantages, but these are outweighed by the risks, most notably that the weapons could find their way into less-friendly hands in the future. Gad-hafi’s weapons caches already pose a long-term threat not just to Libya but to other states in North Africa, including Tunisia and Egypt. Allied forces should not contribute to the problem.

The air campaign, while unlikely to depose Gadhafi on its own, has bought time for more creative means of rebel support that do not increase the danger of unintended consequences. If improving the rebels’ military capacity is necessary, the international community should continue to pro-vide training rather than weapons. Assisting insurgents is a classic form of unconventional warfare, and it does not necessarily mean putting Western personnel in Libya. The United States can help by facilitating rebel commu-nications and delivering virtual instruction on military basics. Training and advisory assistance to rebel leaders can be provided outside Libya’s borders (in a neighboring state, ideally) with support from other countries in the region.

The enemies of our enemy in Libya may not be our friends. But the danger that they pose to U.S. interests in the future will be determined in no small part by what the United States and its allies do in Libya today. Intervention is often a lose-lose situation. But the international commu-nity had better get used to that ambiguity sooner rather than later. In Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria, the choices will not get any easier.

Reprinted by permission of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com) © 2011 The Slate Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Skating on Stilts:

Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism, by

Stewart Baker. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



William Ratliff is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and the curator

of the Hoover Archives’ Americas Collection.

Tigers of a Different StripeAfter their revolutionary fever cools, Arabs will have work to do.

They could do worse than to emulate the booming Asian nations.

By William Ratliff.

It took only a few weeks for the “Arab spring” to oust or threaten several perennial strongmen and to leave authoritarian and proto-authoritarian leaders as far away as China and Nicaragua scrambling to fortify domes-tic security. The political tsunami that began in Tunisia and Egypt—and then washed over Libya, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere—was precipitated by outspoken demonstrators demanding greater freedom, dignity, democ-racy, and better living conditions for the poor and repressed. Compelling objectives all, and goals endorsed by the five-part Arab Human Devel-opment Report (AHDR) sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) between 2002 and 2009. But they will not be easily realized.

The would-be democratizers must confront above all the potential barrier of culture—broadly defined as the values, beliefs, habits, commit-ments, and passions shared by and guiding the actions of most (or the most powerful) members of a society and its institutions. “Culture and values are the soul of development,” notes the crisis-defining 2002 report. “They provide its impetus, facilitate the means needed to further it, and substantially define people’s vision of its purposes and ends.”



The hope, humiliation, and rage evident in so much of the Arab/Islam-ic world today are faces of a culture, a religion, and a region once in the vanguard of world civilizations—in science, artistic creativity, relative tol-erance, economic development, and magnificence—but which over the centuries fell farther and farther behind the world’s most dynamic mod-ernizing nations and cultures.

A similar decline occurred in East Asia during recent centuries but was reversed, step by step, by Japan in the nineteenth century and the Asian “tigers” after World War II. These nations were led by the most successful leaders in the so-called developing world over the past half cen-tury. Within that era the tigers—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Sin-gapore—leaped over all other developing countries to join the developed world. Mostly, their leaders exploited positive and overcame negative aspects of Sinic (traditionally Chinese) culture and moved on to preside over quite balanced and productive political and economic reforms and nations. (To be sure, the Sinic culture also provided a twisted legitimiza-tion of power run amok in the cases of megalomaniacs Mao Zedong and Kim Jong Il.)

Take just two of many possible comparisons of the Asian and Arab/Muslim worlds. In 1960, South Korea’s per-capita GDP was almost the same as Egypt’s and well below Syria’s. Just fifty years later, South Korea’s was five times Egypt’s and six times Syria’s. Or simply go to Seoul, Cairo, and Damascus and look around. Why the stark difference? In this spirit, as Middle East historian Bernard Lewis noted in his book What Went Wrong?, “The rise of Japan had been an encouragement [to the Arab/Muslim world], but also a reproach. The later rise of other new Asian economic powers brought only reproach.”

CONDIT IONS , CHALLENGES , AND RED HERRINGSThe AHDR of 2002 described many of the fundamental conditions and challenges in the Arab world that remain today. Its sobering assessments were drawn up by more than a hundred Arab scholars and experts, the first four reports under lead author Egyptian Nader Fergany. It stressed that “success in meeting today’s challenges will depend on the ability to shape, and adapt to, the demands of the new economics and the new

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politics.” The Arab world generally has failed to do this. Much of the explanation has been that “traditional culture and values, including tra-ditional Arab culture and values, can be at odds with those of the global-izing world.”

In her foreword to the 2002 report, Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, the Jorda-nian director of the UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Arab States, concluded that “the predominant characteristic of the current Arab reality seems to be the existence of deeply rooted shortcomings [that] . . . pose serious obstacles to human development.” In November 2006 Fergany wrote that the “acute, complex, and multifaceted” Arab crisis can be resolved only

Singapore is among the celebrated Asian “tiger” nations that moved assertively into the

modern age after World War II. Among the ingredients for success were productive economic

policies and a reliance on positive aspects of traditional Chinese cultural values.


with “reforms touching almost all aspects of Arab society—cultural con-structs, social and economic systems, and above all the political structures at the national, regional, and global scales.”

In recent decades, Arab leaders have generally ranged from inadequate to thuggish. But Muammar Gadhafi, Hosni Mubarak, and other Middle Eastern strongmen did not create the conditions that both enabled them to take power and dragged the region ever farther behind the West—and more recently the East—in serving their people’s political, economic, and other needs. (Though I will not develop this important line of thinking, for many in Arab or Islamic countries modernization and those who sup-port it are themselves the problem.)

However bad an individual dictator or elite may be, all are better seen as symptoms of intrinsic problems—here, often derived from tradition but often worsened by modernization—rather than primary causes of national and regional woes. Of course, bad leaders are demonized dur-ing uprisings, since focused hatred rallies opposition. But the fact that so many activists and analysts in the Arab world and beyond so personify the problem, and speak so glibly of their goals, also suggests a failure to grasp the depth of the challenge. The difficulty in making real change after a dictator is removed should begin to bring that lesson home, but it may just stoke further frustration that will encourage more and perhaps esca-lating protests and repression, with activists in some degree successful or more often giving up or turning to more extreme pseudo-solutions.

CULTURE MATTERS , BUT IT CAN CHANGEMany Arab demonstrators have spoken hopefully of democracy, before and after overthrowing a dictator, but democracy is a system not effec-tively adopted without significant cultural congruity. Historically the Muslim world has had little experience with democracy but has relied on consultation to check the power of rulers and get things done. Bernard Lewis told the Wall Street Journal in April that “to lay the stress all the time on . . . parliamentary Western-style elections is a dangerous delu-sion.” That is, truly responsive democracy will not open the door to a balanced and productive modern society if the traditional cultural and institutional obstacles to change and political and economic development


remain largely in place. The March referendum in Egypt, for example, suggested that voting there after Mubarak’s ouster may not support the stated goals of the most vocal Tahrir Square activists but rather those of the more conservative and better-organized religious groups.

Latin America shows how difficult it can be to create democracies that serve popular needs, even in a region with its own branch of Western tra-dition. Costa Rican Nobel laureate Oscar Arias recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that Latin Americans have been flirting with democracy for two hundred years but most democracies there are still “fragile.” Moreover, the region remains remarkable internationally for its very high levels of pov-erty and inequality. Mindset plays its part. Lawrence Harrison’s first book on the impact of culture on reform, based on the author’s experiences as a USAID official handing out U.S. money in Latin America, was titled Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind.

Specific issues inhibiting Arab world modernization, of varying impact around the region, have been building for centuries or are recently arrived and often are quite contrary to earlier culture. Just a few of these are: profound differences over what ultimate goals should be and intolerance of those who think differently; widespread ignorance of what constitutes modernization, including what democracy is and how it works; a paucity of wise and capable leaders to rally and lead constructive and peaceful change; a tilt toward authoritarian leadership and obedience, originat-ing in the family and reaching to the highest levels of clan and nation; the exclusion of half the population—women—from active involvement outside the home; inattention to serious modern education resulting in widespread ignorance, unskilled labor forces, and unemployment within a rapidly growing population; the inability to creatively develop mod-ern activities and institutions; a strong tendency to seek scapegoats for personal and group failures, these often linked to extreme and intolerant branches of Islam; an inclination toward paternalism rather than legally protected private economic initiative; and impatience. Former Peruvian

Democracy is a system not effectively adopted without significant

cultural congruity.


president Alberto Fujimori, of Japanese heritage, once told me that when it comes to reforms, Asians are more patient than Latins. And Arabs.

Unlike the AHDR authors, many political leaders, scholars, and pun-dits worldwide tend to dismiss analyses highlighting the impact of cul-ture. In part this is because, as Harvard historian David Landes has writ-ten, “criticisms of culture cut close to the ego and injure identity and self-esteem.” Most economists are inclined to look askance at culture as a major factor in economic affairs because claims for its role are “difficult to test.” True, and there are similar problems trying to measure the impact of ambition, vengeance, loyalty, and adherence to ideologies or religions, which in varying ways constitute culture. Nonetheless, singly or in com-bination, these often have a far greater impact on economic and other decisions and actions by an individual or government than mountains of economic experience and empirical data. We must try to weigh them. Last year, for instance, an econometric study in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics concluded that parts of Chinese tradition were critical to enabling the tigers to join the First World. Traditional thinking and prac-tices, the study showed, were used to implement lessons from the West.

T IGER COUNTRIES , T IGER MOTHERSThe experiences of the Asian tigers offer impressive evidence that pro-found change is possible if two primary criteria are met:

1. Adopting productive economic policies and putting them into action. Other so-called developing countries could have followed this course but chose not to.

2. Culture. Specifically, the noneconomic common denominator of all poor nations that jumped into the developed world, an ingredient absent from all countries that did not (save two), was Sinic culture.

The two exceptions are China, the mother lode of Sinic culture, and Vietnam, one of China’s oldest disciples, which have yet to join the devel-oped world. Their lag is due to many factors, prominent among them some lingering negative aspects of Sinic culture—now fortified by aspects of “Marxism”—including authoritarianism and a paternalism that still sti-


fle much individual initiative. (This state role was seemingly legitimized for many in the developing world by the recent U.S.-sparked global finan-cial crisis.) But China’s economic growth has been so spectacular—and China is so huge, with rapidly expanding global links—that for many China, rather than the tiger countries, has become the Asian inspiration and development model.

Among the cultural factors in the Sinic world that are absent or less powerful in the Arab world and in other developing countries are cer-tain convictions: education is an expressway to success for nations and individuals; goals should be high and pursued over the long haul with both single-minded diligence and a vigorous work ethic; merit should be sought out and rewarded; and frugality and clear focus must guide the spending of money and energy. These have long been noted in vari-ous ways by Sinologists Edwin Reischauer, Lucian Pye, William Theodore de Bary, and Hoover senior fellows Ramon Myers and Thomas Metzger, among others.

In fact, just as the Arab world was coming unhinged in early 2011, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua caused a riot in pedagogical and parent-ing communities with her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Never even mentioned during the controversy over Chua’s book about raising two daughters was her unstated subtext: that the Sinic “tiger mother” was one of the critical factors in the explosive modernization of East Asia over the past half century.

Of course, Chinese mothering is a misnomer, as Chua herself insists, for “tigering” can be done by individuals or groups of any ethnicity, sex, age, or historical period. It is a matter of strictly implementing a demand-ing educational or cultural curriculum. Thus the protagonists of Max Weber’s much-remarked-upon Protestant ethic were in important respects tiger mothers. Ditto many Jews, Basques, Koreans, Scandinavians, and Americans. Indeed, jousting with TV comic Stephen Colbert on his pro-gram, Chua noted that her tiger approach often reflects the most basic of

The Arabs’ explosive enthusiasm must be focused on productive

programs and the long term.


traditional American values: “hard work, don’t blame others, and don’t give up.”

Hopes for major reform in the Arab world are welcome, and a more representative, democratic leadership there is possible, though prospects should come with a strong dose of caution. Real increases in freedom and economic development, sought by so many activists, will be possible only if leaders and people are united and fully committed to bringing them about through a less paternalistic, and more individual, initiative-friendly culture. Early explosive enthusiasm must be focused on productive pro-grams and the long term if the Arab peoples want to improve their living standards and perhaps even join the developed world. For inspiration they may look in part to today’s tigers or find models among any of history’s more progress-inclined cultures, including their own some centuries ago. Reform will be most secure if it blends modern aspirations and institu-tions with the most progressive aspects of the Arabs’ own tradition.

Special to the Hoover Digest.

Available from the Hoover Press is Law and Economics

in Developing Countries, by Edgardo Buscaglia and

William Ratliff. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



Charles hill is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member

of Hoover’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the

International Order. He is the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand

Strategy, the senior lecturer in international studies, and the senior lecturer in

humanities at Yale University. His latest book is Trial of a Thousand Years:

World Order and Islamism (Hoover Institution Press, 2011), from which this

essay is drawn.

Trial of a Thousand YearsBehind the headlines lies an old and basic question: in the clash

between Islamism and the nation-state, who will win? By Charles

Hill.

The most consequential events affecting the problem of modern world order have been the rise of Islam, global exploration, and Europe’s state system.

First came the rise of Islam with its great Arab conquests, which were not only battle victories but also revolutionary repudiations of the Roman and Persian world orders. These were followed by the establishment of an “international” caliphate rule and eventually by a steep decline in Arab-Islamic power.

Second came the reconnaissance and exploration of the globe. Between 1000 and 1500 an Islamic world system flourished across a vast portion of the southern hemisphere. The Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea between India and East Africa were a Muslim lake until the Portuguese expedi-tion under Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached

ISLAMISM


Calicut, India, in 1498. During the centuries of Ottoman-Christendom confrontation, European explorers visited most of the habitable regions of the globe, and nearly all those accessible by sea. They found vast territories formerly unknown to them and drew the rough outlines of the world we now know. Europeans thus came to think of all the seas as one and all the world as a whole.

Third was the development of an international state system in Europe in the seventeenth century and its spread and adoption by nations on every continent. This would become a “procedural” system, designed to forestall religious confrontations such as had inflamed the Thirty Years’ War.

Today’s problem of Islamism and world order is that Islam, the first of the above three world-historical phenomena, has been a uniate and there-fore an unsuccessful and, in part, adversarial participant in the pluralistic and procedural third phenomenon.

Recent scholarship has revealed a phenomenon called the Global Renaissance. Commonly seen in recent centuries as only a process of European penetration, exploitation, and domination, these cross-cultural encounters generated material exchanges across varying power relation-ships and led to a complex cross-pollination of art, culture, beliefs, and technologies. The circulation of goods required the circulation of people who traveled abroad, inserted themselves in foreign communities, and returned with exotic products. Cultural understanding was crucial to suc-cessful trade.

In this process, images of Muslims proliferated in a variety of literary and cultural representations. Encounters between West and East began to belie the stereotypes. Actual interactions multiplied and complicated simplistic notions about “the Turk.” Travelers’ accounts began to combine admiration and sometimes awe with the legacy of demonization.

Out of this age of reconnaissance and renaissance came a great para-dox: the recognition that mankind is unimaginably and often intractably diverse. From this reality would emerge an outline of the modern interna-

Islam has been an unsuccessful participant in the growth of a

pluralistic world.


tional state system designed to accommodate such diversity in a common understanding of world order.

VARIET IES OF MISRULEThe Economist of August 6, 1994, ran a special “Survey of Islam.” The cover depicted Christian knights and mounted Muslim warriors—led by Richard the Lionheart and Saladin—in battle, with the headline: “Not Again, for Heaven’s Sake,” an archetypical image of the two opposing religion-civilizations in irrepressible confrontation.

We can trace the roots of the twentieth-century phase of the confronta-tion at least as far back as 1914, when the Ottoman empire chose to enter the Great War on the side of imperial Germany. The kaiser’s Germany and its Ottoman partner lost, the Ottoman empire collapsed, and when in 1924 the caliphate—the sole form of overall governance of the Islam-ic world—was abolished, a process was set in place that would establish states all across the Arab-Islamic Middle East; none would be democratic.

In the years that followed, the Arab states would remain impervious to worldwide trends toward government by consent of the governed as region after region was swept by a wave of democratization, including:

• After World War II, when Germany and Japan, under American tute-lage, turned decisively toward democracy.

• In the midcentury era of decolonization, which saw India become the world’s largest democracy.

• In the post–Cold War period, when countries in every part of the world sought open political and economic systems, and the United Nations for the first time responded by helping set up elections and democratic political institutions.

Through all these changes, the Arab Middle East resolutely remained the one region without a single democratic government. Looking back on

A cover of the Economist depicted Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in

battle, with the headline: “Not Again, for Heaven’s Sake.”


these decades, the Arab Human Development Report of 2002—an “unbi-ased, objective analysis” by “a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals,” as the document published by the United Nations stated—found that the region was uniquely impaired by its own bad governance. For gen-erations, the report found, people of the Arab world have been hindered from acquiring information and have been denied freedom of expres-sion. Beyond that, Arab governments have suppressed the intellectual and social capabilities of half the population—Arab women. The report put it starkly: “The wave of democracy that transformed governance in most of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s has barely reached the Arab states. This freedom deficit undermines human development and is one of the most painful manifestations of lagging political development. . . . Fate has not decreed that political power in the Arab world should permanently exclude participation by citizens.”

The varieties of Arab misrule over the decades since the end of the First World War produced economic, social, and political pathologies that provided fertile ground for the steady growth of a revolutionary religious ideology bent on taking command of the Middle East and turning the region as a whole against the rest of the world.

What might be called the First Terrorist War was fought in the 1970s and 1980s: Israeli Olympic athletes murdered; Palestinians attempting to overthrow the government of Jordan; passengers gunned down at airline ticket counters; American embassy personnel taken hostage; the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the cruise ship Achille Lauro; the bombing of a Berlin discotheque.

In the 1980s, Secretary of State George P. Shultz tried to convince con-gressmen and media commentators that the slogan “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” was false and dangerous. The Reagan administration focused on how to defend against terrorism by reinforc-

USAF

For years, American administrations failed to recognize Islamism’s role in

terrorism because foreign affairs specialists assumed such acts must be

politically motivated. The Westphalian credo had done its work.


ing our embassies and increasing intelligence efforts. We thought we had made some progress. But American administrations really did not under-stand what motivated the terrorists or what they were out to do.

For years, American administrations failed to recognize Islamism’s role in terrorism because foreign affairs specialists assumed such acts must be politically motivated. The Westphalian credo had done its work: religion was out of the question when it came to international diplomacy.

The Foreign Service had been profoundly affected when in 1973 the American ambassador and the deputy chief of mission in Khartoum were seized at a diplomatic reception and murdered the next day. The killers came from the Palestinian group Black September and were acting, it was said, on orders from Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, left, arrives at Andrews Air Force Base in 1980 and is greeted

by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. When Sadat was assassinated the next year, U.S. officials

did not realize that the perpetrators were Islamists, seeing only political motivations.


Arafat. To the American diplomatic establishment, the PLO was an indis-pensable interlocutor in “the peace process” and its stated political objec-tive was a “secular democratic binational state”—nothing religious about it. When Egypt’s Sadat was assassinated in 1981, American officials were simply blind to the fact that the perpetrators were Islamists; not until the 1990s, when the 1981 videos were reviewed, would the obvious Islamist role be recognized.

A C IV IL WAR OF IDEOLOGYThe attacks of September 11, 2001, were fortunate in one sense: they forced the United States to focus on the situation that had led to the attacks and on the dimensions of the challenge. The world awakened to the threat at a relatively early stage. Had the 9/11 attacks been held off for some years, further deterioration in the established mechanisms of world order might have made its defense far more difficult, even impos-sible.

What we have been witnessing is nothing short of a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world. On one side are those regimes in the Arab-Islamic world that, after appeasing, trying to buy off, or propagandizing the ter-rorists, have begun to recognize that as members of the international state system, they must find a way to reconcile their Islamic beliefs and prac-tices with it. On the other side are those who, for Islamist ideological rea-sons, reject the international system of states, international law and orga-nization, international values and principles, such as human rights, and the use of diplomacy to work through problems. The distinction between Islamic and Islamist is imperative.

Islamists follow a doctrine that cannot accept or participate in or with the international order:

• The state, as the basic unit of the international system, is by definition un-Islamic in that it fragments a people that should be one community (umma). So for Muslims to be part of the state system opens them to the charge of apostasy—and in Islam there is nothing worse.

• The state, under the international system begun with the Treaty of Westphalia, must have a secular character in its international dealings.


(The 1648 treaty fostered this understanding as a way to avoid further wars of religion.) Such a secular dimension is unacceptable to Islamists.

• International law similarly is unacceptable as it falls outside and in many ways could not accommodate sharia, to Islamists the only law governing Muslims.

• Similarly, democracy, which in the modern era increasingly has come to be part of the accepted international order, cannot be tolerated by Islamists, as it requires equal justice under laws made by representatives of the people. This would amount to an ongoing violation of sharia.

• International norms and agreements on human rights, such as the rights of women, do not accord with the Islamist interpretation of sharia.

In the largest context, an unbreakable logic chain imposes an insur-mountable barrier between Islamism and the established international sys-tem. Islamists claim, first, that the originating source of the international system lies in the duality expressed at Christianity’s founding: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; unto God that which is God’s.” This division of temporal and spiritual realms is what Islam brought to an end with the message of the Prophet.

Second, they claim that the modern international order is a secular-ized version of this Christian duality: the separation of church and state, of public and private, and of powers with “checks and balances.” All are anathema to the unity and wholeness of Islam.

Therefore, any participation in the international order is impossible for Islamists to tolerate. As an example, Saudi Arabia, which bases its regime on the strictest fundamentalist reading of the Quran, is considered by Islamists to be un-Islamic and apostate simply because it is a state within the international state system.

Over the past two decades, four major phenomena have emerged in the Middle East and other Muslim areas, posing an interrelated set of threats to world order. First, governance in some states collapsed or lost con-trol of parts of once-sovereign territory. This shocking and unanticipated development in international affairs called forth the then-new concept of


“failed states.” Second, it soon appeared that these ungoverned spaces of the world were becoming bases in which non-state, terror-using Islamist groups could recruit, arm, plan, and train for attacks on targets in and beyond the Muslim world.

Third was the realization that governing regimes of several Arab states had turned themselves into “enablers” of these enemies of international order. The pattern, set by Saudi Arabia, involved enhanced promulga-tion of radical instruction, subsidies for non-state terror-using groups, and incessant propagandizing of the population to instill a semiconspiratorial, one-issue explanation narrative. What was this narrative? That all prob-lems of the region and the faith stemmed from Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians; that the United States bore a core responsibility in that its policies were uniformly pro-Israel, Washington being under the control of American Jews; and that nothing could be asked or expected of the Arab-Islamic world in any regard until the Palestine problem is solved—the solution generally being described as the de facto end of the state of Israel through the demographic means of a Palestinian “right of return.”

The fourth phenomenon was the rise of “rogue” regimes, states that are recognized as legitimate members of the international state system and entitled to its privileges and immunities yet, at the same time, are ideo-logically committed adversaries of the international system. This dual role provides the “rogue” state with an on-off switch in its foreign policy: it can take a number of wrongful actions in pursuit of its own interest until, facing harsh countermeasures from the international community, it sud-denly announces its readiness to negotiate or otherwise comply with nor-mal international procedures—this in the sure knowledge that the outside world will welcome the rogue’s “change of heart.”

Over the course of many years this tactic has worked again and again as a means of neutralizing world pressure while going forward with the regime’s illicit activities. We have seen the pattern produced by Kim’s North Korea, Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, Saddam’s Iraq, and now most adroit-

“The point is not that it feels threatened,” Kissinger said of a

revolutionary power, “but that nothing can reassure it.”


ly by the Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran. It has become the dictators’ diplomacy of choice; call it “dictaplomacy.”

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a true revolutionary power. Its central theme has been its relentless attacks, in words and deeds, on the interna-tional system. As Henry Kissinger wrote about the Soviet Union, “when-ever there exists a power which considers the international order or the manner of legitimizing it oppressive, relations between it and other pow-ers will be revolutionary.” This, as Iranian leaders have made clear, is the case with the Islamic Republic and world order; it is the system that must go. As Kissinger noted of a revolutionary power, “the point is not that it feels threatened—such feeling is inherent in the nature of international relations based on sovereign states—but that nothing can reassure it.”

From the global point of view, the stakes are enormous. If the Islamists can defeat the Middle Eastern states that seek to reform and work within the international system, we will be faced with another world war. Like the Cold War, it will be a war launched by a revolutionary ideology that aims to destroy the international state system and replace it with one of its own.

DEMOCRACY AS PRACT ICAL CHOICEAlexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that “Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theo-ries. . . . That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy.” Tocqueville says this out of his recognition that the modern international system, with democracy as a part of it, is procedural, not substantive—and he seems to be saying that Islam is not only substan-tive, but dogmatically and aggressively so.

In contrast, democracy and the Westphalian system in which it operates neither require nor challenge any substantive commitment—ideological, religious, or otherwise—from its members. It requires only that each member adhere to a minimal number of practices and proce-dures that make it possible for states and other international entities to engage in working relationships even though they may be committed to vastly different substantive doctrines and objectives.


Thus, contrary to former president George W. Bush’s often-stated belief that democracy is “a God-given right” when it comes to inter-national affairs, democracy is simply the only reliably practical way to provide legitimacy and achieve results. Only democracy produces the “transparency” that economies require to avoid corruption. Only democracy keeps open the flow of information required to operate a modern society. As the economist Amartya Sen famously declared years ago, “No democratic country has ever suffered a famine,” and as Fried-rich Hayek explained, democracy is in this sense methodological; the best information utilized in the best way is the information possessed by each single individual. A crowd can empty a stadium more effi-ciently than any “authoritative” set of directions imposed from above.

Argued this way, America’s center of gravity can be shown to be in the Arab-Islamic world’s best interests and in no way incompatible with Islam. In Indonesia today, in theological debates at Qom in Iran, in the cafes of Beirut, ideas and actions compatible with this proce-dural approach are under way and poised to join in this perception.

The question of democracy will be a test, not for Islamism, but for Islam itself, to show that Tocqueville—who almost never puts a foot wrong—in this case is mistaken. Islamic practices in a democracy would join other religions in political action and debate over how far religion should go beyond private practice to display itself in the public square.

Excerpted from Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism, by Charles Hill (Hoover Institution Press, 2011). © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is Trial of a Thousand Years:

World Order and Islamism, by Charles Hill. To order, call

800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.


Gary S. Becker is the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the

Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic

Policy and Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy. He is also the

University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. He

was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992.

How Could Inequality Be Good?If it prodded people to seek greater productivity, higher pay, and a

better standard of living. By Gary S. Becker.

How are we to understand inequality? I believe that the main way to evalu-ate inequality in income or wealth—and how those numbers change over time, both within and among countries—is to ask whether the inequality is the good or bad kind.

Many people, especially academics and other intellectuals, would find the phrase “good inequality” jarring. They can hardly think of any aspect of inequality as being good. Yet a little thought makes clear that some types of economic inequality have great social value. For example, it would be hard to motivate most people to exert much effort, including creative effort, if everyone had the same earnings, status, prestige, and other rewards. Many fewer individuals would engage in the hard work involved in finishing high school and going on to college if they did not expect their additional education to bring higher incomes, better health, more prestige, and better opportunities to marry.

On my first trip to China in 1981, I visited several factories in the Beijing area. All the employees in each factory received more or less the

THE ECONOMY


same pay, and they could hardly ever be fired for bad work or absenteeism. This was an extreme egalitarian approach to compensation, with the result that no one worked hard, even though Chinese workers have tradition-ally been known for their diligence and energy. The picture was more or less the same in all the factories I visited. Urban China, highly egalitarian at the time, was also extremely poor because of very low productivity. China’s economic miracle has been based, in good measure, on allowing much greater inequality in pay to motivate greater productivity in both urban and rural areas.

Bad inequality is the kind that reduces efficiency, productivity, and util-ity. About 80 percent of China’s vast population in 1981 lived in rural areas, yet it was then virtually impossible for anyone born in rural China to gain legal residence in a city, even though farm incomes averaged less than half of urban incomes. The result was a large inequality between urban and rural areas that lowered overall efficiency and productivity. Urban-rural inequality has not gone away in China; if anything, it has grown worse during the past thirty years because urban incomes have grown much faster than farm incomes. People born on farms are still at an artificial disadvantage: their schools tend to be of low quality and it is still not easy, although much easier than in the past, to gain legal residency in a city.

Earnings inequality in the United States and many other countries has increased greatly since the late 1970s, in large part because of globaliza-tion and technological progress that raised the productivity of people with greater education and skills. The average American college graduate earned about a 40 percent premium over the average high school gradu-ate in 1980; twenty years later this premium had risen to 70 percent. The good side of this earnings inequality based on higher education is that it induced more young people—especially young women—to attend and finish college. The bad side is that many sufficiently able children could not take advantage of the greater returns from a college education because

It would be hard to motivate most people to exert much effort if everyone

had the same earnings, status, prestige, and other rewards.


their parents failed to prepare them to perform well in school, or they went to bad schools, or they could not afford to attend. As a result, the incomes of high school dropouts and of many high school graduates stag-nated while incomes boomed for many college graduates, especially those with postgraduate education.

