AN FP SPECIAL REPORT

WHAT AILS
AMERICA?
IAN BURUMA, THOMAS FRIEDMAN,
MICHAEL MANDELBAUM & STEPHEN WALT
WEIGH IN
HILLARY CLINTON

OUR PACIFIC CENTURY

JAMES TRAUB

THE ELEPHANTS IN THE

2012 ROOM
NOVEMBER 2011 ForeignPolicy.com

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ixteen years ago, when another secretary of state sat down to write for Foreign Policy, the
world looked like a starkly different place to a top American ofciala post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American
leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, The simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else
will. It was an ageand one that now seems quaintly outdatedof America the indispensable nation. Fast-forward to today, and the struggle by the United States to assert its continued leadership in the
worldor even its commitment to remaining there.
In her exclusive piece for this issue of Foreign Policy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton does her best
to convince us that America is not retreating from the world. Or at least that it should not. Beyond
our borders, she writes, many are now questioning Americas intentionsour willingness to remain
engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay,
whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we
can makeand keepcredible economic and strategic commitments, and
whether we can back those commitments with action. Clintons answer is
a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing, extraordinary
even, coming from a sitting secretary of state, and the context is clear: These
are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of Americas role in
the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to nancial markets
abroad is wondering about the staying power of this humbled superpower.
The rest of fps special section on America at this time of troubles is dedicated to diagnosing what ails the country. We started by asking that question
to a standout collection of foreign writers and thinkers, from Chinese market guru Fan Gang to Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav Smil and Dutch
writer Ian Buruma. Their provocative and pointed contributions, starting on
page 64, remind us what an uncomfortable position this is for a United
States that is more used to sitting in judgment on other countries than receiving the worlds criticism. A
rousing debate follows, pitting fps in-house provocateur, Harvard University professor/blogger Steve
Walt, versus New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and his book-writing partner Michael Mandelbaum, on the question of whether America is really all that exceptional. And fp contributing editor James
Traub, a weekly columnist on our website as well as a regular New York Times Magazine author, weighs
in with a thoughtful and engaging look at a troubling phenomenon: the insistence by pretty much the
entire eld of 2012 Republican presidential candidates on running away from the world rather than telling us what they think about it. His piece, The Elephants in the Room, starting on page 79, is an early
must-read from a campaign off to a depressing start.
These may be tough times for an America beset by debt and self-doubt, but of course its still an extraordinary island of privilege tooas were reminded by some of the other powerful pieces in this issue.
In fps In Box section, Cuban dissident Yoani Snchez takes us inside the remnants of Castros daddy
state, now that Pap Fidel is just the patient-in-chief, while Think Again: Nuclear Power, by Charles
Ferguson, head of the Federation of American Scientists, offers a sobering look at the fallout from Japans
Fukushima nuclear disaster. Finally, theres a unique close to this edition of the magazineour rst-ever
visual In Other Words, dedicated to making sense of the revolutionary grafti of this year of global upheaval. From the crude racism in portrayals of doomed Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qadda to New
York-style scrawl on a Palestinian wall, these are images you just cant stop looking at.
Susan Glasser

November 2011

CONTENTS
N ov emb e r

2011

AN FP SPECIAL SECTION

THE AMERICA ISSUE

56 Americas
Pacic Century

71 An FP Debate: Just How

Special Is America Anyway?

The future of geopolitics will be

decided in Asia, not Afghanistan
or Iraq, and the United States
should be right at the center of
the action. By Hillary Clinton

American exceptionalism is a myth.

By Stephen M. Walt
We really were that great (but that doesnt
mean we are now). By Thomas L. Friedman and
Michael Mandelbaum

79 The Elephants in the Room

Barack Obamas Republican challengers are trying hard not
to talk about the rest of the world. It shows. By James Traub
plus: The fp Survey: Is there a gop foreign policy?

D E PA RT M E N T S

12 LETTERS
The Numbers Game Love
and Robots Sea Change
Duchy of Hazard The Jihad
Decit

23 IN BOX
The List: Checkbook Diplomacy
By Peter Van Buren The
Things They Carried: The Afghan Policewoman Ideas By
Joshua E. Keating Epiphanies from Nandan Nilekani

Foreign Policy

The Optimist: Haiti Doesnt

Need Your Old T-Shirt By
Charles Kenny Responsibility to Protect: A short history
By Charles Homans Letter
from Havana: Country for Old
Men By Yoani Snchez

86 IN OTHER WORDS:

GRAFFITI EDITION

A special photo essay, with

captions by Roger Gastman.

Revolution in a Can: Grafti

is as American as apple pie,
but much easier to export.

By Blake Gopnik

49 THINK AGAIN:
NUCLEAR POWER

war. By Paul Salopek

Japan melted down, but

that doesnt mean the end
of the atomic age.
By Charles D. Ferguson

COVER AND THIS SPREAD:

Photo illustrations by Matt Dorfman for FP

Conict Grafti: The art of

64 WHAT AILS AMERICA?

We went around the world to ask about the
problems of the one global superpower.

Imperial Hubris By Ian Buruma The Presidency By Sunil

Khilnani Gluttony By Vaclav Smil The Fed By Heleen Mees
The Dollar By Fan Gang Education By Mishaal Al Gergawi

96 America at Dusk
fp asked a distinguished international panel
to tell us what the United States is doing wrong.
We got an earful.

November 2011

FOREIGNPOLICY.com

Decline Watch

ack in fps January/February issue, Gideon Rachmans cover story

Think Again: American Decline: This Time Its for Real captured the
national mood, with Americans increasingly looking over their shoulders
at a rising China. Nearly a year later, this fretting has turned into an obsession. ForeignPolicy.com is charting the scaremongers and soothsayers of the
American Apocalypse in real time, grading the claims and prognostications.

NR: At this point there is serious risk of a

double-dip recession in the U.S. and most
other advanced economies.

STAY CALM
AND
CARRY ON.

NR: The fundamental problem is not the

individuals. Its that in most advanced economies, they have weak governments. In the
U.S., we have divided government.

USA!
USA!

2recalls
Advantage:
World Eliot Spitzer fondly
when the United States used to

3testDumb
and Dumber U.S. college acceptance
scores are slipping, but do lower

dominate mens tennis. What if Novak

Djokovics ascendancy really does foretell a coming Serbian superpower?

reading scores actually mean that things

are so bad Americans cant even speak
their own language anymore?

SAT

MEMORABLE TWEETS FROM THE FP TWITTERATI 100

@alexmassie Takeaway from the #reagan

debate No sane man would ever wish
to be President of the United States of
America. A terrible business.

Change the Channel

IB: I dont think the severity or the shock is

anywhere near as great. Were not talking
about the sudden implosion of the worlds
nancial markets. But I think the nancial
ability to respond isnt there.

DECLINE,
SCHMECLINE.
WERE GONNA
BE JUST FINE.

WERE
TOTALLY
SCREWED.
(START
LEARNING
MANDARIN.)

@bencnn Estimates put #Libyas stock of

surface-to-air missiles at around 20,000.
How many have been accounted for? No
answers yet.

Foreign Policy

Is this the second coming of the global economic meltdown? Nouriel Roubini, perhaps
better known as Dr. Doom for having
predicted the 2007-2008 nancial crisis,
and Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group
political-risk analysis rm and moderator of
The Call blog on ForeignPolicy.com, took sides
in a spirited debate over the grim news:

IB: The biggest danger is

the Chinese are kicking a
bigger can farther down the
road than anyone else.

Bremmer

@DougSaunders The phrase Berlusconi

shouted at Merkel in a phone convo was
culona inchiavabile. Not quite the English translation but VERY rude.

ForeignPolicy.coms acclaimed channels dive

deep into two of the worlds newsiest areas, with the
AfPak Channela National Magazine Award nalistdedicated to the latest thinking, writing, and
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Weve relaunched both channels to make them more
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ARE WE DOOMED?

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Susan B. Glasser
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Foreign Policy

contributors

Roger Gastman became Americas leading expert

on grafti the old-fashioned wayby scrawling
the name clear on subway trains and rail yards
around Bethesda, Maryland. After sort of getting arrested as a teenager, he says, he became a
grafti historian, authoring a number of books,
including The History of American Grafti, and
serving as an associate curator for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Arts Art in the
Streets exhibit this year. In this issue, he takes his
eye for this classic American form international.
Its not the polished, New York-style street art hes
used to writing about, Gastman says, but Im
just glad to see people are going out and writing
on walls. It shows you that its an important medium. | 86
Career U.S. Foreign Service ofcer Peter Van Buren, an East Asia specialist with little experience in Middle East policy, found himself in
Iraq in 2009 for no good reason beyond the attraction of hazard
pay and a fair amount of bureaucratic pressure. Once there, he was
shocked by the amount of money being wasted on dubious projects,
which he describes in this issue and his new book, We Meant Well:
How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People. Why were we able to hand $5,000 to Iraqis we barely
knew to start a small business, when the same option wasnt available to a guy in Cleveland? he remembers asking. | 24
Yoani Snchez, a 36-year-old magazine editor, webmaster, and
blogger at Generation Y, has become the Cuban dissident
movements de facto international spokesperson, as well
as a textbook example of the Internets power to frustrate
authoritarian regimes. But life as a famous bloggerthis
year, she conducted an email interview with U.S. President
Barack Obamain the Castro brothers Cuba has its challenges. Cameras lm me; there are microphones in my
house; people listen on my telephone; I am harassed from
ofcial websites and on national television, she says. For
this issue, she looks ahead to a post-Castro future. | 36

10

Foreign Policy

Gastman

Fan Gang, one of Chinas top

economists and head of its
National Economic Research
Institute, is known today as a
prominent advocate for free
market reforms. But as a student in the 1980s, his economic
education was dominated by
Chinas then-rigid Soviet-type
Marxism, as he remembers
it. Fan has been writing about
the dramatic rise of the Chinese economy for years, but
he says it was not until about
2005, when Chinas growth
exerted some real impacts on
global commodity prices, that
the rest of the world nally
snapped to attention. In this
issue, he warns of the dollars
inevitable decline: Even the
worlds banker cant put off
the reckoning any longer, he
writes. | 69

Van Buren

Snchez

Fan

clinTon: MARK WilSon/AFP/GeTTy iMAGeS; FAn: PieRRe VeRDy/AFP/GeTTy iMAGeS; All oTheRS: couRTeSy oF conTRibuToRS

During her tenure as U.S. secretary of state,

Hillary Clinton has logged more than 612,000 miles
traveling to 87 countries, while keeping a steady
hand in Foggy Bottom during a tumultuous period
that has included the U.S. drawdown from Iraq,
the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Arab Spring,
and the leaking of thousands of secret diplomatic
cables. For this issue, she previews the future of
American foreign policywhich promises to look
much different from that of the last few decades.
The next 100 years wont be about the Middle
East, she says. Instead, the Asia-Pacic region is
where much of the history of the 21st century
will be written. | 56

What are the drivers of global growth and rebalancing?

Slow recovery to nowhere?

Can Asia
i secure a more b
balanced
l
d expansion?

Are international policies sufciently proactive?

Restore and Rebalance

Global Growth
Is the search for yield leading to credit excesses?
What is the impact of increasing unemployment?
Can Europe endure economic and nancial turbulence?

How
H
w lo
longg w
will
ill
ll it
i take
t kke too lower
lo r public
p bblic
ic debt?
deb

Has enough
nough be
been done in the globa
global banking
ing s
sy
systems?
What actions are needed to tackle increased risks and secure growth?

Can macroprudential policies contain rapidly rising property prices?

The IMFs World Economic Outlook, Global Financial Stability Report, and
Fiscal Monitor deliver analysis and insights needed to address crisis legacies
and mounting risks in the global economypressures felt by governments,
banks, and householdsand to strike a balance between reducing
public debt over time and supporting growth today.

Subscribe today to these essential IMF publications

at www.elibrary.imf.org/page/fpp

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

M O N E T A R Y

F U N D

LETTERS

Yes, we humans will be forming emotional attachments

with machines, falling in love with them, having sex
with them, and marrying them, thereby contributing
signicantly to a worldwide reduction in loneliness.
david levy
on the future Page 13

from

around the web

the numbers Game

DaviD Rieff (Millions May Die

Or Not, September/October 2011)
really be serious in accusing international aid agenciesand myselfof
using hyperbole to get donor-fatigued
countries to loosen their purse strings and
come to the assistance of not-really-sobadly-off people? Rieff goes even further,
suggesting that some (the Hutus who ed
the massacre in Rwanda in 1994, for instance) might not be worthy of any assistance at all. Im not so sure.
an

One thing I do know: In January 2010, when I

tried to convey the magnitude of the destruction
wrought by the Haiti earthquake before a crowd of
journalists at the United Nations in Geneva, I was
myself one of the walking wounded, at least emotionally. This was not only an earthquake that killed
hundreds of thousands of people, left more than a
million homeless, and just about completely wiped

out that countrys infrastructure. It also killed 102

U.N. staffmore than any other single event in historyincluding many of my friends and colleagues.
I was hearing the nightmarish stories directly relayed to me by friends who had survived, including
one of a colleague who was found wandering, shoeless and disoriented, days after the quake, searching
for his family only to nd that his children had been
crushed to death under the rubble. So no, I dont think
my statement at the time that This is a historic disaster. We have never been confronted with such a
disaster in the U.N. memory. It is like no other was
hyperbole, as Rieff suggests. It was a cri de coeur.
Donor fatigue is something we have to combat
every day and something I can understand. What
I cannot understand are the people who think we
should simply give up trying to convey the real extent and impact of the many humanitarian disasters
and emergencies all over the world.

For every area

of philanthropy
I have worked
in, I made the
best argument
I possibly could
for the need for
funding. Did
I ever cross
the line into
exaggeration and
overestimation?
If I did, I never
realized it or
thought about it
in a conscious
way. Does that
mean I never did
it unconsciously?
Not necessarily.
Tara STeinmeTz,
www.tarasteinmetz.
com
Everybody is
aware of this
problem-ination
syndrome, yet
it continues to
exist.
Fiorenzo ConTe,
badcure.wordpress.
com

ELISABETH BYRS
Spokesperson
U.N. Ofce for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs
Geneva, Switzerland

Foreign Policy welcomes letters to the editor. Readers should address their comments to fpletters@ForeignPolicy.com.
Letters may be edited for length and clarity. For more debate and discussion of our stories, go to ForeignPolicy.com.