Although inequality in many developing and developed countries grew during the past thirty years, world income inequality actually declined. Credit this to a much more vigorous growth in per capita income in populous developing countries—Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia, for example—than in the rich Western countries and Japan. World poverty declined enormously, and so did the income gap between poorer and richer countries. Thus, a large decline in the bad kind of world inequality.

A large part of the increased income and wealth inequality since the mid-1990s in the United States and some other rich countries was due to the explosion of financial-sector incomes before the financial crisis. Most people will not object to huge incomes and vast wealth when they feel the money was earned, as with icons such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett. However, they are justifiably unhappy about large paychecks for CEOs who mismanage their companies, huge bonuses and stock options for executives who took unreasonable risks and then were bailed out by the Fed and the Treasury, and other big paydays for work that (perhaps unjustly) does not appear to be particularly socially valuable.

Some types of inequality are not easily classified. For example, would an increase in the marginal income tax rate from 35 percent to 45 percent on individuals earning over $500,000 have much of an effect on how hard and how long they work, and their efforts to legally (and illegally) reduce the income reported to tax authorities? Those who support this kind of tax increase deny that it would have a big effect, while opponents are just as certain that it would significantly discourage effort. The evidence is far from conclusive, but studies by Edward Prescott, Richard Rogerson (see

People are justifiably unhappy about large paychecks for CEOs who

mismanage their companies, and huge bonuses and stock options for

executives who took unreasonable risks and then grabbed taxpayer bailouts.


The Impact of Labor Taxes on Labor Supply: An International Perspective), and others into the relationship between the amount of work and average tax rates on earnings is persuasive: tax rates in general seem to have strong negative effects on effort. However, the evidence is silent on the ways in which much-higher tax rates on individuals with very high incomes affect their effort and other behavior.

Some authors have claimed a sizable negative relation between social and economic inequality and the healthiness of a population (for an influ-ential work see M. G. Marmot’s “Understanding Social Inequalities in Health,” published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine in 2003). I have no doubt that people who try but fail to climb the income and prestige ladder may suffer stress and poor health. On the other side, the stress lev-els and health of those who succeed tend to be improved by their success. The data on happiness and health show conclusively that higher-income persons are both happier and much healthier than others. Less clear is whether narrowing the degree of inequality in health and status, while maintaining the incomes and social ranking of the poor, would signifi-cantly improve overall health. I am doubtful.

Reprinted from the Becker-Posner Blog (www.becker-posner-blog.com).

New from the Hoover Press is Death Grip: Loosening the

Law’s Stranglehold over Economic Liberty, by

Clint Bolick. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



Stephen h. haber is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover

Institution; a member of Hoover’s John and Jean De Nault Task Force on

Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity; co-director of Hoover’s Project on

Commercializing Innovation; and the A. A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor

in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. F. Scott KieFF

is the Ray and Louise Knowles Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; a member

of Hoover’s John and Jean De Nault Task Force on Property Rights, Freedom, and

Prosperity; co-director of Hoover’s Project on Commercializing Innovation; and a

professor at George Washington University School of Law.

Sweet-Talking the “Fat Cats”Why businesspeople aren’t banking on Washington’s supposedly

pro-business overtures. By Stephen H. Haber and F. Scott Kieff.

President Obama has told American businesses to “get in the game” by investing their massive cash reserves to stimulate jobs, demand, and over-all economic growth. Whether his call for aggressive private-sector invest-ment succeeds will depend on why businesses have stayed on the sidelines to this point, declining to invest their mountains of cash. There are two theories.

The theory implicit in the president’s speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is that the business community has simply not been pay-ing close enough attention, that it has overlooked promising investment opportunities.

The other is that the business community has been paying very close attention—most particularly to the president himself—and what it sees

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is cause for concern. Under this theory, businesses may not see the presi-dent as having made a gentle suggestion to reconsider investment oppor-tunities that are attractive on their own terms. Instead, businesses may fear that he’s made a demand that they deploy their capital or face con-sequences.

The president is right to compare big markets with big games, but the game to envision is not football but poker. Successful firms are sophisti-cated players. They don’t show up at the table without a large stake. The mountains of cash companies are hoarding provide plenty of bank for that purpose. But they also don’t ante up if they think that any moment in the middle of the hand the dealer is likely to announce that the wild cards are deuces, kings, and one-eye jacks . . . until he decides they’re not.

We think the administration might want to consider the second the-ory, that businesses know what they’re doing. Obama’s interactions with business are one reason that his recent remarks might be unhelpful. His administration has already overseen extraordinary changes in the degree and nature of the basic rules of the game, and this may be why cash is being hoarded.

Since Obama took office, the business community has seen a $787 billion stimulus package that was poorly designed and largely misspent, a massive increase in the federal deficit, and a total overhaul of the health care system, the last fact a big component of every employment relation-ship.

Businesses also watched the president deploy his bully pulpit to hurl epithets like “fat cats” when referring to finance professionals, among oth-er populist business bashing. They saw him stand with his entire econom-ic team on national television to call out one group of secured creditors in an effort to shame them into surrendering their property rights during the Chrysler bankruptcy. More recently, they watched as the Dodd-Frank Act brought more sweeping changes to the structure of American financial regulation than the combination of every other action since the New Deal.

The president is right to compare big markets with big games, but the

game isn’t football but poker.


This history helps explain why the business community was largely silent in response to another public Obama overture. This was his arti-cle in the Wall Street Journal touting a governmentwide review of federal regulations, which he pitched as a quest to eliminate rules that stymie economic growth. If the FDA deems saccharine safe enough for coffee, he said by way of example, then the EPA should not treat it as hazardous waste.

But some in the market detect an attempt by the White House to use artificial sweeteners to mask a bitter taste. They may refuse to believe Obama’s new business overtures, seeing them as too saccharine to whet the appetite of a serious market participant. Or they may perceive them as well-meaning, but fear that they signal too many more big changes to the rules of the game. In such a case, prudence requires patience before any serious investments can be designed, let alone implemented.

Ultimately, Obama’s repeated incantation in this year’s State of the Union address that “we do big things” may contribute to business con-tinuing to make only penny antes.

Reprinted by permission of Investor’s Business Daily. © 2011 Investor’s Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is Pension Wise: Confronting

Employer Pension Underfunding—And Sparing Taxpayers

the Next Bailout, by Charles Blahous. To order, call


Some in the market detect an attempt by the White House to use artificial

sweeteners to mask a bitter taste.


HealtH Care

John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover

Institution and a member of Hoover’s Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy

Policy, Working Group on Health Care Policy, and Working Group on Economic

Policy. R. glenn hubbaRd is a member of the Working Group on Health Care

Policy and the dean of Columbia Business School. daniel P. KessleR is a senior

fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the Working Group on Health Care

Policy, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor in Management at Stanford

University’s Graduate School of Business, and a professor of law at Stanford.

Doctored NumbersThe key justification for ObamaCare is “cost shifting”—that the

insured pay a hidden tax to support the uninsured. But for the most

part, such a shift does not, in fact, take place. By John F. Cogan, R.

Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel P. Kessler.

The centerpiece of the court battle over ObamaCare’s constitutionality is the law’s mandate that most U.S. residents obtain health insurance. To justify the mandate, the administration and Congress have asserted that people with private insurance pay for care for the uninsured through “cost shifting”—higher prices charged by doctors and hospitals to recover losses from uncompensated care.

The government argues that the Constitution permits Congress to require that people get insurance in order to reduce the extent of this “hidden tax.” Although courts have disagreed about the constitutionality of the mandate and the new law as a whole, all courts have accepted the premise that the hidden tax is significant.

But how strong is the evidence for this proposition? Our review of the research has found that there is no credible evidence of a cost shift of any

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consequence, either within state boundaries or across state lines. More-over, the new law will most likely generate a cost shift exactly opposite from what its supporters would have us believe.

There are surprisingly few peer-reviewed studies of the magnitude of alleged cost shifting at the national level. A study conducted by George Mason University professor Jack Hadley with John Holahan, Teresa Cough-lin, and Dawn Miller of the Urban Institute, and published in the journal Health Affairs in 2008, found that so-called cost shifting raises private health insurance premiums by a negligible amount. The study’s authors conclude: “Private insurance premiums are at most 1.7 percent higher because of the shifting of the costs of the uninsured to private insurance.” For the typical insurance plan, this amounts to approximately $80 per year. (The cost shift amounts to $215 per year for the typical family insurance plan.)

The Health Affairs study is supported by another recent peer-reviewed study that focused exclusively on physicians. That 2007 study, authored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Jonathan Gruber and David Rodriguez and published in the Journal of Health Economics, found no evidence that doctors charged insured patients higher fees to cover the cost of caring for the uninsured.

Where did Congress go wrong? We traced its estimates of the magni-tude of the hidden tax of $43 billion per year, or an increase in family premiums by an average of $1,000 per year, to two sources: the aforemen-tioned Health Affairs study, and a non-peer-reviewed study commissioned by FamiliesUSA, a Washington, D.C., group long known for its advocacy of greater government involvement in health care. Yet Congress simply ignored the evidence in the Health Affairs study and failed to recognize the serious flaws in the FamiliesUSA analysis.

Specifically, Congress ignored the $40 billion to $50 billion that is spent annually by charitable organizations and federal, state, and local governments to reimburse doctors and hospitals for the cost of caring for the uninsured. These payments, which amount to approximately three-

A long line of academic research does show that low rates of Medicaid

reimbursement mean higher prices for the privately insured.


fourths of the cost of such care, mitigate the extent of cost shifting and reduce the magnitude of the hidden tax on private insurance.

Moreover, the economics of markets for health services suggest that any cost shifting that may occur is unlikely to affect interstate commerce. Because markets for doctor and hospital services are local, not national, the impact of cost shifting will be borne where it occurs, not across state lines.

The bad news for the new law’s supporters (and for individuals with private insurance) doesn’t stop there. If anything, the likely impact of the law will be to increase, not decrease, cost shifting. According to the Congressional Budget Office, around half of the people who are expected to become newly insured under the new law will be enrolled in Medicaid. But Medicaid payments to doctors and hospitals are so low that the program creates a cost shift of its own. In fact, a long line of academic research shows that low rates of Medicaid reimbursement translate into higher prices for the privately insured.

Some argue that cost shifting should be defined more broadly, to include costs of caring for the uninsured that are shifted onto taxpayers. We agree. But by this measure, the new law will increase cost shifting substantially. Again according to the Congressional Budget Office, once the law is fully operational, the volume of new health spending borne by taxpayers will be approximately $200 billion.

In an ideal world, we would expect our courts and elected representa-tives to rely on the best available evidence when making policy. In the case of cost shifting, the evidence is that there is neither a substantial cost shift nor any effect on interstate commerce. The absence of factual support for a key premise of the new law should give courts reason to ask for a second opinion.

reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2011 Dow Jones & Co. all rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is Healthy, Wealthy, and

Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System, second

edition, by John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel

P. Kessler. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



LABOR

RobeRt J. baRRo is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Paul M.

Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Tear Up That Lousy ContractThe economic crisis did at least one good thing: it forced us all to

take a long, hard look at the enormous power of public-employee

unions. By Robert J. Barro.

How ironic that Wisconsin became ground zero for the battle between taxpayers and public-employee labor unions. Wisconsin was the first state to allow collective bargaining for government workers, in 1959. It also was the first to introduce a personal income tax (in 1911, before the introduc-tion of the current form of individual income tax in 1913 by the federal government).

Labor unions like to portray collective bargaining as a basic civil liberty, akin to the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion. For a teach-ers’ union, collective bargaining means that suppliers of teaching services to all public school systems in a state—or even across states—can collude with regard to acceptable wages, benefits, and working conditions. An analogy for business would be for all providers of airline transportation to assemble to fix ticket prices, capacity, and so on. From this perspective, collective bargaining on a broad scale is more similar to an antitrust viola-tion than to a civil liberty.

In fact, labor unions were subject to U.S. antitrust laws in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was first applied in 1894 to the American Railway Union. However, organized labor managed to obtain exemption

LABOR


from federal antitrust laws in subsequent legislation, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Remarkably, labor unions not only are immune from antitrust laws but can also negotiate a “union shop,” which requires nonunion employ-ees to join the union or pay nearly equivalent dues. But somehow, despite many attempts, organized labor has lacked the political pow-er to repeal the key portion of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that allowed states to pass right-to-work laws, which now prohibit the union shop in twenty-two states. From the standpoint of civil liberties, the individual right to work—without being forced to join a union or pay dues—has a much better claim than collective bargaining. (Not to mention that “right to work” has a much more pleasant, liberal sound than “collec-tive bargaining.”) A renewed push for right-to-work laws, which haven’t been enacted anywhere but Oklahoma over the past twenty years, seems about to take off.

The current pushback against labor-union power stems from the colli-sion between overly generous benefits for public employees—notably for pensions and health care—and the fiscal crises of state and local govern-ments. Teachers and other public-employee unions went too far in per-suading weak or complicit state and local governments to agree to obli-gations, particularly defined-benefit pension plans, that created excessive burdens on taxpayers.

In recognition of this fiscal reality, even the unions and their Dem-ocratic allies in Wisconsin agreed to Governor Scott Walker’s proposed cutbacks in benefits, though they dug in their heels over restrictions on collective bargaining. This “compromise” left intact the structure of strong public-employee unions that helped create the unsustainable fiscal situation. The next governor, after all, may have less fiscal discipline than Walker. A long-run solution requires a change in structure: for example, restricting collective bargaining for public employees and, further, intro-ducing a right-to-work law.

Collective bargaining is like letting all providers of airline transportation

meet to fix ticket prices, capacity, and everything else.


There is evidence that right-to-work laws—or, more broadly, the pro-business policies offered by right-to-work states—matter for economic growth. In research published in 2000, economist Thomas Holmes of the University of Minnesota compared counties close to the border between states with and without right-to-work laws (thereby holding constant an array of factors related to geography and climate). He found that the cumulative growth of employment in manufacturing (the traditional area of union strength before the rise of public-employee unions) in the right-to-work states was 26 percentage points greater than that in the non-right-to-work states.

Which states are likely to be the next political battlegrounds on labor issues? One can interpret the extreme reactions by union demonstrators and absent Democratic legislators in Wisconsin not so much as attempts to influence that state—which may be a lost cause—but rather to deter politicians in other states from taking similar actions. This strategy may be working in Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder recently asserted that he would not “pick fights” with labor unions.

In general, the most likely arenas are states in which the governor and both houses of the state legislature are Republican (often because of the 2010 elections) and in which substantial rights for collective bargaining by public employees currently exist. This group includes Indiana, which has recently been as active as Wisconsin on labor issues; Indiana actu-ally enacted a right-to-work law in 1957 but repealed it in 1965. Other-wise, my tentative list includes Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maine, Florida, Tennessee, Nebraska (with a nominally nonpartisan legislature), Kansas, Idaho, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

The national fiscal crisis and recession that began in 2008 had many ill effects, including the ongoing crises of pension and health care obligations in many states. But there was at least one positive consequence. The required return to fiscal discipline has caused a re-examination of the

Teachers and other public-employee unions went too far in persuading

weak or complicit state and local governments to agree to obligations

that created excessive burdens on taxpayers.


growth in economic and political power of public-employee unions. We can hope that embattled politicians like Governor Walker in Wisconsin will maintain their resolve and achieve a more sensible long-term structure for the taxpayers of their states.

Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2011 Dow Jones & Co. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is The Case Against the

Employee Free Choice Act, by Richard A. Epstein. To order,

call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.


Michael McFaul is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow (on leave) at the

Hoover Institution, a coordinator of Hoover’s Iran Democracy Project, and a

professor of political science at Stanford University.

America’s Democratic CredentialsHoover fellow Michael McFaul, who has the president’s ear on Russia,

argues that promoting freedom is both moral and wise.

Michael McFaul, Hoover’s Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow (on leave), reportedly has been picked by President Obama to be ambassador to Russia. McFaul, who has written extensively about Russia, served as the president’s senior Russia adviser on the National Security Council and is a key figure in the administration’s efforts to “reset” relations with Moscow. Last year, in his book Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can, written before he joined the Obama administration, McFaul looked into how promoting democracy and human rights amount to prudent foreign policy. Here is an excerpt from that book.

American support for democratic change abroad aligns the United States with the preferences of the vast majority of people around the world. When some Americans argue instead that the United States should back autocrats in the name of “stability,” whose preferences does that serve? Whose stability? Obviously not the preferences or stability of most people living under those autocracies. Democracies do not commit genocide, do not generate refugees, and do not permit wide-scale famines, so by sup-

FORE IGN POL ICY


porting democratic change abroad, the United States also will be support-ing a more ethical and just foreign policy.

The direct security and economic benefits of such a moral foreign poli-cy are hard to measure. Famines, genocide, and state collapse often end up costing the United States financially and have even pulled America into conflict, as in Somalia and Haiti in the 1990s. So investing in democratic government in other countries today can be thought of as helping to pre-vent more costly interventions in the future.

Less direct but more important over the long haul, a more moral U.S. foreign policy increases America’s standing in the world, which in turn increases its leverage in all issues of international politics, including those with more direct consequences for U.S. national security and prosper-ity. Especially after the United States emerged as a world power, other countries were willing to accept American leadership because of a genuine belief in the American commitment to “doing good” in the world. U.S. leaders were allowed to take the lead in building international institu-tions that benefited American security and prosperity in part because the United States was the most powerful country in the free world, but also because other leaders trusted the United States as a moral force for good. Conversely, U.S. foreign policies that have undermined American com-mitment to democracy—supporting autocrats, undermining democrati-cally elected leaders, or ignoring international human rights norms—have weakened American influence and standing.

Moreover, Americans—policy makers and citizens alike—may gain some sense of satisfaction in seeing their country do the right thing, or stand on the right side of history. Although impossible to measure, the feeling of pride or contentment with one’s country’s international stand-ing must register as a benefit to the American people.

ENGAGING WITH (AND COERCING) THE AUTOCRATSIn practice, American leaders who seek democratic change have pursued confrontation against certain countries—those with strained relations with the United States—but engagement with others, America’s friends and allies. This foreign-policy hypocrisy is accentuated when presidents actively use coercive tools to promote regime change in the first category W

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Hoover senior fellow Michael McFaul, the senior director for Russian Affairs on the National Security Council, briefs President Obama in the Oval Office in February 2010.


of nations but not the second. President Reagan provided financial and military assistance to “freedom fighters” seeking to undermine communist regimes in Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Cambodia but did not extend such support to freedom fighters in Indonesia, Mexico, Taiwan, or South Africa. President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech threatened autocratic regimes in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea but conspicuously left Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia off the list.

This bifurcated strategy has produced uneven results. Although useful perhaps for achieving other American policy objectives, coercive strategies such as military force or sanctions have seldom worked as instruments for promoting democracy in autocracies antagonistic to the United States. More generally, periods of high tension or disengagement between the United States and authoritarian foes rarely facilitate internal democratic change in these countries; more often they create a pretext for greater lev-els of political repression.

On the other hand, policies of engagement with autocratic foes have sometimes created conditions that permit democratization.

U.S.-Soviet relations are illustrative. The conventional story about the collapse of the Soviet Union celebrates Reagan for using a military buildup and the threat of “star wars” missile defenses to pressure Moscow to change. In fact, it was Reagan’s own secretary of state, George P. Shultz, who rec-ognized the folly of isolation and the necessity to engage both the Soviet leaders and Soviet society. As Shultz wrote in his memoirs about the start of 1983, “I wanted to develop a strategy for a new start with the Soviet Union. I felt we had to try to turn the relationship around: away from confronta-tion and towards real problem solving.” Shultz’s new strategy met resistance but he was “determined not to hang back from engaging the Soviets because of fears that the ‘Soviets win negotiations.’ ” In re-engaging Moscow,

We were determined not to allow the Soviets to focus our negotiations

simply on matters of arms control. So we continuously adhered to a broad

agenda: human rights, regional issues, arms control, and bilateral issues.

Once Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, Shultz’s strategy reaped ben-efits. As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union became


less confrontational and more cooperative, Gorbachev felt more embold-ened to pursue radical political and economic reform. He announced his most revolutionary democratic reforms at the nineteenth conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in June 1988—years after the thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations had begun, and a month after Reagan’s historic trip to Moscow. By that time, Reagan was not seeking to con-front the “evil empire” but instead was developing a friendly, personal relationship with the Soviet leader. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze established a similar bond. To be sure, the United States continued to supply Stinger missiles to anti-Soviet insurgents in Afghanistan and Reagan went out of his way to demonstrate solidarity with people in the Soviet Union being persecuted for their religious and political beliefs. But compared to the hostile and tense atmosphere sur-rounding American-Iranian relations today, U.S.-Soviet relations at the dawn of political liberalization inside the USSR were downright friendly.

President George H. W. Bush continued to support Gorbachev, not wanting to weaken or undermine America’s trusted friend in the Kremlin. Even after the August 1991 coup had failed and the collapse of the Soviet Union was obvious to everyone, Bush still tried to persuade other Euro-pean leaders to support Gorbachev and his quest to preserve the USSR.

This relatively benign international context made it easier for Gorba-chev to pursue his radical domestic agenda of change. During this period of warm relations, Gorbachev did not worry that his “enemy” would try to take advantage of his country’s weakness as the USSR underwent its chaotic transformation from communism to something else. A more hostile interna-tional environment might have made Gorbachev more cautious. The West’s embrace of Gorbachev made Gorbachev more powerful inside the Soviet Union, at least for a time, in his struggles with both the left and the right.

Along with greater U.S. engagement with the Soviet regime came great-er engagement with the democratic opposition inside Russia and the other Soviet republics. The former was a precondition for the latter. During tenser eras in U.S.-Soviet relations, groups such as the National Endow-ment for Democracy (NED) had found it difficult to operate inside the USSR. As diplomatic relations thawed, however, nongovernmental activ-ity by myriad groups seeking to promote democracy became possible.


During that period, nongovernmental organizations such as NED; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), affiliated with the Democratic Party; and the National Republican Institute (now the International Republican Institute, or IRI) received the bulk of their funding from U.S. government sources.

Indirectly, therefore, the U.S. government was using a dual-track strat-egy to promote democratization within the Soviet Union and then Russia. The degree of engagement or level of resources devoted to aiding the dem-ocrats was minuscule, and this assistance began only a few years and some-times just a few months before the Soviet collapse and the perceived victory of the “democrats.” But the assistance that did flow into the Soviet Union could only have occurred during a period of close relations between Wash-ington and Moscow. During the Cold War, when conflicts with the United States intensified, Soviet internal suppression of dissidents escalated. The same pattern emerged in other communist countries. A similar dynamic has unfolded over the past thirty years regarding U.S. relations with Iran.

HOW TO CHART A BETTER APPROACHIn rethinking the U.S. strategy for supporting democracy in these kinds of countries, the first step must be the expansion of the agenda for gov-ernment-to-government relations. With Iran, for instance, this means an offer of direct talks with the theocrats in Tehran. Everything must be on the agenda: the prospect of formal diplomatic relations and the lifting of sanctions; the potential supply and disposal of nuclear fuel (from a third-party organization or state); suspension of nuclear enrichment; an end to aid to Hezbollah and Hamas; and a serious discussion about stopping the arrests of students and human rights advocates and the persecution of union leaders and religious minorities. Establishment of new regional security institutions in the region also should be on the table.

With an increasingly autocratic Russia, a new strategy of engagement to support democratic development would require a more comprehensive bilateral agenda that raises issues of mutual concern: preventing weapons of mass destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists, addressing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, reducing nuclear arsenals, securing stable sup-plies of oil and gas from Russia and Eurasia, discussing European secu-


rity issues, expanding connections between our societies, and increasing investment opportunities.

Regarding China, a comprehensive and mostly positive bilateral agenda already exists. Without question, U.S.-Chinese relations today are a vast improvement over the twenty-two-year period when no contacts existed. Greater state-to-state engagement has increased societal contacts between Americans and Chinese, including even some contacts with Chinese dem-ocratic leaders, independent journalists, and civil society activists. These interactions were much more constrained when the United States and China lacked diplomatic relations. Of course, as the China case illustrates, engaging authoritarian regimes alone does little to promote democratic change. For the strategy to work, U.S. diplomats must practice dual-track diplomacy of the sort practiced by Shultz in dealing with the Soviet Union: simultaneously engaging autocratic leaders in charge of the state and democratic leaders in society.

Historical analogies go only so far, but the general principles of Shultz’s dual-track diplomacy still apply today. Whether engaging Russians to reduce our respective nuclear arsenals or Iranians to end their nuclear enrichment program, Americans must not check their values at the door. Nor should they allow their interlocutors to narrow the scope of bilateral relations to arms-control issues alone. If developed carefully, a more substantive, less confrontational relationship with autocratic regimes such as these can fulfill a necessary condition for beginning a more meaningful dialogue about democracy and human rights. A more substantial government-to-govern-ment agenda also will create a more favorable environment for engaging societal forces in these countries pushing for democratic change.

Excerpted from Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should and How We Can, by Michael McFaul (Rowman & Littlefield and Hoover Institution Press, 2010). © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is The Troubled Birth

of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and

Programs, by Michael McFaul and Sergei Markov. To



Bruce S. ThornTon is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor

of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno.

Wishing Away the WorldForeign policy doesn’t mean righting every wrong. It means acting in

our national interest. By Bruce S. Thornton.

The West’s military intervention in Libya was marketed with the claim that its purpose, as French President Sarkozy put it, was “to protect the civilian population from the murderous madness of a regime that has for-feited all claim to legitimacy.” Behind this humanitarian idealism, how-ever, lurked a host of questions and dangers, reflecting wishful thinking rather than a prudent foreign policy.

First, we should acknowledge that the intervention was an Ameri-can show from the beginning. The French and British, along with a few Arab allies, provided some warplanes and a few missiles, but the bulk of the materiel and intelligence assets that make such attacks possible were American. Thus the U.N. Security Council resolution and the participa-tion of NATO served to give a patina of internationalism to an American action. This fact should remind us—particularly those who are propo-nents of internationalist and multilateralist idealism—that the United States, not any international institution or coalition, is the world’s peace-keeper, responsible for maintaining the global order that makes possible the globalized economy enriching everybody else. Given that the United States undertook most of the costs and risks, our interests and security should have been the primary reason for our participation.

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Next, all talk of humanitarian idealism aside, national self-interest is mainly why NATO nations and the Arab League chose to get involved in Libya. Back in 2003, the French weren’t as keen for the much more dif-ficult and costly task of getting rid of Saddam Hussein and “the murder-ous madness” of his regime, one whose toll of torture, murder, and terror-ism vastly outstripped the grisly record of Muammar Gadhafi. Too many French leaders had profited too long from their cozy friendship with the butcher of Baghdad, buying his oil and selling him advanced weaponry. But earlier this year, the French calculated that they could obtain some international prestige on the cheap, given that the United States would once again carry most of the load and in the end take most of the blame if things went badly in Libya. As for the Arab League, which quickly parroted Gadhafi’s propaganda as soon as airstrikes commenced, it apparently sup-

A French rescue helicopter lands aboard the U.S. amphibious command ship Mount Whitney

during the initial NATO military operations against Libya. The Libya operations were char-

acterized by statements of humanitarian purpose that did not fully reflect the participants’

national interests.


ported only the appearance of action without its necessary consequences. (And it takes considerable cheek for regimes that brutalize their own people to call for the removal of Gadhafi because he brutalizes his own people.)

The lesson here is one George Washington understood: “No nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest.” So what are the national and security interests of the United States in this intervention?

The received wisdom of Republican and Democratic foreign policy alike is that support for brutal dictators in the long run tarnishes our prestige and harms our interests by squelching the democratic aspirations of the oppressed. Particularly in the Middle East, this “democracy defi-cit” has empowered the jihadists who turn to a debased form of Islam in compensation for a lack of freedom. Removing these oppressive autocrats thus will clear space for incipient democratic movements to create regimes founded on liberal democratic principles of freedom, tolerance, human rights, and the rest. And our efforts to liberate oppressed Muslims will buy us their affection and support, further eroding the appeal of jihadism and making us more secure from terror.

But this dogma appears to lack a sober understanding of reality. Already we have liberated oppressed Muslims in the Balkans, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and now we have decided to liberate (maybe) oppressed Muslims in Libya. How much goodwill have these actions bought us in the Muslim world? Did liberating millions of Shiites from a murderous tyrant in Iraq make Shiite Iran stop regarding us as the Great Satan? We have to free our-selves from the curiously arrogant assumption that the world determines its policies and beliefs simply in reaction to what we do. The Muslims’ religious worldview and sensibility condition their actions and interests, and we must understand those spiritual beliefs on their own terms rather than reducing them to the materialist determinism that dominates our thinking. The Ayatollah Khomeini once pointed out that he hadn’t started an Islamic revolution to lower the price of melons.

In the current crisis, this means seeing beyond the feel-good terms “democracy” and “freedom” and thinking about what sorts of regimes will take the place of the autocrats we help remove, and whether those regimes will better serve our interests. We still don’t know what sort of regime will arise in Egypt, but so far the implications for our interests aren’t good,


given the substantial Egyptian opposition to the peace treaty with Israel; the release of many jihadists, including two who participated in the assas-sination of Anwar Sadat; and the increasing clout of the Muslim Brother-hood, whose number two leader said recently, “Our people and societies must realize that their main enemy abroad is the U.S. and the Zionist gang, and that their main enemy within is Israel. Everybody must take this into account, and must be aware that this is the enemy that lurks in the midst of Middle Eastern society. This must be clear to everybody.”

We should also be troubled that the Westernized moderate Mohamed ElBaradei was pelted with stones and shoes and driven away from the polls so he couldn’t vote against a referendum supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, while security forces stood by and watched. As Barry Rubin writes, “At this point—to show how bad the situation is in practice—Amr Moussa, veteran radical Arab nationalist, Israel-baiter, and anti-American, is quickly becoming the best one can hope for in terms of the new regime.”

As for Libya, we still know too little about what the rebels want, or even who they are. Even more troubling, the rebels’ stronghold, eastern Libya, has been the home of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fight-ing Group (LIFG). According to a Stratfor report, jihadist personnel files captured in Iraq revealed that on a per capita basis, Libyans made up the largest percentage of foreign insurgents, and 85 percent of the Libyans said they intended to become suicide bombers. Finally, the majority of these fighters listed their hometowns in Libya as Darnah and Benghazi, the latter the de facto capital of the rebellion.

The implications of the removal of Gadhafi—who had worked out a mutually beneficial modus vivendi with the LIFG—or the splintering of Libya into two countries are not good for American interests. As the Strat-for report warns,

Even if Gadhafi, or an entity that replaces him, is able to restore order,

due to the opportunity the jihadists have had to loot military arms

Did liberating millions of Shiites from a murderous tyrant in Iraq make

Shiite Iran stop regarding us as the Great Satan?


depots, they have suddenly found themselves more heavily armed than

they have ever been inside their home country. And these heavily armed

jihadists could pose a substantial threat of the kind that Libya has avoid-

ed in recent years. . . . The looting of the arms depots in Libya is also

reminiscent of the looting witnessed in Iraq following the dissolution

of the Iraqi army in the face of the U.S. invasion in 2003. Not only

was that ordnance used in thousands of armed assaults and indirect-fire

attacks with rockets and mortars, but many of the mortar and artillery

rounds were used to fashion powerful IEDs. This concept of making and

employing IEDs from military ordnance will not be foreign to the Liby-

ans who have returned from Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter). This

bodes ill for foreign interests in Libya, where they have not had the same

security concerns in recent years that they have had in Algeria or Yemen.

If the Libyans truly buy into the concept of targeting the far enemy that

supports the state, it would not be out of the realm of possibility for them

to begin to attack multinational oil companies, foreign diplomatic facili-

ties, and even foreign companies and hotels.

Murderously mad, illegitimate regimes, many of them much worse than Gadhafi’s, are as common as flies. The danger and hypocrisy exposed by events in Libya reinforces the truth that our interventions abroad must be in the service of our own interests. Intervening in a civil war in service to other nations’ interests and our own misplaced idealism––without a clear knowledge of the rebels’ aims, or a reasonable estimation of what sort of regime will be in place when the smoke clears––endangers those inter-ests and puts our national security at risk.

Reprinted from Advancing a Free Society (www.advancingafreesociety.org). © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Foreign Policy

for America in the Twenty-first Century: Alternative

Perspectives, edited by Thomas H. Henriksen. To order,



Terry M. Moe is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a member of the

Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and the William

Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His latest

book is Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools

(Brookings Institution Press, 2011), from which this essay is drawn.

The Staggering Power of the Teachers’ UnionsA look at the most powerful force in American education—and it isn’t

a force for good. By Terry M. Moe.

Janet Archer painted watercolors. Gordon Russell planned trips to Alaska and Cape Cod. Others did crossword puzzles, read books, played chess, practiced ballet moves, argued with one another, and otherwise tried to fill up the time. The place was New York City. The year was 2009. And these were public school teachers passing a typical day in one of the city’s Rubber Rooms—Temporary Reassignment Centers—where teachers were housed when they were considered so unsuited to teaching that they needed to be kept out of the classroom, away from the city’s children.

There were more than seven hundred teachers in New York City’s Rub-ber Rooms that year. Each school day they went to “work.” They arrived in the morning at exactly the same hour as other city teachers, and they left at exactly the same hour in the afternoon. They got paid a full salary. They received full benefits, as well as all the usual vacation days, and they had their summers off. Just like real teachers. Except they didn’t teach.

All of this cost the city between $35 million and $65 million a year for salary and benefits alone, depending on who was doing the estimating.

EDUCAT ION


And the total costs were even greater, for the district hired substitutes to teach their classes, rented space for the Rubber Rooms, and forked out half a million dollars annually for security guards to keep the teachers safe (mainly from one another, as tensions ran high in these places). At a time when New York City was desperate for money to fund its schools, it was spending a fortune every year for seven-hundred-plus teachers to stare at the walls.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein wanted to move bad teachers out of the system and off the payroll. But they couldn’t. While most of their teachers were doing a good job in the classroom, the problem was that all teachers—even the incompetent and the danger-ous—were protected by state tenure laws, by restrictive collective bar-gaining contracts, and by the local teachers’ union, the United Federa-tion of Teachers (UFT), which was the power behind the laws and the contracts and the legal defender of each and every teacher whose job was in trouble.

With such a big defensive line, teachers who were merely mediocre could not be touched. So Bloomberg and Klein chose to remove just the more egregious cases and send them to Rubber Rooms. But even these teachers stayed on the payroll—for a long time. They didn’t leave; they didn’t give up; and because the legal procedures were so thickly woven and offered union lawyers so much to work with, it took from two to five years just to resolve the typical case.

THE DYSFUNCT IONAL IS NORMALSometimes it seems that public education operates in a parallel universe, in which what is obviously perverse and debilitating for the organization of schools has become normal and expected. The purpose of the Ameri-can public school system is to educate children. And because this is so, everything about the public schools—how they are staffed, how they are funded, and more generally how they are organized to do their work—

Proceedings for any single “Rubber Room” teacher went on much longer

than the O. J. Simpson trial.


should be decided with the best interests of children in mind. But this isn’t what happens. Not even remotely.

The New York City school district is not organized to provide the best possible education to its children. As things now stand, it can’t be. Why? If we could view the district’s entire organization, we would doubtless find many reasons. But when it comes to bad teachers alone, the district is wasting millions of dollars because the rules it is required to follow in operating the schools—rules that are embedded in the local collective bargaining contract and state law—prevent it from quickly, easily, and inexpensively removing these teachers from the classroom. Getting bad teachers out of the classroom is essential if kids are to be educated effec-tively. Yet the formal rules prevent it.

These rules are part of the organization of New York City’s schools. The district is literally organized to protect bad teachers and to undermine the efforts of leaders to ensure teacher quality. It is also organized to require that huge amounts of money be wasted on endless, unnecessary procedures. These undesirable outcomes do not happen by accident. They happen by design.

New York may seem unusual. Its dimensions dwarf those of the typi-cal American school district, and its organizational perversities may be extreme as well. But the kind of problem I discuss here is quite common. Almost everywhere, in districts throughout the nation, America’s public schools are typically not organized to provide the nation’s children with the highest quality education.

One example: salary schedules that pay teachers based on their senior-ity and formal credits and have nothing whatever to do with whether their students are learning anything. Another example: rules that give senior teachers their choice of jobs and make it impossible for districts to allocate teachers where they can do the greatest good for kids. Another example: rules that require districts to lay off teachers (in times of reduced rev-enues or enrollments, say) in reverse order of seniority, thus ensuring that excellent teachers will be automatically fired if they happen to have little

Such undesirable outcomes don’t happen by accident. They are structured

into the system. They happen by design.


seniority and that lousy teachers will be automatically retained if they hap-pen to have lots of seniority.

These sorts of rules are common. But who in their right mind, if they were organizing the schools for the benefit of children, would organize them in this way? No one would. Yet the schools do get organized in this way. The examples I’ve given are the tip of a very large iceberg. As a result, even the most obvious steps toward better education are difficult, if not impossible, to take.

Researchers have long known, for example, that when a student is for-tunate enough to have a teacher near the high end of the quality distribu-tion rather than a teacher near the low end, the impact amounts to an entire year’s worth of additional learning. Teacher quality makes an enor-mous difference. Indeed, even if the quality variation across teachers is less stark, the consequences for kids can still be profound. As researchers Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin report, if students had good teachers rather than merely average teachers for four or five years in a row, “the increased learning would be sufficient to close entirely the average gap between a typical low-income student receiving a free or reduced-price lunch and the average student who is not receiving free or reduced-price lunches.” In other words, it would eliminate the achievement gap that this nation has struggled to overcome for decades. Good teachers matter, and they matter a lot. Yet our school system is organized to make it virtually impossible to get bad teachers out of the classroom, bases key personnel decisions on seniority rather than expertise, and in countless other ways erects obstacles to providing children with the best possible teachers.

Ineffective organization has long been an open secret. A Nation at Risk warned in 1983 of a “rising tide of mediocrity” in America’s schools—leading to a frenzied era of nonstop reforms that, it was hoped, would bring dramatic improvement. But today the facts show that this dramatic improvement hasn’t happened, and that bold reforms are still needed to turn the schools around. The most intensive period of school reform in the

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Having a high-quality teacher rather than a low-quality one gives a pupil

the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of additional learning.


nation’s history has largely been a failure. So we now have two questions to ponder. To the first, which asks why the public schools are burdened by ineffective organization, we can add a second: why has the reform move-ment, which for a quarter century has been dedicated to bringing effective organization to the nation’s schools, failed to do that? The answer to both questions, I argue, is much the same: these problems are largely due to the power of the teachers’ unions.

UNION POWER AND AMERICA ’S SCHOOLSIt might seem that the teachers’ unions would play a limited role in public education: fighting for better pay and working conditions for their mem-

Teachers picket in La Habra last December. Teachers’ unions, above all else, are concerned

with pleasing their constituents—who expect their unions to protect their jobs, get them

higher wages and better benefits, push for teacher-friendly work rules, oppose threatening

changes, and generally fight for their interests. Because of their size, funding, and political

acumen, teachers’ unions exert great power over political decisions at all levels.


bers, but otherwise having little impact on the structure and performance of the public schools more generally. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The teachers’ unions have more influence on the public schools than any other group in American society.

Their influence takes two forms. They shape the schools from the bot-tom up, through collective bargaining activities so broad in scope that virtually every aspect of school organization bears the distinctive imprint of union design. They also shape the schools from the top down, through political activities that give them unrivaled influence over the laws and regulations imposed on public education by government, and that allow them to block or weaken governmental reforms they find threatening. In combining bottom-up and top-down influence, and in combining them as potently as they do, the teachers’ unions are unique among all actors in the educational arena.

It’s difficult to overstate how extensive a role the unions play in mak-ing America’s schools what they are—and in preventing them from being something different.

Before the 1960s, the power holders in America’s public school sys-tem were the administrative professionals charged with running it, as well as the local school boards who appointed them. Teachers had little power, and they were unorganized aside from their widespread member-ship in the National Education Association (NEA), which was a profes-sional organization controlled by administrators. In the 1960s, however, states began to adopt laws that for the first time promoted collective bargaining for public employees. When the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) launched a campaign to organize the nation’s teachers into unions, the NEA turned itself into a labor union (and eventually kicked out the administrators) to compete, and the battle was on in thousands of school districts. By the time the dust settled in the early 1980s, virtually all districts of any size (outside the South) were success-fully organized, collective bargaining was the norm, and the teachers’ unions reigned supreme as the most powerful force in American educa-tion.

This transformation—the rise of union power—created what was essentially a new system of public education. This new system has now


been in equilibrium for roughly thirty years, and throughout this time it has been vigorously protected—and stabilized—by the very union power that created it.

POL IT ICAL WEAPONS AND HOW TO BLUNT THEM

The trademark of this new system is not just that the teachers’ unions are pre-eminently powerful. It is also that they use their power to promote their own special interests—and to make the organization of schooling a reflection of those interests. They say, of course, that what is good for teach-ers is good for kids. But the simple fact is that they are not in the busi-ness of representing kids. They are unions. They represent the job-related interests of their members, and these interests are not the same as the inter-ests of children.

Some things are obvious. It is not good for children that ineffective teachers cannot be removed from the classroom. It is not good for chil-dren that teachers cannot be assigned to the classrooms where they are needed most. It is not good for children that excellent young teachers get laid off before mediocre colleagues with more seniority. Yet the unions fight to see that schools are organized in these ways.

And there’s more. The organization of schooling goes beyond the per-sonnel rules of collective-bargaining contracts to include all the formal components of the school system: accountability, choice, funding, class size, special education, and virtually anything else policymakers deem rel-evant. These matters are subject to the authority of state and national gov-ernments, where they are fought out in the political process—and deci-sions are heavily determined by political power.

Here the unions’ great strength as political organizations comes into play. The NEA and the AFT, with more than four million members between them, are by far the most powerful groups in the politics of educa-tion. They wield astounding sums of money, year after year, for campaign contributions and lobbying. They have armies of well-educated activists in every political district. They can orchestrate well-financed public-rela-tions and media campaigns any time they want, on any topic or candidate. And they have supremely well-developed organizational apparatuses that blanket the country.


They don’t always get their way on public policy, of course. The Ameri-can system of checks and balances makes that impossible. But these same checks and balances also ensure that blocking new laws is much easier than getting them passed, and this is how the teachers’ unions have used their power to great effect: not by getting the policies they want, but by stop-ping or weakening the policies they don’t want—and thus preventing true education reform.

From the beginning of the reform era, reformers have focused on the problem of ineffective schools, and thus on fixing the schools themselves. Yet they have failed to resolve this problem because there is another prob-lem—the problem of union power—that is more fundamental, and has prevented them from fixing the schools in ways that make sense and have real promise. If our nation ever hopes to transform the public schools, this problem of union power must be recognized for what it is. And it must be resolved.

But can it be resolved? This is the pivotal question for the future of American education. The answer, I believe, is yes—although major change may take decades.

In normal times, reformers who try to change the system or its underly-ing power structure will almost always lose. This is the Catch-22 of power: if you try to weaken powerful groups, they will normally be able to use their power to stop you. Yet, fortunately for the nation, these are not nor-mal times. American education stands at what political scientists would call a critical juncture. Because of a largely accidental and quite abnormal confluence of events, the stars are lining up in a way that makes major change possible, and in fact will drive it forward. Two separate dynamics are at work.

The first is arising “endogenously”—that is, within the education sys-tem and its politics. More than at any other time in modern history, the teachers’ unions are on the defensive: blamed for obstructing reform, defending bad teachers, imposing seniority rules, and in general, using their power to promote their own interests rather than the interests of kids and effective organization. And open criticism is coming not just from conservatives anymore. It is also coming from liberals, moderates, and Democrats. Key constituencies have become fed up. Fed up with per-


petually abysmal schools for disadvantaged kids. Fed up with the party’s perpetual impotence with regard to reform. Fed up with what Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has called the “stranglehold of the teachers’ unions on the Democratic Party.” The demand is palpable for the party to free itself to pursue serious education reform in the best interests of children, espe-cially those who need it the most.

But the shifting political tides will not be enough to bring about major education reform. Absent some other dynamic, the unions will remain very powerful, with over four million members, tons of money, count-less activists, and all their other weapons still intact. Their Democratic allies will allow reform to go only so far before pulling up short. Luck-ily, another dynamic is at work. This one is “exogenous”—arising entirely outside the educational and political systems—and will ultimately dove-tail nicely with the political trends that are running against the unions. I’m speaking about the revolution in information technology, one of the most profoundly influential forces ever to hit this planet. It is fast transforming the fundamentals of human society, from how people communicate and interact to how they collect information, gain knowledge, and transact business. There is no doubt that it has the capacity to transform the way children learn, and that it will ultimately revolutionize education systems all around the world, including our own.

The specific kinds of changes wrought by technology—among them the massive substitution of technology for labor, the growing irrelevance of geography for teaching (which means that teachers can be anywhere, and no longer need to be concentrated in districts), and the huge expan-sion in attractive alternatives to the regular (unionized) public schools—are destined to undermine the very foundations of union power and make it much more difficult for them to block reform and impose their special interests through politics. This will lay the groundwork, over a period of decades, for truly massive reforms—and for the rise of a new system that

Technology will give rise to a new system that is much more responsive

to children’s needs and much better organized to provide the quality

education they deserve.


is much more responsive to children’s needs and much better organized to provide the quality education they deserve.

LOOKING FOR A GAME-CHANGERAlthough the teachers’ unions have tremendous influence over the nation’s schools, they have been very poorly studied—and as a result, very poorly understood. My book, Special Interest, attempts to change that by provid-ing a great deal of information: on the unions’ historical rise to power, on how they use their power in politics and collective bargaining, and on what the consequences seem to be for effective schools. But it also, and more fundamentally, offers a way of understanding why the unions do what they do—and thus why they engage in behavior that so often creates problems for children and schools.

By way of introduction, let’s first consider the behavior of members of Congress. They are well known for crafting legislation to advance the spe-cial interests of favored constituents and powerful groups and companies. They lard their bills up with thousands of special-interest earmarks. They fill the tax code with special-interest deductions, credits, and loopholes. They support an archaic, inefficient system of farm subsidies. They even insist that the government buy expensive planes and weapons systems, produced in their states and districts, that the Defense Department says it does not want.

So here is the question. Why don’t members of Congress just stop doing these things and instead do what’s in the national interest? The answer is that they have strong incentives to do exactly what they are doing. The incentives, moreover, are not a matter of choice, but arise from the elec-toral and legislative institutions of which these members are a part. The fact is, if they want to stay in their jobs and succeed, they need to respond to these incentives—and cater to the special interests of constituents and powerful groups.

None of this has much to do with who they are as human beings, nor with what they value or how they behave in other realms of their lives. Any human beings who want to be members of Congress—and want to stay there—need to respond wisely and efficiently to the incentives of their institutions. If they don’t, they’ll be looking for other jobs.


The teachers’ unions can be understood in exactly the same way. Like members of Congress, union leaders are elected to their organizational roles, and in those roles—but not in the rest of their lives—they have strong incentives to behave in very distinctive ways. Above all else, they must be centrally concerned with pleasing their members—their constit-uents—who are employees of the public school system, and who fully expect their unions to protect their jobs, to get them higher wages and better benefits, to push for teacher-friendly work rules, to oppose threat-ening reforms, and in general, to fight for their basic job-related interests. Union leaders will be special-interest advocates for their members.

As human beings, union leaders may care very deeply about children and want the best for them. They may also be very concerned about the quality of education and be convinced that significant improvement in the public schools is called for. More generally, they may be very good, public-spirited people. But these qualities are not of the essence when it comes to what they do in their jobs. In that role, they have strong incen-tives to be special-interest advocates. And that is how they will behave.

In the private sector, the unions are transparent about their special-interest role. What’s to hide? The United Auto Workers pushes hard to secure good wages and benefits for employees on the auto assembly lines, and it doesn’t pretend to be concerned, first and foremost, with the welfare of the millions of consumers who buy cars. The teachers’ unions, however, are in the public sector, and there the institutional incentives are very different—for they need to depend heavily on the political process, and thus on gaining democratic support for what they do and want. To behave wisely in this setting, they have incentives to convince the voting public that they are not self-interested but in fact fundamentally concerned about children and quality education—and that whatever they do to promote their own interests is actually good for children and schools too.

There is often a big gulf, therefore, between what they say and what they do. When teachers’ unions argue, for example, that charter schools should be opposed because of their poor academic performance, they may or may not be saying something accurate about the actual perfor-mance of charter schools. The more important fact is that this is not


why they oppose charter schools in the first place. They oppose them because charters give kids alternatives to the regular public schools—allowing them to leave, and thus threatening the jobs of unionized teachers. In politics, however, they can’t just say that. Instead, their job is to look around for other arguments—any arguments—that might persuade voters to support the unions’ predetermined position. The themes, accordingly, are all about what’s good for kids and schools. Their special interests are carefully hidden inside a public-interest package.

We need to keep the focus on the players’ incentives and interests. When we do that, we have a solid foundation for understanding the unions’ role within American education. Here is a summary of the basics:

• The teachers’ unions are special-interest groups.

• As the most powerful groups in American education, they use their power to promote these special interests—in collective bargaining, in politics—and this often leads them to do things that are not good for children or for schools.

• None of this has anything to do with union leaders or teachers being self-interested as human beings. The unions can be—and are—special-interest groups, even though leaders and teachers may well care very much about children, quality education, and effective schools.

Interest-group influence is hardly unusual in American politics and government. Indeed, it is the normal state of affairs across all areas of public policy. To say that public education is an arena of special-inter-est influence, then, is simply to say that it is normal. If education is at all different, it is only because one special interest is far more powerful than any others. By focusing on that one special interest, then, and by learning about the various roles it plays in shaping the public schools

This is how interest groups play the game of politics. The unions’ special

interests are carefully hidden inside a public-interest package.


and the policies that govern them, we should be able to learn a great deal about the American education system—and why its serious prob-lems have yet to be overcome despite a quarter century of national effort.

Excerpted from Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, by Terry M. Moe (Brookings Institution Press, 2011). © 2011 The Brookings Institution. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is A Primer on

America’s Schools, edited by Terry M. Moe. To order,



Chester e. Finn Jr. is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, chairman of

Hoover’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and president of the Thomas B.

Fordham Foundation.

The States Are BackWhether racing to the top or sinking in debt (or both), some governors

are taking the school-reform baton back from Washington. By

Chester E. Finn Jr.

Thirty years ago, Saturn started its current revolution around the sun, Mount St. Helens erupted, and Americans began to understand that gov-ernors are the most important people in American K–12 education. They control, on average, about half of schools’ budgets. They propose, lobby for, and ultimately sign legislation that spans the spectrum from teacher evaluations and collective bargaining to textbook adoption. Today, with bold gubernatorial leadership on display once again, we do well to recall some of the pioneering “education governors” of the 1980s, men and women who set about to reform their states’ public schools—indeed, to overhaul their states’ entire K–12 systems.

Most of them were considered political moderates—mind you, that was neither a slur nor an endangered species in the ’80s—and they came from both major parties. Prominent among them were Dick Riley (D-South Carolina), Tom Kean (R-New Jersey), Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), Jim Hunt (D-North Carolina), John Engler (R-Michigan), Bill Clinton (D-Arkansas), Tommy Thompson (R-Wisconsin), Ann Richards (D-Texas), and Rudy Perpich (DFL-Minnesota)—to name a few.

These leaders ushered in statewide academic standards, new tests, the concept of results-based accountability, some fresh thinking about teach-

EDUCAT ION


ers and principals, charter schools, and plenty more. Teamed up (in 1989) with the first President Bush in Charlottesville, they also produced a set of “national education goals” that this land had never had before, and they helped to make up a new panel in Washington to monitor progress toward those goals.

What charged them up was the need for economic development and competitiveness for their states, complaints from their employers and uni-versities about the unreadiness of local high school graduates, and mount-ing costs. They also were frustrated that education consumed huge chunks of their budgets although they had relatively minimal control over what those funds purchased. (In addition, they were fired up by A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.)

So they exerted themselves as never before. Their organizations and affiliates revved up, too. Most notable was the National Governors Asso-ciation (NGA), which historically had not been greatly involved in K–12 education. Beginning in 1986 with a five-year Alexander-prompted proj-ect called “Time for Results,” the NGA bestirred itself to both push for education reform across the states and monitor progress made by them.

With the 1990s came increased federal involvement in education reform, as governors of that time helped to activate and animate the feds. Though the elder Bush and Lamar Alexander (as his second secretary of education) didn’t get much through the Democratic Congress, President Clinton signed major legislation in 1994 which George W. Bush—Texas’s education-reform-minded governor of the late 1990s—built upon when he reached the White House a few years later. The result, of course, was No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

As Washington pushed harder, however, some governors backed off. The first decade of this century was not a time of huge gubernatorial ini-tiative on the K–12 front. Reforming education seemed for a while to be Uncle Sam’s job. (Massachusetts under Bill Weld and his successors, and Florida under Jeb Bush, are notable exceptions.)

Today, however, Saturn has completed a full revolution and a new crop of reform-minded governors are reclaiming their territory in an efflores-

Reforming education seemed for a while to be Uncle Sam’s job.


cence of leadership and state-level initiatives. Some of this shift back was triggered by discontent with NCLB and some was stimulated by Race to the Top. Either way, many have perceived that the nation is still at risk—and so are its states; that looking to Washington to solve problems is mostly futile and sometimes damaging; and that, in the end, states bear primary constitutional and financial responsibility for K–12 education.

What’s more, with states running out of money and education consuming so many billions, eking out greater bang

from the available bucks is both irresistible and unavoidable.


The NGA is back in action, too, with the Common Core State Stan-dards Initiative (co-created with the Council of Chief State School Offi-cers and foundation support). That happened before the 2010 elections, which swept into office a number of governors who have set out to reform public education while cutting its budget, something virtually unprec-edented. Not all are Republicans (consider Phil Bredesen, former governor of Tennessee, and Jack Markell in Delaware—both of whose states were first-round winners under Race to the Top, also before the Ill

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2010 elections) but most are. Prominent among them are Mitch Dan-iels (R-Indiana), John Kasich (R-Ohio), Scott Walker (R-Wisconsin), and Chris Christie (R-New Jersey). This time, however, few of them would be described as moderates and their states are awash in vivid partisan clashes.

That’s mostly due to budget cuts and related policy changes. Auster-ity defines the era and the leadership and reform strategies of these chief executives. Yes, they want to boost achievement and foster more school choices. Some of them murmur about governance changes and technolo-gy. But what really seems to kindle their fires is saving money while rewrit-ing the ground rules by which teachers in their schools are employed. They want rules to help economize in response to diminished revenues, purge the ranks of incompetents, reward merit, open up the pathways by which new teachers enter and veteran teachers exit, and weaken the public sector unions that have been stalwart supporters of the status quo (and of those governors’ political opponents).

Two of the education governors from the ’80s and ’90s went on to become president; two others became secretary of education. Will today’s crop of state leaders ascend to those heights? Time will tell. But we already know this: if the governors are able to implement their reform agendas, preferably without alienating their teachers, America’s kids will be the bet-ter for it. So will our taxpayers and our competitiveness.

Reprinted by permission of the Education Gadfly (http://www.edexcellence.net/news-commentary/educa-tion-gadfly.html). © 2011 The Thomas B. Fordham Institute. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is Tests, Testing, and

Genuine School Reform, by Herbert J. Walberg. To



RichaRd a. EpstEin is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the

Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s John and Jean De Nault Task

Force on Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity. He is the Laurence A. Tisch

Professor of Law at New York University Law School and a senior lecturer at the

University of Chicago.

Gone FissionUnreasoning fear is the wrong reaction to the Japanese reactor crisis.

We can master the risks and reap the benefits of nuclear power. By

Richard A. Epstein.

There’s nothing like an undeniable catastrophe to focus attention on the proper response to risk—especially in its most elusive form, the rare and devastating occurrence. No one can overlook the one-two punch that struck Japan last winter: a monstrous earthquake and a huge tsunami, followed by harrowing reports of meltdown at the seaside Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant. In the United States, the visceral response was to boost the always strong, if sometimes latent, categorical opposition to nuclear power—and perpetuate the long-term folly that has undercut both sen-sible energy policy and public safety.

So powerful has the no-nuclear movement been that no new nuclear plant has been commissioned since the incident at Three Mile Island in 1978, which means that our aging nuclear plants remain active as their use-ful lives are extended with various repairs and upgrades. They are far inferior to any new plant that could be put into service today. At the same time, the United States dithers on designating and building a site to deal with the growing risk of spent nuclear fuel, which is generated in ever-larger quanti-ties but remains stored in inferior facilities near the plants that produce it.

ENERGY


This combination magnified the already-serious problems in Japan. First came the direct hit to the country’s nuclear plant, and then, when water to cool down the fuel rods drained or boiled away, the fuel overheat-ed. The result was a substantial release of radioactive materials into the air and sea. Moreover, many people, especially those involved in cleanup, were exposed to the risk of radiation. Our own policies have, in the name of abundant caution, created exactly the same risk in the United States.

As far back as 1982, the United States enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which empowered the federal government to locate, develop, and operate an underground nuclear waste disposal site. After thirty years, the job should have been long done. But the strength of local politics is such that it took twenty years for Congress to approve, in 2002, the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. Seven years later, under the constant prod-ding of then–Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Obama administration, in one of its more boneheaded decisions, decreed that this site was no longer an option.

The fundamental blunder of that decision lay in its indefensible approach to risk management. The correct approach is to compare the risks of


the proposal with the risks inherent in the current situation. By that stan-dard, Yucca Mountain is a no-brainer. Leaving spent fuel onsite in rickety containment facilities is just asking for trouble. Putting it in Yucca Moun-tain, which has gone through extensive safety reviews, reduces that risk by many orders of magnitude.