12

Foreign Policy

David Rieff replies:

Can Elisabeth Byrs be serious? As she
knows perfectly well, but disingenuously
fails to acknowledge, the view that aid
should have been withdrawn from the
camps in eastern Congo because they were
controlled by the same groups that had
orchestrated and carried out the Rwandan
genocide is hardly controversialexcept,
it seems, at the U.N. Many mainline relief
NGOs withdrew from the camps for this
reason.
As for Haiti, while I can sympathize with
Byrss shock and sense of loss over what
happened in Haiti, the truthare we still
interested in the truth or only in mobilizing
people?is just as I stated it: It may have
been the worst disaster in history for the
U.N., but this is not the message Byrs was
understood by her listeners as conveying.
To the contrary, she was understood to be
speaking of the people of Haiti.
I entirely agree with her when she says
that it is essential that the real extent and
impact of humanitarian disasters around
the world be conveyed. My point is that
by indulging in hyperboleand the U.N.s
public statements on the current Somali
famine show that no lessons have been
learned in this regardU.N. and NGO
ofcials do a disservice to the truth and,
by so doing, actually foment the increasing
cynicism and disbelief with which their
statements are now greeted.

to fear, or perhaps also articially intelligent software programs. I would

answer both, and their threat to just
about every facet of our lives will be
awesome.
In the case of robots built for love
and sex, one aspect of what we have
to fear from cyberhackers is encountering robots that play with our emotions because their software has been
hacked to make them do so. The
warped thinking that encourages
hackers to wreak havoc with computer systems just for the fun of it is
likely to instigate, for example, a type
of virus that manipulates human emotions sufciently to make someone fall
in love, and then dash their bliss by
dumping them. This and other emo-

Love and Robots

In their lucid and convincing piece,

Ayesha and Parag Khanna (Technology Will Take on a Life of Its Own,
September/October 2011) use the example of a young man in Japan who
recently married a video-game character, pointing to a future in which
human-robot marriages will be commonplace. Yes, we humans will be
forming emotional attachments with
machines, falling in love with them,
having sex with them, and marrying
them, thereby contributing signicantly to a worldwide reduction in loneliness and the unhappiness that the lack
of a loved one so often brings. But
there are dangers as well.
The article also touches on what will
be one of humankinds greatest challenges in the futurecyberhacking.
The Khannas ask whether it is only
human cyberhackers whom we have

tional games will have the potential

to cause misery to the point of making
some who love robots suffer extreme
psychological trauma.
We need Alvin Tofer-like thinking to prepare us for these threats and
point the way for dealing with them.

DAVID LEVY
CEO, Intelligent Toys Ltd.
Author, Love and Sex With Robots
London, England

Ayesha and Parag Khanna reply:

We welcome David Levys insight, based on
his own intellectually stimulating research.
He rightly points to the unintended
consequences of our growing emotional
attachment to machines. While some

FROM

FOREIGNPOLICY.COM
When I read Future Shock, I was
struck by its ambivalence as much as
its insight. Yes, the future is exciting,
but theres a larger downside than
feeling bewildered by it all. Other
prognosticators have offered darker
visions, which we are now seeing in
developing tech, particularly with
respect to extending authoritarian
controls over citizenry and the
technology of war-ghting.
URGELT
Whoever has read Future Shock and The
Third Wave would distinctly remember
the awe those two books aroused. They
have remained an important milestone
for the students of futurism.
ENERGY2CWORTH

maladies such as loneliness are addressed,

other vulnerabilities are created. As
pervasive networks expandwhether
among humans or among machines and
humansthere is a window or lag time in
which users can be manipulated. Hybrid
Reality Institute fellow Marc Goodman has
conjured very specic scenarios around the
possibility of nancial algorithms gaining
the autonomous capacity to divert capital
toward shell companies, effectively stealing
from the markets.
Stanford Universitys Jeremy Bailenson,
an expert on virtual-human interactions,
predicts that eventually anti-malware
software will be developed that alerts us
to the kinds of intrusions Levy rightly fears
will transpire. But with the stakes and
potential prots from online emotional
extortion rising (just witness the many
fraudulent schemes that have pervaded
Second Life), cyberhackers will no doubt
persist in their efforts to penetrate not
just individual consumers, but en masse.
In a related vein, recent reports have
documented the rise of virtual slavery in
which Chinese prison inmates are forced
to play online games for up to 12 hours
per day (in addition to hard manual labor)
in order to gold-farmbuild stockpiles
of virtual currencies that prison guards
then spend. We know all too well how
regulations and education frequently lag
one or more steps behind such crafty and
malicious purveyors of cyberexploitation. It
is therefore a task of foresight to anticipate
these possibilities.

November 2011

13

LETTERS

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Sea Change

Robert D. Kaplans often incisive analysis of the current and prospective geostrategic rivalry in the South China Sea
(The South China Sea Is the Future of
Conict, September/October 2011) suffers from three deciencies. First, Kaplan
says surprisingly little about how such
East Asian powers as Japan and South
Korea are likely to respond to the looming prospect of a Chinese bid for hegemony. A second deciency is his comparison of Chinas projection of power in
the South China Sea today to the United
States drive to make the Caribbean a
U.S. lake in the early 20th century. The
United States had no credible competitors in the Western Hemisphere capable
of thwarting its ambitions. China faces
a more challenging environment. Japan
and India are credible competitors, and
Indonesia has the potential to achieve
that status.
The third problem is Kaplans prescription for the United States. His
conclusion that the optimal situation
is a U.S. air and naval presence at approximately the current level creates
an incentive structure that inhibits the
development of an East Asian balance
of power.
Countries like Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan woefully underinvest in
their own defenses because they believe that they can rely indenitely on
U.S. protection. Given Americas own
scal woes and its excessive commitments in other regions, their expectation may prove to be more illusion
than substance in the coming decades.
If Washington wants to complicate Beijings strategic calculations in the South
China Sea and elsewhere, it needs to
change the incentive structure so that
Chinas logical competitors realize
that they must put forth more serious
efforts. Kaplans insistence on preserving the current oversized U.S. military
presence in the Western Pacic would
encourage the continuation of an unhealthy security dependence.

An Afrmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

TED galEn carpEnTEr

Senior Fellow
The Cato Institute
Washington, D.C.

Robert D. Kaplan replies:

It is a pleasure to be engaged by Ted Galen
Carpenter, whose own incisive analyses
about subjects as diverse as Mexico and
East Asia I read regularly. Carpenter asks a
serious question: If wealthy countries such
as South Korea and Japan do not do more
in their own military defense, why should
American taxpayers pick up the burden? I
am in agreement that hundreds of billions
of dollars could be saved from our defense
budget through various means, but I do not
agree that this should be done by reducing
the presence of carrier strike groups in the
Western Pacic.
It is an exaggeration to say that East
Asian nations are simply not rising to the
challenge that Chinas military poses. I write
these lines from Vietnam, where I can tell
you that, as the Australian analyst Desmond
Ball writes, East Asia is in the midst of an
action-reaction arms race, rather than
a more benign general defense buildup.
South China Sea nations are enlarging their
submarine eets, even as South Korea and
Japan continue to modernize their own
navies in reaction to what China is doing.
Carpenter seems willing to bet that
if we do less, East Asian countries will
do more. But that may not be the case,

since all these countries have no choice

but to accept China as their biggest
trading partner. It is the very combination
of Chinas economic might, rising
military strength, demographic heft, and
geographical proximity that could force a
form of Finlandization on countries of East
Asia were the United States to reduce its
naval and air presence.
I am all for leveraging like-minded others
to do more in their own defense so as to
reduce our own burden; but it cannot be
done by forcing an either-or decision on
them. It is precisely our willingness to
keep our own forces at adequate strength
that is encouraging smaller countries of
the region to enlarge or at least modernize
their own militaries. On another matter,
while the differences between the South
China Sea and the Caribbean are real, it
is the similarities that are fascinating and
therefore worth recording.

Duchy of Hazard

Eric Pape (The Lap of Luxembourgery, September/October 2011)

describes Luxembourg as a country

rotten to the core. We write not to
question the articles style or humor,
but to get some facts straight.
Among the numerous inaccuracies in this article is the myth of the
gdp per capita gure. This gure is
relatively meaningless when applied
to Luxembourg and cannot be used
to demonstrate the countrys wealth.
Luxembourgs gdp is generated not
only by the local workforce but, as
Pape admits, by a large number of
cross-border commuters. These represent some 150,000 out of a total
working population of just 340,000.
With foreign workers added to the
head count, Luxembourgs per capita
gdp falls by around 45 percent.
Pape writes that Luxembourgs
per capita external debt (some $3.76
million per person) is 84 times that
of the debt-ridden United States.
According to Eurostat statistics, the
global level of Luxembourg public debt in 2010 was 7.66 billion
(around 15,200 per capita.) Hence

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LETTERS
the external debt cannot be several trillion euros.
In addition to relying on inaccurate
statistics, Papes article also displays
a poor understanding of politics. He
says that democracy in Luxembourg is
a joke because the ruling family is hereditary and appoints certain members
of parliament. This is not true. Moreover, parliamentary monarchy is a
widespread model, which democracies
including Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden
have adopted.
Luxembourgers do not suffer from a
sense-of-humor failure, but we expect
articles about our country to be wellresearched and constructively argued.
Given that Foreign Policy is an opinion leader in its eld, poorly crafted
texts can mislead readers and raise
questions about the credibility of a distinguished publication.

FERNAND GRULMS
Chief Executive Ofcer
Luxembourg for Finance
Luxembourg

Eric Pape replies:

I was willing to risk
my well-being when
FOREIGN POLICY
sent me, its intrepid
reporter, into the
bowels of Luxembourg
to write an irony-laden
dispatch that mocks
myself and parachute
journalism in general,
but I try my best to
relegate my banking
and debt analysis as a
journalist to my own
banking and debts.
So, for the most
sensitive numbers
those suggesting that
Luxembourg has an
outlandish external
debt (which is not to be confused with the
countrys honorably low public debt)I
sought out experts. One was the genial (and
sadly recently deceased) parliamentarian and
banking-world expert Lucien Thiel. Thiel readily acknowledged the famously high external
debt data that I brought up with him, and he
contextualized it as the natural extension of
the tiny countrys unparalleled success with in-

vestment funds, among

other things. In his
telling, Luxembourgs
external debt is a sign
that it is economically
creative, and thriving.
Interestingly,
Luxembourgian folk
wrote to explain
away pretty much
all the data brought
up in my dispatch.
Could it be that
Luxembourgers are so
dejected that the only
statistics that they
have faith in involve
good news: the puny
public debt, low
unemployment, and
projections for vibrant
economic growth? Maybe they are right
about that. (As for the countrys dismal
score on the happiness ranking, I welcome
travel donations so that I can visit similarly
unhappy peoples and rank them myself.)
If Luxembourg really is the dark,
corrupted heart of Europe, then one thing
is clear to me: Evil sure picked a pleasant
place to live.

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DEPT. OF IRONY
Eric Papes dispatch from Luxembourg
(The Lap of Luxembourgery,
September/October 2011) was an
experiment in ironyan attempt to
poke fun at the type of parachute
journalism that leads Western
journalists to make sweeping
generalizations about the countries
they visit based on brief discussions
with cab drivers and hotel clerks. We
thought that over-the-top phrases
such as the armpit of the European
Union and descriptions of a young
revolutionary in the making, forced
into exile for his creative vision would
tip people off that we werent quite
serious. Judging by the comments the
piece generated online, some folks
dont seem to have gotten the joke.
How can you get the essence of a
country with such a short visit and
by talking to largely unrepresentative
persons? Ive lived there for more
than 13 years, and its nowhere
near what you are picturing, fumed
OLIVIER101.
I am a teacher in Luxembourg, and
one of my students brought in this
article to know if it was really as
uninformed as it appeared to her. I was
abbergasted by the terrible quality
of the journalism. The sources Pape
cites are poor representations of the
country, complains MIKEYMANNON.
SUPERJHEMP called the article,
Typical bullshit to fool the
American John Doe, who still thinks
that the U.S. is the only legal country
on Earth and all others are either evil
communist leftovers or some lost spots
undermined by Islam.
Pape found himself compared to Hitler
and called a cancer on American
journalism by angry Luxembourgers.
His hard work was dismissed as the
ramblings of a jealous Parisian.
(Sorry, Eric!)
A few folks got it, though. MARTEILLE
sighed, For a moment, I thought the
author was being serious here. Kind
of wish I was born in Luxembourg.
Oh well.

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LETTERS

The Jihad Decit

Charles Kurzmans essay (Why Is It So

Hard to Find a Suicide Bomber These
Days? September/October 2011) probes
an important question and offers a balanced, intelligent answer. Kurzman eshes out a signicant structural weakness
within the jihadi movement: its inability
to draw as many recruits as it would like
(and as many as some fear). His conclusion is undoubtedly correct that the terrorist attacks we may see in the near
term do not threaten our way of life,
unless we let them. A great tragedy of
the past decade is the way the blundering U.S. response to the very real threat
of terrorism has often strengthened the
enemys hand.
But though his overarching argument
is astute, I fear Kurzmans analysis understates the risks well face in the coming
decade. Although he points to a decline
in recruits entering terrorist training
camps, militants have also ocked to live
battleelds in places like Afghanistan,
Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. Real combat

experience is one of
the best drivers of
the enemys ingenuThink what our world would
ity. The era of ausbe like if as many people died
terity were entering
from
terrorism
(13,191 in 2010) as die
further ensures that
each year from nutritional deciencies
fewer resources will
be devoted to polic(approximately 418,000 per year).
ing efforts to contain
Charles Kurzman replies:
the threat.
I thank Daveed Gartenstein-Ross for his
Moreover, Kurzman appears overly
sobering reminder that recruits continue to
dismissive when he writes the National
get live battle training in numerous conict
Counterterrorism Center calculates
zones. Fortunately, the number of militants in
that Islamist terrorism claims fewer than
these areas, as estimated by U.S. government
50 lives per day. Fifty lives a day adds
ofcials, continues to run much lower than
up to a considerable total over the course
the numbers trained in Afghanistan during the
of a year. Its even more signicant when
Taliban era and far lower than the numbers
one considers militant groups ability
that many experts predicted after 9/11.
to set in motion retaliatory violence, as
I agree that the death toll from terrorism is
a terrible human tragedyhow fortunate we
they did in Iraq, or exacerbate humaniare that it is not higher! Think what our world
tarian crises, as al-Shabab has in Somawould be like if as many people died from
lia. But these differences in threat assessterrorism (13,191 in 2010, according to the
ment aside, I commend Kurzman for his
National Counterterrorism Center) as die each
thoughtful essay.