The 2009 decision to take Yucca Mountain off the table was justified, if at all, by an entirely bogus analysis. It’s true that no site is ever 100 percent safe. That conclusion doesn’t depend on any detailed analysis of a given site, but rather on the blunt observation that siting decisions never achieve the status of mathematical truth. By that standard, no new facility

should or would ever be built. Identify a site, and sure as night follows

day, the site falls short of per-

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fection in at least one dimension so that it, too, has to be rejected. In the meantime, the danger in the local storage facilities only grows. The cur-rent policy of inaction meets the definition of reckless: a conscious and knowing effort to raise the level of risk associated with certain essential activities.

The situation doesn’t look any better when we turn to the second ingre-dient of the Japanese tragedy, the aging facilities. Forty years is too long to keep any nuclear plant in operation. But the only way to decommission these old plants is to put up some new power source. On that issue, of course, nuclear power is not the only option on the table. In the United States, it may well be the best—if we can set aside the entrenched thinking that stands in its way.

We can write off both solar and wind energy as meaningful sources of energy. These intermittent sources of electricity are difficult to collect and expensive to transmit. Even large government subsidies have not kept these useless operations in working order. Throwing good money after bad energy projects won’t bend the laws of physics—it will only illustrate, once again, the futility of government engagement in industrial planning. Remove the solar and wind subsidies, and markets are likely to find those few niches where such power sources make sense.

The misguided affection for solar energy could easily make matters worse. In Germany, regulations require that nuclear plants be powered down so that wind energy can be better deployed. Unfortunately, it is far more risky to dial down—and then up—a nuclear reactor than it is to turn off a windmill. Goofy government subsidies, therefore, lead to an increased business risk. Nuclear power should be the anchor tenant, with wind and solar power as marginal sources.

We can, of course, switch to coal, oil, and natural gas; all the facilities for these energy sources can now be built far more safely than two genera-tions ago. But the same is true of nuclear power, so long as we are prepared to take advantage of the best technology developed overseas in places like

Leaving spent nuclear fuel onsite in rickety containment facilities is just

asking for trouble.


France, which for years has had a far more sensible nuclear power policy than the United States.

Yet taking that view will require a wholesale revision of current think-ing about how to develop nuclear power plants. Right now, anti-nuclear groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists can point with some truth to the proposition that, as Bob Herbert recently noted in the New York Times, the “total cost to ratepayers, taxpayers, and shareholders stem-ming from cost overruns, canceled plants, and stranded costs exceeded $300 billion in today’s dollars.”

Why should anyone be surprised at this appalling figure? The high cost in each of these areas is not a function of the construction costs. It’s a direct consequence of the grotesque permitting and regulatory structure put in place to supervise—make that guard against—the construction of new nuclear facilities in the United States. Quite simply, the people who cry out in opposition to nuclear power have done everything possible to thwart any sensible investment in it.

So how can we make things better? First, replace aging power plants. The worst nuclear facility that could be built using today’s technology is likely to be far safer than the safest forty-year-old plant in service.

Second, use the best, most innovative technology. There is just no reason to balk at hiring people overseas who have designed and built the best new plants now in service. On this score, as on so many others, the Obama administration has to put aside its juvenile “America first” position on international trade to allow foreign participation in these decisions.

Third, streamline the regulatory process. Delay should no longer be the inevitable outcome when determined anti-nuclear activists wear out overburdened bureaucrats. What I call “permititis”—the excessive delays caused by repetitive, mindless reviews—has to be replaced by far more expedited procedures. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should be encouraged to develop a standard waste-disposal design, which could then be modified on a limited basis to take into account the safety risks of par-

Remove the solar and wind subsidies, and markets are likely to find those

few niches where such power sources make sense.


ticular sites. Those sites should be selected through a much more abbrevi-ated process, which would forestall the next Yucca Mountain fiasco.

It’s absolutely critical to learn the right lessons from the calamity at Fukushima Daiichi. For one, there is no site anywhere in the United States remotely as risky as the rocky coast of Japan. Put a new, well-constructed plant smack dab along the San Andreas Fault and it would still never be exposed to a quake 5 percent as powerful as the Japan quake and tsunami.

The Japanese tragedy illuminates a pressing need for sound policies in the United States. If we start now, we should be able to start reducing nuclear risks in five to seven years. But if we panic about nuclear risks and hold fast to failed policies, it could well be twenty or thirty more years before the situation starts to improve. And remember the potential cost of those outsize delays. If and when they lead to a nuclear meltdown, we can thank the anti-nuclear activists whose retrograde analysis of risk made catastrophe that much more possible. The road to nuclear hell can be paved with good intentions.

Reprinted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas). © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Free Markets under

Siege: Cartels, Politics, and Social Welfare, by Richard

A. Epstein. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.

hooverpress.org.


AbbAs MilAni is co-director of the Hoover Institution’s Iran Democracy Project, a

member of Hoover’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and

the International Order, and a Hoover research fellow. He is also the Hamid and

Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, where

he is a visiting professor of political science.

It Started with the ShahHoover fellow Abbas Milani on the rebellions in the Muslim world—

and the monarch who set them off. An interview with Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose, host of the PBS program Charlie Rose, explores the Iranian revolution with Hoover research fellow Abbas Milani, author of the new book The Shah (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Highlights of that interview:

Charlie Rose: Abbas Milani’s new book, The Shah, is a biography of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled Iran between 1941 and 1979. His rule was a period of modernization but also oppression. It fueled the Iranian revolution of 1979. After so many years, tell me the significance of this man, the shah.Abbas Milani: I think with every passing day or year we are recognizing that his fall was really the beginning of almost everything that has shaped the Middle East in the past thirty years, from the Afghanistan war, to the Iran-Iraq war, to everything. The rise of radical Islam. So he has become, and his fall has become, the pivotal event, I think, of the latter part of the twentieth century, and understanding his fall enables us to understand what is going on in the Middle East today. And understanding his fall

IRAN


makes us understand what is going on inside Iran today. Without that, I don’t think we can.Rose: What does it explain about what’s going on in Iran today?Milani: Essentially I think the coalition of forces that came together to overthrow the shah in 1979 are now very much the core of the Green

A 1953 photo shows Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the ruler of Iran, and his second wife,

Princess Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiary. The shah, an ally of the United States for decades,

was toppled in 1979 in a revolution that brought Shiite religious leaders to power.


Revolution with one exception: some of the conservative clerics like [Aya-tollah Ali] Khamenei are on the other side and some of the hoodlums and street toughs and some segments of the poor that are getting paid by the regime have joined that minority. They are the government, and the bulk of the society is essentially trying to get what they thought they were promised in 1979, which was a democracy, and has not been yet delivered.Rose: So their revolution was hijacked.Milani: I think that’s a perfect way of putting it. The revolution in Iran was precisely a democratic revolution.Rose: And therefore the question that often is raised is: can the revolution that is sweeping across the Middle East from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya (and having impact in other places) be hijacked?

Milani: If you look at the Iranian experience, you have to be worried that it could be. Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris—a month before coming to power—said everything that was right to make him look like a democratic leader. He had another agenda but he was hiding it. So today if the Mus-lim Brotherhood in Egypt, for example, says all the right things, as they do on their website, I become a little bit anxious. I have experienced the Iranian case, where Khomeini said all the right things, and then when he came to power he changed and literally told the people that he had lied.Rose: If in fact there is a similarity or a fear of a similar kind of event tak-ing place, in what ways are they not similar?Milani: With the Egyptian case, the very important difference is that Hos-ni Mubarak had allowed the independence of the army to be maintained. There was an independent army that could act. The shah had turned the army essentially into his private fiefdom. It was called the royal army and he had made sure that not a single charismatic officer who could potentially be a threat to him remained in the army. He basically threw them out, retired them. . . . And this is now December 1978—the shah is about to leave Iran—but the shah refuses to turn over the control of the military.

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“His fall was really the beginning of almost everything that has shaped

the Middle East in the past thirty years, from the Afghanistan war, to the

Iran-Iraq war, to everything.”


Rose: And if he had?Milani: I think if he had, then we might have seen a scenario more like Egypt than the scenario we saw in Iran. Rose: One of the things said, and you are a historian on the case, is that the first thing that Khomeini and the people supporting him did was to assassinate most of the top leadership of the shah’s military.Milani: Well, absolutely. He did two things. He didn’t make the mistakes that the United States made in Iraq. He didn’t dismantle the military com-pletely; he just dismantled the leadership and brought in a new cadre of officers. And then he gradually built a parallel military called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC. And with every passing year the IRGC has been strengthened to the detriment of the military. So we now have two militaries, one very insignificant.Rose: So tell me your picture of Iran today. Khamenei is the supreme leader?Milani: Khamenei is the supreme leader. His base of power is essentially the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards.Rose: And they’re more loyal to him than they are to Ahmadinejad or anyone else.

Milani: They are more loyal to themselves, I think, right now, because they are the power center, and they’re becoming an economic juggernaut. They own about half of the country now. Literally. About half the economy.Rose: So therefore it is argued that sanctions can have an impact because sanctions can deny them their source of revenue.Milani: I think that’s absolutely true. Sanctions are beginning to have an impact. Or better yet, sanctions were beginning to have an impact and then something happened on the way to the forum. That is, Gadhafi went berserk and crazy. The price of oil went up. And the [Iranian] regime that was very much hurting now has much more revenue to try to weather the storm that is the result of the sanctions.Rose: Is it unlikely that a revolution could take place in Iran?

“I don’t think the same thing that happened in Egypt and Libya and

Tunisia is unlikely to happen in Iran. . . . I think it definitely will happen.”


Milani: If by revolution you mean . . . Rose: I mean the same thing that is happening in Libya.Milani: I don’t think the same thing that happened in Egypt and Libya and Tunisia is unlikely to happen in Iran. I think it is unlikely that it won’t happen. I definitely think it will happen.Rose: And soon?Milani: That I am not sure about, because the regime has shown the capacity to exercise absolute brutality, and it has still the financial capac-ity to keep this machinery of oppression going. And when you have this machinery going, you can stay in power. The shah lost the revolution because he lost the will to stay in power. He became absolutely weak and vacillating in the last few months. He couldn’t make decisions. He was weak by nature. Now he had cancer and he wasn’t getting the right kind of advice from the Carter administration. He was getting different advice. All of this worked to make the revolution happen.Rose: I want to come back and talk about the shah, but let me just stay with Iran today. What would be an igniting factor to bring the people back into the streets, as they were after the election?Milani: Nobody knows. Who would have thought that the burning of . . .Rose: . . . an immolation in Tunisia would start it.Milani: Or in Egypt, that a website, a Facebook site, would start it. In Iran it really began two years ago. It was the stolen election and suddenly you had three million people in the streets. And the regime has gone out of its way in the last year and a half to make it extremely costly to con-tinue to come into the streets. But the people have continued to come on. When the regime arrested Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, people defied the regime’s threats and came into the streets.Rose: Mohammad-Javad Larijani was on this program, and I said to him: will you guarantee me that I can come to Iran and interview Mousavi and Karroubi? He said yes. Do you think that would ever happen?Milani: I think Mousavi and Karroubi right now are in prison. The regime doesn’t dare say they are in prison, but keeps saying they are under house arrest with their contacts to the outside world cut.Rose: And their families say they are no longer at home and they don’t know where they are.


Milani: Precisely. And we can’t get in touch with them. We can’t call. We go to their homes, we ring the bell, nobody answers. Not even Orwell could have thought this through. The spokesperson for the judiciary says Mr. Mousavi is at his home. He didn’t answer the door because he doesn’t want to answer the door. To have the audacity to say this, to look into the camera and say this. I think Jon Stewart caught it quite beautifully the other night. He said that the Iranian regime has militarized irony. They have weaponized irony. They say things that are remarkably, overtly, clearly a lie, but they say them with certainty.Rose: What about Mr. Ahmadinejad?Milani: He is trying to play a very interesting game, I think. He is trying to begin to create for himself an independent base of power. And if you look at what he has been saying and what his son’s father-in-law—Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, a very controversial figure—has

“He was modernizing, authoritarian, weak, vacillating.” Protesters carry an effigy of Iran’s

shah, who died in exile in 1980, during a demonstration in Tehran in 2008. The shah and his

American support still figure prominently in the worldview of the Islamic Republic and its

leaders.


been saying, they’re saying a lot of things that the Iranian middle class want to say. That is, that religion shouldn’t interfere in people’s private lives. Talking about the greatness of Iran. Talking about that there would have been no Islam if there wasn’t an Iran. This is virtually what he said. So he’s moving gingerly, I think, into creating this indepen-dent base.Rose: It’s hard to use American definitions, but becoming more moder-ate? Or more nationalistic?Milani: Giving his rhetoric more of a nationalistic color to make it more appealing to the force that I think has the future of Iran, which is the moderate democratic middle classes and the working classes that are their potential allies.

Rose: And how do you think the powers that be—the supreme leader and Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard—are looking at the revolu-tion that’s spreading? Take Libya.Milani: They are absolutely frightened by it.Rose: Because it shows what happens even if you try to resist with force. The power of the people in the streets.Milani: Absolutely. The head of the IRGC intelligence division, a very frightful cleric, recently gave a fascinating interview in which he said he thinks there is going to be much more trouble and that the Americans are planning to make another attempt at the revolution in the coming few months. So they clearly anticipate trouble on the horizon. And I think they think that’s when there will be blowback from Tunisia and Egypt and everywhere else. Like Gadhafi in Libya, the Iranian regime has shown that there is no limit to what they will do to stay in power. If you add all the people who have been killed in Iran over the past thirty years in the opposition, it is greater than the number that Gadhafi has killed. Rose: Take me back to the shah. What kind of ruler was he? Milani: He was modernizing, authoritarian, weak, vacillating. That’s the

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“[Jon Stewart] said that the Iranian regime has militarized irony.

They have weaponized irony.”


complication of his character. In the Mossadegh era, he is exactly the weak and vacillating character we see in 1978. But when he feels in power, as he does in 1974, he has no problem making decisions. He could sit behind a table and order the country to become a one-party system. And, to the dread of the United States, he increased the price of oil. He began a nuclear program that the United States was not in favor of. But then, two or three years later, he wouldn’t drink a glass of water without asking the American ambassador whether it was a good idea. It’s really remarkable, the two sides of his character.Rose: If in fact he had resisted Khomeini with force, he would have been successful? Or not?

Milani: I think if he had made one-third of the concessions he made in 1978 back in 1975, he would have absolutely survived. And Khamenei has taken the exact wrong lesson from the shah’s fall. Khamenei’s conclu-sion is that the shah fell—he’s said this several times—because he made concessions. But the truth is the shah fell, just like Khamenei will fall, because he didn’t make concessions when he was in a position to make concessions. That’s why I begin every chapter in the book with a quote from Richard II. The shah is just like Richard II. He is very much almost hectoring when he is in power. And then when the first sign of trouble comes, he basically says, come on, take the throne. Nobody was after the throne. People just wanted their lands back in Richard. In the case of the shah, initially, people just wanted a little more democracy. But he wasn’t willing to give them that. Instead of opening the system in 1975, he cre-ated a one-party system.Rose: And then it ends up with a man who didn’t have a country. Nobody wanted him.Milani: And that is truly one of the most incredible things. A man who was an ally of the United States for thirty-seven years, an ally of the West, for a year he was, as Kissinger called him, a Flying Dutchman. He couldn’t get a visa to this country until a lot of people intervened.

“Like Gadhafi in Libya, the Iranian regime has shown that there is no limit

to what they will do to stay in power.”


Rose: At the time of the Iranian election and the consequences of the election results, when Iranians in large number were in the streets, should the president of the United States have identified with them, and if he had, would it have made a difference?Milani: I definitely think he should have. He did identify but belatedly and very gingerly. I think if he had done it, it would not necessarily have changed the result, but it would have very much emboldened the opposi-tion. And I think it would have given them strength . . .

Rose: Because they would have known that they were being heard.Milani: Absolutely. And because in the Middle East—and I think you probably know this, Egypt I think is no exception—people believe that the West, the United States particularly and Britain, have far more power than the United States and Britain might in fact have. They believe in conspiracy theory. So they parse out every word that Carter said during the shah’s crisis, and every word Obama says with the kind of a care that Kremlinologists used to do during the Kremlin days.Rose: Reading the tea leaves.Milani: They would absolutely read the tea leaves. And they’re doing it right now and they say the United States is now on our side.

Reprinted by permission. © 2011 Charlie Rose LLC. All rights reserved.

“Khamenei has taken the exact wrong lesson from the shah’s fall . . . that

the shah fell because he made concessions. But the truth is the shah fell,

just like Khamenei will fall, because he didn’t make concessions.”

Available from the Hoover Press is The Myth of the Great

Satan: A New Look at America’s Relations with Iran, by

Abbas Milani. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



Daniel PiPes is the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover

Institution.

Will Change Come to the House of Saud?Reforms, if any, will depend on how modernizers and hard-liners

settle their differences. By Daniel Pipes.

It is perhaps the most unusual and opaque country on the planet—a place without a public movie theater, where women may not drive, where men sell women’s lingerie, where a single-button self-destruct system can per-haps destroy the oil infrastructure, and where rulers spurn even the patina of democracy. In its place, the rulers of Saudi Arabia have developed some highly original and successful mechanisms to keep power.

Three features define the regime of Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz: control-ling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, subscribing to the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, and possessing by far the world’s largest petroleum reserves. Islam defines identity, Wahhabism inspires global ambitions, oil wealth funds the enterprise.

More profoundly, wealth beyond avarice permits Saudis to deal with modernity on their own terms. They shun jacket and tie, exclude women from the workspace, and even aspire to replace Greenwich Mean Time with Mecca Mean Time.

Not many years ago, the key debate in the kingdom was between the monarchical and Taliban versions of Wahhabism—an extreme reading of Islam versus a fanatical one. But today, thanks in large part to Abdullah’s efforts to “tame Wahhabi zeal,” the most retrograde country has taken

SAUDI ARABIA


some cautious steps to join the modern world. These efforts have many dimensions, from children’s education to mechanisms for selecting politi-cal leaders, but perhaps the most crucial one is the battle among the ulema, the Islamic men of religion, between reformers and hard-liners.

The arcane terms of this dispute make it difficult for outsiders to fol-low. Fortunately, Roel Meijer, a Dutch Middle East specialist, provides an expert’s guide to arguments in the kingdom in his article “Reform in Saudi Arabia: The Gender-Segregation Debate” (Middle East Policy, winter 2010). He demonstrates how gender mixing (ikhtilat in Arabic) inspires a debate central to the kingdom’s future and how that debate has evolved.

Current stringencies about gender separation, he notes, reflect less age-old custom than the success of the Sahwa movement in the aftermath of two traumatic events in 1979: the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by radicals in the Osama bin Laden mold.

When Abdullah formally ascended to the monarchy in mid-2005, he ushered in an easing of what critics call gender apartheid. Two key recent events toward greater ikhtilat took place in 2009: a change of high govern-ment personnel in February and the September opening of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, with its ostentatious mixed-gender classes and even dances.

Debate over ikhtilat ensued, with jousting among royals, political fig-ures, the ulema, and intellectuals. “Although the position of women has improved since 9/11, ikhtilat demarcates the battle lines between reform-ists and conservatives [i.e., hard-liners],” Meijer writes. “Any attempt to diminish its enforcement is regarded as a direct attack on the standing of conservatives and Islam itself.”

Meijer concludes by noting that “it is extremely difficult to determine whether reforms are successful and whether the liberals or conservatives are making gains. Although the general trend is in favor of the reformists, reform is piecemeal, hesitant, equivocal, and strongly resisted.”

The most retrograde country has taken some cautious steps to join the

modern world.


The state under Abdullah has promoted a more open and tolerant Islam but, Meijer argues, “it is obvious from the ikhtilat debate that the battle has not been won. Many Saudis are fed up with the inordinate interference of religious authorities in their lives, and one can even speak of an anticlerical movement. The liberals, however, speak a language that is alien to the world of official Wahhabism and the majority of Saudis and is therefore hardly likely to influence them.”

In brief, Saudis are in mid-debate, with the future course of reform as yet unpredictable. Not only do elite and public opinion play a role, but, complicating matters, much hangs on the quirks of longevity and per-sonality—in particular, how long Abdullah, who is eighty-seven, remains in charge and whether his ailing half-brother crown prince, Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, eighty-two, will succeed him.

Because Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most influential Muslim countries, the stakes involved are high, not just within the kingdom but for Islam and for Muslims generally. The debate over modernity deserves our full attention.

Reprinted by permission of National Review Online. © 2010 National Review, Inc. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is The End of Modern

History in the Middle East, by Bernard Lewis. To order,


In Saudi Arabia, much hangs on the quirks of longevity and personality.


Joshua TeiTelbaum is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a

contributor to Hoover’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism

and the International Order. He teaches at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan,

Israel, and is principal research associate at the Global Research in International

Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya.

The Kingdom of CautionThe land where stability vies ceaselessly with stagnation. By Joshua

Teitelbaum.

The year started out poorly for Riyadh. In January, the Lebanese gov-ernment it had backed fell because of pressure from Hezbollah. An ally, Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, was thrown out of office by a popular rebellion; soon after, kindred spirit Hosni Mubarak, president of Egypt and a close partner against Iranian influence, made his ignomini-ous departure. Then came eruptions in Morocco, Jordan, Libya, Yemen, Oman, Kuwait, and—most ominously for Riyadh—Bahrain.

Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family, Sunnis like the Saudi royals, were rattled by the mass demonstrations of the Shiite majority. The Saudis could not help but take notice in light of their own restive Shiite popula-tion in the oil-rich Eastern Province.

A few, small demonstrations took place in Saudi Arabia and petitions (three petitions, at latest count) were circulated. A “day of rage” was called for March 11. But although the petitions demanded more participation in decision-making, better governance, and an end to corruption, they did not call for revolution. The slogan heard in Tahrir Square, “The people

SAUDI ARABIA


demand an end to the regime,” has yet to be heard in the streets of Riyadh and Jeddah.

DEAL ING WITH D ISSENT AND SOCIAL CHANGESaudi Arabia has gone through tremendous social change since it was established in 1932. The discovery of oil, economic growth, and a boom-ing population all put strain on a very traditional country. Other political systems might have cracked under the strain, but the Al Saud have put into place a system that has so far met these challenges. They seem well positioned to weather the current one as well.

The founding fathers harnessed the tribalistic nature of Saudi society to the enterprise of state formation. Tribes were used as a military force, and tribal values such as kinship played a key role in the state’s development. The sons and grandsons of founder Ibn Saud hold all-important cabinet posts and govern the most important provinces. Using classic coup-proof-ing methods, King Faisal divided military forces between family factions and drew internal security forces from the most loyal tribes of the Najdi heartland.

Crucially, the Wahhabi religious establishment, so important for the ruling family’s legitimacy, was co-opted to support slow, careful modernization in the form of economic and social development, while conservative values were protected. King Faisal was the master of this approach. He instituted women’s education, television broadcasting, and the expansion of a government bureaucracy many times over to handle the new oil wealth and provide jobs for a growing population. He challenged the conservative Wahhabi religious establishment and won.

The Al Saud family struck an alliance with American presidents in which the United States promised to protect oil installations in exchange for access by U.S. companies and the free flow of oil.

Using classic coup-proofing methods, King Faisal divided military forces

between family factions, and drew internal security forces from the most

loyal tribes.


As oil income became significant, the Saudi royals used a distributive model to develop the country. Huge infrastructure projects, educational institutions, hospitals, and an enlarged military benefited many. Housing projects for previously nomadic or seminomadic Bedouin brought mod-ern conveniences, along with closer control by the central government. Huge subsidies for fuel and other goods, along with a stock market that the government occasionally propped up, saw to it that the wealth was distributed to a large swath of people.

But as the population grew, it became harder to distribute the wealth. Nor was it distributed equally. People in the Hijaz complained that Najdis were favored, and the Shiites of the Eastern Province suffered both eco-nomic and religious discrimination.

Corruption and nepotism among the royal family became a common complaint. While residents born during the early years were quite aware of the tremendous progress the Al Saud had brought the country through oil wealth, younger generations know only the Al Saud, and are less apprecia-tive. Through the technology so readily available to them, they can exam-

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ine life in other places and share it with their friends. The government can no longer monopolize information.

Saudi Arabia has always had political dissent. The 1950s and 1960s saw the influence of Nasserism, communism, socialism, and Baathism. The reli-gious establishment helped combat such challenges from the left. Where violence occurred, such as among the disenfranchised Shiites in the Eastern Province in the 1950s and in 1979–80, the government did not hesitate to send in the Saudi national guard to restore order with a heavy hand.

Since the 1990s, two waves of political challenges have swept the coun-try, each resulting in some reforms. The first, catalyzed by opposition to the presence of U.S. troops in the country during the 1990–91 Gulf War, resulted in the announcement of a consultative council appointed by the Al Saud. The second wave came after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by a mostly Saudi Al-Qaeda cell. Reformers took advantage of those events to press their demands. The consultative coun-cil was expanded, municipal elections (for half the seats of the municipal councils—the rest would remain royal appointees) were announced, and national dialogues were held. Many called this period the “Riyadh spring of 2003.” It ended with a series of Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in May and the arrest of several reformers in March 2004.

The Al-Qaeda insurrection allowed the government to crack down on the reformists. But the ascension of King Abdullah to the throne in 2005 gave reformers fresh hope, as did the municipal elections finally held that year. The Al-Qaeda insurrection was essentially suppressed by 2007, although sporadic attacks still occur. Its suppression has contributed to the reopening of political space for the resurgence of the reformist activity we see today.

RIYADH VERSUS THE “ARAB SPRING”The revolt in Tunisia caught the Saudi royal family at an awkward moment. King Abdullah, eighty-seven, had been out of the country

Other political systems might have cracked under the strain of change,

but the Al Saud have put into place a system that has so far met these

challenges.


since November, when he flew to the United States for an operation. The crown prince, Sultan, nearly as old and also known to be ill, had flown back from Morocco to stand in for Abdullah, but day-to-day matters were actually being run by Prince Nayif, the minister of the interior and potential crown prince to Sultan, and widely considered to be quite conservative and close to the religious establishment. Con-servatives may have been satisfied with this line of succession, but it did not portend well for younger reformers influenced by the revolts sweeping the Arab world.

The Saudi government censors the Internet, but not completely, and the Qatar-based news station Al-Jazeera is beamed into every Saudi home. Just as Tunisia’s “Jasmine Revolution” was gaining steam in late December and early January, the government announced that all blogs and news sites would now need to apply for a license. The new regulations had been discussed for a while, but the royal family saw fit to announce them exactly when social media were gaining prominence as a tool of the Tuni-sian revolt.

Unequal wealth distribution, corruption, inflation, unemployment, and lack of freedom have bothered Saudis for many years. Demonstra-tions are rare, and illegal, but the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Associa-tion requested to stage a sit-in protest in late December. Permission was denied, and the group publicly demanded the firing and prosecution of Prince Nayif in early January. Unemployed teachers had already demon-strated in August, and did so again in January. Then several Saudi women began a Facebook campaign to allow women to vote for municipal coun-cils. Clearly, grievances were becoming more public.

TR ICKLE OF PROTESTS , FLOOD OF MONEYWhile bloggers were discussing events in Tunisia and then in Egypt, two events put a damper on possible contagion from those countries. First, top leaders condemned the uprisings. The widely respected king, from

Saudi Arabia has always had political dissent. The 1950s and 1960s saw

the influence of Nasserism, communism, socialism, and Baathism.


his sickbed in Morocco, came out strongly against the demonstrations in Egypt and in support of Mubarak. Demonstrators were inciting fitna, or discord, he charged, and therefore going against the traditional Islam-ic order. The general mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh, echoed the king, accusing the demonstrators of sowing discord between the people and the rulers.

The main event occupying Saudis in late January was the disastrous flooding in Jeddah, which killed at least ten people. On January 28, police arrested dozens of protesters in Jeddah who were outraged by the floods. People were making connections between their own government’s lack of accountability and what was going on in Tahrir Square.

Attention moved back to the local implications of what was going on in Egypt as events became more dramatic there in February. Taking their cue from Tahrir’s main slogan, a Facebook page was opened under the title “The people demand reform of the regime,” stopping just short of Tahrir’s call for toppling the regime. The group called for an elected parliament, political freedoms, the right to organize political parties, women’s rights, and a constitutional monarchy.

On February 10, Islamists announced the formation of the Islamic Umma Party (IUP). Most of the founders seemed to be clerics not con-nected to the religious establishment. They sent a letter notifying the royal court that the party had been established. Speaking in an Islamic idiom, the party demanded political freedoms, elections to the legislature, and the right to engage in advocacy of peaceful political reform. Political par-ties are illegal in Saudi Arabia. The regime therefore did not take kindly to the establishment of the IUP, arresting several leaders.

But the regime tried to show its willingness to lend an ear. Prince Kha-lid al-Faisal, a contender for the throne and governor of Mecca Province, where Jeddah is, invited five media personalities to a televised briefing after the floods. Among them was Fuad al-Farhan, a blogger who had once been arrested and banned from traveling. Khalid asked Farhan to send his

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The king responded to protests this year in a time-tested manner: he

offered government aid.


regards to the “young people on Twitter.” In another move, a Facebook page was apparently set up by Khalid bin Abd al-Aziz al-Tuwayjri, the chief of the royal court, on which people were invited to fax in their com-plaints—something they could already do.