DAVEED GARTENSTEIN-ROSS
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Washington, D.C.

year from nutritional deciencies (approximately

418,000 per year, according to World Health
Organization estimates). Global concern need
not be calibrated solely with fatalities, but even
well-informed people may be unaware of these
disparities in scale.

eufocus
in Foreign Policy

A M E S S A G E F R O M A M B A S S A D O R J O O VA L E D E A L M E I D A

HEAD OF DELEGATION
European Union Delegation to the United States
Te $4.28 trillion partnership between the EU and the United States
represents the largest and most integrated economic relationship in
the world. Transatlantic trade in goods alone is worth more than a
billion dollars a day, and the transatlantic economy provides jobs for an
estimated 15 million workers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Every day, our closely interconnected relationship in the areas of trade, foreign investment,
and foreign aliates creates and sustains jobs for Europeans and Americans alike. However,
as the economic and nancial crisis has demonstrated, we cannot aord to rest on our
laurels. Instead, we must build on our relationship and our achievements to date to support
the growth of the transatlantic economy and the employment it provides. Tis requires
removing regulatory barriers, liberalizing new segments of the transatlantic marketplace,
and investing in future-oriented elds like clean energy and emerging technologies.
I invite you to learn more about transatlantic eorts
to create jobs in the current issue of EU Focus.

EU Focus
In-depth treatment
of important European
issues and the transatlantic
relationship

This Issue
Transatlantic Job Creation

Comments
E-mail to Delegation-USAComments@eeas.europa.eu

www.eurunion.org

Special Advertising Section

November 2011

Transatlantic Job Creation

Trade is an engine for
global growth. It contributes
to long-term jobs in the EU
and around the world.
EU Trade Commissioner
Karel De Gucht

Jobs are the lifeblood of the modern economy, creating income that is spent at businesses, saved in banks,
and gathered as tax revenue. Without jobs, growth
grinds to a halt, economic condence falters, and the
economy contractsbad news for all concerned.
Te recession has taken a comparable toll on employment on both the United States and the European
Union. Yet, in spite of the economic downturn, the
size and interconnected nature of the transatlantic
economic relationship continues to create and sustain
jobsclose to 15 million of them, divided more or less
equally between the EU and the U.S. Tese jobs result
from transatlantic trade in goods and services, foreign
investment, and the activities of foreign aliates in
each others economies.
Jobs and Transatlantic Trade. Trade in goods and
services leads to economic growth and spawns jobs.
Te EU and the United States are one anothers main
trading partners, together accounting for about onethird of global trade and half of global GDP. In 2010,
the EU continued to be the top destination for U.S.
merchandise exports, and ranked second only after China as a source of U.S. imports. Likewise, the
United States was the top destination for EU exports
of goods in 2010 and ranked second afer China as a
source of EU imports. Te most recent gures indicate
that trade in goods between the transatlantic partners
is on the rise in 2011.

inside
2 Keeping Transatlantic
Commerce Moving,
Business Booming,
and Jobs Blooming
3 Creating Jobs
at Home: the EU Strategy
4 Help for Redundant,
Unemployed, or
Underemployed Workers
in the European Union

Jobs and Foreign Direct Investment. However, trade

alone is not responsible for the highly integrated nature of the EU-U.S. economic relationship. Te unrivaled amount of two-way foreign direct investment
and aliate activities are at the core of this connection
and contribute to growth and jobs on both sides of
the Atlantic.
Transatlantic scholars consistently emphasize that
foreign investment is the tie that binds together the
U.S. and EU economies. According to Dan Hamilton
and Joseph Quinlan of Johns Hopkins University, a
relationship that rests on the foundation of foreign investment is one in which both parties are extensively
embedded and entrenched in each others economies.
Such a relationship is more job-creating, income-producing, and wealth-generating for both partners than

Transatlantic Foreign Afliates:

An Impact Assessment
Most American foreign aliates in Europe are indistinguishable from local German, British, or Dutch
rms, while European aliates operating in the United States are barely distinguishable to U.S. consumers
who enjoy European goods and services on a daily
basis without much thought. Ubiquitous brands such
as Trader Joes, Jenny Craig, Sunglass Hut, Lenscrafers, AC Nielsen, Glidden Paint, Skippy Peanut Butter,
and Budweiser beerall are as American as apple pie
and all are European-owned companies.
Moreover, these aliates invest in local communities.
European aliates in the United States employ millions of American workers and are the largest source
of onshored jobs in America.
Dan Hamilton and Joseph Quinlan, Te Transatlantic
Economy 2011, SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations
at Johns Hopkins University

one based solely on trade. Te transatlantic economy

epitomizes this type of economic integration.
Te EU and the U.S. count more than $3 trillion in
mutual investment stocks between them. Total U.S.
investment in the EU is more than triple what the U.S.
invests in all of Asia, and EU investment in the U.S.
is more than eight times what the EU invests in both
India and China.
Jobs and Foreign Aliates. Increasingly, industrialized economies deliver goods and services through
foreign aliates and subsidiaries rather than through
exports, and establishing a corporate presence abroad
creates both direct and indirect jobs in the host country.
For example, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, German automaker BMW invested $5 billion in its rst
full manufacturing facility outside of Germany, creating more than 7,000 jobs. Swedish retailer Ikea has not
only established nearly 40 stores in the United States,
but it has also opened its rst U.S. furniture manufacturing factory in Danville, Virginia, bringing hundreds of jobs to the region. Te U.S.-based research,
manufacturing, and distribution operations of French
pharmaceutical company Sano-Aventis are responsible for 11,400 jobs in the United States.

Special Advertising Section

Keeping Transatlantic
Commerce Moving, Business
Booming, and Jobs Blooming
Te direct [air] connection
between Memphis and
Amsterdam has a $120 million
impact on Tennessees economy
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Skies Agreements, these routes
simply did not exist.these
agreements may not create
headlines, but they do create
jobs.
U.S. Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton

Removing Regulatory Barriers: the Transatlantic

Economic Council. With such a high level of transatlantic economic integration, tariswhich average 2
to 3 percentare no longer the major barrier to trade
between the U.S. and the EU. Instead, regulatory differences represent one of the most serious obstacles to
EU-U.S. commerce.
In 2007, the EU and the U.S. established the Transatlantic Economic Councilthe TECto advance
transatlantic economic integration by bringing together governments, the business community, and
consumers to work on key areas where greater regulatory convergence and understanding can foster economic growth and jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.
Multinational rms collectively spend billions to run
parallel supply lines to tailor products to both European and American specications.
Transatlantic regulatory convergence involves developing common standards for, or at least common recognition of, legal requirements, testing and certication procedures, and enforcement mechanisms.
As EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht explains, Tere are compelling reasons to engage in
this regulatory cooperation. Studies have shown that

eciency, and nancial markets. It is advised by representatives of transatlantic dialogues representing

business, legislators, and consumers.
One such group, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue,
brings corporate leaders from the EU and U.S. together to help establish a barrier-free transatlantic market
which will serve as a catalyst for global trade liberalization and prosperity. Unied markets are needed to
create a business environment conducive to innovation, economic growth, increased investment, and job
creation.
Unleashing Transatlantic Aviation: Open Skies. Te
airline industry is vital to the global economy, generating $3.5 trillion in economic activity annually and
creating jobs for 32 million people. Together, the EU
and U.S. aviation markets represent around 60 percent
of global aviation.
A landmark two-stage EU-U.S. air transport agreement, known as Open Skies, has ushered in unprecedented liberalization of the EU-U.S. airline market by
removing restrictions on routes, prices, and number
of ights.
Stage one of the accord, launched in 2008, triggered
an increase in services in previously restricted parts of
the transatlantic market. In 2010, the second stage of
the agreement expanded the benets of the agreement
to include additional investment and market access
opportunities. Both stages of Open Skies strengthen
the cooperative framework in regulatory areas such as
safety, security, and the environment. Estimates of the
potential benets from removing regulatory obstacles
to the EU-U.S. transatlantic aviation market include
up to 80,000 new jobs.
Investing in the Future: Green Collar Jobs. Overall,
foreign investment is directly responsible for more
than ve million American jobs, including two million in manufacturing; the bulk of these jobs come
from European investment, including aliate operations.

we can generate impressive savingsmore than 200

billion dollarsby reducing non-tari measures and
by aligning regulatory divergences. And even if we
only tackle a number of specic areas, the gains are
huge because of the sheer size of transatlantic trade.
So, the formula of the TEC is to tackle regulatory issues at an early stage, before the actual regulation is
in place, resulting in cost savings for both producers
and consumers.
Te TEC provides a high-level forum to address complex topics ranging from chemicals, intellectual property
rights, and secure trade, to electric vehicles, energy

Green collar jobsthose involved with renewable

energy technologiesare expanding, particularly in
places like Colorado, which now boasts nearly 20,000
renewable energy and research jobs, making it a national leader in new energy employment.
Danish company Vestas, a global leader in the production of high-tech wind power systems, has invested
over $1 billion at its various wind turbine production
plants throughout Colorado and directly created more
than 2,400 jobs, including more than 1,000 highly
skilled manufacturing positions.
Iberdrola Renewables, Inc., the U.S. division of Spains
number one energy group, Iberdrola, S.A., is already
helping to generate power from more than 40 renewable

Special Advertising Section

supporting jobs in industries and communities across

the country.
German-owned Siemens AG is a $19.9 billion company that provides a broad range of products and services and employs 60,000 people in nearly 800 locations
throughout the U.S. Siemens Energy, a subsidiary, has
made a remarkable dierence in the American towns
where it has set up wind power manufacturing facilities.
In 2008, Siemens helped energize a community with
a high unemployment rate by creating more than 300
jobs when it began construction in 2008 on Windy
Flats in Washington state, one of the largest wind
farms in the U.S. Two years later, the company created
approximately 400 green collar jobs when it opened a
plant to manufacture wind turbine parts in Hutchinson, Kansas, which had witnessed a steady ight of
industry from the region.
energy projects for customers in the U.S. Te company directly employs more than 850 people in the
United States, and has created thousands of additional

American companies also create jobs in the EU. For

example, General Electrics GE Wind Energy has production facilities in Germany and Spain and employs
980 at its Salzbergen, Germany headquarters alone.

Creating Jobs at Home:

the EU Strategy
To create sustainable growth and jobs in its 27 Member States, the EU promotes a knowledge-based society underpinned by innovation within businesses and
investment in people.
Europe 2020 is the EUs strategy to emerge stronger
from the economic and nancial crisis and prepare
the EU economy for the next decade. It identies
three key drivers for growthsmart growth (fostering knowledge, innovation, and digital society), sustainable growth (making EU production greener and
more resource-ecient while boosting competitiveness), and inclusive growth (enhancing labor market
participation, skills acquisition, and the ght against
poverty).

According to the Europe 2020 strategy, by 2020:

n

75 percent of the EU population between the ages

of 20 and 64 should be employed.

3 percent of the EUs GDP should be invested in

research and development.

Previously established targets for reduced greenhouse gases, increased renewable energy production, and improved energy eciency should be met.

Te share of school drop-outs should be below 10

percent and at least 40 percent of the population between 30 and 34 should have a degree or diploma.

20 million fewer people should be living below the

poverty line.

Te Europe 2020 strategy is

built around the ambitious
goal of inclusive, sustainable,
and smart growth, based on
social fairness, environmental
protection, and investment in
technological advancement.
Lszl Andor, EU Commissioner
responsible for Employment,
Social Affairs, and Inclusion

The EUs 7 Billion Boost for Research and Innovation

In July 2011, the EU launched a 7 billion ($9.3 billion) call for proposals
for research on todays most challenging problems, ranging from climate
change to energy to food security to aging populations. Funded by the
EUs 7th Framework Program for Research and Technological Development, projects will focus on bridging the gap between research and the
marketplace and demonstrating that new technologies have commercial
potential or can work on a large enough scale to be industrially viable.

Competition for this money

will raise standards across the
board and bring the best talent
in Europe and beyond together to
work on everything from curing
cancer to electric cars.

Te funding is expected to create an estimated 174,000 jobs in the short

term, and nearly half a million jobs and an increase in GDP of nearly 80
billion ($106 billion) over the next 15 years.

Mire Geoghegan-Quinn,
EU Commissioner for Research,
Innovation, and Science

Special Advertising Section

Help for Redundant,

Unemployed, or Underemployed
Workers in the European Union
On the Web
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Trade and Jobs

http://ec.europa.eu/trade/
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Europe 2020
http://ec.europa.eu/
europe2020

European Employment
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http://ec.europa.eu/social/
main.jsp?catId=101

Te Transatlantic Economy
Series: SAIS Center for
Transatlantic Relations, Johns
Hopkins University
http://transatlantic.sais-jhu.edu/
transatlantic-topics/transatlanticeconomy-series.htm

Because stronger growth requires a shif of resources

toward the best-performing sectors, some sectors may
experience job losses. Te EU equips its citizens to
adapt to such changes through funding including its
Globalization Adjustment Fund and European Social
Fund.

EUs member countries and regions, focusing particularly on areas where economic development is less
advanced.
Te European Social Fund will distribute 75 billion
($99.4 billion) to EU Member States and regions between 2007 and 2013.

European Globalization Adjustment Fund. Te EU

aids workers who have lost their jobs as a result of globalization through its 500 million ($662.9 million) a
year European Globalization Adjustment Fund which
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IN
BOX

EPIPHANIES WITH NANDAN NILEKANI

The intersection of what is possible with todays

technology and the age-old challenges of developing
countriesthat, to me, is a very exciting point. | 29

With the Castros

getting old, whither
Cubas daddy state?
Leading dissident
Yoani Snchez
reports. | 36

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

AN AFGHAN POLICEWOMAN CARRIES NAIL CLIPPERS,

A BLACKBERRY, AND SALT IN HER PURSE. | 26

What did the State Department really

spend money on in Iraq? French
pastry chefs and unused bicycles. | 24
ANTHROPOLOGY OF AN IDEA

JUST WHAT IS A JUST WAR? | 34

November 2011

23

IN
BOX
the list | by pet er van bu r en

Checkbook Diplomacy
In shopping for hearts and minds in Iraq, the State Department made some bizarre impulse purchases.
n 2009, the State Department sent me to Iraq for a year
as part of the civilian surge deployed to backstop the
more muscular military one. At the head of a six-person
Provincial Reconstruction Team (prt), I was assigned
to spend U.S. government money creating projects that
would lift the local economy and lure young men away from
the dead-end opportunities of al Qaeda. I was to empower
women, turning them into entrepreneurs and handing them
a future instead of a suicide vest. This was newfangled
hearts and minds, as practiced with a lavish checkbook
and supervised by a skittish embassy looking for victory
anywhere it could be found. We really did believe money
could buy us love and win the war.
The work was done by amateurs like me, sent to Iraq
on one-year tours without guidance or training, and eager
to create photogenic success stories that would get us all

promoted. No idea was too bizarre, too gimmicky, or too

pointless for us hearts-and-minders: We actually preferred
handing out croissants and childrens calendars to tackling
tough issues like health care or civic services. One month it
might be guaranteed-to-fail small businesses like car washes
and brake repair shops in an economy struggling just to take a
breath; the next, an Arabic translation of Macbeth, with some
of Saddam Husseins henchmen in bad-guy roles. As one Iraqi
told me at a U.S.-funded art show in Dora, one of the most
violent suburbs of Baghdad, It is like I am standing naked
in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and
helps put owers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to
notice that I am naked.
Here are some of the wacky ideas we came up with to
rebuild Iraq, and remember: These are the wacky ones that
actually got U.S. taxpayer funding.