While still in Morocco, the king responded to protests in a time-tested manner: he offered government aid. The government said the king would write off $156 million in housing loans. The governor of Riyadh Province, Prince Salman, announced the expansion of a food bank named for the king. But the biggest announcement was timed for the king’s return February 23. With oil prices at over $100 a barrel filling his coffers, the king opened the Privy Purse. Saudi Arabia would introduce nineteen new measures, at an estimated cost of over $36 bil-lion, aimed primarily at unemployed youth, to help them with unem-

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal meets with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

in July 2009. In early 2011, the foreign minister reacted angrily to suggestions that Saudi

Arabia needed political reform, saying “change will come through the citizens of this

kingdom and not through foreign fingers; we don’t need them. We will cut any finger that

crosses into the kingdom.”


ployment benefits and affordable housing. Huge sums were also allo-cated for higher-income students studying abroad at their own expense. Grants were to be made for household expenses and renovations (the


latter a gesture to those with homes damaged by the Jeddah floods); a temporary 15 percent salary increase for state employees was made permanent.

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In the meantime, events in the kingdom and the region as a whole began a slide in the Saudi stock market, where millions of Saudis gambled their fortunes. But, true to form, it was reported that government funds had bought stock in all sectors, causing a recovery. Once again, the state had come to the financial rescue of its citizens.

“DAY OF RAGE”? NOT YETWhile the Al Saud timed the aid package for the king’s return and mass welcome by a grateful population, Saudi dissidents riding the wave of protests in the Arab world were preparing another kind of welcome. This was in the form of a “Letter from Saudi Youth” calling for a national dialogue conference with binding recommendations and massive gov-ernmental reforms that would allow young people a more active role in decision-making. A few days later, another petition appeared with a bit more gravitas. Signed initially by more than one hundred leading liberal Saudi academics, businessmen, and activists, the “Declaration of National Reform” called for the people to be the source of legitimacy, for the coun-try to move in the direction of a constitutional monarchy, and for over-sight of government spending to ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Prominent Shiite activists signed as well.

Members of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite population, who make up 10–15 percent of citizens and are concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Prov-ince, just across the King Fahd Causeway from Shiite-majority Bahrain, have often demonstrated, including violently, and have been put down with equal violence. Throughout Saudi history, they have protested dis-crimination and persecution by their Al Saud rulers, who draw their inspiration from the viscerally anti-Shiite Wahhabi trend of Sunni Islam. Many Saudis distrust the Shiites, believing them to be agents of Iranian influence.

It was no surprise, then, that the first serious signs of public unrest would come from the Shiites. After protests by fellow Shiites in Bah-rain in mid-February, a small but vocal demonstration was held in Awwamiya to protest the detention of Saudi Shiite activists. The government responded by releasing the activists, but this only drew another demonstration in Qatif the next week calling for more prison-


ers to be released. Around February 27, the authorities arrested a Shiite cleric for calling for a constitutional monarchy. Yet true to its carrot-and-stick approach, at the same time the regime allowed the reopen-ing of several Shiite mosques in Al-Khobar. Demonstrators could be heard chanting “no violence, no violence” (silmiyya, silmiyya), like the protesters in Bahrain and Egypt.

Riyadh was understandably anxious—even desperate—to make sure that the Bahraini royal family survived its most serious challenge to date. On February 17 the Saudis called a meeting in Manama of the Gulf Coop-eration Council foreign ministers, who pledged full political, economic, security, and defense support for the Al Khalifa of Bahrain. Together with Washington, Riyadh tried to move the Bahrainis towards talks and com-promise.

The message was clear: “The kingdom of Saudi Arabia stands with all its capabilities behind the state and the brotherly people of Bahrain,” read an official statement. On March 14, around one thousand troops from the Gulf Cooperation Council “Peninsula Shield” forces crossed over into Bahrain to protect the Al Khalifa.

The calls for a “Day of Rage” on March 11 after Friday prayers seem to have emerged from the Shiite activists, influenced by similar calls in Bah-rain and Egypt. Several Facebook pages were established for the event, but did not seem to gather more than a few thousand “likes.” The low number could be attributed to Saudi blocking, but just as easily could be a result of most Saudis not being willing to cross the line.

The regime made it clear that no demonstrations would be tolerat-ed. It mobilized close to ten thousand troops to be ready for protests in the Eastern Province, and went through another round of arrests and releases in the region. Surely in the back of the rulers’ minds were the violent Iranian-inspired demonstrations in 1979–80 known to locals as the “Intifada of the Eastern Province.” The Council of Senior Scholars, representing the religious establishment, published a paean to the regime as a rock of stability and unity based on Islamic principles, hinting at outside influences that had caused discord and crisis and warning against deviant (unnamed) intellectual and partisan trends. As before, it stated that the proper Islamic way to redress grievances was through (silent-


ly offered) advice, not proclamations and demonstrations. All mosque preachers and imams received orders from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs to read out a warning against demonstrations. The regime worked its tribal and regional ties.

The regime hoped that it would not have to use violence, opening itself up to the kind of condemnation heaped upon Ben Ali and Mubarak. But it seemed clear that it would not hesitate to do so.

To many young people, the commands to be deferential must have sounded anachronistic, out of touch with the Internet age. Yet the mass-ing of troops and police and the warnings from the highest authorities had their effect. The Day of Rage did not materialize. Worshippers left the mosques peacefully.

U .S . -SAUDI RELAT IONS: I T ’S COMPLICATEDAs the United States searched for a clear, meaningful response to the events in Egypt, Bahrain, and eventually Saudi Arabia itself, the Al Saud were puzzled and eventually angered. In the Saudi view, Washington had treated Mubarak shabbily, and reports said that King Abdullah had upbraided President Obama about his treatment of a U.S. ally. The head of Al-Arabiyya satellite channel, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, wrote that Obama was encouraging Iran and meddling in Egyptian affairs; the Egyp-tians in the street would not requite America’s love. The veteran foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, spoke sharply of “interference in the internal affairs of Egypt by some countries.”

Obama sent the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, to calm the Saudis and others in the region. But on March 7, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley said Washington supported the right of peaceful assembly, “including [in] Saudi Arabia.” Saud al-Fais-al was livid. The Saudis supported dialogue, he said. “Change will come through the citizens of this kingdom and not through foreign fingers; we don’t need them. We will cut any finger that crosses into the kingdom.” The last phrase may have referred to Iran as well. Relations appeared to be under strain. An unnamed U.S. official sought to calm the Saudis in an interview, stressing that relations were firm and based on principles and mutual interests. Still, it was clear that the United States now believed


that democracy in Egypt and reform in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were the keys to stability.

The Al Saud will probably have to give, somewhere. But it is sure to be a tough sell. Despite the growing influence of the young, Saudi Arabia remains a very traditional society. Too much reform, too fast, and the rul-ing family will see its conservative base erode. King Abdullah will have to continue the balancing act.

The Al Saud could take several steps without undermining the cur-rent order. They could allow long-delayed municipal elections, last held in 2005. They could consider letting women participate. Women could also be allowed to drive, a symbol of modernity that many Saudis want. (Prince al-Walid bin Talal, who proposed this concrete step in an interview, said it would allow the kingdom to send home more than 750,000 foreign driv-ers.) The government could boost employment. It could allow elections for the appointed Consultative Council, as demanded by the reformers, initially vetting the candidates as Iran does but promising entirely free elections in four years.

In the meantime, the steps taken to defuse the current crisis seem to be working. The Sunni majority is not culturally accustomed to mass dem-onstrations; the violence in Libya reminded many Saudis of the conse-quences of chaos. Tribal and family connections remain very strong and militate against organized opposition. The young generation still bears watching, though. Connections made online might someday compete with traditional social ties. But tribes have websites, too.

Columnist Maureen Dowd once remarked that observing change in Saudi Arabia is like watching a snail on Ambien. The Saudis will have to consider moving faster. No doubt, however, they are painfully aware of what Samuel Huntington once termed the king’s dilemma, that “limited reforms introduced from the top often increase rather than decrease bottom-up demand for more radical change.” The shah of

The Saudi regime sees itself as a patron of Bahrain’s ruling family. Should

the Bahraini ruling family fall, it would be a very bad sign for

the Al Saud.


Iran’s “white revolution” was a case in point, as was Gorbachev’s pere-stroika. Saudis are therefore likely to prefer that reform arrive at a snail’s pace.

Reprinted from Advancing a Free Society (www.advancingafreesociety.org). © 2011 by the Board of Trust-ees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Saudi Arabia and the

New Strategic Landscape, by Joshua Teitelbaum. To



Lieutenant CoLoneL Leif eCkhoLm (USAF) is a national security fellow at

the Hoover Institution.

Extending an Invitation to ReformThe United States has always been among the kingdom’s best friends.

Who better to help it change? By Leif Eckholm.

Among our Arab allies, none is more important than Saudi Arabia, and none is more controversial. The invaluable security partnership, birthed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and King Abdul-Aziz in 1945, has endured despite a clash of values and cultures. Now, as Arab leaders from Tunisia to Yemen fight, flee, or face unprecedented political pressure, the United States must ask itself whether it can support democratic hopes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya while settling for stability in Saudi Arabia. Or should it more forcefully pressure the Saudis on political reform? With its influence, America can promote change. Washington should proceed cautiously, yet deliberately, to inspire meaningful reform in Saudi Arabia to preserve this long-standing partnership and protect U.S. interests in the Middle East.

THE U .S .–SAUDI PARTNERSHIPThe U.S. foray into the Middle East came much later than the British involvement, and in markedly different fashion. Inspired by business rath-er than colonialism, U.S. entrepreneurs in search of oil entered the Middle East through Saudi Arabia in 1933. A strategic relationship was defined in 1943 when the Roosevelt administration declared that “the defense of

SAUDI ARABIA


Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.” Within a few years, what had begun as a business relationship between American indus-try and the Saudi monarchy evolved into a lasting partnership between governments, built upon economic and military security.

The free flow of Saudi oil to U.S. markets became an essential compo-nent to the economic growth of both nations. America enjoyed absolute energy independence in 1950, but the post–World War II U.S. economic boom eventually created demand for more oil than American wells could produce. By 1949, Saudi wells were accounting for slightly more than 5 percent of total world production. This increased the global oil supply and ushered unprecedented wealth into the kingdom. America contributed heavily to the development of Saudi infrastructure, which in turn fueled growth in American industry. Saudi direct investment in U.S. financial markets skyrocketed. In 1974, Saudi Arabia invested almost 20 percent of its oil revenue in the United States; by 1979, the Saudis had accrued the largest single holding of dollars and U.S. government securities. The Saudi government effectively tied its growth to the U.S. economy, and as the economic ties strengthened, a vital security partnership formed along-side it.

Starting in 1942, Allied air forces gained access to air routes across the Arabian Peninsula as well as safe passage for significant wartime resupplies that flowed up the Persian Gulf. In exchange for military access and oil, King Abdul-Aziz looked to the United States to preserve the kingdom’s territorial integrity against the ambitions of Iraq and Jordan in the 1940s and against those of Egypt in the 1950s. The completion of Dhahran air base in 1946 embodied the official U.S. interest in Saudi security.

The United States Military and Training Mission (USMTM), estab-lished in 1953, is devoted to advising and assisting the Saudi armed forces with military planning, organization, and training methods, and remains the cornerstone of U.S. military relations with Saudi Arabia today. Mas-sive arms purchases in later decades brought F-15 fighter aircraft, high- ©

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In 1943 the Roosevelt administration declared that “the defense of Saudi

Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.”

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Saudi King Abdullah, right, and then-president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt express their friend-

ship in Riyadh at the 2007 Arab League Summit. After the Egyptian revolution early this

year, many Saudi intellectuals appealed to their government for political reforms such as a

constitution, the rule of law, women’s rights, direct elections, and an independent judiciary.

The Saudi ruling house, however, resisted.


ly sensitive airborne warning and control aircraft (AWACS), tanks, and sophisticated weaponry to the kingdom. Protection of the vital oil fields remained a unifying goal, and the United States viewed a more capable Saudi military, one able to fend off regional and domestic threats, as key to attaining it. This mutual interest in military and economic growth pow-ered the relationship for more than fifty years, but it was a shared ideology that made it nearly unbreakable.

In the context of the Cold War, battling the spread of communism throughout the Middle East and beyond became the geostrategic glue that bound Washington and Riyadh for half a century. For decades Saudi Ara-bia repeatedly joined U.S. efforts to battle the spread of communism in its immediate neighborhood and around the globe. In the Middle East, the two governments worked in concert to stem Soviet influence in Nasser’s Egypt and South Yemen and to weaken the Marxist government in Ethio-pia. Farther afield, Saudi financial support bolstered American anti-com-munist initiatives in Angola and Nicaragua. This collaboration motivated President Reagan to declare in 1985 that the “friendship and cooperation between our governments and peoples are precious jewels whose value we should never underestimate.” He delivered this statement, of course, dur-ing a time of peak cooperation in Southwest Asia, when the epic struggle between the Soviets, the Afghan mujahideen, and the Arab jihadists accel-erated the end of the Cold War. After Soviet-led communism came to an end, there was a gap in shared ideological purpose. But Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and threatening overtures toward Saudi Arabia in the summer of 1990, filled the void.

In August 1990, just days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd agreed to the deployment of over 500,000 U.S. soldiers on Saudi soil. Saudi support throughout Desert Storm was absolute. In the decade that followed, command, control, and execution of the U.S. mission to secure the southern no-fly zone largely occurred from within the kingdom. This

The Saudi government effectively tied its growth to the U.S. economy,

and as the economic ties strengthened, a vital security partnership

formed alongside it.


required a much larger footprint of American troops on the peninsula than the traditional Islamic society preferred to accept, and this deeply eroded Saudi domestic support. Fresh from the Afghan struggle, Saudi jihadists condemned their own government for its inability to protect the kingdom and its two holy cities without the sustained presence and aid of a great infidel power. Saudi religious leaders responsible for the export of radical Islam joined the chorus, and much of Saudi society followed suit.

The strength of the domestic pressure was evident in how the royal fam-ily greeted the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, twelve years after the first. In August 2002, Crown Prince Abdullah publicly stated his opposition to a U.S. invasion. Forced to walk a fine line between the widespread domestic opposition to the war and his support of the long-standing U.S. security partnership, he privately permitted the presence of nearly ten thousand U.S. military personnel. But by the end of September 2003, aside from a small number of military trainers, not a single U.S. soldier, tank, or plane remained on Saudi soil.

The Saudi government’s cool reception to the second U.S. invasion of Iraq was a telling indicator of how its internal domestic and regional con-cerns flowed against the currents of the American vision of a post-Saddam Iraq and a greater Middle East. Today, amid revolution in many Arab states, the political realities that prompted Saudi objections in 2003 are still rel-evant. The Wahhabi clerics and radical elements in Saudi society that most notably influenced the monarchy’s resistance to military invasion in 2003 are positioned to forcibly resist a cultural invasion in 2011. Freedom and modernity are a profound challenge to Wahhabi conservatism. The royal family, whose legitimacy and self-preservation rest heavily on the endorse-ment of the religious class, treads ever so carefully between the two worlds.

Saudi Arabia is, by tradition, a closed society. The tribal customs of desert nomadic life still dictate many of its cultural norms. Conservative Islam governs the private and public sector, and the strength of the tribal

Freedom and modernity are a profound challenge to Wahhabi conservatism.

The royal family, whose legitimacy and self-preservation rest heavily on

the endorsement of the religious class, treads ever so carefully.


and religious mores acts to repel Western political and social influence. Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia is also a changing society. The youth demo-graphic is disproportionately large: people under thirty account for two-thirds of the population. And yet this educated, connected, and articulate potential workforce is highly unemployed. Many view the Saudi royal family, with nearly seven thousand princes, as corrupt, nepotistic, and highly inefficient. Despite the country’s massive oil wealth, 40 percent of Saudis live in poverty and 70 percent cannot afford a home.

These societal conditions under an authoritarian regime bear striking resemblance to those that have sparked protest and revolution in the Mid-dle East and North Africa. Saudi rulers have so far avoided similar unrest, partly out of society’s reverence for the current monarch, King Abdul-lah, who has tried to introduce modest reforms, partly because the cleri-cal establishment backs the ruling family, and partly because Saudis fear government reprisals. After the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, how-ever, many Saudi intellectuals did appeal to their government for political reforms, calling for a constitution, the rule of law, acknowledgment of human rights (including women’s rights), direct elections, an independent judiciary, and government transparency. Rather than initiate a dialogue to address these concerns, the king imprisoned leading advocates for change. Then he announced massive spending initiatives that create public sector jobs, increase government wages and unemployment benefits, and pro-vide subsidies. These measures are an attempt to buy continued allegiance without making any political sacrifices or reforms. They will not reduce the high level of youth unemployment, nor will they quench the growing thirst for genuine political change.

THE WAY AHEADFor decades, America accepted the Saudi system and enjoyed the benefits of its strong partnership. It will not be easy to back freedom in Saudi society, putting at risk our close relationship and the security and stability

A controlled transition would give a voice to those who value the

American partnership and aim to protect it.


it provides, but the turmoil of 2011 has demonstrated that the old model needs reworking, and soon.

When it became clear that leaders in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya had lost the loyalty of their populations, American support for those regimes died. As a result, King Abdullah questions the reliability of his security guaran-tor, and rightly so. America can no longer prescribe freedom as a univer-sal right while turning a blind eye to those who violate it. On the other hand, driving away a long-standing Middle East security partner that sits on one quarter of the world’s oil reserves, amid an unpredictable wave of revolutionary euphoria, isn’t the answer. America must walk this tightrope carefully. It can adhere to its values and support universal freedoms while preserving this vital security partnership. By capitalizing on this time of unrest, it must persuade the Saudi royals that reform suits the regime’s best interest and that meaningful reform, early on, is the best way to obviate a wider social revolutionary movement.

America must convince the Saudi government that its reprieve from regional unrest is ephemeral. The power of social media and informa-tion technology to mobilize society will only intensify. Ever-increasing access to information, combined with political stagnation and disen-franchisement, will at some point trigger unrest among the burgeon-ing, impoverished, unemployed youth. Retention of power can best be accomplished by actively addressing these concerns before tensions overflow. When a regime grants concessions only after a movement gains momentum, dissenters see it as a sign of weakness. Often it only emboldens the movement. Such was the case in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak’s promises came too little and too late.

Deliberate dialogue now among the Saudi royal family, the religious conservatives, the intellectuals, and the free-thinking youth can lead to a road map under which change can be introduced gradually, avoid-ing political upheaval. A civil discussion would help to usher in true reform while preserving many of the religious and tribal norms that Saudis hold dear. But a violent revolution, hijacked by the ultra-reli-gious, could resemble the path of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

A controlled transition also would give a voice to those who value the American partnership and aim to protect it. The strong military-


to-military relationship, and the Saudi dependence on U.S. military training and weapon systems, can both anchor the diplomatic front and apply leverage for change.

Saudis must understand that America is not interested in imprinting American democracy onto Saudi society, but that when a society stands up for its freedom, the United States will not tolerate violent repression or stand by rulers who have lost the support of their people.

The United States must be resolute, but not obtuse, in its endeavor to promote reform. A heavy-handed approach risks backlash, and we cannot forget the devastating economic effects that Saudi manipula-tion of oil markets produced during the oil embargo of 1973. Rather, America must pursue a strategy where the Saudi government assumes the leading role. A monarchy viewed as pandering to American interests will lose the backing of the religious class, and political legitimacy will falter. On the other hand, one that leads reform in conjunction with its religious class can introduce sensitive changes that will stem revolutionary fervor yet protect many of its conservative customs. The Saudi government must be convinced that reform is in the kingdom’s best interests, and Washington can help persuade it. A strong relationship based on decades of mutual economic, military, and ideological interests puts America in a unique position to do so.


New from the Hoover Press is The Wave: Man, God,

and the Ballot Box in the Middle East, by Reuel Marc

Gerecht. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



Walter e. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics

at George Mason University. His latest book is Race and Economics: How

Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (Hoover Institution Press, 2011),

from which this article is adapted.

Race and EconomicsWhat do black Americans need in order to get ahead? A truly free

market. By Walter E. Williams.

Black Americans have come a greater distance, over some of the high-est hurdles, in a shorter period of time than any other racial group. This unprecedented progress can be verified through several measures. If one were to total black earnings and consider black Americans a separate nation, he would find that they earned $726 billion in 2008. That would make them the world’s sixteenth-richest nation, just behind Turkey but ahead of Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.

Individual feats, in terms of “power,” are equally impressive. Black Americans are, and have been, chief executives of some of the world’s larg-est and richest cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phila-delphia, and Washington, D.C. It was a black American, General Colin Powell, appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1989, who directed the world’s mightiest military and later became U.S. secretary of state. And he was succeeded by Condoleezza Rice, of the same race and national origin. As a group, black Americans include many of the world’s richest and most famous personalities.

On the eve of the Civil War, a slave or a slave owner would hardly have believed these gains possible in less than a century and a half, if ever. That progress speaks well not only for the sacrifices and intestinal fortitude of a

RACE


people but also for a nation in which the gains were possible. One cannot imagine any other nation in which these gains could have been achieved. However, if one listens to spokesmen for civil rights organizations, self-anointed black leaders, and various politicians, one would get a different impression about black progress.

It is indeed true that for many black Americans, such gains have proved elusive. The U.S. Bureau of the Census classifies those people, who repre-sent perhaps 30 percent of the black population, as poor. Poverty among them today differs significantly from the poverty of yesteryear. There is a difference between material poverty and what may be called behavioral or spiritual poverty. The former is a money measure that the Census Bureau in 2006 defined as $20,444 for an urban family of four. The latter, on the other hand, refers to conduct and values that prevent the develop-ment of healthy families, a work ethic, and self-sufficiency. The absence of those values virtually guarantees pathological lifestyles that include drug and alcohol addiction, crime, violence, incarceration, illegitimacy, single-parent households, dependency, and erosion of the work ethic.

For the most part, material poverty is no longer the problem it once was. Generally, people whom the Census Bureau defines as poor have almost the same level of consumption of protein, vitamins, and other nutrients as upper-middle-income people. In 1971, only about 32 per-cent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes; by 2001, 76 percent of poor people enjoyed that comforting amenity. In 1971, 43 percent of all American households owned a color television set. By 2001, 97 percent of poor households had a color television set and over half of those had two or more sets. Forty-six percent of poor households now own their homes, and only about 6 percent of them are overcrowded. Indeed, the average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other European cities.

By earnings, black Americans would make up the world’s sixteenth-

richest nation, just behind Turkey but ahead of Poland, the Netherlands,

Belgium, and Switzerland.


Money measures of poverty seriously understate income, because they omit in-kind transfers such as food stamps and medical and housing assis-tance. Money measures are suspect in other ways: as early as 1990, it was estimated that the poor were spending an average of $1.94 for every dol-lar in welfare income received. That additional income might have come from unreported employment or illegal activities.

While material poverty in its historical or global form is nonexistent in the United States, what I call behavioral poverty has skyrocketed. Female-headed households increased from 18 percent of the black population in 1950 to well over 68 percent by 2000. As of 2002, 53 percent of black children lived in single-parent households, compared with 20 percent for whites. As of 2006, roughly 45 percent of blacks fifteen or older had never been married, in addition to 17 percent who had been divorced or wid-owed; that contrasts with only 27 percent of whites fifteen and older never married and 16 percent divorced or widowed.

Some argue that today’s weak black family structure is a “legacy” of slavery. Such an explanation loses credibility when one examines evidence from the past. Even during slavery, where marriage was forbidden, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. One study of nine-teenth-century slave families (The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, by Herbert Gutman) found that in as many as three-fourths of them, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households. In fact, “five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents,” Gutman wrote.

A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia showed that three- quarters of all black families were nuclear (composed of two parents and children). What is significant, given today’s arguments that slavery and discrimination decimated the black family, is the fact that years ago there were only slight differences in family structure between racial groups. The percentages of nuclear families were: black (75.2 percent), Irish (82.2),

There is a difference between material poverty and what may be called

behavioral or spiritual poverty.


German (84.5), and native white American (73.1). Only one quarter of black families were headed by women. Female-headed families among Irish, German, and native white Americans averaged 11 percent.

Also significant was the fact that in 1847, just one of ten Philadelphia blacks had been born in slavery. However, those ex-slave families were more likely than freeborn blacks to be two-parent families. Theodore Hershberg found that 90 percent of households in which the head purchased his free-dom included two parents. He found that those households existed 80 percent of the time among ex-slaves in general and 77 percent of the time among freeborn blacks. Gutman, who analyzed data on families in Harlem between 1905 and 1925, found that only 3 percent of all families “were headed by a woman under thirty.”

Thomas Sowell has reported that “going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had mar-ried than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940.”

Coupled with dramatic breakdown in the black family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black rate was only 19 percent in 1940 but skyrocketed in the late 1960s, reaching 49 percent in 1975. As of 2000, black illegitimacy stood at 68 percent and in some cities over 80 percent. High illegitimacy rates not only spell poverty and dependency but also contribute to the social pathology seen in many black communities: high incidences of adolescent violence and predatory sex, and as sociologist Charles Murray has noted, a community not unlike that portrayed in Lord of the Flies.

Several studies point to welfare programs as a major contributor to sev-eral aspects of behavioral poverty. One of these early studies was the Seat-tle/Denver Income Maintenance Experiment, also known as the “SIME/DIME” study. Among its findings: for each dollar increase in welfare pay-ment, low-income persons reduced labor earning by eighty cents. Using

A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia showed that three-

quarters of all black families were nuclear (two parents plus children).


1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, Anne Hill and June O’Neill found that a 50 percent increase in the monthly value of welfare benefits led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.

We can see some of the effects of welfare on the work experience of poor families. In 1959, 31.5 percent of heads of poor families worked full time year-round; by 1989, the percentage had fallen to 16.2. In 1959, 30.5 percent did not work at all (either full time or part time); by 1989, that figure had risen to 50.8 percent. Some argue that such high unemploy-ment stems from lack of job opportunities in inner cities. That observa-tion is questionable. During 1979–80, the National Bureau of Economic Research conducted a survey in the ghettoes of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Only a minority of the respondents were employed, yet almost as many said it was easy or fairly easy to get a job as a laborer as said it was difficult or impossible; and 71 percent said it was fairly easy to get a minimum-wage job.

Despite frequent assertions to the contrary, many of the seemingly intractable problems encountered by a significant number of black Ameri-cans do not result from racial discrimination. This is not to say discrimi-nation does not exist. Nor is it to say discrimination has no adverse effects. For policy purposes, however, the issue is not whether or not racial dis-crimination exists but the extent to which it explains what we see today. For example, it is clear that low academic achievement by black young-sters poses serious handicaps. If we assume that the problem is one of racial discrimination, where blacks are being denied educational oppor-tunities, then civil rights strategies might produce a solution. However, if poor educational achievement is a result of other factors, resources spent pursuing a civil rights strategy will yield disappointing results.

The thrust of the argument in my new book, Race and Economics, is that the most difficult problems faced by black Americans, particularly

The most difficult problems faced by black Americans, particularly

those who are poor, cannot adequately be explained by current racial

discrimination.


those who are poor, cannot adequately be explained by current racial dis-crimination. Instead, most problems are self-inflicted or a result of poli-cies, regulations, and restrictions emanating from federal, state, and local governments. Free markets and the profit motive have not reduced oppor-tunities. The drivers have instead been the power of vested interest groups to use, as a means to greater wealth, the coercive powers of government to stifle market competition.

Free markets and the profit motive, far from being enemies to blacks, have been friends. The reason is quite simple. Customers prefer lower prices to higher prices, and businessmen prefer higher profits to lower profits. The most effective tools for a seller to gain a customer are to offer a lower price and better services than his competitor. Similarly, the most effective tool for a worker to get an employer to hire him is to offer to accept a lower wage (with wages being a form of pricing). Many employers will find higher profits a more attractive alternative to indulging personal preferences or maintaining racial loyalty.

The ability to prevent a less-preferred worker from accepting a lower wage is one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of racists everywhere. Racial antipathy is not a necessary, or even the primary, incentive for using government power to prevent others from offering a lower price. People simply want to earn higher income and profits. The use of government restrictions, violence, or intimidation to prevent others from compet-ing and offering prices below the “desired” price is consistent with that end. The fact that some blacks were able to earn a comfortable living and indeed become prosperous—in both the antebellum South, in the face of slavery and grossly discriminatory laws, and in the North, where there was at best only weak enforcement of civil rights—testifies strongly to the power of the market as a friend to blacks.

Further evidence of the free market as a friend is suggested by all the legislation and extralegal measures taken to prevent free, peaceable, vol-untary exchange between blacks and whites. After all, why would laws and extralegal measures be necessary to restrict whites from hiring blacks or blacks from selling to whites, or whites serving blacks in restaurants, if whites did not want to make these transactions in the first place? When-ever one sees laws written, or extralegal measures taken, to prevent an


activity, he should immediately suspect that not everyone would volun-tarily behave according to those legal requirements.

In short, market restrictions are a far more important limitation on black socioeconomic progress than racial discrimination.

Excerpted from Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? by Walter E. Williams (Hoover Institution Press, 2011). © 2011 Walter E. Williams. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is Race and Economics:

How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? by Walter

E. Williams. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



RobeRt Conquest is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. AleC Ash is

communications manager of the Browser (www.thebrowser.com).

Robert Conquest’s Five BooksThe eminent historian and Hoover fellow contemplates the communist

mind. By Alec Ash.

Hoover research fellow Robert Conquest was interviewed for the blog Five-Books (www.fivebooks.com), whose mission is to “invite international experts to recommend the best reading in their given fields of interest.”

Alec Ash, FiveBooks: You were born in the year of the Russian Revolu-tion, and joined the Communist Party seventy-three years ago. What does communism mean to you personally?Robert Conquest: Well, when I joined the Communist Party, we didn’t know the first thing about it, strictly speaking. I called myself communist when I was seventeen. I stood as Communist candidate in my college debat-ing society. But we were mostly contrarians, or it was a general lefty feeling.Ash: Let’s move on to your first book, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.Conquest: Yes, let’s do that, as I’ve quite a lot to say about old Solzh. It was a critical book—an entirely objective account of a victim in a labor camp. Just one day in an ordinary labor camp. Not exaggerated, not even a particularly nasty day. The most extraordinary part is how it got printed. It ran contrary to everyone in the Communist Party in Russia, but the Novy Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky snuck a copy in to Khrushchev

INTERV IEW


and said, “This is awfully good, you ought to publish it.” And he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, “The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in.”Ash: How would you define that genie?Conquest: The curious position is that we can handle the terror, but the worst thing isn’t the terror, it’s not the torture or the killing of millions, as Stalin did; in a way it’s simply the intrinsic nastiness of the regime that is still not quite understood (a real key is the film The Lives of Others). After One Day in the Life, Solzhenitsyn didn’t publish anything for a long time, but meanwhile he was hoarding the real killer book: The Gulag Archi-pelago. When he published that, he was arrested and sent to the West in handcuffs. That’s where I met him, in Zurich in 1976.

Ash: What was he like?Conquest: Solzhenitsyn was great fun—none of that haggard and fanati-cal effect you get in the photographs, but an easy, warm atmosphere. I was relieved to find him a great Conquest fan, with tales of how he and Sakharov read The Great Terror together. We ended up after four hours with bearlike hugs, kisses on the cheeks, raspy beard and all.

As I was leaving, he asked if I would translate “a little poem” of his. I said yes, and it turned out to be 2,000 words long, about his experiences in East Prussia during the war (later published in both languages as “Prus-sian Nights”). I am still asked by his widow, Natalia, to come to Moscow events celebrating him.Ash: What did Solzhenitsyn make of Russia in the ’90s and after?Conquest: It’s difficult to say. He certainly wasn’t a liberal; he was more on the patriotic right. What he would say is, “Russia has to get rid of that awful past,” which doesn’t go down well with run-of-the-mill superpatri-ots. But now that position is erratically supported by the official regime, which is a big change.

“The worst thing isn’t the terror, it’s not the torture or the killing of

millions, as Stalin did; in a way it’s simply the intrinsic nastiness

of the regime.”

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Ash: Your next book is Galina: A Russian Story, the memoirs of the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya. I’ve just been listening to her songs—they’re beautiful.Conquest: She was extraordinarily pretty, also, as well as a wonderful singer. And another reason for reading her book is that the photographs are particularly good. She and her husband put up Solzhenitsyn when he was writing The Gulag Archipelago, so they’re all connected.Ash: What can we learn about communism from her memoirs?Conquest: The first thing is that it gives the feeling of Russian sanity about what the truth was. She had a lot of nasty experiences with the party apparatchik literary and opera machinery. They gave her a lot of trouble. But her personality was such that she could answer them back, and did. Sometimes she got away with it, and eventually she left the Soviet Union in 1974. Russia has been through a lot of people who were silenced, but there were some people who managed not to be. It really is a very Russian story; it has a lot of Russia in it.

Ash: Your next book, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, by Milovan Djilas, is a move sideways to Yugoslavia. Djilas was part of Tito’s regime before he began to advocate democracy and was purged. What is his thesis?Conquest: Djilas observed that instead of getting rid of a ruling class, as was supposed to happen, party members became the ruling class them-selves. But it’s not a class analysis in the sense that we generally mean. In Russia you could be a peasant or a worker. You couldn’t be an intellectual because it didn’t count as a class. But if it didn’t count as a class, then why were hundreds of thousands of them persecuted? So it’s rather curious from a Marxist point of view. Marx would almost certainly have disap-proved—but then, he disapproved of almost anybody.Ash: Is Djilas’s new class theory still relevant, when talking about China and so on?

“Solzhenitsyn was great fun—none of that haggard and fanatical effect

you get in the photographs. . . . We ended up after four hours with

bearlike hugs, kisses on the cheeks, raspy beard and all.”


Conquest: Of course it is. And China is still relevant when talking about Yugoslavia. Obviously there is a connection between, say, Pyong-yang and Marxism, and with the Cambodian terror and so on. You can’t say those regimes can be justified by Marxism, but somehow the connec-tion is there—or at least the regimes thought so, even if it isn’t a rational connection.Ash: So is it helpful or misleading to think of communism in terms of Marxism?Conquest: It’s hard to say. Of course, this list should really include the works of Marx. But The Communist Manifesto doesn’t have much to do with what I thought Marx was, or what anyone else thought Marx was afterwards. It’s just a piece of old-fashioned politics. And Das Kapital is one of those books that people claim to have read, but no one has really read it to the end. Still, it accumulated into a creed.Ash: Let’s talk about Anne Applebaum’s book Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe.Conquest: In this book, Anne Applebaum goes into the area between the old Russian empire, Germany, and the old Turkish empire, and sees how it has developed. In 1800, there wasn’t what I would call a Ukrainian—or still less a Belarusian—nation. They become nations when their educated classes came together and formed a nationality, more or less late in the nineteenth century. I’ve got a railway map in my home of Europe in the 1840s. You can see all the countries, but similarly for the Balkans and Turkey, it just says “various nomadic tribes.”Ash: I love Applebaum’s description of the man who was born in Poland, was raised in the USSR, and is now living in Belarus, but he never left his home village.Conquest: That happened to a lot of people. At some points people didn’t know who they were, or where they really came from. At those times, would you have known that Belarus would become an independent country? I’ll bet you didn’t.Ash: You’d be right.Conquest: The borders all changed. And that is a cultural point which is quite extraordinary. If you went from West to East Germany, after the Wall had fallen, in ten miles you were into a completely different country.


The same with Finland and Vyborg. Anne Applebaum captures the feeling of regression under the Soviets so well. Ash: Finally, Ronald Hingley, The Russian Mind. What can we learn from this book?Conquest: Hingley looks at the whole context of Russia—history, lit-erature, what society is like. He knows Russia very well, but he does this as an Englishman knowing Russia very well, and is good at observing how different Russians are. Russia has these curious incongruities—from extreme dullness to hyperactivity. Hingley relishes the bizarre—in life and literature—and gives us stories from the literature. One of Gogol’s begins with a civil servant looking in his mirror one morning to find his nose has disappeared. Just talking about it is tempting me to pick the whole thing up and read it again.Ash: Me, too! One last question: all of your books have been about the Soviet bloc, but what is different about communism in North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, and so on?Conquest: It’s a good question. In a sense they are curious in that they went on with communism after the Russians had given it up—so it was local, in that it wasn’t imposed by Russia. But there is something in common among all communist countries. I remember when I was in Bulgaria during the takeover, and one of President Kolarov’s entourage asked, “Could you get me Orwell’s book?” That meant his first book, Animal Farm. When I gave it to this party veteran and he read it, he said Orwell must have come from a communist country. But of course, Orwell didn’t. So it was possible to understand communism without having been there.

Reprinted by permission of the blog FiveBooks (www.fivebooks.com), where books mentioned in this inter-view may be purchased. © 2011 The Browser Publications, AG. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is The Troubled Birth

of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and

Programs, by Michael McFaul and Sergei Markov. To



Walter e. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics

at George Mason University. Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason.tv and

Reason.com.

“A Radical, a Troublemaker . . .”As a scholar and a black American, Walter E. Williams has always

been his own map. By Nick Gillespie.

In 1981, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Patricia Harris wrote in the Washington Post that libertarian economists Walter E. Wil-liams and Thomas Sowell are “middle class” so they “don’t know what it is to be poor.”

In fact, Williams grew up in a single-parent household in a poor sec-tion of Philadelphia. He was raised by his mother, who was a high school dropout. The family spent time on welfare, and eventually moved into the Richard Allen public housing project. (Sowell, whose father died before he was born, was the son of a maid.)

Drafted into the peacetime Army, Williams eventually earned a PhD from UCLA in the late 1960s and quickly became a sought-after research-er and public intellectual. His best-known book, 1982’s The State Against Blacks, argues that a major cause of black unemployment is government intervention in the labor market.

Williams’s contrarian views have had wide exposure through docu-mentaries, public appearances, and, for the past thirty years, a syndicat-ed weekly column. Since 1992, Williams has also been a frequent guest host of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. Now a professor emeritus at George

INTERV IEW


Mason University, Williams has taught at Temple University; California State University, Los Angeles; and other universities.

His new book, Up from the Projects: An Autobiography, is a fascinat-ing look at his childhood, his half-century-long marriage to his recently departed wife, his unusual career path, and the genesis of his views on race, economics, and politics.

Throughout his career, Williams has used his own life to illustrate how government regulations often work to deny opportunities to poor blacks, and his memoir is no exception. For example, Williams recounts that when he was a teenager, he was fired from a great job at a hat factory when a fellow employee complained to the Department of Labor that his boss was violating child labor laws.

I recently sat down with Williams to talk about his life, how his experi-ences have informed his scholarship, and whether the Obama presidency has improved the lives of blacks in the United States. Williams is also an emeritus trustee of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that produces Reason.tv.

Nick Gillespie, Reason: You were growing up in Philadelphia and you spent time on welfare. You were raised in a single-parent household. How does where you’re from show up in where you are now?Walter E. Williams: I am not sure. As a youngster I never even thought about being a college professor or libertarian. I was always a radical, a troublemaker, a person who questioned the status quo. So my upbringing might have had very little to do with where I am now. And as a matter of fact, even though we grew up poor, we didn’t consider ourselves poor. As a matter of fact, during those days to call somebody poor was an insult.Gillespie: What did being called poor mean then?Williams: Well, it meant that you didn’t eat or you missed meals or you wore tattered clothes, and all those weren’t the case with me. But at least in the neighborhoods where I grew up, and in poor black neighborhoods today, there is kind of what I call spiritual poverty, that is poverty of the spirit. And back when I was a kid, my mother used to always say to us, “we have a bare pocketbook, but we have champagne taste.” Meaning that we had high aspirations.


Gillespie: So where does the spiritual poverty or where does the aspira-tional poverty come from?Williams: Well, if you look at some of the characteristics, particularly of black people, but to a large extent everybody, back when I was coming up, for a girl to have a baby out of wedlock was a disgrace. Today, women have babies out of wedlock and they have baby showers; it is no longer a disgrace. And indeed the illegitimacy rate among blacks is somewhere around 70 percent and back in the ’40s it couldn’t have been more than 13 or 12 percent, something like that. Or the breakdown in the black family—only 35 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. As a matter of fact, when we were coming up, my father deserted us when I was three and my sister was two, and they ultimately got divorced in the late


’40s. But among our friends, we were the only kids in the housing project who did not have a mother and a father in the house. Today, it would be exactly the opposite; it would be rare to have a mother and father in the household today.

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Gillespie: In 2008, you wrote that Obama’s election “might turn our attention away from the false notion that discrimination explains the problems of a large segment of the black community.” Has that happened?Williams: Obama’s presidency hasn’t meant very much for the black com-munity. I haven’t seen a big change. I don’t see lower crime rates. I don’t see a greater high school graduation rate. But in general, I don’t think that there is much progress that blacks can make through the political arena.Gillespie: Now, what do you mean by that? I think most observers, whether they are black or white or European or whatever, would say that a lot of black progress has been due to the Civil Rights Act, because of changes in de jure segregation.

Williams: If you look at our country and you ask this question—in what cities do blacks suffer from the highest victimization rates in crime, the rot in the schools, the very poor living conditions?—it is in the very cit-ies where a black is the mayor, a black is the chief of police, a black is the superintendent of the schools. Now I am not stating a causal relationship, but I am saying that if political power meant so much, you would expect in a city like Philadelphia, where a black is the mayor, a black is superin-tendent of schools, a black is the chief of police, you would expect living conditions to be wonderful. But on the other hand, if you look at the other end of another group of people—let’s say Chinese and Japanese—they don’t have any political power even in the places on the West Coast where they are the most numerous. But according to statistics, Japanese or Chinese are in any measure of socioeconomic success at the very top. And if you look at the history of our country, the Irish had the greatest political power, but they are the slowest rising of any of the white ethnic groups in our country. So I think it’s false to assume that economic power depends on political power. And you can just go all around the world. My colleague Tom Sowell has done extensive work on the Armenians and the post–Ottoman empire. They didn’t have any political power, they were discriminated against, but were the highest income-earning people.

“In general, I don’t think that there is much progress that blacks can

make through the political arena.”


Gillespie: But if it is not political power that will help advance living standards and quality of life, it’s economic power, right?Williams: You have to develop skills and training, and one of the reasons why people make low wages is, for the most part, they have low skills. But again, getting a hold of the political system or even eliminating every ves-tige of discrimination is not very important for economic advancement. If you look at the question, at one time, there were no blacks in professional basketball. Today, blacks are 80 percent of professional basketball players, 60-something percent of professional football players, and it wasn’t affir-mative action, it wasn’t any court suits, it wasn’t getting rid of discrimina-tion. What was it? It was that these guys just do a 360 slam dunk in your face and you can’t do anything about it. It’s high skills.Gillespie: But it was an undoing of discrimination, right? When you think about football and basketball color lines, they are less celebrated than Jackie Robinson breaking into major league baseball. But there was a de facto law against letting blacks play.Williams: Well, the best engines of it—in terms of baseball—it wasn’t any affirmative action, it wasn’t any court suits. It was the fact that there was a huge pool of high skills in what they called the Negro Leagues that just could not be ignored, and once the Dodgers cracked it, everybody else had to go along. They just could not ignore this huge pool of black talent. And it would be the same thing if this black talent were in physics, were in chemistry—you just could not ignore it.

DISCRIMINAT ION AND MERITGillespie: What are the best ways to speed up the process by which race or ethnicity or social standing doesn’t matter in fields that should be determined by merit? Williams: Personally, one of my strong values is freedom of association. And if you believe in freedom of association, you have to accept that people will associate in ways that you find offensive. And I believe people have the right to discriminate on any basis they want, so long as they are not using government. For example, I would disagree that a library should be able to engage in racial discrimination against me, because I am a taxpayer.


Gillespie: Not a public library, but a private library. The David Duke Memorial Library, they can keep you out.Williams: I have no problem whatsoever. And so discrimination is actu-ally for me, simply an act of choice, and we all discriminate. As I tell people, when I was choosing a wife to marry, I didn’t give every woman an equal opportunity. I discriminated against Japanese women, Italian wom-en, women with criminal records, women who did not bathe regularly. The point is that people have the right, in my opinion, to associate in any way they want, but they should not get subsidized. Now there’s a whole lot of laws on the books that subsidize discrimination—for example, the minimum wage law. Gillespie: But in the book you also talk about when you were drafted into the Army and you ended up going to Georgia for an assignment. That was the first time that you met with the de jure segregation in the deep South, and you mentioned going through frustrations where there were black-only restrooms, restaurants, etc. What is the best and most efficacious way to break down state-sponsored discrimination?Williams: Well, you do it by law, because I think that states should not be able to engage in discrimination. And you do it by any means that is necessary to get rid of state-sponsored discrimination, including disobey-ing the law. The very fact that you do find state-sponsored discrimination is good evidence that maybe discrimination would not exist. That is, if you see a law on the books, well, the reason why that law is on the books is because not everyone would behave according to the specifications of the law. And so if you see a law saying blacks have to sit in the back of a trolley car, you would say, why do you need a law? If the trolley car is privately owned—and that’s what they were when the discrimination started in our country—and the streetcar companies would not discrimi-nate against their customers, the people who wanted the discrimination needed a law.Gillespie: So where are you in terms of the variety of the Civil Rights Acts that were passed in the late 1950s through the mid-1960s? Were those good laws?Williams: No, I think the Civil Rights Act was a major error. That is, during the 1960s when we had the civil rights movement, I think all that


we needed was a law that said that the Constitution of the United States applies to each and every citizen in our country. Gillespie: You mention in the book, both when you were hired as an economist at Temple and at George Mason, that you sat down with the people who were hiring you and said, “If you are practicing affirmative action, I don’t want any part of this.” Were you a beneficiary of affirmative action and, if so, how did you deal with that when you found out about it and what was the effect of that on you?

Williams: Well, as I understand it, at Temple University I did not run into the problem. But at George Mason University, I think, after I had been here quite a while, the former chairman who hired me said that he got beneficial points from hiring me and Karen Vaughn, my colleague who is a woman. And later on, Karen Vaughn, who was here before I was, told me that if Bill Snavely was practicing affirmative action, he didn’t get the right kind of black.Gillespie: Is it tiresome to talk about yourself as the libertarian black?Williams: When I look at people, I don’t see colors. I don’t judge people by colors. I say that, well, you are a man just like I am.Gillespie: Do colleges still practice affirmative action for racial admis-sions and should that stop?Williams: I think it definitely should stop. Private universities, in my opinion, have the right to do anything they want in terms of admitting students. Public universities ought to be constrained by the law.Gillespie: What about private schools that are so heavily subsidized either by federal research dollars, student loans—Williams: Then they are, in fact, government schools. And if they are heavily subsidized, the first thing I would do is get rid of the subsidizing and then let them behave any way that they want to.Gillespie: In the book, you said that people like Jackie Robinson and Wilt Chamberlain had made it safe for the NBA and major league base-ball to hire incompetent blacks, such as you, so that you could now pursue a career in baseball or basketball—

“People have the right, in my opinion, to associate in any way they want,

but they should not get subsidized.”


Williams: What I meant by that example was this. I was telling a group of students at Temple University that I would love to teach a course in physics. I love subatomic physics, but I was saying that black people can-not afford for me to be teaching a course in physics. I was giving the example of basketball and baseball, because of the excellence of Jackie Robinson or Wilt Chamberlain or Bill Russell, that I can now go play basketball and I can mess up royally and there’s not a person in the audi-ence who can say, “Those blacks can’t play basketball.” I meant that black people can afford incompetent basketball players, but they cannot afford incompetent physics teachers.

And the same thing applies to President Obama. I wrote a column saying that black people can’t afford for the first black president to be a failure. And he has every indication of being a failure, like the Carter administration.

Gillespie: I guess that the broader point is that between 1954 and now, race relations have clearly changed and most of the most odious, obvious excrescences of racism are gone. Are we past race or will we ever be past race?Williams: We are not past it yet. Americans have come the furthest dis-tance among any group of people in solving the problems of race in our country, but we’re not past it.

THE FUTURE OF L IBERTYGillespie: Let’s talk a little bit about the broad-based libertarian move-ment. Do you feel that you are part of a libertarian movement?Williams: No, I don’t.Gillespie: So, what are you then?Williams: I am not a part of a movement. I have never been part of a movement, I just do my own thing.Gillespie: Can we tally up a score and say are we more free, or less free, or are we moving in the right direction? Are you happy about the world that your daughter is inheriting?

“Americans have come the furthest distance among any group of people

in solving the problems of race in our country, but we’re not past it.”


Williams: No, no. I think for the first time in our history, it’s prudent for parents to tell their children to have enough gold and silver coins, enough to be able to get out of this country and move to some other country. For the first time in our history, people are considering leaving the United States or taking their wealth out of the United States, where before the United States was the bastion of liberty and low regulations and people were bringing their wealth to our country. So I think that we have to be concerned about losing our liberties.Gillespie: What needs to happen for that to reverse? I mean, it’s one thing to say we have to reduce regulation, but what are the kind of policy steps and the kind of psychological or ideological steps that need to happen?Williams: I don’t think anything is going to happen. I think what one has to ask is: are we so arrogant as American people to think that we are different from other people around the world? That is, how different are we from the Romans who went down the tubes, or the British, or the French, or the Spanish, or the Portuguese? These are great empires of the past, but they went down the tubes for roughly the same things that we are doing. Liberty is the rare state of affairs in mankind’s history. Arbitrary abuse and control by others is the standard, even now. All the tendencies are for us to lose, and have greater and greater amounts of our liberty usurped by government. If you press me for a trend in the opposite direc-tion, because of the Obama administration, the Democrat control of the House and the Senate, they have become so bold in many of their actions that for the first time in my life, Americans are debating about the Con-stitution. We have people forming a tea party movement and all this kind of fervor that I have never heard before in my seventy-five years of life. But is that enough or is it too late? I’m not sure.

Reprinted by permission of Reason (www.reason.com). © 2011 Reason Magazine. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is Up from the Projects:

An Autobiography, by Walter E. Williams. To order,



William Damon is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of

Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society. He is a

professor of education at Stanford University and the director of Stanford’s Center

on Adolescence. His latest book is Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving

Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society (Hoover

Institution Press, 2011), from which this essay is drawn.

The Core of Civic VirtueEither we teach the young to understand and appreciate their

freedom, or we cheat them of their birthright. By William Damon.

Liberty can no more exist without virtue . . . than the body can live and

move without a soul.

—John Adams

Whenever we speak about the future of any society, we are really speak-ing about today’s young and their prospects. Preparing young people for bright futures is one of the core obligations of every adult community. Of course, this means providing young people with the vocational skills they will need to prosper, but vocational skills are not enough. There also exist qualities of character that determine the success or failure of a person’s life. Foremost are the virtues that make possible a life of honor and integrity.

To ensure a bright future for young people and the society they will inherit, every adult community must take seriously its responsibility to raise young people for lives of virtue. Failure to do so inevitably will result in societal decadence—literally, a “falling away,” from the Latin decadere.

VALUES


World history has shown us time and again what happens to a society when its citizens no longer prize virtue. Citizens have an obligation to preserve the benefits of their societies for the future as well as the pres-ent—which means an obligation to foster virtuous character in the young. Preparing young people for responsible citizenship in a free society is a crucial part of this obligation for adult citizens in the United States.

At present, we are failing to meet this obligation for major sectors of our youth population, to the detriment of their life prospects and those of liberty and democracy in our society. The problems I discuss in my new book, Failing Liberty 101—a decline in civic purpose and patriotism, a crisis of faith, a rise in cynicism, self-absorption, ignorance, and indiffer-ence to the common good—can be found among the adult population as well as among the young. But they are especially poignant when found among young people, who are in a formative time of life typically charac-terized by idealism, hope, and elevated ambition. As young people search for meaning in their lives, their minds are often open to all possible choic-es about what to believe, how to live, and what—if anything—to dedicate themselves to. When young people find nothing positive to believe in, they drift in unconstructive and sometimes destructive directions.

In recent years, a vast amount has been written about the inferior stan-dards of academic achievement demonstrated by too many American youth. Not only has this story been widely covered in the press, it also has made its way into the popular cinema, in widely heralded films such as Waiting for “Superman.” The serious gap in academic skills among many of our young people contributes to the problem discussed in my book, and I am pleased that this problem is now receiving public attention. But our academic skills gap pales next to the neglect of character and civic education that we have allowed to develop. Our disregard of civic and moral virtue as an educational priority is having a tangible effect on the attitudes, understanding, and behavior of large portions of the youth population in the United States today.

History has shown us time and again what happens to a society when its

citizens no longer prize virtue.


This is not to say that all of our young are languishing. The United States is a large and enormously diverse country. Many young Americans shine with inspiration and purpose, and are acquiring amazing degrees of skill and talent. Others may not be there yet, but are moving in a promis-ing direction that someday will lead them to rewarding and fulfilling com-mitments. But too many of today’s young are floundering or worse: they have no goals that motivate them, and there are no adults in their lives who are providing them with guidance they need to find such goals. Today’s cohort of youth is a highly fragmented generation. Popular accounts of a youth generation that can be labeled with a single letter or adjective—X, Y, Z, Millennial, “the dumbest generation,” and so on—are little more than fanciful caricatures. The true story of youth today is schism: on one hand, the individuals who are on track to becoming sterling citizens; on the other, the members of their cohort who have found nothing to believe in or aspire to and who have little hope of gaining the skills or purpose they will need to succeed.

Some parts of today’s youth population seem wholly oblivious to the lives and concerns of all the others. It is astonishing to note that while some young Americans are risking their lives fighting in two foreign wars, the vast majority of their peers show little interest in anything related to their sacrifices. Has this level of mutual obliviousness—across an entire genera-tion—ever occurred before in American history? Young Americans have at times dissented from national wars, as during the Vietnam War protests, but at least those protests stood as an indication that those young people (not all of them subject to the draft) did care about the state of the nation.

We cannot expect our free society to long endure if large portions of its citizenry grow up ill-educated, oblivious to the world and current affairs, out of touch with other members of their generation, and displaying little concern for their responsibilities as American citizens—in short, if they fail to acquire any commitment to civic virtue.

The true story of youth today is schism: on one hand, those on track to

becoming sterling citizens; on the other, those who have found nothing to

believe in or aspire to, and who have no skills.


L IVES OF C IV IC V IRTUEMy mission is to expose this very real threat to America’s future, a threat far more serious than any foreign enemy could ever pose. It is a danger close at hand, one that has not received a hundredth of the resources that we devote to combating external dangers such as terrorism. Nor has the threat been recognized by our nation’s leaders or policy makers, even though signs of it are everywhere. The most serious danger Ameri-cans now face—greater than terrorism—is that our country’s future may not end up in the hands of a citizenry capable of sustaining the liberty that has been America’s most precious legacy. If trends continue, many young Americans will grow up without an understanding of the benefits, privileges, and duties of citizens in a free society, and without acquiring the habits of character needed to live responsibly in one. As a consequence, many of today’s young will be unable to recognize the encroachments on liberty that regularly arise in the normal throes of social life, and too few will be equipped to defend their society against such encroachments.

It is not their fault. It is we—today’s grown-up generation of parents, educators, opinion leaders, and public officials—who are failing to pre-pare them properly for their futures as citizens in a free society. Unless we begin to pay attention and meet our challenge as stewards of a priceless heritage, our nation and the prospects of all individuals dwelling here in years to come will suffer.

My message can be summed up in four assertions:

• A free society requires, for its very survival, a citizenry devoted in large part to moral and civic virtue.

• When virtue loses its public footing, too few citizens accept the respon-sibilities necessary for sustaining liberty in that society.

• In the United States today, we are failing to pass along essential moral and civic virtues to large segments of the youth population.

• Unless we rectify this failure by placing a higher priority on educating young Americans for lives of moral and civic virtue, the nation will move away from liberty and toward despotism—and this movement


will be both inevitable and astonishingly quick, perhaps within the space of a generation.

These are not imaginary or hyperbolic warnings. In recent times, most cultural influences on the young have become increasingly less conducive to the cultivation of civic virtue. Permissiveness, indulgence, and material inducement have replaced discipline and responsibility as the beacons of child rearing in too many contemporary homes. Major media influences on today’s young commonly emphasize the glitter of celebrity and instant success. The famous figures in the limelight are too likely to have cho-sen vice over virtue. News stories about substance abuse, sexual scandals, and financial chicanery among the eminent outnumber stories of service, courage, or self-sacrifice by a margin too great to measure.

What’s more, there is undeniable evidence of vanishing attention to civic and moral virtue among those who make U.S. education policy. At the federal level, education to promote citizenship has become wholly marginalized over the past decade; promoting character was eliminated as a Department of Education priority in 2009, when the current admin-istration took office. Since federal funding tends to drive local education policies (particularly during hard economic times), this has translated into a severe diminishment of civic and character instruction from school cur-ricula throughout the nation.

Many parents and teachers do not favor this shift in focus, but they are powerless to prevent it. The most recent study on the matter, released by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in September 2010, shows a striking disconnect between those who determine public educational poli-cies and those who raise and teach the young. Funding policies now focus single-mindedly on basic math and literacy skills (with special emphasis on the remedial), squeezing out the time and resources needed to prepare students for citizenship. Yet most teachers and parents believe that citi-zenship, along with the essential character virtues that it requires, should

The lures of a celebrity culture and the barrenness of the educational

landscape have left little room for broader civic concerns.


occupy a central place in American education priorities, as it did in previ-ous periods of U.S. public schooling. Unfortunately, today’s federal poli-cies have been winning the day, at least as far as our public schools are concerned, because of the power of federal financial clout. Inattention to this shift by the news media compounds the severity of the loss.

As for the young themselves, the picture is uncomfortably mixed. A sig-nificant number of today’s youth shine with purpose and high aspirations. This is important to acknowledge because too many accounts sound as if this entire cohort is destined to go down the drain together. In our own research at Stanford, we have found at least one-fifth of twelve- to twenty-two-year-olds from varied backgrounds to be reassuringly well directed and very likely on track to becoming capable citizens. But important as that group is, it makes up a relatively small part of the youth population as a whole. For the remaining segments, finding purpose in life is still an elusive aim, and a devotion to moral and civic goals lies at the bot-tom of a long list of personal concerns, if it exists at all. For many young people today, the lures of a celebrity culture and the barrenness of their educational landscape have left little room for broader civic concerns. A distressingly large number of today’s young have found nothing to strive for beyond a day-to-day pursuit of comfort and pleasure.