French Pastry classes

Cost: $9,797

Peter Van Buren, who served in the U.S. Foreign Service for more than two decades, is author of
We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. The
views expressed here are solely the authors and do not in any way represent the views of the
U.S. government.
illustrations by ward sutton for fp
24

Foreign Policy

In the hands of one prt in southern

Baghdad, our instructions to help
female entrepreneurs translated into
pastry classes for disadvantaged
Iraqi women who presumably could
then go open cute little French cafes
in their citys bombed-out streets.
In the funding request, the prt
stipulated that a French Chef with
experience in both baking pastries
and in teaching pastry classes
internationally would volunteer to
teach. So, you may ask, if the French
chef was volunteering le time, what
was the $9,797 spent on? Well,
some was certainly spent on paying
students to attend. It was almost
impossible to get Iraqis to show up
for these things (as they had to, if
you wanted your photos of the event
to look good) without offering a
free lunch, taxi fare, and a stipend.
Needless to say, I never heard of any
ptisseries sprouting up on the road
to Baghdads airport.

For the same reason, Gen. David Petraeus

sponsored a million-dollar Baghdad water
park, unusable ever since the water pumps
broke down. At the zoo, the now-defunct
websites chat room and Skype-like
features devolved into a series of absurd
internal discussions among the vets: Issues
included whether to keep providing alcohol
to the bears (it kept them docile) and
whether to continue the daily throwing of
live donkeys into the lions cage.

baghDaD yellow Pages

Cost: $7,000

Play about Donkeys

MuscleMen Mural

How to convince the Iraqis to abandon

several thousand years of ethnic and
religious sectarian hatred? One Baghdad
prts solution was to pay the local Iraqi
artists syndicate to produce a play, Under
the Donkeys Shade. The play focuses
on an uproariously funny legal dispute
that splits the people of a town into two
groups, the description in the funding
report boasts. The matter in dispute
is the value of shade cast by a donkey.
The message is clear: Dont quarrel over
minor differences. Those who see the
play will get the message that political
reconciliation is critical as we head into
national election season. The production
was staged at least once to my knowledge,
with some coerced locals in reluctant
attendance; political reconciliation did not
spontaneously ower.

One prt hired a local artist to paint a mural

on the side of a gym near Sadr City. The
purpose was to provide an aesthetically
pleasing sight upon entry, helping to bring
a sense of normalcy for the citizens in the
area and for those passing through. What
we ended up with instead was a group of
oiled, homoerotic Steve Reeves musclemen.

Cost: $22,500

roaD to nowhere

Cost: Unknown

In 2009, the U.S. Army hired a

contractor to pave a short stretch of
dirt road near the city of Salman Pak,
with the idea of increasing commerce
between two nearby neighborhoods. The
contractor, however, took the money and
laid down only gravelwhich made the
road just passable enough that insurgents
started to use it as a transit route. The
local residents appealed to the police,
who set up barricades, ending what little
commerce the original dirt road had
sustained.

Cost: $22,180

chilDrens art calenDar

Cost: $18,375

Tasked with community-building on

Baghdads outskirts, my prt decided to
publish a calendar illustrated with Iraqi
childrens art. First, a local womens
association was paid to conduct an art
contest for the areas children. Refreshments
were served, and the 12 best works were
printed on the 1,000 calendars made and
distributedsome within the neighborhood,
but most to other State Department ofcials.
I left mine behind in Baghdad.

Vets for the baghDaD Zoo

Cost: Unknown

As part of a joint effort with the Army

and the U.S. Agriculture Department
to revitalize Baghdads zoo, the State
Department paid for computers and
Internet service, ostensibly so that the
zoos veterinarians could establish online
relationships with vets in the United
States but also so that people could be
shown on tv going to the zoo, sending a
message that life was returning to normal.

In a country with few land-line phones and

a seriously toxic business environment,
some Green Zone genius decided that
economic success hinged on producing
the rst-ever Baghdad Yellow Pages. Even
under pressure, we could come up with
only 250 businesses that had permanent
phone numbers in a city of several million
people. My prt was saddled with hundreds
of copies of the nished product. We could
not safely go door-to-door and so hired a
local contractor, at seven bucks a copy, to
give the books away. He dropped off a few
copies here and there and likely dumped
the rest behind some abandoned building.

bikes for tykes

Cost: $24,750

At one point the State Department bought

225 childrens bicycles from a Jordanian
middleman, some with training wheels, to
give away near Sadr City, an impoverished
Shiite area of Baghdad. The idea was to
replace streets lled with trash, pockmarked
with shell craters, and ruled by wild dog
packs with kids biking to each others
houses, a sort of Mayberry on the Tigris.
But it was quickly clear that riding the bikes
would be impossible on the destroyed and
dangerous roads. Later, I saw some wheels
from the bikes being used on wheelchairs
for injured Iraqi kids.

IN
BOX
T HE T HI NGS THEY CA RRIED

The Afghan Policewoman

HOPIRAI SHIRZAI, ONE of 35 female police ocers

in Afghanistans Balkh province, joined the

force more than two decades ago, when she was
just 14 and newly married. My husband was a

police ocer and I wanted to spend time with him,

she explains. Shirzai, who worked as a prison guard
under the Taliban, is now stationed at a checkpoint

care of the youngest of her six children, a 9-month-old

protecting the entrance to the city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

boy. Shirzai took a break from her work searching other

She works the morning shift; in the evening, she takes

peoples bags to show FOREIGN POLICY whats in hers.

Cell phones: Shirzai carries two, a Nokia

and a cheap BlackBerry knockoffone
to take and make calls, and one to record
conversations with suspects. Otherwise
later they always change their story.

Salt: Shirzai does not

carry a weapon, but
she does carry a halfliter of salt in an empty
water bottle. Once,
when the driver of a
car she was searching
refused to cooperate,
she threw a handful
of salt in his face and
then overpowered him
while he was rubbing
his eyes. It turned out
he was carrying more
than 110 pounds of
opium. Im told the
government burned it,
she says.

Purse: It is Shirzais
only purse, bought in
Mazar a year and a half
ago for about $10. Its
plastic decoration, the
word Daren, broke
months ago. Shirzai
has no idea who or
what Daren is, but she
likes the way the purse
looks.

26

Foreign Policy

Police ID card: Policewomen,

like all ofcers in Afghanistan,
are given ID cards that read,
This is an acknowledgment
that [name], son of [name],
has attended Module One
Provincial Training Program.
They also are issued mens
uniforms, which Shirzai refuses
to wear, bringing clothes from
home instead, because I need
a skirt. (She does not wear a
burqa, though she did under
the Taliban.)

Scissors and knives: To

cut open suspicious bags
and parcels. That large
opium shipment, for example,
was hidden in burlap sacks
stuffed mostly with coal.

Nail clippers: To keep her

nails short. She likes them
that way.

INTERVIEW BY
ANNA BADKHEN

PHOTOGRAPHS BY
THORNE ANDERSON

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IN
BOX ideas
BY JOSHUA E. KEATING

strange trade

Free trade advocates say its an engine of

economic growth; opponents think it perpetuates
global inequality. But the unintended effects of all
that cross-border trafcwhich has nearly
quadrupled around the world since 1990may
be even more interesting. Heres a look at some
of the most surprising conclusions from recent
research on trade.

1. Trade makes countries shrink.

How the West was wonin the Middle Ages.

ts one of the best-known but least understood of historical trends: Until

the 13th century, the Middle East and North Africa were far more scientically and economically advanced than medieval Europe. But while the European Renaissance was followed by the rise of capitalism and the Industrial
Revolution, the Arab world stagnated for centuries. What happened?
The traditional view, held by early 20th-century theorists like Max Weber
and modern historians like Bernard Lewis, is that cultural factorsIslams
conservative nature, the Protestant work ethicwere the reason. But in a
recent paper published in The Economic Journal, economist Jared Rubin pinpoints a more specic and potentially far more decisive factor: the Western
ability to loan money at interest.
Both Islam and early forms of Christianity ban usury, dened as the charging of interest on a loan. In both cultures, businesses developed methods to
get around the prohibition. A popular stratagem in early Islamic nance was
the mukhatara, or double-sell. For example, a debtor might sell a creditor
something for $100 and then immediately buy it back for $110 to be paid at
a later date, the $10 becoming in effect a form of interest on the $100 loan.
Today, schemes like mukhatara remain the only legal way to charge interest in much of the Muslim world. But secularizing governments in the West
gradually did away with the ban on usury during the 14th and 15th centuries, allowing them to develop the sophisticated banking services needed to
generate capital for, say, building factories or funding massive construction
projects, Rubin says. The split might have come, Rubin points out, because
Islam evolved as a binding social code, intimately entwined with the political
systems it dominated and absorbed throughout the Ottoman Empire, whereas
Christianity developed as a dissident movement separate from the political
institutions of the Roman Empire.
So how, then, to account for todays booming Islamic economies in the
Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia and billions of dollars invested in so-called
sharia-compliant nancial services? Rubin considers these new methods just
variants on the age-old workarounds, but not enough to propel Islamic economies past Western gdps. If you get left behind in the Middle Ages, it takes more
than a few shortcuts to catch up to the future.

28

Foreign Policy

2. Trade is less important than marriage.

Facing a shortage of available wives, Chinese
families are increasing their savings rates to
increase their sons competitiveness in the
marriage market. This drives down Chinas
exchange rate, contributing to a global trade
imbalance. Qingyuan Du and Shang-Jin Wei,
National Bureau of Economic Research

3. Trade built the ancient civilizations of

Mesoamerica.
Far from being isolated developmentally, [the
cacao trade] integrally tied populations in the
American Southwest to the socio-political and
economic activities of Mesoamerican states.
Dorothy K. Washburn, William N. Washburn,
and Petia A. Shipkova, Journal of Archaeological
Science

4. Trade doesnt turn low-tech countries into

high-tech ones.
Despite hopes that globalization would allow
developing countries to innovate themselves into
prosperity, 30 years of increased trade has only
brought steeper and more intransigent gaps
between low-tech and high-tech countries, with
the high-tech countries maintaining their edge
through specialization that can take years to
match. Thomas Kemeny, Journal of Economic
Geography

5. Trade can improve your basketball game.

An increase in the number of foreigners playing in
domestic basketball leagues correlates with
improved performance for the national team, even
if its composed only of domestic players.
J. Alvarez, D. Forrest, I. Sanz, and J.D. Tena,
Labour Economics

IlluSTrATIon By STepHen SAvAge For Fp

Money MarkeT

Increased international trade lowers a countrys

birth rate, in part because it exposes countries to
gender norms that bring women out of the home
and into the workplace. John A. Doces,
International Interactions

epiph a nie s | i n t ervi ew by c h ar l e s h o ma n s

Nandan Nilekani
large units in the public sector, or they were
family companies. The notion of a rstgeneration set of entrepreneurs creating a very
different kind of company was like a breath
of fresh air in the 1980s.

all the forces that friedman and i talked

aboutglobalization, technology, the leveling
of the playing eldare as valid as ever.
The transmission of information and
capital globally and instantaneously that is
happening thanks to the cloud, tablets, and
social networking are all manifestations of
that concept. That hyperconnected world is
both a source of opportunity and a challenge.

what were doing [in the indian government] is

leapfrogging paper and going straight to online
IDs, which is actually a big idea: People who

Seattle has Bill, Thomas Friedman once wrote. Bangalore has

Nandan. The co-founder of Infosysthe Indian company that
made outsourcing a household wordfamously gave Friedman
the central conceit for The World Is Flat when he said that global
commerces playing eld is being leveled by communications
technology. Now tasked with providing digital IDs to 1.2 billion
Indians, Nandan Nilekani is trying to nish the job he started in the
private sector: bringing a country that never entirely left the 19th
century all the way into the 21st.

IllustratIon by Joe CIardIello for fp

My father was a Middle Manager in a textile mill in Bangalore and

ran into hard times. He had to move on and look for other jobs.
My parents were concerned that I would not get good schooling,
so they put me up in my uncles house in Dharwad, and I spent
about six years there. So at a very young age, I was away from my
parents. I developed an amount of independence and learned to
stand on my own feet.

infosys was going to be a different type of company. It was going to

be very ethically run, meritocratic, quality-conscious, transparent.
People didnt confuse the personal with the corporate. In those days
in India, companies were either large multinationals, or they were

had no idea what ids were, which is many

Indians, are now going to jump from that
to an online digital id that works on the
Internet or the mobile phone. Then you can
start designing services in the online world:
a new way to deliver banking services, food
entitlements, whatever. The intersection of
what is possible with todays technology and the ageold challenges of developing countriesthat, to me,
is a very exciting point.

when western developMent happened in the 19th

and 20th centuries, it took many decades and it went
through the evolution of many technologies: the steam
engine, the automobile, the airplane, electricity,
the telegraph. Today, countries like India that are
experiencing 7 or 8 percent growth and have this
population that is impatient for change have to
look at a fundamentally different model.

india is fulfilling its proMise. it has the largest

pool of young people anywhere in the world. And its a
country thats fully exposed because of its openness
to the most modern technology. Its a society in
transition, where this huge, young, aspirational
population is working in a system that is still older
and slower. Its a very exciting time.
Nandan Nilekani is chairman of Indias Unique
Identication Authority and author of Imagining
India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation.

November 2011

29

IN
BOX
zambia

the optim i st | by c h a r l e s ken n y

Haiti Doesnt Need Your Old T-Shirt

he Green Bay Packers this year beat the Pittsburgh Steelers to win Super Bowl xlv in Arlington, Texas. In parts of
the developing world, however, an alternate reality exists:
Pittsburgh Steelers: Super Bowl xlv Champions appears
emblazoned on T-shirts from Nicaragua to Zambia. The
shirt wearers, of course, are not an international cadre of
Steelers die-hards, but recipients of the many thousands of
excess shirts the National Football League produced to anticipate
the post-game merchandising frenzy. Each year, the nfl donates
the losing teams shirts to the charity World Vision, which then
ships them off to developing countries to be handed out for free.
Everyone wins, right? The nfl ofoads 100,000 shirts (and
hats and sweatshirts) that cant be soldand takes the donation
as a tax break. World Vision gets clothes to distribute at no cost.
And some Nicaraguans and Zambians get a free shirt. Whats
not to like?

30

Foreign Policy

Quite a lot, as it happensso much so that theres even a

Twitter hashtag, #swedow, for Stuff We Dont Want, to track
such developed-world ofoading, whether its knit teddy bears
for kids in refugee camps, handmade puppets for orphans, yoga
mats for Haiti, or dresses made out of pillowcases for African
children. The blog Tales from the Hood, run by an anonymous
aid worker, even set up a swedow prize, won by Knickers 4 Africa, a (thankfully now defunct) British ngo set up a couple of
years ago to send panties south of the Sahara.
Heres the trouble with dumping stuff we dont want on people in need: What they need is rarely the stuff we dont want.
And even when they do need that kind of stuff, there are much
better ways for them to get it than for a Western ngo to gather
donations at a suburban warehouse, ship everything off to Africa or South America, and then try to distribute it to remote
areas. World Vision, for example, spends 58 cents per shirt on

Leah Missbach Day/worLD vision

The West can (and should) stop dumping its hand-me-downs on the developing world.

FINBARR OREILLY/REUTERS; PHILIPPE DESMAZES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ANTHONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

shipping, warehousing, and distributing them, according to data

reported by the blog Aid Watchwell within the range of what a
secondhand shirt costs in a developing country. Bringing in shirts
from outside also hurts the local economy: Garth Frazer of the
University of Toronto estimates that increased used-clothing imports accounted for about half of the decline in apparel industry
employment in Africa between 1981 and 2000. Want to really
help a Zambian? Give him a shirt made in Zambia.
The mother of all swedow is the $2
billion-plus U.S. food aid program, a Perhaps
boondoggle that lingers on only because the most
of the lobbying muscle of agricultural conembarrassing
glomerates. (Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was when the United States moment was
airdropped 2.4 million Pop-Tarts on Af- when the
ghanistan in January 2002.) Harvard Uni- United States
versitys Nathan Nunn and Yale Universiairdropped
tys Nancy Qian have shown that the scale
of U.S. food aid isnt strongly tied to how 2.4 million
much recipient countries actually require Pop-Tarts on
itbut it does rise after a bumper crop in Afghanistan.
the American heartland, suggesting that
food aid is far more about dumping American leftovers than
about sending help where helps needed. And just like secondhand clothing, castoff food exports can hurt local economies.
Between the 1980s and today, subsidized rice exports from the
United States to Haiti wiped out thousands of local farmers and
helped reduce the proportion of locally produced rice consumed
in the country from 47 to 15 percent. Former President Bill Clinton concluded that the food aid program may have been good
for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. I
had to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity
to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of
what I did.

SENEGAL

Bottom line: Donations of cash are nearly always more effective. Even if there are good reasons to give stuff rather than
money, in most cases the stuff can be bought locally. Economist
Amartya Sen, for example, has conclusively shown that people
rarely die of starvation or malnutrition because of a lack of food
in the neighborhood or the country. Rather, it is because they
cant afford to buy the food thats available. Yet, as Connie
Veillette of the Center for Global Development reports, shipping U.S. food abroad in response to humanitarian disasters
is so cumbersome it takes four to six months to get there after
the crisis begins. Buying food locally, the U.S. Government Accountability Ofce has found, would be 25 percent cheaper and
considerably faster, too.
In some cases, if there really is a local shortage and the
goods really are needed urgently, the short-term good done by
clothing or food aid may well outweigh any long-term costs
in terms of local development. But if people donate swedow,
they may be less likely to give much-needed cash. A study by
Aradhna Krishna of the University of Michigan, for example,
suggests that charitable giving may be lower among consumers who buy cause-related products because they feel theyve
already done their part. Philanthrocapitalism may be chic:
The company Toms Shoes has met with considerable commercial success selling cheap footwear with the added hook
that for each pair you buy, the company gives a pair to a kid
in the developing world (its sold more than a million pairs
to date). But what if consumers are buying Toms instead of
donating to charity, as some surely are? Much better to stop
giving them the stuff we dont wantand start giving them
the money they do.
Charles Kenny, a Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development
Is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More.

HAITI

KENYA
IVORY COAST

November 2011

31

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IN
BOX

Just What Is a Just War?

he rst French missiles that streaked over Benghazi

in March were more than the beginning of the end for
Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddathey were also the
rst real-world test of the international communitys new
rules for humanitarian intervention. The conict made
an instant catchphrase out of responsibility to protect
and its inevitable clunky acronym, r2pa doctrine adopted
by the United Nations in 2005 and invoked for the rst time

to justify the bombing. r2p was intended to be the rst piece

in a new international legal framework for stopping war
crimes after a century of ad hoc humanitarianism. But did the
removal of Qaddas pariah regimewhile similar atrocities
were allowed to continue in Syria and elsewheremark the
dawn of a new era, or the same old inconsistent approach
debated in a new vocabulary?
Charles Homans

1940s-1960s

HMS BLACK JOKE FIRING ON THE SPANISH SLAVER EL ALMIRANTE

1807 Britain bans the slave trade. At the urging of abolitionists,

British naval vessels patrolling the Atlantic begin interdicting
other countries slave shipsthe rst example of a country
enforcing human rights beyond its shores.
1933 Polish Jewish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, appalled
by the slaughter of more than a million ethnic Armenians by
the Ottomans during World War I and by Hitlers rise, begins
a crusade for international legal protection from ethnically
motivated mass killings. He is rebuffed by the League of Nations,
where one delegate
objects that such
crimes occur too
seldom to legislate.
That same year, the rst
concentration camps
open in Germany.
1946 Twenty-four
Nazis are put on trial at
Nuremberg by the Allies
for atrocities committed
during World War II; 19 are convicted. The legal proceedings,
however, focus on war crimes and so do not fully establish a
precedent for prosecuting genocide (a term coined two years
earlier by Lemkin, who lost dozens of family members in the
Holocaust).

1948 Lemkin lobbies the three-year-old United Nations

relentlessly for legal protections against genocide, and on
Dec. 9 the U.N. General Assembly votes unanimously to
adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide (though the United States doesnt
ratify it until 1988).

European colonialism ends

with the liberation of 57
countries in Asia and Africa.
State sovereignty is an
important and sensitive issue
for the countries recently freed
from the yoke of Western rule
and one that will be used
for decades to come as an
argument against humanitarian
intervention.

1971
India intervenes in a bloody
civil war between Pakistan
and East Pakistan, which
declares independence as
Bangladesh. Seven years
later Vietnam invades Pol
Pots Cambodia, and in 1979
Tanzania deposes dictator Idi
Amin in neighboring Uganda.
All three wars are fought under
the banner of national interest,
but as each also aimed to
avert the mass slaughter of
civilians, international-law
scholars later look to them as
precursorshowever faintof
the humanitarian interventions
to come.

1991
The Soviet Union collapses.
The next decades conicts
dont carry the lofty geopolitical
stakes of the Cold War and
are more likely to happen
within countries own borders,
complicating the prospect of
outside forces stepping in.

1994
Ethnic Hutus begin killing
Tutsis in Rwanda. Susan Rice,
then an aide on
U.S. President Bill
Clintons National
Security Council,
says of the crisis,
If we use the word genocide
and are seen as doing nothing,
what will be the effect on
the November election? The
United States does nothing,
and by July, 800,000
Rwandans are dead.

1995
Bosnian Serb forces massacre
more than 7,000 Muslim
men and boys in the town of
Srebrenica, while Dutch U.N.
peacekeepers look on helplessly.

1996
Brookings Institution scholar
Francis Deng, later the
U.N.s special advisor for
the prevention of genocide,
co-authors Sovereignty as
Responsibility. The inuential
treatise argues that sovereign
states are dened not by the
inviolability of their bordersthe
assumption of the post-colonial
erabut by their obligation to
protect their citizens.

NICHOLAS MATTHEWS CONDY VIA ROYAL NAVAL MUSEUM; U.S. ARMY; MICHIEL JANSZ VAN MIEREVELT VIA WIKIMEDIA; AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

1625 In On the Law of War and Peace, Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, below, argues that intervening to help a people resist tyranny
constitutes a just war.

A NTH ROPOLOGY OF AN I D E A | R E SPO N SI BI L I T Y TO PROT ECT

Reiterating the responsibility of the Libyan

authorities to protect the Libyan population and
reaffirming that parties to armed conicts bear
the primary responsibility to take all feasible
steps to ensure the protection of civilians...
U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 1973

2005

JOEL ROBINE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ADAM DEAN/REUTERS; MAHMUD TURKIA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; JOEL SAGET/AFP/GETTY IMAGES;
MARK VON HOLDEN/GETTY IMAGES FOR HBO; FRANCISCO LEONG/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

1998
The United States and NATO
seek U.N. Security Council
approval to intervene in
Serbias persecution of
ethnic Albanians in the
province of Kosovo. China
and Russia veto it, but NATO,
eager to avoid a repeat of
its mid-1990s failures,
starts bombing anyway. The
actionbroadly supported,
successful, and illegalsets
an uneasy precedent.

1999
Chinese Foreign Minister
Tang Jiaxuan complains
that human rights taking
precedence over sovereignty
and humanitarian
intervention seem to be
in vogue these days,
threatening to wreak havoc
on international relations.

2000
With the U.N.s backing,
Canada convenes the
International Commission
on Intervention and State
Sovereignty, a blue-ribbon
panel co-chaired by
Australian politician Gareth
Evans and charged with
drawing up guidelines for
humanitarian intervention.
The panels report, The
Responsibility to Protect,
released in December 2001,
puts the term on paper for
the rst time.

At its World Summit, the

U.N. unanimously adopts
responsibility to protect as
a guiding principle for the
prevention of atrocity crimes.
It cannot be right, SecretaryGeneral Ko Annan declares,
when the international
community is faced with
genocide or massive human
rights abuses, for the United
Nations to stand by and let
them unfold to the end.

2008
When Cyclone Nargis strikes a
hapless Burma, French Foreign
Minister Bernard Kouchner
argues that the responsibility
to protect obligates the
international community to
step in. Writing in Britains
Guardian, Archbishop
Desmond Tutu similarly invokes
the principle in calling for a
nonmilitary intervention in
Zimbabwe. Neither persuades
the Security Council.

2009
U.S. President Barack Obama
takes ofce. His foreign-policy
team includes two prominent
anti-genocide advocates: U.N.
Ambassador Susan Rice,
who is haunted by
the U.S. failure
in Rwanda, and
special assistant
Samantha Power,
who reported on
the Srebrenica massacre
as a journalist and later wrote
A Problem from Hell, an
inuential critique of the U.S.
governments response to
genocide.

2011: LIBYA
February 15: The Arab Spring arrives in Libya. After
several days of protests in major cities, ghting breaks
out between protesters and security forces in Benghazi.
On Feb. 22, Muammar al-Qadda orders a
violent crackdown, vowing to go house by
house to nd and kill the rebels.
March 17: As Libyan tanks threaten Benghazi, the Security
Council passes Resolution 1973, for the rst time invoking the
responsibility to protect to condemn Qadda and impose a no-y
zone over his country. Two days later, a French ghter jet res the
rst shots in the coalition forces strike on Libya.
March-April: As NATO bombs,
debate reopens over the legitimacy
and limits of the R2P doctrine.
Evans argues in a March 24
Sydney Morning Herald editorial
that a military action intended
to kill or unseat Qadda or to
otherwise support a rebel victory is simply not permissible
under the explicit legal terms of UN resolution 1973. Nor is it
permissible under the moral rst principles of the responsibility to
protect doctrine. And though a European ofcial warns in April
that the Libya intervention should be a warning sign to regimes
undertaking bloody crackdowns in U.S. allies Bahrain and Yemen
as well as Syria, the U.N. takes no action.
August 20: Backed by NATO air power, Libyan rebels end Qaddas
four-decade rule. The expansion of the allies U.N.-sanctioned
involvement, from enforcing a no-y zone to unequivocally helping
the rebels win the war, prompts Indian U.N. Ambassador Hardeep
Singh Puri to remark, Libya has given R2P a bad name. But
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, among others, argues,
The intervention has been done rightthat after the disgraces
of Rwanda and Bosnia and the overreach of Iraq, an atrocity has
nally been stopped, in time and for the right reasons. [T]he idea
that the West must at times be prepared to ght for its values
against barbarism, he writes, is the best hope for a 21st century
less cruel than the 20th.

Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result

of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure,
and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or
avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the
international responsibility to protect.
INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON INTERVENTION AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY

Thanks

y c i l o P n g i e r o F XX
to Lloyd Axworthy of the University of Winnipeg, Kyle Matthews of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human
Rights Studies, Joshua Muravchik of Johns Hopkins University, and David Scheffer of Northwestern University.

IN
BOX

le t ter f rom havana | by yoA n i s n c h ez

Country for Old Men

t the end of his July 31, 2006, broadcast, the visibly

nervous anchor on Cuban Television News announced
that there would be a proclamation from Fidel Castro.
This was hardly uncommon, and many Cubans no
doubt turned off their tvs in anticipation of yet another diatribe from the comandante en jefe accusing the
United States of committing some fresh evil against the
island. But those of us who stayed tuned that evening saw,
instead, a red-faced Carlos Valenciaga, Fidels personal secretary, appear before the cameras and read, voice trembling,
from a document as remarkable as it was brief. In a few short
sentences, the invincible guerrilla of old confessed that he was
very ill and doled out government responsibilities to his nearest associates. Most notably, his brother Ral was charged

36

Foreign Policy

with assuming Fidels duties as rst secretary of the Communist Partys Central Committee, commander in chief of the
Revolutionary Armed Forces, and president of the Council of
State. The dynastic succession had begun.
It was a miracle that the old telephone exchanges, with
their 1930s-vintage equipment, didnt collapse that night as
callers rushed to share the news, in a code that was secret to
no one: He kicked the bucket. El Caballothe Horse
is gone. The One is terminal. I picked up the receiver and
called my mother, who was born in 1957, on the eve of Castros revolution; neither of us had known any other president.
Hes not here anymore, Mom, I said, almost whispering.
Hes not here anymore. On the other end of the line she
began to cry.