FOR LOVE OF COUNTRY , AND OF TRUTHIn a study of American civic virtues, gratitude must be front and cen-ter. How can a people blessed with the privileges of American citizenship not feel grateful for the unique rights and opportunities embodied in the American tradition? Or for the sacrifices, efforts, and genius of those who forged that tradition of liberty and democracy?

Yet a mood of disaffection—and, in some quarters, strident com-plaint—is sweeping the country. Gratitude for America’s blessings is in short supply. There is no way to know how long this sour mood will last; public opinion in an open democracy can turn around quickly. But for young people raised in the present sociopolitical climate, it is especially hard to find things to believe in or civic leaders to admire. And young people need inspiration if they are to become motivated to contribute to the public good.


Isn’t it the case, many will argue, that the United States has made grave errors, that the nation’s actions nowadays seldom live up to the noble ide-als proclaimed in its founding, and that this is what young people should be taught for the sake of critical thinking? Perhaps such statements have some truth to them, but they are far from the whole truth. Critical think-ing is worthless unless built upon a base of concern and caring. To criticize something to improve it is entirely different from criticizing it to detach from it. Young people growing up in the United States need an apprecia-tion for the American tradition to ensure that their critical perspectives on the country will be constructive rather than nihilistic. Any balanced view of American history will conclude that this sense of appreciation is well warranted.

Certainly many shortcomings in the American past have merited com-plaint, especially for people and groups who have suffered discrimination and exclusion. But there is a long story of successive liberation and eventu-al progress in American social life, even if at times too slowly realized. Nor is our story of successive liberation and progress accidental—quite the opposite. The nation was founded with the explicit intention of creating a government that would allow for such progress through reflection and conscious choice. The founders realized that this would be an uncertain path, at times difficult to forge and always beset by formidable obstacles. Indeed, the founders predicted that the United States would be a unique and decisive experiment in the ability of humans to enjoy political liberty. The Federalist Papers began with this stirring observation:

(I)t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their

conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies

of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from

reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for

their political constitutions on accident and force . . . and a wrong election

of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the

general misfortune of mankind.

Conceived in this way, as an experiment in good government, indi-vidual choice, liberty, and human dignity, the United States occupies a


special place in the pantheon of human moral endeavor. However imper-fectly, the American tradition has remained true to the intention of the founders, providing a long string of affirmative answers to their original experimental question.

The essential civic manifestation of gratitude and affection for one’s country is patriotism—the commitment to society that grows out of a spirit of love and appreciation for the benefits that society has bestowed. The founders recognized that love of country and patriotism were inex-tricably linked to the virtues required to sustain a free society. Thomas Jefferson, for example, copied the following quote from Montesquieu in his Commonplace Book:

In a republic . . . virtue may be defined as the love of the laws and of our

country. As such love requires a constant preference of public to private

interest, it is the source of all private virtue. . . . Now a government is

like everything else: to preserve it we must love it. Everything, therefore,

depends on establishing this love in a republic; and to inspire it ought to

be the principal business of education, but the surest way of instilling it

into children is for parents to set them an example.

In our time (as in other contentious times and places), patriotism has become a contested word. One side of today’s political spectrum looks upon it with suspicion and distrust, echoing Samuel Johnson’s witticism that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Too many on the other side claim patriotism as their side’s sole property, using it as a politi-cal wedge issue and limiting it to token gestures such as waving flags and wearing lapel pins. This is unhealthy for civic cohesion. Debates can and should rage about the most sensible and admirable versions of patriotism, but its value as a necessary civic virtue should not be doubted. Without a patriotic attachment to one’s society, the kinds of full devotion that spur citizens to make crucial sacrifices for the public good could never exist. There are times when every society needs this full devotion for its very survival.

Patriotism, of course, is a particular attachment to one’s own society. Some influential educators have objected to fostering patriotism in stu-


dents because they fear that particular attachments lead inevitably to con-flict with those who harbor competing attachments. In the place of patrio-tism, they would promote “world citizenship” or “cosmopolitanism.” In a time of rapid globalization, this argument has found considerable favor among both intellectuals and the business community—the former wish-ing to avoid global conflict, the latter wishing to facilitate international commerce.

It is true that particularistic devotions can be exclusionary, discrimina-tory, and predatory, all of which can create serious moral problems. More-over, provincialism can be bad for commerce. But patriotism does not need to take a chauvinistic or insular form. It can go hand in hand with a concern for the welfare of people everywhere, with a respect for universal human rights and a belief in universal justice. Indeed, that is exactly in the spirit of the American Constitution. The founders were convinced that the success of their “experiment” would promote human dignity and freedom everywhere—and that its failure would be a misfortune to all mankind.

Unfortunately, global citizenship is an empty concept. It contains none of the essential meanings that students need to learn for their own futures as citizens in an actual society: the privileges and rights granted to citizens of a particular country, or the duties and obligations to which they are expected to commit themselves. Our students will not be able to vote for a public official of the world; they will not petition to a world court to address a grievance; no global government will protect their property or their rights; they will not pay taxes to the world; they will not be inducted to serve in a world jury or a world army.

Citizenship is particularistic. A student can learn how to be a good American citizen only by learning the particular rights and obligations that United States citizenship entails. Students can understand the mean-ing of these rights and obligations only by learning about the American constitutional tradition as it has evolved since the nation’s founding. For American students, patriotism is a particular attachment to this tradition. Based on gratitude and an informed appreciation of the tradition, patri-otism gives emotional support to citizenship and serves as the primary source of civic purpose.


Without question, our students need to absorb as much as possible about the world beyond our borders. They should learn about the world’s diverse cultures and master foreign languages. They very likely will partici-pate in the global economy. As a moral matter, American students should develop an understanding of the perspectives of people around the world so that they can respond to others’ needs and problems in a humane way. But the present-day emphasis on world citizenship and cosmopolitanism in our schools obscures rather than clarifies what it really means to be a responsible citizen. And it works against the very concerns that animate those who promulgate it, such as the fear that patriotism fosters quarrels and injustice.

Patriotism is not the only essential concept to draw controversy among educators in recent years. There have been parallels in the handling of indispensable notions such as morality and truth. In the latter part of the twentieth century, moral relativism (the belief that there are no universal moral values) became so fashionable that many educators avoided using the term “moral” in their classrooms, believing that it should be left to fundamentalist groups such as the Moral Majority. At the same time, a smaller (and less influential) contingent was denying the existence of truth on the grounds that perceived reality is inevitably shaped by distorted per-spectives, especially perspectives that reflect the self-interests of a “ruling class” with the power to determine what is presented in cultural settings such as public schools.

Again, as in the case of patriotism, such conclusions are misguided. Arguments about what is morally right and what is true are educative for students; but arguments that there is no such thing as morality, or that truth is an illusion, make little sense, and they can discourage a student’s motivation to learn how best to pursue the good and the true. It is time for patriotism, the motivational basis for informed and devoted citizenship, to join morality and truth as the highly valued objectives of education in American schools.

Patriotism, far from being “the last refuge of the scoundrel,”

is indispensable.


WHAT L IBERTY MEANSLiberty in a society makes possible a range of important personal free-doms, including religious, economic, ideological, family, and lifestyle free-doms. But liberty and freedom are not strictly synonymous, because there are some unrestrained freedoms (for example, from individual responsi-bility, from obligations and duties, and licentiousness) that erode liberty by damaging the social framework needed to protect it. It is important to cultivate virtue in young people for the very reason that virtue alone can provide the self-imposed restraints that can enable them to live responsi-bly under conditions of political liberty.

For centuries, political philosophers have written about the nature of liberty. As in any scholarly field, debates and distinct ideological positions have been staked out. I am a consumer rather than a maker of political philosophy, and I use a somewhat eclectic mix of these positions. Some thinkers refer to “negative” liberty and “positive” liberty: the former denoting the absence of social interference with private actions, the latter the capacity to influence the governance of one’s society. There have been fascinating debates about whether these two kinds of liberty are compat-ible, which is primary, and so on.

As interesting as these debates are, they are not my focus. I assume that for full citizenship, young people must be prepared for both kinds of political liberty: they must learn to live in a free society and to participate in its governance. The question is how to prepare them so that they and the generations after them will continue to enjoy access to all the freedoms that political liberty makes possible.

Excerpted from Failing Liberty 101: How We Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship in a Free Society, by William Damon (Hoover Institution Press, 2011). © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Press is Failing Liberty 101: How We

Are Leaving Young Americans Unprepared for Citizenship

in a Free Society, by William Damon. To order, call



Russell MuiRhead is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Boyd and Jill Smith

Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society and is the Robert Clements Associate

Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College.

Honor in the TaskHow can we shore up the American work ethic? By honoring good

work. By Russell Muirhead.

Americans are often contrasted with Europeans by the way we take work seriously. We identify with our jobs, not our inheritances or our noble ancestry. Often the first question we are asked when we meet somebody is “What do you do?” which is shorthand for “Who are you?” We connect the working life to human dignity. For us, as Tocqueville noted long ago, jobs may be easy or hard, well paid or poorly paid, but every kind of hon-est work is honorable. We are a country that honors work.

But it was not always so. And perhaps it might not always be so, which is the danger.

THE PECUL IAR INST ITUT IONThe first century of our existence was marked by slavery, which cast a dark shadow over many things, including the dignity of labor. Among its many wrongs, slavery made work dishonorable, something for respectable people of advantage to avoid.

U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond from South Carolina, more hon-est and more cutting than most defenders of slavery, freely admitted that slavery was oppressive. But he challenged slavery’s opponents to find any social system that was not. What about the mill workers of Lowell, Mas-sachusetts? Was this freedom?

VALUES


The Civil War soaked the ground in blood, but it was also a war of ideas. The ideal of union, though powerful, was not enough. It was also necessary to say what the union was for, which in the fullness of time required rejecting slavery. The rejection of slavery, in turn, required anoth-er idea: the affirmation of work.

There are two essential ingredients to the work ethic: devotion to a practice and contribution to society. The most obvious point in favor of free labor is that it is free, but this argument would not satisfy the likes of Senator Hammond, who thought that wage work was oppressive because it was assented to against a background of poverty and desperation. A real choice requires real options, and options are exactly what most workers lack.

In the years just before his ascent to the presidency and the country’s descent into civil war, Abraham Lincoln tried to work out an answer to this problem. Against Hammond’s image of the American economy—one filled with impoverished wage laborers in the North and oppressed slaves in the South—Lincoln emphasized that it is wrong to think all workers are either hired laborers or slaves and thus oppressed. Most are neither hired laborers nor slaves, but instead work for themselves. Nor is where you start where you end. Many start out laboring for others, but eventu-ally they come to buy their own tools, own their own land, and work for themselves. This opportunity to advance to a condition of indepen-dence is what could fund, in Lincoln’s view, a true work ethic. Opportunity makes work compelling.

Work—at least the right kind of work—activates a vast collection of human powers. It concentrates the mind, engages the heart, and directs the body. In this way, work is worthy of people who see themselves as dignified, free, and equal.

THE OFF ICE AND THE PROTESTANT ETH ICIn Lincoln’s day, it might have made sense to imagine an economy of farmers and artisans filled with the hope of becoming their own bosses. A century and a half later, this image remains compelling yet less realis-

The rejection of slavery required another idea: the affirmation of work.


tic. In the modern economy, most depend on employers, not only for their livelihoods but also for their health insurance. Where the farmer of the nineteenth century worked the earth and where the artisan worked materials into more useful forms, today we are more likely to work each other, managing our reputation in elaborate hierarchies that stack manag-ers upon managers, where no single person can point to something at the end of the day and say, “I did that.”

The dream of escaping the web of interdependence and becoming your own boss survives, but mostly in fantasy form.

Work is always a virtue for the citizens of a free society. To remain free, we need to do what we can to avoid making ourselves a burden on our fellow citizens. So we work, but perhaps without a work ethic. To be sure, many people—80 percent, according to polls—feel their own work is meaningful and identify with it. Yet recent evidence suggests that job satisfaction is declining, especially among young workers in their twenties and thirties. What marks these young people is not that they reject the conventional values affirmed by their parents but that they have trouble locating any compelling purpose. They do not reject the work ethic as unhappy or pointless, as did the romantic rebels of the 1960s. Instead, they neither affirm nor reject, but drift without a purpose.

The inability to locate purpose in the world of work may seem strange to some who see the point of work so clearly that it would seem to require no interpretation or argument. The point of work is quite simple in this view: to make us safe in an unsafe world.

As work promises to keep us safe, it also points beyond need to some-thing finer: luxury. Elemental needs may be satisfied, but wants never end. As soon as one is satisfied, a new (and more expensive one) grows up to take its place. Even Ben Franklin, that archetype of the work ethic, had a taste for luxury: after he experienced some success as a printer, he traded in his earthenware bowls for China dishes. Unlike natural excellence, luxury is open to anyone who works, earns, and saves—and finds a little luck.

Lincoln emphasized that it is wrong to think all workers are either hired

laborers or slaves and either way are oppressed.


But luck comes most to those who work. Because we might make our own luck, the work ethic possesses a hopeful and optimistic cast. Free labor, as Lincoln said, “opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”

Work gets its reason from wants and desires almost no one can escape. Seen this way, work is natural: it is what we do because we are what we are. Does work really need an ethic? Should we really need fancy purposes to experience work as meaningful?

Anyone can appreciate the traditional purposes of work—security, com-fort, and luxury. Yet solid though they are, standing alone they threaten to undercut the dignity of work. The traditional purposes of work ultimately suggest that the good life is an escape from work.

A true work ethic does not merely ratify the traditional approach of work but transforms it. The Protestant ethic overturned the traditional approach to work by connecting work not with worldly goods like secu-rity and wealth but with salvation. In the Protestant ethic, work is com-manded by God and—this was the radical part—God’s command touch-es all socially useful and honest labors, regardless of their social status. The farmer and the statesman each have their work to do, and each kind of work is equally important. Leveling distinctions, the Protestant ethic acknowledges a democracy of work: all work has dignity. And all work has a point, which is to create a community that exemplifies God’s teachings. Skills are not tools one gets to gain advantage over others, but they are gifts, meant to be deployed for purposes larger than our own.

This connecting of work to purposes larger than ourselves is what equipped the Protestant ethic to invest all useful and honest work with meaning. And this is what the work ethic in its contemporary form still requires. To work from an ethic (rather than simply from need or vainglo-rious desire) is to work with a view to excellence. It means cultivating our own gifts, activating our full powers, and giving them focus. The Protes-tant ethic connected work not with worldly goods like security and wealth

For those who lack trust funds, connections, and other safety nets,

the habit of work is the most practical virtue they can possess.


but with salvation. The purpose of work was larger than the worker, and that’s what gave it dignity.

There are two essential ingredients to the work ethic: devotion to a prac-tice and contribution to society. No doubt, for many kinds of work these two ingredients will be hard to locate. Job roles that have been stripped of their skills, their discretion, their variety, and their responsibility offer little scope for developing excellence. In addition to the de-skilling of jobs, bureaucratic structures that fragment jobs into infinitely small pieces can make it difficult to detect how our own work contributes to anything outside the organization in which it is nested. The cartoon Dilbert and the television sitcom The Office hardly exaggerate the pointlessness that work comes to possess when it is disconnected from the larger world and takes its bearings only in response to managerial whims.

It is not the case that a work ethic makes sense regardless of what you work at. By their sheer scale, advanced industrial economies threaten to make the work ethic irrelevant in the worst way—by making it quaint.

THE NEXT GENERAT IONBut it is not quite quaint yet, and it would distort our experience to claim that work today is wholly unworthy of a work ethic. The builder, the teacher, the counselor, the banker, the mechanic, the nurse, the engineer, and countless other occupations all involve an understanding of what it means to be good at the job, and how the job contributes to the larger world.

To improve the quality of work where it is deficient, we have to be capable of recognizing the value of work where it is sufficient to support a work ethic. This means asking the right questions about work, espe-cially our own work. The questions central to the work ethic are: “What kind of excellence of skill does doing this work develop?” and “How does this work contribute to the larger world?” If we bundle those two ques-tions together, we could simply ask, “Why might this work be called good work?” To be able to answer those questions is to “give an account” of one’s work.

Perhaps for many of us, time is too scarce and the pressures of everyday life too unremitting to bother with giving an account. And perhaps it is


not necessary. A mechanic has a job to do—figure out what’s killing the car’s battery!—and no one wants to pay his mechanic $90 per hour to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Giving an account requires distance and time that few can afford.

Yet if it is right that young people are finding it increasingly difficult to map their own sense of purpose onto the world of work, it is more imperative that the older generation take the time to give an account, to think through what might make their work good work. Many have learned how to find meaning in their work—by quietly subverting small-minded managerial control, by focusing on what is really important, by conscious-ly mastering skills that are of more general use in life, by learning how to cooperate and work together, and by daring to invest something of their unrepeatable spirit in their daily labors.

Transmitting all this learning to the young will not happen automati-cally. Market forces, left to their own devices, might sooner dissolve the work ethic than sustain it. Passing along the work ethic to those who are finding their way in the world of work for the first time will require giving an account of our own work, more explicitly and more honestly than has been the custom.

The work ethic is not without its critical edge; after all, it makes the traditional purposes of work seem insufficient. Yet on its vitality depends the honor of work, and more fundamentally, the equal respect character-istic of a democratic culture.

Adapted from Defining Ideas (www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas). © 2011 by the Board of Trust-ees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This essay will appear in a forthcoming Hoover Institution Press volume produced by the Hoover Institution’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society.

Available from the Hoover Press is “A Country I Do Not

Recognize”: The Legal Assault on American Values,

edited by Robert H. Bork. To order, call 800.935.2882

or visit www.hooverpress.org.


A. Ross Johnson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior

scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Today’s Liberation TechnologiesA Cold War lesson that’s entirely relevant today: free people need free

information. By A. Ross Johnson.

This is true Liberty when free born men

Having to advise the public may speak free,

Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise

—Euripides, as translated by John Milton, 1644

The “Arab spring” of 2011 has shown us a world of transformed politics, communications, and technology beyond anything imaginable during the Cold War. But the ferment in the Arab world echoes the struggle for freedom of oppressed peoples under communism, demonstrating that striving for freedom is not simply a Eurasian but a universal aspiration. It’s a familiar story in another way: just as in the Cold War, Arabs agitat-ing for change must erode the information monopoly of authoritarian regimes and provide citizens with objective, honest information—not only news but also information about democratic ideas, institutions, and values.

This challenge of communicating to and within a transformed world was the focus of a workshop in February featuring Hoover Distinguished Fellow George P. Shultz, Hoover Senior Fellow Larry Diamond, Hoover Research Fellow Abbas Milani, and former adviser to the Open Society

HISTORY AND CULTURE


Institute Media Program John Fox. The panelists made use of a new Hoover Institution–supported book, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Central European University Press, 2010), which draws on Hoover’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty collections, among others. Co-sponsors of the workshop at Stanford were the Europe Center of the Freeman Spogli Institute for Interna-tional Studies and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, and other Western radios reached over the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, provid-ing captive peoples in the Soviet orbit with news about the world and their own countries that was barred by the censorship apparatus of repressive regimes. The impact was remarkable. The broadcasts sometimes attracted Soviet and Eastern Europe audiences of half the adult population. For ordinary listeners, the Radios “kept hope alive” and provided perspective on a world they wanted to be part of. For dissidents, the Radios were a megaphone, allowing uncensored communication with their fellow citi-zens that strengthened opposition to the regimes. For Communist leaders, the Radios were such a threat to their rule that they sought to block their messages with massive and expensive countermeasures—technical jam-ming of broadcasts, repression of listeners, and pressure on broadcasters and their families.

RADIOS ’ REC IPE FOR SUCCESSWhat is especially interesting today is how over the course of forty years, sometimes in fits and starts, the Radios developed the policies and practices that accounted for their success. RFE and RL became a free press for unfree countries because they were audience-centric—they focused not on the United States but on developments in the tar-get countries. They offered listeners a mix of views as well as news: opinion, commentary, and analysis. This blend of domestic-focused

The broadcasters were audience-centric: they focused not on the United

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news, comment, and features was vitally important—far more so than the verbal bombast which, however satisfying to some in the West dur-ing the Cold War, was counterproductive with the audience in the East. Audiences listened to and believed the broadcasts because, above all, they were credible.

News was as balanced, objective, and well sourced as possible. The Radios provided the bad news as well as the good, about the United States as well as other countries. Newscasters and commentators spoke the same language as their audience, not just linguistically but culturally and eth-nically. At Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, editorial authority was exercised by talented émigrés who enjoyed editorial autonomy in part-nership with Americans who ultimately were responsible for broadcasts. During the Cold War, the Americans were the publishers; the broadcast directors from “there” were the chief editors.

Broadcasters generally resisted the temptation to overreach and pre-tend to know the interests of the audiences better than the audiences themselves. They understood that information from outside can only

Hungarians riding a historic tram through Budapest hand out copies of a booklet

commemorating the revolution of 1956, in which opposition broadcasting played a large part.

An image of Imre Nagy, the former prime minister who led the abortive uprising, appears at left.


reinforce indigenous opposition to repressive regimes, never create that opposition.

They also came to understand the special responsibility of external communicators in crises. Among other duties, it was their job to reinforce emerging independent media in repressive countries, whether in Hungary during the 1956 revolution, in Poland with the emergence of Solidarity, or in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Unintended consequences were always a danger. During a crisis, responsible journalism can inadvertently be inflammatory because audiences might mistake reporting for exhorta-tion. This happened with RFE broadcasts to Hungary in 1956, accused by some of encouraging revolutionaries to continue a fight they could not win (see “To the Barricades,” Hoover Digest, 2007:4).

Moreover, the United States came to understand that effective broad-casting was a long-term proposition. Governments are always tempted to demand short-term indicators of success. The U.S. government was no exception; it sought to appraise the impact of specific broadcasts year to year, to prove from one budget cycle to the next that a particular project was “moving the needle” in the Cold War. But broadcasting into the Iron Curtain required sustainable support. The payoff came in 1981–89, when the investment over several decades helped to restore eastern nations to a Europe whole and free, and to bring the Soviet Union to an end.

THE MORE TH INGS CHANGE . . . The Arab world is less receptive to messages from the West than were coun-tries under Communist rule, but democratic opposition leaders in today’s Middle East still look to free countries to magnify their message and sustain the flow of information. They seek to publicize the plight at home and abroad of imprisoned democrats, such as Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran. (During the Cold War, Czechs tuned in to RFE to learn of the imprison-ment and protests of Vaclav Havel and his fellow Charter 77 dissidents.) And in ways unimaginable during the Cold War, new technologies are allowing

The “Arab spring” emphasizes the message that striving for freedom is

not simply a Eurasian aspiration but a universal one.


Arab opposition figures to unite their followers and elude the autocrats, who also have been fast learners of the new communications game.

Print media and radio broadcasts are still important, but they are often overshadowed by satellite television, Internet audiovisual and text mate-rials, and the new Internet-based social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. Satellite television, notably Al-Jazeera Arabic, and social media have sparked protests and demonstrations around the Arab world and Iran. The digital media have become important tools of communication not just to but within unfree societies.

During the Cold War, news from Western broadcasts and local rumors spread slowly by word of mouth. Earlier, letters and travelers’ communi-cations had fueled the European revolutions of 1848. But social media now allow such horizontal, peer-to-peer communication to reach tens and hundreds of thousands instantly—a reach that would astonished Soviet dissidents with their covertly shared, typewritten copies of underground manuscripts. The digital media are liberation technologies, allowing citizens themselves to carve out spheres of information freedom within authoritarian systems and, as we have seen throughout the Middle East this year, mount fundamental challenges to those systems. The new tech-nology empowers newly emergent citizen reporters and opinion leaders to communicate far easier and quicker than was possible through the mega-phone of Western radio during the Cold War.

Yet the new technologies are no silver bullet. Repressive regimes fight back, just as during the Cold War. They jam satellite signals, censor and even shut down the Internet, and carry out surveillance of wireless com-munications. The cat-and-mouse game between broadcasters and jam-mers continues. Multinational telecom companies, which provide much of the infrastructure to support the new technologies, may have a moral obligation to support users and not censors but they cannot always be counted on to do so.

Facebook, Twitter, the Internet in general: these are liberation technologies,

allowing citizens to carve out spheres of information freedom within today’s

authoritarian systems.


Certain older technologies may be due for a revival. Shortwave radio transmissions, for instance, are the most difficult form of communications to block. Earlier this year, Sudanese youth turned to shortwave radio for communication after the authorities blocked Facebook and text messag-ing. The villagers of a town in Sarawak state, Malaysia, bought up every shortwave set available to they could listen to a London-based station, Radio Free Sarawak.

The new technologies can serve oppressors as well as freedom fight-ers, just as the telegraph, telephone, radio, and television have done. Evgeny Morozov has cautioned in his book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Public Affairs, 2010) that repressive regimes and mobs employ the new tools to their advantage. The Ayatollah Kho-meini incited religious fanaticism in Iran using audiocassette recordings spread by telephone. Mobs used mobile telephones to organize torching of Serbian monasteries in Kosovo in 2004. The Taliban incites violent jihad via the Internet. The Iranian Republican Guard wages cyber-jihad. Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez has a reported one million Twitter fol-lowers.

Discussing the potential of then-revolutionary technology of shortwave radio in 1952, Ambassador Foy Kohler, director of the Voice of America, cautioned that “radio is a means often mistaken as an end.” Today, too, the medium is indeed not the message. Walter Laqueur has cautioned in Democratic Digest that “Facebook and the Internet will change nothing in a country like Egypt unless you have a message which tells people how to build a free and just society, how to make the country more prosperous, how to give satisfactory jobs to young people.”

That is the challenge facing those today—including the U.S.-fund-ed stations Alhurra, Sawa, Persian News Network (VOA), and Farda (RFE/RL)—which carry the message of freedom to oppressed peoples. It is also the challenge facing citizens if they are to use new liberation technology not just to organize mass protest but to complement inde-pendent traditional media and develop postauthoritarian democratic systems.

Hoover Senior Fellow Timothy Garton Ash writes in his preface to Cold War Broadcasting that “history never repeats itself. One should try


to learn from it nonetheless.” Efforts to communicate to and within unfree societies will benefit from remembering what worked and why during the Cold War.


Available from the Hoover Press is Communicating with

the World of Islam, edited by A. Ross Johnson. To order,



Harvey C. Mansfield is the Carol G. Simon Senior Fellow at the Hoover

Institution, a member of Hoover’s Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a

Free Society, and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard

University. He is the author of Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford

University Press, 2010).

On the Road with AlexisNew insights into Alexis de Tocqueville, the genius who journeyed

into the heart of American exceptionalism. By Harvey C. Mansfield.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a book that every Ameri-can who reads should read. There’s no better book on democracy and none better on America, first home of modern democracy.

Among a wave of new translations and analyses in recent years, two books provide elegant decoration for Tocqueville’s masterpiece.

In Letters from America (Yale University Press, 2010), Frederick Brown has edited and translated a handy collection of the letters Tocqueville wrote while traveling through America in 1831–32, speaking with Ameri-cans and gathering documents in preparation for his book. Olivier Zunz and Arthur Goldhammer have produced a tome fit for a generous gift, containing the same letters as in Brown’s collection plus Tocqueville’s trav-el notebooks, narrations of his side trip to the frontier, later letters, other writings on America, and ample selections of writings from Tocqueville’s friend and companion on the trip, Gustave de Beaumont. This book, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels (University of Virginia Press, 2010), even includes pic-

HISTORY AND CULTURE


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tures of American birds that Tocqueville and Beaumont shot so that Beau-mont could paint them—thus illustrating Tocqueville’s uncanny appeal to both the left (lovers of nature) and the right (lovers of hunting).

Two questions arise from the materials of Tocqueville’s trip and his preparations for his book, whose first volume appeared in 1835. First, what did he learn by coming to America instead of examining it from afar? Second, how—by what method—did he learn what he wrote so convinc-ingly and profoundly? These questions engage the assertion known today as American exceptionalism, a recent issue between Republicans, who trumpet it as the justification for American patriotism, and Democrats, who deprecate it and imply that America is nothing special, unless it is special to be the leader of all other unexceptional countries.

Tocqueville thought America to be singular quite apart from the favor-able circumstances permitting it to grow and flourish on its own without much interference from Europe. In the introduction to his book, he said he saw in America “more than America . . . an image of democracy itself.” Special to America was not only that it believed in democracy and prac-ticed it as best it could, as if straining to fulfill the demands of a theory of democracy. Rather, the theory or the “image” was shown in the practice of democracy, because America was democracy complete and as a whole, the material and source of its image.

In speaking of democracy in America—the title of his book—Toc-queville confirmed and went beyond what Alexander Hamilton said on the first page of The Federalist by way of explaining American exception-alism. Hamilton wrote that America was deciding by its conduct and example the question of whether good government could be thoughtfully chosen or was just a matter of chance. America was special because it would answer a theoretical question never before answered, not by think-ing up a new theory but by means of its own practice. Tocqueville agreed and then actually found the new theory in its practice. His book on America told the rest of the civilized world what to expect in its future,

America not only believed in democracy, it practiced it as best it could,

as if straining to fulfill the demands of a theory.


as America was unique in displaying a complete democracy. It was not unique in being superior to all other peoples for all time, as implied in the boastful, irritable American patriotism Tocqueville found so objec-tionable.