DesmonD Boylan/reuters

A dissident reports from the ruins of the daddy state, where Pap Fidel is now just the patient-in-chief.

afp/getty images

It was the little things that changed at rst. Rum sales increased. The streets of central Havana were oddly empty. In the
absence of the prolic orator who was fond of cutting into tv
shows to address his public, homemakers were surprised to see
their Brazilian soap operas air at their scheduled times. Public events began to dwindle, among them the so-called antiimperialism rallies held regularly throughout the country to rail
against the northern enemy. But the fundamental change happened within people, within the three generations of Cubans who
had known only a single prime minister, a single rst secretary
of the Communist Party, a single commander in chief. With the
sudden prospect of abandonment by the pap estadodaddy
statethat Fidel had built, Cubans faced a kind of orphanhood,
though one that brought more hope than pain.
Five years later, we have entered a new phase in our relationship with our government, one that is less personal but still
deeply worshipful of a man some people now call the patient
in chief. Fidel lives on, and Ralwhose power, as everyone
knows, comes from his genes rather than his political gifts
has ruled since his ultimate accession in February 2008 without
even the formality of the ballot box, prompting a dark joke
often told in the streets of Havana: This is not a bloody dictatorship, but a dictatorship by blood. Pepito, the mischievous
boy who stars in our popular jokes, calls Ral Castro Version
1.5 because he is no longer No. 2, but still isnt allowed to be
the One. When the comandantenow barely a shadow of his
former selfappeared at the nal session of the Communist
Partys sixth congress this April, he grabbed his brothers arm
and raised it, to a standing ovation. The gesture was intended
to consecrate the transfer of power, but to many of us the two
old men seemed to be joining hands in search of mutual support, not in celebration of victory.
Rals much-discussed reforms followed the supposed
handover of power, but in reality, they have been less steps forward than attempts to redress the legal absurdities of the past.
One of these was the lifting of the tourist apartheid that prevented Cubans from enjoying their own countrys hotel facilities. For years, to connect to the Internet, I had to disguise myself as a foreigner and mumble a few brief sentences in English
or German to buy a web-access card in the lobby of some hotel.
The sale of computers was nally authorized in March 2008,
though by that time many younger Cubans had assembled their
own computers with pieces bought on the black market. The
prohibition on Cubans having cell-phone contracts was also repealed, ending the sad spectacle of people begging foreigners to
help them establish accounts for prepaid phones. Restrictions
on agriculture were loosened, allowing farmers to lease government land on 10-year terms. The liberalization brought to light
the sad fact that the state had allowed much of the countrys
land (70 percent of it was in state hands) to become overgrown
with invasive weeds.
While ofcially still socialist, the government has also
pushed for an expansion of so-called self-employment, masked
with the euphemism of nonstate forms of production. It is,
in reality, a private sector emerging in ts and starts. In less
than a year, the number of self-employed grew from 148,000
to 330,000, and there is now a owering of textile production,

food kiosks, and the sale of cds and dvds. But heavy taxes,
the lack of a wholesale market, and the inability to import raw
materials independent of the state act as a brake on the inventiveness of these entrepreneurs, as does memory: The late
1990s, when the return to centralization and nationalization
swept away the private endeavors that had surged in the Cuban
economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall, were not so long ago.
So for now, the effects of the highly publicized reforms are
barely noticeable on our plates or in our pockets. The country
continues to import 80 percent of what we consume, at a cost
of more than $1.5 billion. In the hard-currency stores, the cans
of corn say Made in the usa; the sugar provided through
the ration book travels from Brazil; and in the Varadero tourist hotels, a good part of the fruit comes from the Dominican

The prohibition on Cubans having

cell-phone contracts was repealed,
ending the sad spectacle of people
begging foreigners to help them establish
accounts for prepaid phones.

Republic, while the owers and coffee travel from Colombia.

In 2010, 38,165 Cubans left the island for good. My impatient
friends declare they are not going to stay to turn off the light
in El Morrothe lighthouse at the entrance to Havana Bay
after everyone else leaves.
The new president understands all too well that transformations that are too deep could cause him to lose control. Cubans
jokingly compare their political system to one of the dilapidated houses in Old Havana: The hurricanes dont bring it down
and the rains dont bring it down, but one day someone tries
to change the lock on the front door and the whole edice collapses. And so the governments most practiced ploy is the pur-

November 2011

37

IN
BOX
chase of time with proclamations of supposed
trail. Cubas major cities are now lled with
Over the last
reforms that, once implemented, fail to achieve
surveillance cameras that capture both those
ve years the
the promised effects.
who smuggle cigars and those of us who carry
But this can only continue for so long. Before government has
only our rebellious thoughts.
the end of December, Ral Castro will have to
But over the last ve years the government
fulll his promise to legalize home sales, which undeniably and
has undeniably and irreversibly lost control
have been illegal since 1959, a move that will irreversibly lost
of the dissemination of information. Hidden
inevitably result in the redistribution of people
in water tanks and behind sheets hanging on
in cities according to their purchasing power. control of the
clotheslines, illegal satellite dishes bring people
One of the most enduring bastions of revolu- dissemination
the news that is banned or censored in the nationary imageryworking-class Cubans living
tional media. The emergence of bloggers who
in the palatial homes of the bygone elitecould of information.
are critical of the system, the maturation of incollapse with the establishment of such marked
dependent journalism, and the rise of autonoeconomic differences between neighborhoods.
mous spaces for the arts have all eroded the
And yet the old Cuba persists in subtle,
states monopoly on power.
sinister forms. Ral works more quietly than Fidel, and
Fidel, meanwhile, has faded away. He appears rarely and only
from the shadows. He has increased the number of politiin photos, always dressed in the tracksuit of an aging maoso,
cal police and equipped them with advanced technology to
and we begin to forget the fatigues-clad ghting man who inmonitor the lives of his critics, myself among them. I learned
truded on nearly every minute of our existence for half a century.
long ago that the best way to fool the security is to make
Just a year ago, my 8-year-old niece was watching television and,
public everything I think, to hide nothing, and in so doing
seeing the desiccated face of the old commander in chief, shouted
perhaps I can reduce the national resources spent on underto her father, Daddy, who is this gentleman?
cover agents, the pricey gas for the cars in which they move,
and the long shifts searching the Internet for our divergent
Yoani Snchez is the Havana-based author of the blog
opinions. Still, we hear of brief detentions that include heavy
Generation Y and the recently published book Havana Real.
This article was translated by Mary Jo Porter.
doses of physical and verbal violence while leaving no legal

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SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

INAUGURAL ISSUE

now
D An Economy on the Rise
D Tourists Go Green

D Winning The Nobel Peace Prize

A Resilient Nation
Its a new day for Timor-Leste. Ten years after a long conflict for its independence, this small, young and
determined Southeast Asian country has emerged from the ashes of war armed with big dreams, a
renewed sense of purpose and an agenda to match.

Leading
g7+

ECONOMY

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

imor-Leste has transformed from a

country in conflict to one of the
fastest-growing economies in the world.
Average annual growth has exceeded
10 percent, prompting noted development economist Jeffrey Sachs to
predict that, between 2010 and 2020
Timor-Leste will grow faster than
China.
Petroleum continues to be the
leading industry in the economy with
receipts in 2010 reaching $2.1 billion.

Between 2010 and 2020

Timor-Leste will grow faster
than China.

Jeffrey Sachs, economist

The banking sector also shows

signs of growth: the largest increase in
private sector credit flowed to the
tourism and service sectors.
Government spending picked up
rapidly in the second half of 2010, and
other indicators, such as electricity
consumption, also point to strong
demand in the economy.

NE
NDO

Timor-Leste is investing in human

capital, infrastructure and vital sectors
of the economy, such as oil, gas and
agriculture. Since Timor-Leste emerged
from conflict, health, literacy and education have been on the rise. Planned
spending in 2010 increased from $660
million to $838 million. Much of the
increase was spent on infrastructure,
food security, social payments for vulnerable groups, and agriculture.
Poverty levels are on the decline,
falling nearly 10 percent since 2007.
In addition, four of 13 districts have
been declared free of illiteracy.
Preliminary census results show a
sharp increase in enrollment rates for
basic education, reaching almost 90
percent in 2010.
Timor-Leste has surpassed the
Millennium Development Goals target
for 2015 for both the under 5 mortality
rate and the infant mortality rate.
Challenges clearly remain, but
Timor-Leste has become an example
of a country that has an ambitious strategy for growth and is focusing its
resources to meet its goals. a

DILI
KDILI
LIQUI
BOBONARO

INDONES IA

ormer United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair

praised Timor-Leste for its leadership in promoting
governance and accountability at a recent conference
in Dili.

Blair was on hand for a regional conference on the

Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The
initiative, which Blair founded in 2002, sets a standard
for transparency in oil, gas and mining. The process
promotes accountability in the energy and resource
sectors and compliant countries are required to disclose their financial transactions to the public.
Not every country is automatically accepted into the
EITI group Timor-Leste is the first nation in the Asia
Pacific region and third country in the world accepted
into the initiative. Timor-Leste has become a recognized leader in best practice innovations in resource
management.
There are now 10 other countries in the group.

Fast Facts

BAUCAU

LAUTM

MANATUTO

F Portuguese, Tetum, English and

Indonesian are the official and working languages of Timor-Leste.

AILEU

Timor-Leste
AINARO

OECUSSI
(ENCLAVE)

Blair commends TimorLeste for transparency

initiative

Wetar Strait

SIA

S avu S ea

ZIPI/epa/Corbis

Economic
Prospects Look
Strong for Timor-Leste

VIQUEQUE

Tim or S ea

MANUFAHI

F Dili, the capital and largest city, is

13 hours ahead of EST.
F The current population is 1.1 million.

PALAU

COVA LIMA

F The official currency: U.S. dollars.

PHILIPPINES
BRUNEI

M A L A Y S I A
SINGAPORE

Sumatra

Borneo

MOLUCCAS

I N D O N E S I A

New Britain

PA P U A N E W G U I N E A
Java

Wetar

Bali

TimorLeste

A U S T R A L I A

2 TIMOR-LESTE

F Upon its independence, Timor-Leste

became one of two predominantly
Roman Catholic countries in Asia.
The other is the Philippines.

Q&A

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Prime Minister Xanana

Gusmo speaks on the
effects of war, the
challenges of
reconstruction and hopes
for tomorrow
What do you want the world to
know about Timor-Leste?
We are in a process of building the state. The international
community can trust that we will
fulfill these expectations. We
believe in our commitment.
How would you characterize
your relationship with the
United States?
We have a very good relationship with the United States.We
face big challenges, and I believe
the fact that we are open to each
other will increase our closeness.
If we go step-by-step, we believe
we will succeed.

We have to be
transparent and create
the right conditions for
the private sector.

A Poet,
Political
Prisoner &
Peoples
Leader
path because, from the beginning, we did things in the proper
way.
What do you see as the role of
government in the lives of citizens?
The government has to look
after the people because these
people created the state. We put
in everything to achieve this goal:
we have to be transparent and
create the right conditions for
the private sector.We have to prepare, educate and provide jobs
for our youth. We owe it to the
sons and daughters of this country to help them achieve their
dreams when they have sacrificed so much.
What do you think is the greatest challenge facing Timor-Leste?
The first is how we can best
utilize our human resources.The
second is how we can manage
our wealth. We dont want to
waste these opportunities.

What do you believe is TimorLestes contribution to the

world?
Our contribution is to make
sure we help other countries like
Timor-Leste. We are on the right

Why was it so important to

quickly start reconciliation with
Indonesia after the conflict?
It was for our survival. We
have to work with all people for
our stability and peace.

What have you learned in your

struggles?
Whatever happened in the
past has happened. We cannot
forget about the capacity to forgive. Forgiveness gives us our
freedom, and we have to be free
in every aspect.
When you were in solitary confinement, you used that time
to focus on Timor-Leste. You
said you often reflected on
your comrades and considered
their suffering and struggles.
What have their sacrifices
meant?
It means everything -everything. People accepted
their sacrifices for another life.
And, now, we are building the
nation. We remember the lives
[lost] and conditions they
were in. When we talk about
providing funding for veterans
and the elderly, it is because
they need everything. We are
independent through the sum
of their sacrifices.
When you talk about gratitude,
what are some of the experiences that come to mind?
There are so many occasions
when somebody saved my life. a

Xanana Gusmo has

spent his life in
service to TimorLeste first as the
commander of the
resistance movement,
then as the first
president and now as
the prime minister.

During the war, we

learned so much... We
learned to understand
that, wherever one is
placed, human beings have
the same feelings, the same
desires, the same ideals,
the same will, to build a
world without war, without
oppression, without
frontiers.
Excerpt from a letter written
by Xanana Gusmo and published in Sara Niners book,
Xanana

TIMOR-LESTE 3

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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Government leaders convene in August for budgetary hearings that were also broadcast
for the first time on Timorese national television as part of a transparency initiative.

A New Vision for the Future

Timor-Leste heads the g7+ to focus on reconstruction in post-conflict societies
ore than 1.5 billion people live in conflict-affected and fragile countries, and
Timor-Leste knows first-hand that moving from
conflict to stability is a long and demanding
political process.
Spurred by the lessons drawn from its own
experiences, Timor-Leste is leading the g7+, a
consortium that represents 350 million people
from 17 of these fragile states. The g7+ is the
first time in history that fragile and conflictaffected countries have formed a shared voice
to review their common challenges and
opportunities on a global stage.
Minister of Finance Her Excellency Emilia
Pires is the inaugural chair and represents
Timor-Leste. She assumed leadership of the
g7+ last year and helped lead the group to
agree on the Dili Declaration. Signed in April
2010, the Declaration outlines a bold new
vision for creating specific peace building and
state building processes and improves the efficiency of international assistance.
The value of sharing these experiences is
clear: 43% of countries moving out of conflict
slide back into war within five years. Basic
government transformations can take any-

where from 20 to 40 years. The g7+ provides a

mechanism to prevent countries from slipping
back into conflict.
During the g7+ conference in May in
Monrovia, Liberia with leaders from states
including Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ivory
Coast, Pires encouraged members to leverage
their collective experiences and apply them
toward common goals, such as eradicating
poverty.We have a duty to share best practices
and learn from each other, Pires said. Our
problems are very similar.
Accountability is a key part of the g7+
group both for member countries and international donors and Timor-Leste leads by
example. In March, Timor-Leste launched a
ground-breaking transparency portal that provides the public with specific information on
government expenditures. This user-friendly
portal, available in Tetum, English and
Portuguese, tracks government expenses and
revenues and includes important information
regarding budget laws.
Timor-Lestes example is gaining worldwide attention. World Bank Group Managing
Director Sri Mulyani Indrawati recently praised

We have a duty to
share best
practices and learn
from each other.

H.E. Emilia Pires,

Minister of Finance

4 TIMOR-LESTE

Wu Jingdan/XinHua/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Timor-Leste, as a nation, is
building strength and
economic resilience and has
demonstrated how much
can be won in a short space
of time.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati,

World Bank Group Managing Director

Timor-Leste for its leadership, fast-growing

economy and political stability during a conference in Dili in August.
Timor-Leste, as a nation, is building
strength and economic resilience and has
demonstrated how much can be won in a
short space of time, Indrawati said.a
The g7+ meets several times a year; the next conference is scheduled for November 29-December 1 in
Busan, South Korea. For more information on the
transparency portal and the g7+, go to www.transparency.gov.tl/english.html and www.g7plus.org.

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

Minister for Foreign Affairs Zacarias da Costa was appointed

to his position in 2007. He previously served as a member of
Parliament and leader of the Social Democratic Party bench at
the Parliament.

A
Place
in the

World
Timor-Leste celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2012. How
have you seen this country change?
It is very different.This was a country that was completely devastated. It was 80-to-90 percent destroyed.When I returned in 1999,
it was not the same country that it is today. We have done tremendous work building the country, but this is still a post-conflict
nation. This is the message that I tell the world.

How have the memories of the conflict

influenced Timor-Lestes interactions with
other countries?
As foreign minister, I believe we need to
put the past behind us and focus on the
future.We need to ensure this for future generations. The best justice we can make is to
have a different Timor-Leste.

I believe we
need to put
the past
behind us
and focus on
the future.
We need to
ensure this
for future
generations.

What are your key priorities?

It is important to ensure that Timor has
excellent engagement with Indonesia and
Australia. We need to live together and
ensure that all aspects of our relations are excellent.

How would you describe the U.S.-Timorese relationship?

We are promoting a close relationship with the U.S. to balance
the growing influence of China. Many challenges remain, but we
will continue to have a close relationship. This is the first priority.
The second, of course, is regional integration. We are a new country and need to find our place in the world.
What do you think it would mean for Timor-Leste to be part of
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)?
We are a small country. If we close ourselves, we will not survive
in the future. Joining ASEAN will benefit us and our membership
will help ASEAN by adding another democratic voice. a

A Permanent Partnership

American Ambassador Fergin discusses the U.S.-Timor-Leste relationship

both share values and interests

around the world.We collaborate
on human rights and democracy
in other countries -- ways that
Timor-Leste has consistently tried
to make its contribution on the
world stage.

Before President Obama

named her as U.S.
Ambassador to Timor-Leste,
Amb. Judith R. Fergin previously served in Indonesia
and Singapore.
What do you see as the future of
U.S-Timor-Leste relations?
We have coined a phrase,
which we think describes the U.STimor-Leste relationship.We call it
a permanent partnership. We

What are some of the priorities

you have established as
Ambassador for Timor-Leste
that you hope will strengthen
bilateral relations?
The first and foremost is
working together with the government to help sustain the
peace and security Timor-Leste
needs to progress.We believe that
a healthy, well-educated population with rising incomes and
hopes for a better future for their
children builds the kind of environment that will meet all of
Americas needs and interests.

How have you seen this region

change over the last several
years?
I first came to Timor-Leste in
1990 when it was still part of
Indonesia. I think the biggest
change is that of an independent
Timor-Leste.
What do you think are some of
the major challenges facing
Timor-Leste with respect to its
regional integration? Are you
optimistic about Timor-Lestes
entry into ASEAN?
Timor-Leste has already
made its decision that it wants
to be part of Southeast Asia. It
wants to integrate into ASEAN.
The challenge for Timor-Leste is
to work through its membership
application with ASEAN. We are
not a member of ASEAN, and we
dont have vote on the matter;

but, we do think that a natural

progression for Timor-Leste is to
join the group.

In a world where many

countries seem to be
going in the wrong
direction, you can take
Timor-Leste as one of the
lessons on how you can
arrest the instability.

What should Americans know

about Timor-Leste?
In a world where many
countries seem to be going in
the wrong direction, you can
take Timor-Leste as one of the
lessons on how you arrest the
instability. As every month goes
by, its another month of success
and stability. a
TIMOR-LESTE 5

PROFILES

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Searching for an
adventure, finding a
second-home
Three young, professional Americans
find opportunity in Dili
Steve Catt, 26, has been an English
teacher to young Timorese in Dili for the last
year.While his peers don suits, Catt instructs in
a short-sleeved shirt, shorts, flip flops and a
straw hat that hides his medium-length hair.
The son of diplomats, he became interested in Timor-Leste for its history and heart.
When he studied at the University of Hawaii,
he learned about the conflict from the personal perspective of his Timorese friends.The
reconciliation efforts that Timor-Leste initiated with Indonesia inspired him to journey
to Dili on his own.
I respect the way they handled the conflict, he said.

Building
a better
future
More than three-quarters
of the population in TimorLeste is under 30 -- making
it one of the most youthful
countries in the world

6 TIMOR-LESTE

New Yorker Gabe Schickel, 30, had just

graduated from City College of New York and
needed a job. He taught in Bangkok and
wanted to return to the region. It was at that
time that Timor-Leste needed someone with
his language, administrative and analytical
skills.
He arrived in Timor-Leste several months
ago and immersed himself in the challenges
facing the government. He took on more and
more responsibilities, worked long days and
learned about governance in a post-conflict
society.
He says working in Timor-Leste inspired
him to continue building his career in
Southeast Asia.
The work they are doing is interesting, he
said.

Eurfrazia Amaral Menezes,

23, lost her uncle during the
conflict and knows about the
toll of war first-hand. As her
family mourned, she was
forced to stay home and
could rarely venture out of her
home.
These days, she is a mathematics student at the
National University of TimorLeste and aspires to teach
young people math to prepare
them for jobs. She doesnt
mourn the lost time.
You can always look
back, she said. We need to
move forward. For me, personally, (my goal) is to be a
better woman to serve my
family, my society and my
country.

Joel Sellereit wanted to do something

different with his summer. The 28-year-old
sandy blond from Seattle was studying international business at the University of
California-San Diego when he set his sights on
Southeast Asia. He learned about Timor-Leste
after hearing a presentation from a visiting
government leader.
When the Ministry of Finance offered him
a summer internship that would utilize his
political and economic policy acumen, he
packed his suitcases for Timor-Leste. Over the
summer, he worked with high-ranking government officials from the Ministry, gaining
valuable exposure to the budgetary process in
a post-conflict society.
He found time to play, too. He traveled to
different cities, including Baucau, the second
largest city, and made the most of the beaches.
They appreciate having you here,
Sellereit said. a

Fernando Baptista Xavier, 27, has a simple

aim: To return to the village where he was born
and give back to the people and community
that raised him. He studies agriculture at
University of Timor-Leste.
My people are in farming, he said. We
need to value the lifestyle we have developed.
The days of the conflict are past, he says, and
the future for Timor-Leste is bright.
Im optimistic that this country is moving
forward to the future.
Eva Tavares, 22, grew up around farmers and wants to help them improve their
yields, and, ultimately, their livelihoods.
She studies agriculture at the
University of Timor-Leste and hopes to
stay in Timor-Leste, working with rural
farmers and technology.
The majority of people are in agriculture, she said. That is what pushed
me to study it.

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

I want the
international
community to know
about the resilience
of our people and our
commitment to
peace its enduring
and very profound.

Resilience
Pays Off
His Excellency Agio Pereira was a student when he heard the call to serve

H.E. Agio Pereira is the Secretary of State

for the Council of Ministers. A musician by
training and career public servant, he is committed to a democratic Timor-Leste, reminding
himself of the Buddhist saying in his office,
Too pure water has no fish -- the courage to
be imperfect is our greatest lesson.

You have previously said, If you want

peace, forget justice. What did you mean
by that?
Its strategic. Justice is fairness. For us, its
better to forgive.Were in a David vs. Goliath situation. This is a strategy. When the Prime
Minister spoke to a group of veterans, he said,
From today onwards, there are no more traitors and heroes. We need people who can
transform ideas into realities to benefit our
nation and heroes.
What do you see as the greatest challenge
facing Timor-Leste?
Managing expectations. The ultimate
responsibility of the leaders is to manage
expectations. The expectations of the people
are very high. None of us were ever in the
government. Liberal democracy can become
very nasty. Like Frank Sinatra, (were) doing it
our way.

Timor-Leste is one of the youngest countries in the world. How have you seen
Timor-Leste change over the years?
Its been very special for me to watch. It
was a war that lasted a quarter of a century.
When I was in Lisbon, I was a young man and
Indonesia had invaded East Timor from the
border. People came together and told us to
fight for our country. It took a whole lifetime.
I made it back in July 1999 after 25 years in
exile. It was my country, but I could not recognize it.

Poverty reduction is something to which

you have devoted so much of your life. You
were behind the campaign to bring electricity to the remotest parts of the world.
What else needs to be done to further
improve the livelihoods of the poor?
There is no shortcut. We need to build
institutions of the state. We have to do it
together.

How do you think Timor-Leste has progressed from a UN-administered territory

to its own country?
Our people voted to determine our future.
We decided on a liberal democracy. We
wanted a liberal constitution.

When you were a student, you studied

music. When you were a young man, what
made you switch to a life in public service?
My conscience forced me into it. When I
was young, I was very ignorant of politics.
When people spoke of the revolution, I didnt

understand. But, I understood that unless we

stand up we may lose our country and identity forever. It was a long struggle. We
understood that if we dont fight for the country, then who will? We may die, but well die
standing. We must keep going. In the end, we
won. We won.
What do you think is Timor-Lestes contribution to global affairs?
We have so much to offer in terms of postconflict war rebuilding.
What do you want the international community to know about Timor-Leste?
I want the international community to
know about the resilience of our people and
our commitment to peace its enduring and
very profound.We want the world to know we
have a determination to succeed at all costs. a
TIMOR-LESTE 7

PLACES

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

Respecting
the Earth
Eco-tourism takes shape in TimorLeste and attracts a global clientele

arrys Place, a sprawling collection of

earthy bungalows that sits across the stunning Timor Sea in Atauro Island, isnt your
average profit-driven lodge.
And, thats the point, says co-founder and
operator Barry Hinton.
Barrys Place is part of a small but growing
trend of eco-tourism destinations in TimorLeste. Ecotourism aims to minimize the

negative impacts of tourism for local

communities and environments.
Like many other eco-tourism
initiatives that feature environmentally-friendly practices, this modest
but popular location caters to
tourists who demur the fancy hotels
in favor of bungalows with natural
lighting, compost bathrooms, vegetarian cuisine and an authentic
cultural experience.
At Barrys Place, just north of
the pier on Atauro Island, there are nine
rooms across five huts with different bedding
arrangements.-- For example, one bungalow
that rents for $105 per night can accommodate as many as four adults or two adults and
two children. Single travelers and backpackers
can also find accommodations for $30.
Travelers can also pitch a tent or have one
provided for a fee of $25. Meals are included.
We are not here for the money, Hinton
said.
Honoring the local culture
Hintons love affair with Timor-Leste began
about a decade ago when he left his native
Australia to teach English to Timorese youth.
He married a woman from Timor-Leste and
8 TIMOR-LESTE

Barry Hinton (center) left the city life

to start his own eco-lodge
on Atauro Island.

decided to stay.After his first wife died in childbirth, he remarried and his in-laws gave him a
block of land on the Atauro Island along the
edges of the pristine Timor Sea.
He and his family built the lodge using
local materials and have been living there
since 2005 with their two children. On most
weeks, the lodge averages 25 guests. Hinton is
quick to point out an irony of eco-tourism: He
has a successful business, but he wants to
keep it small to stay environmentally responsible and respectful of the local culture.
Atauro, he says, is an unspoiled island,
where time is nothing and money doesnt
matter. He prefers to spend his days chatting
with the guests and locals and reading.
If you look at Australia or America, every-

one is worried about money, Hinton says.Its

very freeing not to have that problem.
Barrys Place has attracted visitors from
across the world who understand and appreciate the lodges mission of stewardship.
Another attraction: Inexpensive snorkeling.
Barrys Place offers snorkeling for $10.
Robyn Dusting arrived from Victoria,
Australia, with her retired husband, who works
on the grounds. They believe in environmentally-responsible vacations.
Eco-tourism is something that should be
embraced by more people in the world,
Dusting said.
The visit was their second to Timor-Leste,
and Dusting says she is open to returning to
Timor-Leste but is content to spend her days
reading, lounging along the coast and snorkeling.
Its a wonderful place, Dusting said.Im
spoiled. a
For more information on Barry's Place, go to:
www.timorleste-hotels.com/
Barry_s_Place_on_Atauro.

RESOURCES

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/Corbis

Ceremony Speech, Presentation Speech by

Francis Sejersted, Chairman of the Norwegian
Nobel Committee at the ceremony:

Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo (left) and Jos

Manuel Ramos-Horta were awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1996 for their commitment to peace.

A Day in
History
1996 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly
to Bishop Carolos Filipe Ximenes Belo,
Jose Ramos-Horta

he Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to

Jos Ramos-Horta and Bishop Carlos
Filipe Ximenes Belo for their work towards a
just and peaceful solution to the conflict in
East Timor.
An edited version of the 1996 Award

Tips for the

busy traveler
Getting There: Travelers en route to Dili can
arrive from three cities, Singapore, Darwin,
Australia and Bali, Indonesia. From
Singapore, Singapore Airways offers several
flights a week. Through Darwin, Air North
through Darwin also flies several times a
week to Dili. More flights are expected to be
added. Daily flights are offered through
Merpati Nusantara Airlines in Bali.
Visas: Americans traveling to Timor-Leste
may apply for a visa at the Dili International
Airport or Dili Sea Port. A fee of $30 to $40
USD applies. If you arrive by land, remember
to apply for a visa in advance. Travelers must
also hold a passport with an expiration date
not less than 6 months from the date of
entry.
Visas for tourism, family visits and business
visits expire after 90 days, but extensions are
available for an added fee.
Source: Government of Timor-Leste

Jos Ramos-Horta: Mediator & Diplomat

The conflict in East Timor has been
called the forgotten conflict. It has not, however, been completely forgotten, having
figured on the international agenda, with
varying degrees of prominence, throughout
those twenty years. But it has so to speak
never caught on. There have been so many
other interests and regards to attend to, and
East Timor is so small.
Ramos-Horta was a leader, one of the
moderates whose ideal was social democracy.
During the so-called civil war, he was out of the
country; and, on his return, he tried to reconcile the parties.
He has lived abroad, unceasingly and with
great personal sacrifice collecting and communicating information on the repression,
torture and killing in his home country and
acting as East Timors principal international
spokesman.
At the same time, he has successfully kept
up his efforts to unite the various East
Timorese groups in a single national front,
while constantly seeking opportunities for a
peaceful solution to the conflict.