Tocqueville was not friendly to philosophers or “theoreticians,” as sev-eral letters confirm. In Democracy in America, he ignored the political phi-losophy in the principles of America’s founding, calling the Puritans and not, say, John Locke, America’s “point of departure.” He emphasized the practical work of the Constitution (based on theories, to be sure) and never even mentioned Jefferson’s more theoretical and Lockean Declara-tion of Independence. Yet Tocqueville was interested in “theoretical con-sequences.” In a letter to a cousin written in 1834 (published only in the Zunz volume) he noted that it is “ten years since I conceived most of the ideas” of his book. “I went to America only to remove my remaining doubts.” Ten years before, Tocqueville was nineteen years old! He did not get his ideas from his trip to America but thought them up years before. He came to America to see “what a great republic is,” knowing what it is in advance. In Democracy in America, he noted it was only of the variety of associational activity there that he “had no idea” before he came.

To this definition and endorsement of American exceptionalism one might object, and doubters of that idea today do object, that a country maintaining slavery could not congratulate itself for being an example, let alone the exemplar, of political freedom or thoughtful choice to the rest of mankind. Tocqueville agreed, and in his letters on America after his visit he inveighed against the taint put by slavery on America’s reputation around the world, particularly since other countries had already abolished it. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 he grew increasingly concerned; it was one thing not to abolish slavery where it was long established, quite another to extend it to new territories. This was a point made by Lincoln, but Tocqueville died in 1859 without learning of the man who would

America was unique in displaying a “complete” democracy—not in

being superior to all other peoples for all time, as implied in the kind of

patriotism Tocqueville found so objectionable.


have shown him the greatness he most praised: great thought from the doer of great deeds.

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville treated slavery as an instance of majority tyranny. As such it belongs to democracy; it is the character-istic vice, the continual threat in democracy. That is why he could say that America revealed what a complete democracy is. Democratic justice is always accompanied by democratic injustice. The reason why slavery continued for so long in America is that the majority was behind it, and when the crisis came—shortly after Tocqueville’s death—Lincoln saw that although there was a majority in the country against slavery, there was not a majority for war to abolish it. After the election of 1860, he was able to rally a majority for a war to save the Union in the course of which, with much bloodshed, slavery was abolished. As Tocqueville foresaw, it was because of democracy that democracy had such trouble cleansing itself.

In his book, Tocqueville contrasted the fates in America of blacks and Indians, the former enslaved by democratic prejudice and the latter cheat-ed in unfair treaties by democratic hypocrisy. On his trip, too, he had shown equal interest in the two sets of victims, and the Zunz volume con-tains Goldhammer’s fine new translation of “Two Weeks in the Wilder-ness” (until now usually known as “Fortnight”). This work of forty pages, composed on a steamboat on Lake Huron, is a demonstration of the pro-digious energy Tocqueville commanded on his trip. It is a reflection on man and nature so beautifully done that it can be thought romantic, but it is not so hostile to civilization as is romanticism. Indians in his view are free and noble in their extreme way, but they remain savages unable to accept the benefits of reason and civilization that would moderate and improve their intractable souls.

And the question of Tocqueville’s method? One must first confront the uncomfortable truth that his genius was indispensable. To see the difference between a genius and a non-genius one could begin with the difference between Tocqueville, who wrote a great book, and his friend

In a complete democracy like America, democratic justice is always

accompanied by democratic injustice.


Beaumont, who wrote a mediocre one. The two shared the investigation into American penitentiaries that was the “pretext” (Tocqueville’s word) for their trip, and Beaumont spoke proudly in July 1831 of “our great work” on America, the real object of their voyage, that was to come. But by November, he understood that Tocqueville was writing that book on his own and that he was to write a fictional treatment of slavery—“the great work that is to immortalize me,” he noted wryly. After Tocqueville’s death, Beaumont edited his works, and one could say of him that he was as true a friend as he knew how.

Tocqueville made “travel notebooks” that are translated in the Zunz collection. These are transcripts of his questioning of his sources appear-ing as dialogues between “Q” and “A” and contrasting nicely with modern survey research techniques. Tocqueville asks intelligent questions of intel-ligent people and presses them to face their contradictions and explain themselves; he thinks and learns as he surveys. Today’s survey researcher asks bland questions of average respondents, has an assistant code the responses, restates and manipulates them mathematically, and then inter-prets them according to a model that he can persuade his professional colleagues to accept.

Which method produces the better result? To answer the question, con-sider that Tocqueville addresses the question of American exceptionalism, the question of what America is all about, while social science assumes it is meaningless or unanswerable and evades it. In our time we can hardly read too much Tocqueville.

Reprinted by permission of the Wall Street Journal. © 2011 Dow Jones & Co. All rights reserved.

Available from the Hoover Press is Leviathan: The

Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty,

by Clint Bolick. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit



Paul R. GReGoRy is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the Cullen

Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and a research

professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin.

Tyranny 101Who better to coach a would-be dictator than Stalin? The curious

episode of a foreign comrade who sought Stalin’s advice—which,

of course, came at a cost. By Paul R. Gregory.

In the Hoover collection known as Fond 89 we find a document that can only be called a short course in despotism. The teacher: Josef Stalin. His pupils: the leaders of the Mongolian Communist Party, who had trekked to Moscow specifically for his tutelage. It was November 15, 1934, during a time when Mongolia had broken away from China and become a Soviet protectorate with a local communist government. The communists were opposed by Bud-dhist monks, who held sway over the nomadic population. Mongolia was important to the Soviet Union in light of the growing Japanese threat.

The Mongolian party secretary, Gendun, had brought along the del-egation to collect their patron’s advice on how to defeat the monks. In the course of this conversation, Stalin imparted his wisdom on the first steps towards establishing a totalitarian regime. His playbook should be required reading for dictators the world over.

Stalin’s advice applied to a would-be dictator in a backward country facing significant resistance from a religious opposition. He warned his Mongolian visitors that they were not yet ready for the big time: forced collectivization, arrests, and outright terror. That could come later. For the time being, he counseled patience and emphasized the importance of winning the battle for hearts and minds.

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A verbatim transcript of the three-hour meeting tells the story. The meeting begins in typical Stalin style, with the Soviet leader asking ques-tions. He wants to know the facts about the Buddhist monks—“the great-est danger,” as he calls them, to the communist government: Are they well organized? Do they oppose you openly? Do the nomads believe them or the communists? In what language are religious services conducted? Do the monks finance their religious and educational activities with “volun-tary or compulsory” contributions? Who controls and builds wells? Do you send party activists into monasteries to stir things up?

The Mongolian party leader’s answers do not particularly please Stalin. He is especially put out to hear that party activists cannot infiltrate evening prayers and that arrests of Buddhist leaders are met with strong protests.

After extracting a reluctant admission that the monks are more popu-lar than the communists, Stalin, exasperated, concludes that Mongolia has “two governments” and that the Buddhists are the stronger. He then launch-es into a lengthy discourse full of advice, excerpts of which I provide here:

“In a war in which you cannot defeat the enemy by a frontal assault, you should use roundabout maneuvers. Your first action should be to put your own teachers in the schools to battle the monks for influence among the youth. Teachers and activists must be the direct conduits of your policy.”

“The government must build more water wells to show the people that they, not the monks, are more concerned about their economic needs.”

“In the case of the Buddhist leaders, it is necessary to charge them with espionage, not counterrevolution, so that the people understand that they are working for foreign enemies. But you can do this only from time to time at this point.”

“If you have workers who disagree with your policies, there is no need for roundabout measures. You must conduct against them the most mer-ciless battle.”

“If the monks practice medicine, it is necessary to prepare your own physicians and veterinarians to counter their influence.”

Stalin counseled patience and working toward winning hearts and minds.

The oppression could come later.

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“It is necessary to have a strong army in which not one recruit is illiter-ate. Along with other training, they must receive political training.”

“You should produce films and promote theater in the Mongolian lan-guage [to spread the communist message].”

“You should hold religious services not in Tibetan but in the Mongo-lian language.”

“As long as there is private and not state ownership, there will be exploi-tation of the poor by the rich. You must conduct a merciless battle against feudalism and monks by taxing them while providing support and subsi-dies to the poor and middle class.”

“You should not allow the rich in the party; only admit a few who are useful. You cannot give the party to the rich. You must hold power in your own hands.”

“Foreign powers will not recognize you as long as it is unclear who is stronger, you or the monks. After you strengthen your government and army and raise the economic and cultural level of your people, the impe-rialistic powers themselves will recognize you. If they do not, now being strong you can spit in their faces.”

“If you carry out all these measures, you will be stronger than the monks. They will stand before you on their hind legs.”

After the Mongolian party leader accepts Stalin’s advice “with joy,” the conversation takes an almost comical turn. The Mongolian leader asks: “And our independence?” Stalin assures him: “You have nothing to gain from independence from the USSR. The USSR does not want your land. We already have enough.”

The Mongolians then proceed to submit to Stalin proposed changes in the structure of government and their nominees for the most important positions in the party and state. They go over each name. Stalin knows about each one; he has done his homework. He then endorses the list of candidates, instructing that these nominations should be formally approved “back home.” So much for the independence of the Mongolian party.

“You cannot give the party to the rich. You must hold power in your

own hands.”


EDIT ING H IS PLAYBOOKStalin obeyed his own advice to wait for a decisive move. In July 1937, almost three years after he met with the Mongolian party leaders, he sent the second in command of his secret police to Ulan Bator to personal-ly supervise the purging of the Mongolian party elite. Stalin’s Novem-ber 1934 conversation partner, Gendun, was among the first victims. A longtime survivor of intraparty struggles in his homeland and known for defying Stalin on occasion, Gendun was executed on a charge of conspir-ing with “lamaist reactionaries” and spying for the Japanese (remember Stalin’s counsel to accuse one’s enemies of espionage). When the purge was over, some 4 percent of Mongolia’s population had been killed, among them some twenty thousand Buddhist monks. Only one monastery was eventually reopened. (Today, Gendun’s former Ulan Bator home is the site of Mongolia’s Victims of Political Persecution Museum.)

The transcript is of interest in itself because it was extensively edited in Stalin’s own hand. Some of his edits are stylistic. Others clarify his comments relating to future collectivization. But a number of edits try to make him appear more statesmanlike. For example, he crossed out his remark about the USSR not needing Mongolian land and removed his reference to spitting on imperialists. Perhaps Stalin wanted a cleansed ver-sion of this document for his personal archive or a later publication.

Stalin’s playbook for the Mongolians shows why dictators and would-be dictators the world over have taken him as a model. We know, for example, that Saddam Hussein and Mao Zedong were apt students of Sta-lin. In this sort of challenge the Soviet leader was in his element. He had already practiced such an approach in Central Asia, where Muslim clerics, who enjoyed strong support among the population, opposed his policies.

In dispensing his advice, Stalin revealed patience combined with both flexibility and ideological rigidity. His long-run goal for Mongolia was totalitarian control by a communist elite loyal to him, but he counseled that the battle for hearts and minds must first be won in the schools and

“If you carry out all these measures, you will be stronger than the monks.

They will stand before you on their hind legs.”


theaters and through the distribution of water. Arrests and repression were to begin slowly, leaving room for retreat if necessary. Enemies should be associated with detested foreign powers such as the Japanese. His rigidity is seen in his ultimate goal, the collectivization of a nomadic population—almost a contradiction in terms.

A MODERN POSTSCRIPTChina today faces a problem in Tibet similar to Stalin’s in the Mongolia of the 1930s. Tibet also has “two governments”—an official one subservient to Beijing and an unofficial one led by Tibetan monks, whose spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled in 1959 as Chinese forces suppressed the Tibetan uprising. China has made heavy investments in Tibet (as advised by Stalin) but has failed to win over hearts and minds. Tibetan monks have been suppressed in quiet campaigns; many have disappeared. Unable to find “loyal” Tibetans (as Stalin did in Mongolia), Beijing installed Han Chinese to run the official government. And Beijing also has followed Stalin’s advice to demonize the opposition as agents of hostile foreign powers. Among the many charges against the Dalai Lama is that he is an agent of the CIA.


Available from the Hoover Press is Politics, Murder, and

Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin

and Anna Larina, by Paul R. Gregory. To order,



Hsiao-ting Lin is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He and Lisa

nguyen are co-curators of the Hoover Archives’ East Asian Collection.

The Revolutionary RepublicIn 1911, China rejected feudalism to enter the modern era. A new

Hoover exhibit on a century of change. By Hsiao-ting Lin and Lisa

Nguyen.

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution of 1911, which swept away more than two thousand years of feudal mon-archies and established Asia’s first republic, the Republic of China. The Xinhai Revolution, as it is known, was triggered by anger at corruption in the Qing imperial court, frustration with the government’s inability to restrain the interventions of foreign powers, and resentment by the majority Han Chinese toward a government dominated by the Manchu ethnic minority. It broke out on October 10, 1911, with an uprising in Wuchang, the capital city of Hubei Province along the Yangtze River. Within months, the revolution had succeeded in overthrowing 268 years of Manchu autocracy.

A new exhibit at the Hoover Institution, A Century of Change: Chi-na 1911–2011, draws on the rich holdings of the Hoover Library and Archives to offer a unique insight into the Xinhai Revolution, an episode that marked a significant turn in the convoluted course of Chinese mod-ern history.

When the curtain opened on the twentieth century, China was still reel-ing from the Taiping Rebellion, the Opium Wars, and the first Sino-Japa-

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Sun Yat-sen, at top center of this 1912 calendar, was the catalyst for the overthrow of the

Qing dynasty and was the Republic of China’s provisional first president. At left is Huang

Xing, a fellow revolutionary; at right is Yuan Shikai, a military leader who later seized

power and tried to re-establish the monarchy around himself. Battle scenes from the 1911

Wuchang uprising adorn the calendar. Across the top: flags signifying equal land distribution

(far left, far right), the banner of the Wuchang revolutionaries (second from left), Sun Yat-

sen’s shining sun, later the Republic of China’s flag (second from right), and the republic’s

original five-striped national flag (center).


nese War of 1894–95. In 1900, the anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion was led by the Yi He Quan (Righteous Harmonious Fists), who received orders from the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), the de facto ruler, to “pro-tect the country and destroy the foreigners.” But an expeditionary column of twenty thousand troops from an eight-nation alliance of Austria-Hun-gary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States quelled the violence. In September 1901, the Qing court signed the Boxer Protocol. China had to pay the bill—450 million taels, almost double the government’s annual income—and the eight nations wrested new concessions from the empire. When the Empress Dowager died in 1908 and Emperor Aisin Gioro Puyi, two years old, ascended to the throne, the Qing throne wobbled on the verge of collapse.

The man who would become known as the father of the republic, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), was the first to advocate the overthrow of the Qing

This image shows republican soldiers storming the Taiping Gate in Nanjing, one of the

milestones of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911–12. This and other scenes of the revolution

were commemorated in a series of prints by the Shanghai Commercial Press.

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dynasty and the establishment of a Chinese democratic republic. Sun was born to a peasant family in a village in southern Guangdong Province. At the age of thirteen Sun went to Honolulu, Hawaii, where his brother enrolled him in a missionary school. There he came under the influence of Western ideas of Christianity and democracy. Later, Sun studied medicine in Hong Kong. After graduation in 1892, he began practicing medicine in Guangzhou and Macao.

But Sun’s mind was soon preoccupied with the problem of curing the ills of feudal China. In 1894, he wrote a letter to Li Hongzhang, then the most powerful official in the imperial court, recommending reforms in agriculture, industry, commerce, and education. But Li turned a deaf ear to this unknown young man. China’s defeat by Japan in 1895 intensified Sun’s patriotic indignation. Convinced that saving the moribund regime through reform was a hopeless task, Sun decided that the Qing dynasty

On January 1, 1912, Sun Yat-sen proclaimed the foundation of the Republic of China.

This image shows him arriving at the Shanghai station to take a train to Nanjing,

where the proclamation would take place. The last Qing emperor abdicated on

February 12, ending 268 years of Manchu dynastic rule.

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must be overthrown and the monarchy replaced by a free, enlightened China. He had become a revolutionary.

FROM SMALL BEGINNINGSIn 1894, with some twenty Chinese shopkeepers and farm owners in Honolulu, Sun formed the Xingzhong Hui (Revive China Society). The following spring he returned to Hong Kong with some followers and staged their first armed uprising against the Qing authorities in Guang-zhou. It failed, but Sun began to be known at home and abroad as the leader of a revolutionary group.

After the failed 1895 uprising in Guangdong, Sun was declared a criminal with a price on his head. He fled to Japan and then traveled to the United States and Europe. Wherever he went, he worked to spread revolutionary ideas among the Chinese residents and students. In Octo-ber 1896, Sun was kidnapped in London by Qing legation officials, who intended to return him to China for execution. Thanks to the aid of James Cantlie, former dean of the British medical college in Hong Kong where Sun had studied, he was rescued. This episode only strengthened Sun’s heroic image as a revolutionary leader, as well as his determination to topple the Qing court.

In the years that followed, Sun continued to travel around the globe, advocating revolution and soliciting financial and other forms of support for his cause. One important base was in Yokohama, Japan, where he, Huang Xing, and Song Jiaoren founded a new underground resistance movement, the Tongmeng Hui (United Alliance League), in 1905. Com-bining republican, nationalist, and socialist objectives, the Tongmeng Hui’s political platform was “Drive out the Tartars, revive China, establish a republic, and equalize land distribution.”

As discontent mounted all around China during the last decade of the nineteenth century, two opposing movements had sought to revive China: the revolutionaries and the reformers. The reformers, led by Kang Youwei

Sun Yat-sen decided that the Qing dynasty must be overthrown and the

monarchy replaced by a free, enlightened China.

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This closeup shows a whimsical map drawn by Frank Dorn (1901–81), an American artist and writer—later a brigadier general—attached to the staff of General Joseph Stilwell before and during World War II. Here Dorn depicts “the Boy Emperor,” the 1911 revolution, and the republic. The Stilwell and Dorn collections are both housed at Hoover.


and Liang Qichao, sought to change the status quo within the confines of the imperial system. Emperor Guangxu (1874–1908) believed that by learning from constitutional monarchies like Japan, China would become more powerful politically and economically. However, the reforms were viewed as too extreme for a China still heavily influenced by neo-Con-fucian statecraft. Displeased, Cixi saw these changes as a serious threat to her power and condemned the reforms as too radical. She placed Emperor Guangxu under house arrest. Kang and Liang escaped to Japan.

Nevertheless, the revolutionary upsurge forced a reluctant Qing court to eventually institute reforms to stave off its final collapse. After the Empress Dowager’s death in 1908, the Qing outlined steps to be taken during a nine-year period preparatory to establishing a constitutional monarchy. Though impressive, these reforms were viewed as too little, too late. The imperial court became more isolated than ever among a dissatisfied and rebellious population. In October 1911, the uprising in Wuchang broke out.

Sun Yat-sen himself played no direct part in the Wuchang uprising. He was traveling in the United States and found out about it from a news-paper. Sun had favored an uprising in his native Guangdong. His rival within the Tongmeng Hui, Huang Xing, had favored an uprising in cen-tral China and had been planning one for late October. The revolutionary leaders were thus caught off guard, leaving the mutineers without a leader.

At first, the revolt was considered merely the latest in a series of muti-nies that had occurred in southern China. It was widely expected to be suppressed quickly, but ended up having much larger implications because the Qing court failed to respond quickly. This allowed provincial assem-blies in many southern provinces to declare independence from the Qing court and declare allegiance to the rebellion.

As news of the success of the insurrection broke, men in urban areas were instructed to shear off their queues (pigtails, a mandated hairstyle for men that symbolized subservience to the Manchu authority). Within a month, representatives from the sixteen seceding provinces met and declared a Republic of China. In February 1912, the child emperor Aisin Gioro Puyi abdicated, and 268 years of Qing imperial rule came to an end.

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This propaganda poster draws on traditional Chinese imagery—a phoenix, the

Forbidden City, the original republican flag—to promote a brief, Japanese-controlled

collaborationist regime called the Provisional Government of the Republic of China.

The puppet state was led by a Kuomintang turncoat named Wang Kemin and based

in Beijing from 1937 to 1940. Wang was tried for treason after World War II and

committed suicide in 1945.

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Sun Yat-sen, in a humorous exchange with his legal adviser Paul Myron Wentworth

Linebarger (whose papers are among the Hoover collections), said of this photo:

“Evidently, I was not posing as a tailor’s model in this picture. Why did I not banish

my reform ideas long enough to make a better showing in pantaloon creasing? I

wonder if our Chinese civilization will ever go in for pressed pants?”

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EARLY HOPES AND SETBACKSThe early republic enjoyed a period of hope that the new China could develop into a full-fledged democracy. Sun, accompanied by his Ameri-can military adviser Homer Lea, returned to Hong Kong on December 21, 1911. One week later, Sun was elected provisional president of the Republic of China by the representatives of the sixteen provisional assem-blies in Nanjing. In his first forty-five days as president, Sun and the pro-visional legislators proclaimed the establishment of the republic, oversaw the introduction of a republican regime, adopted the Gregorian calendar, and replaced the imperial dragon flag with the Five Color Flag, which had five horizontal stripes in red, yellow, blue, white, and black, represent-ing the five major nationalities in China: Han, Manchu, Mongol, Hui, and Tibetan. However, Sun, recognizing that he had neither the experi-ence nor the force of arms to rule successfully, tendered his resignation on February 15, 1912, shortly after the abdication of the last Qing emperor, and offered the presidency to Yuan Shikai, a military man from northern China and an experienced imperial official with some interest in reforms. Sun hoped that Yuan would use his army and power to realize the goals of the republic.

Song Jiaoren, one of the founders of the Tongmeng Hui, was instrumen-tal in the transformation of that organization into the Chinese National-ist Party (KMT). In China’s first nationwide election in 1912–13, he led the KMT to victory. However, the euphoria following the KMT assem-bly victory was brief. Song was tapped to become the next prime minister because he worked diligently for building a majority KMT party inside the parliament. But Song spoke out against the increasing authoritarianism of President Yuan; this angered Yuan, who was not about to share power with any national parliament and particularly the KMT. Yuan, who had his own ambitions, hired an assassin to have Song Jiaoren shot dead on March 20, 1913, at the Shanghai train station. In 1915 Yuan declared himself emperor of China and attempted to re-establish the imperial system.

After 1916, Sun, from his power base in southern China, tried to tame the

regional warlords and build a national government.


After Yuan Shikai died in 1916, the young Chinese republic plunged into the warlord period. Regional military leaders ranged from local bandits in control of small bases to powerful heads of large armies who controlled broad swaths of territory. Sun Yat-sen, with his power base in southern China, tried to tame the regional warlords and build a national government. After years of fruitless attempts to seek international sup-port for his cause, Sun turned to the newly formed Soviet Russia, which was eager to gain influence in China. In 1923, Sun sent his pupil Chiang Kai-shek to Moscow to learn how the KMT and his army could function together. Two Russian agents, Vasily Blücher and Mikhail Borodin, were sent to China to start integrating the fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) within the ranks of the KMT, using the Soviet model. Their alli-ance was attractive to Sun: the Soviets would provide political training, military assistance, and financial support. From their base at the Wham-poa Military Academy in Guangdong, the KMT and CCP started train-ing together in 1923, in preparation for the Northern Expedition, the mission to reunite China. This marked the first United Front between the two parties. Two years later, Sun died, at the age of fifty-nine.

REVERED ACROSS THE STRA ITIt has been more than eight decades since Sun Yat-sen’s death and sixty years since China was divided by civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Sun remains unique among twentieth-century Chinese leaders for his high reputation in both mainland China and Taiwan.

In Taiwan, Sun is the father of the Republic of China. On the main-land, he is seen as a Chinese nationalist and proto-socialist, and is high-ly regarded as the forerunner of the revolution. Even today, Sun’s major political ideology, the Three Principles of the People, retains a high place in the rhetoric of both the KMT and the CCP, although with different interpretations.

Sun’s reputation bridges the Taiwan Strait. In Taiwan, he is the father of

the Republic of China. Mainlanders see him as a Chinese nationalist and

proto-socialist, and honor him as a forerunner of the revolution.


Nationalism, the first principle, was directed chiefly against the Qing monarchy. Democracy, the second principle, involved the establish-ment of a republic with a constitution guaranteeing democratic rule. People’s livelihood, the third principle, involved the improvement of the common people’s lot through peaceful land reform, a major change in a predominantly agricultural Chinese society.

Sun’s political ideas were the product of a childhood in a peasant vil-lage where he was influenced by the heritage of the Taiping Rebellion, his education in an American school in Honolulu and a British medical college in Hong Kong, and ten years of exile in Japan, Europe, and the United States.

The leaders of divided China adhere to different doctrines and gov-ernances, yet they claim to have inherited the spirit of Sun’s philosophy and legacy. Sun’s political thoughts no doubt had their weaknesses. His proposed method to transform China’s feudal landownership, for example, was rather utopian. He imagined that foreign powers were sympathetic enough to the Chinese Revolution to aid and support his cause. Afraid of mass actions, he thought such actions should be restricted and the revolution conducted “in an orderly way.” Neverthe-less, Sun Yat-sen is revered by the Chinese people as a devoted revolu-tionary who, in spite of repeated failures, strove unwaveringly to realize his dream of a modernized, republican China.


Available from the Hoover Press is The Struggle across

the Taiwan Strait: The Divided China Problem, by Ramon

H. Myers and Jialin Zhang. To order, call 800.935.2882

or visit www.hooverpress.org.

218 Hoover Digest N 2011 · No. 3

Board of Overseershoover institution on war, revolution and peace

Marc L. AbramowitzVictoria (Tory) AgnichFrederick L. AllenEsmail Amid-HozourJack R. AndersonMartin AndersonJavier ArangoGeorge L. ArgyrosRobert G. BarrettFrank E. BaxterDonald R. BeallStephen D. Bechtel Jr.Peter B. BedfordPeter S. BingJoanne Whittier BlokkerWilliam K. BlountJames J. BochnowskiWendy H. BorcherdtWilliam K. BowesRichard W. BoyceC. Preston ButcherJames J. Carroll IIIRobert H. CastelliniJoan L. DanforthPaul L. Davies Jr.Paul Lewis (Lew) Davies IIIJohn B. De NaultKenneth T. DerrDixon R. DollSusanne Fitger DonnellyJoseph W. DonnerWilliam H. Draper IIIHerbert M. Dwight

William C. EdwardsGerald E. EganCharles H. (Chuck) EssermanJeffrey A. FarberClayton W. Frye Jr.Stephen B. GaddisJames G. GidwitzCynthia Fry GunnArthur E. Hall, CFAF. Philip HandyEverett J. HauckW. Kurt HauserJohn L. Hennessy*Warner W. HenryHeather R. HigginsKenneth H. HofmannMargaret HooverAllan Hoover IIIPreston B. HotchkisPhilip HudnerLeslie P. Hume*William J. HumeWalter E. Hussman Jr.George B. James IIGail A. JaquishCharles B. JohnsonMark Chapin JohnsonFranklin P. Johnson Jr.Tom JordanSteve KahngMary Myers KauppilaDavid B. KennedyDonald P. Kennedy

219Hoover Digest N 2011 · No. 3

Raymond V. Knowles Jr.Donald L. KochHenry N. Kuechler IIIPeyton M. LakeCarl V. Larson Jr.Allen J. LauerBill LaughlinJames G. (Skip) LawHoward H. LeachWalter Loewenstern Jr.Donald L. LucasRichard A. MagnusonRobert H. MalottFrank B. MapelHaig G. MardikianShirley Cox MattesonGeorge E. McCownBowen H. McCoyBurton J. McMurtryRoger S. MertzHarold M. Messmer Jr.Jeremiah Milbank IIIJohn R. Norton IIIRobert J. OsterJack S. ParkerJoel C. PetersonJames E. PieresonBillie K. PirnieJay A. PrecourtGeorge J. RecordsKathleen (Cab) RogersDavid M. RubensteinJames N. RussellRichard M. ScaifeRoderick W. Shepard

Thomas M. SiebelGeorge W. SigulerWilliam E. Simon Jr.Boyd C. SmithJohn R. StahrAlan G. StanfordWilliam C. Steere Jr.Thomas F. StephensonG. Craig SullivanRobert J. SwainW. Clarke SwansonCurtis Sloane TamkinTad TaubeRobert A. TeitsworthL. Sherman TelleenTerence W. ThomasCharles B. Thornton Jr.Thomas J. TierneyJoy TimkenWilliam R. Timken Jr.David T. TraitelDon TykesonVictor UgolynGregory L. WaldorfJeanne B. WareDean A. WatkinsDody WaughJack R. WheatleyLynne Farwell WhiteBetty Jo Fitger WilliamsNorman (Tad) WilliamsonKay Harrigan WoodsPaul M. Wythes

*Ex officio members of the Board

Hoover Digest, 2011, No. 3, Summer

Documents

Transcript of Hoover Digest, 2011, No. 3, Summer