No serious negotiations aimed at resolving

the conflict are conceivable today without the
participation of Ramos-Horta or one of his
aides.
Bishop Carolos Filipe Ximenes Belo:
Healer & Representative
Bishop Belo was appointed Apostolic
Administrator for the Roman Catholic Church
in East Timor in 1983. Again and again, in the
midst of everyday terror and suffering, he has
intervened, trying to reconcile and mediate
and lessen confrontation, and in doing so he
has saved many lives. Intervening in a violent
conflict entails a risk of being crushed
between the antagonists.
But Bishop Belo has become much more
than a mediator: this man of peace has also
become a rallying point for his sorely tried
people, a representative of their hope for a
better future.
The love his people feel for this mediator
springs from certain fundamental principles
he has adhered to. Show the people respect.
Give them freedom to develop their
humanity to the full.You do not gain respect if
you do not show respect.
This years two Peace Prize Laureates have
labored tirelessly, and with great personal sacrifice, for their people. a

Good Books
Geoffrey Robinsons If you leave us here, we will die is a harrowing description of the genocide and the role of the international community in
stabilizing Timor-Leste. Noted author Luis Cardosas The Crossing: A
Story of East Timor is a memoir of the authors coming of age in TimorLeste. Sara Niners biography, Xanana, provides a detailed account of
Prime Minister Xanana Gusmos life. Timothy Mos The Redundancy of
Courage, which was short-listed for the 1991 Booker Prize, is a novel
based on the conflict in Timor-Leste. Andrea Katalin Molnars ebook, Timor-Leste: Politics,
History, and Culture, published last year and is a comprehensive book on Timor-Leste with
a particular emphasis on the historical roots of the countrys challenges.

Helpful websites on Timor-Leste for planning a stay

Discover Dili, www.discoverdili.com, provides some information on Timor-Lestes
largest city.
Lonely Planet, www.lonelyplanet.com, offers information on Timor-Leste. Key in Timor
Leste for travel tips You have to special order the book, however.
The Government of Timor-Leste, http://timor-leste.gov.tl provides a short history, description of the political system and information on the country.
Friends of Timor,
www.friendsoftimor.com, is run by non-Timorese and includes information on things to do.
World Bank Country Report on Timor-Leste, has strong data concerning youth, civil society
and development. Go to http://web.worldbank.org and key in Timor-Leste in the search box.
East Timor Law & Justice Bulletin, http://easttimorlegal.blogspot.com, provides up-to-date
information regarding legal and governmental actions.
TIMOR-LESTE 9

GALLERY

SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

Life in
Timor-Leste

Timor-Leste is a scenic country with plenty to see

and experience. (Top row from left to right)
Members of the military guard hoisting the flag in
front of the main government building; A young
Timorese girl on the beach. (Center row from left
to right) Handmade masks created by artisans from
Atauro Island; Timor-Lestes iconic image: A statue
of Jesus sits atop a summit; Fishing boats docked
along the beach at sunset. (Bottom row) Children
running along the White Sands Beach in Dili.

Look for the next issue of

Timor-Leste Now in the December
issue of Foreign Policy magazine!
Editor in Chief: Sheila B. Lalwani
Designer: Lisa Pampillonia
Photographer: Katie Cesaro
Contact Amer Yaqub, Publisher at 202.728.7310
or amer.yaqub@foreignpolicy.com, for any
comments or questions about these reports.
For additional information on FPs nation branding
capabilities, please visit
www.foreignpolicy.com/advertising/
mag_nation.php

10 TIMOR-LESTE

think again: nuclear power

Japan Melted down,

But that doesnt Mean the end
of the atoMic age
by charles d. ferguson

think again: nuclear power

Fukushima Killed the

Nuclear Renaissance.
no.
At rst it looked like a natural disaster of epic proportions: shock waves rippling outward from a 9.0-magnitude
earthquake off northeast Japan followed by a 30-foot tsunami, a one-two punch that all but obliterated the coastal city
of Sendai and its environs. Then the electricity went off at the
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, and a random act
of natural destruction became a parable of technological society run amok. Stories of tsunami-leveled villages gave way to
harrowing accounts of nuclear engineers trying, and failing,
to stop the meltdown of rst one, then a second, and nally a
third reactor at Fukushima.
Wed seen this movie twice before, of course: rst in 1979,
when inexperienced operators allowed a reactor to overheat
and melt down at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and most apocalyptically in 1986, when the reactor
meltdown at Chernobyl forced the evacuation of hundreds
of thousands of residents of what is now Ukraine and Belarus and all but nished off the Soviet economy. And in the
wake of the March 11 Fukushima meltdown, commentators
predicted the end of an industry that seemed to have nally
escaped the shadows of its two earlier disasters. All nuclear
operators, Moodys Investors Service warned in an early
April report, will suffer the consequences that emerge from
a post-Fukushima environment.
Indeed, in Japan, where support for nuclear power predictably, and understandably, fell from two-thirds of the public to one-third after the meltdown, plans
for 14 reactors slated for construction by
2030 were soon scrapped. Fukushima also
tipped the scales in Switzerlands decision to phase out nuclear power by 2034
and contributed to more than 94 percent
of Italian voters rejecting Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconis June referendum on renewing nuclear power.
But these were the exceptions rather than
the rule; Japan, in fact, was the only formerly
pro-nuclear country to experience a change
of heart after the accident. The United States is reviewing its
safety procedures for nuclear power, but not changing course
on it; overall support for the energy source among Americans
has hovered around 50 percent since the early 1990s. In France,
which gets 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, President Nicolas Sarkozy said shutting down reactors was out of the
question. And as for China, India, and South Koreacountries
with a growing appetite for nuclear power that account for the
bulk of active plant constructiononly the rst has put any of its
nuclear plans on pause, and thats just pending a safety review. India and South Korea have vowed to tighten safety standards, but
have otherwise forged ahead with plans for nuclear expansion.

Outside Japan, it was Germany that reacted most emphatically to Fukushima, with hundreds of thousands of protesters
taking to the streets and Chancellor Angela Merkel declaring a phaseout of the countrys nine existing nuclear plants.
But most Germans were already staunchly against nuclear power before 2011a legacy not of Fukushima, but of
Chernobyl, whose 1986 meltdown rained down contamination
850 miles away in Bavaria. And though Merkels political coalition was battered in subsequent elections by Germanys antinuclear Greens, the erosion of her popularity had in fact begun months earlier. Nor was Merkels phaseout decision an
entirely new direction; Germany had committed more than a
decade ago not to build new plants.

Nuclear Power Is an Accident

Waiting to Happen.
not necessarily.
In half a century of operation, the global nuclear power
industry has suffered three catastrophic accidents, all dire
enough to make the plant namesThree Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushimasynonymous with industrial
disaster. But each was a failure of organizational culture as
much as technology, and the lessons learned have helped keep
their specic mistakes from being repeated.
Shortly after the meltdown at Three Mile Island, the U.S.
nuclear industry began an ambitious overhaul of its safety
practices. The commercial sector hired nuclear experts from
the U.S. Navy, which has the worlds longest and least blemished track record for nuclear safety, to overhaul safety standards and create a peer-review inspection
body, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. The United States hasnt had a
meltdown since at any of its more than
100 reactors.
The Chernobyl accident seven years
later was an outlier, inextricable from the
pathologies of the late-Soviet-era system
in which it took place: an antiquated,
kludged-together reactor design without
any containment structure to safeguard
against worst-case scenarios and hubristic engineers who believed that nothing could go wrong,
even as they drove the plant into the danger zone (ironically
enough, by dragging out a safety test). Still, the disaster led
to a worldwide transformation of safety standards similar to
what the United States underwent after Three Mile Island,
most notably with the creation of the World Association of
Nuclear Operators, which has since inspected almost all 432
commercial reactors in the world.
Most recently, the Fukushima disaster was equal parts
freakish bad luck (an earthquake of a huge magnitude, followed by an equally extraordinary tsunami of a size not seen
in the region for hundreds of years) and a management cul-

50

Foreign Policy

previous page: KyoKo Hamada/gallery stocK

Japan, in fact, was the

only formerly
pro-nuclear country
to experience a
change of heart after
the accident.

The Fukushima disaster

was partly freakish bad
luckan earthquake
of huge magnitude,
followed by an equally
extraordinary tsunami.

ture that kept problems at the plant from being addressed

prior to the accident. Fukushimas reactors were 32 to 40
years old, and concerns had been raised about their integrity
for nearly as long as they had been up and running. Tokyo
Electric Power Companys management covered up such
concerns and safety violations for years, executives admitted after the accident. Japan also lacked a strong regulatory
agency, as well as the independent nuclear expertise that
would have been necessary to staff one.
As in the previous disasters, lessons have already been
learned from Fukushima; South Koreas government has
ordered the establishment of a strong regulatory agency to
avoid a repeat of its neighbors catastrophe. It would, of
course, be best not to make these enormous mistakes in the
rst place, but we can take some comfort in the fact that so
far, we have avoided repeating any of them.

Nuclear Power Is Too Expensive.

James WhitloW Delano/ReDux

yes and no.

In fact, nuclear power plants are relatively cheap to operate. Averaging the costs over the life of the operation, a
safely run plant can even be a cash cow, generating power
at as low as 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable to a coalred power plant. The problem is getting them built. A large
reactor can cost several billion dollars, and construction
delaysas well as slowdowns forced by inevitable legal

challengeshave been known to drive up construction costs

by $1 million a day.
This problem is nothing new; it has plagued the industry
since the 1970s. Years before the Three Mile Island disaster turned public opinion against the atom, the U.S. nuclear
sector was already in trouble on account of legal and bureaucratic changes enacted under Presidents Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter that made new plants easier
to stop with lawsuitsusually led by environmental and
citizens groupsand regulations more unpredictable. That
spooked investors, who in turn raised interest rates on borrowing for plant developers. The then-ongoing recession,
which depressed energy demand, didnt help; neither did the
plummeting price of oil and deregulation of natural gas that
followed in the 1980s. Today, the industry argues that plant
construction can only happen with the help of tens of billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees, which transfer
nancial risks onto taxpayers.
But the fact is that nuclear power has never succeeded
anywhere without enormous government backing. Until
2004, the French government wholly owned lectricit de
France, the utility that operates all French nuclear power
plants, and the government still controls more than 80 percent of it today. The Chinese government also largely or
wholly owns Chinas nuclear-power utilities. And nuclear is
hardly the only energy source that hasnt stood up in the free
market once you factor in the external costs. Consider how
much of the Pentagons $550 billion-a-year budget goes to-

November 2011

51

think again: nuclear power

ward securing oil supplies. For a country like Japan or South
Korea, with virtually no domestic energy supplies, nuclear
power may be worth the upfront costs if it allows for a measure of energy security. As for the rest of us, nuclear power
may also come to seem a good deal, once you factor in the
risks of climate change.

More Nuclear Power Means

More Nuclear Proliferation.
maybe.

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Nuclear Power Can Help the Worlds

Poorest Get on the Grid.
not really.
The two great energy challenges of the immediate future
will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and
meeting the moral obligation of helping developing countries
gain access to the kind of reliable energy supply that allows
for transformative improvements in health, education, and
overall quality of life. Expanding nuclear power, which currently provides about 14 percent of the worlds electricity, may
appear to offer the best means of addressing each challenge
without exacerbating the other. Eight African countries, in
addition to already-nuclear South Africa, are exploring plant
construction. Environmental scientist James Lovelock has asserted that nuclear energy will give civilization the chance to
survive through the difcult time soon to come.
The problem is that most of the worlds new electricity
demand is in the developing world, and about 85 percent of
todays nuclear power is limited to the most economically
advanced countries. The reasons for this are easy enough to
grasp: Nuclear powers start-up costs are enormous, and large
plants require a robust electrical gridprerequisites that are
by denition out of reach for the estimated 1.6 billion of the
Earths 7 billion people who have little or no reliable access
to electricity. Niger may be the worlds fth-largest uranium
producer, but the cost of building a reactor to make use of it
would take up more than half the countrys gdp.
In recent years, many in the nuclear energy industry
have touted small reactors as the solution to this problem
modular units about one-ftieth to one-third the size of the
behemoths used in todays nuclear-powered countries and
that can be scaled up gradually at far lower cost. U.S. Energy
Secretary Steven Chu, who says he is a big fan of the tech-

BORIS HORVAT/AFP/GeTTy ImAGeS

Its true that the nuclear enrichment and reprocessing

facilities used to produce fuel for peaceful reactors can
just as easily be used to make ssile material for bombs.
For now, however, this threat starts and ends with Iran.
Most of the 30 countries that use nuclear power dont
build their own enrichment or reprocessing facilities,
instead buying fuel for their nuclear power plants from
external suppliers. The only countries with enrichment
facilities that dont have nuclear weapons as well are Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Iran, Japan, and the Netherlandsand only one of those six keeps nonproliferation
hawks up at night.
The rest of the world has been willing by and large
to abide by arrangements like the 2009 deal between the
United States and the United Arab Emirates (uae). Under its terms, the uae passed a national law banning the
construction of enrichment and reprocessing facilities in
exchange for access to a reliable source of nuclear fuel.
Such agreements could maintain the status quo as long
as the same standard is enforced across the board. Unfortunately, U.S. President Barack Obamas administration
is in the process of eroding this precedent in deals it is
pursuing with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam, which
could impose less strict termsand possibly lead the uae
to rethink its self-imposed moratorium. In April, the U.S.
House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously passed a
resolution backing legislation to make terms like those in
the uae deal the norm, but it has yet to become law.
The bad news is that the threat of peaceful nukes begetting the destructive kind is going to get worse before it
gets better, thanks to technological advances. Global Laser Enrichment, a North Carolina-based rm, appears to
be on the verge of commercializing a process that would
use laser technology to enrich uranium. A laser enrichment facility would take up relatively little spaceit could
be hidden in a single nondescript warehouse in an otherwise benign industrial parkand emit few overt signs of
activity, making it far more difcult to detect than conventional centrifuge enrichment. Successful commercialization could trigger the spread of the technology despite the
companys and the United States efforts to keep it safe.
The secret of the nuclear bomb, after all, only lasted a
few years.

nology, has urged Obama to ask Congress for $39 million

to jump-start its development in the United States. But small
reactors cost more per kilowatt-hour than their bigger siblings
to keep up and running, and they still present most of the challenges that make nuclear power logistically difcult: the need
for highly trained personnel to run them safely, procedures
and facilities for safely storing nuclear waste, and protection
against attacks, theft of radioactive materials, and sabotage.
All of this means that for people without electricity, renewable power sources such as wind and solar will continue
to provide a better hope for plugging in quickly and cleanly,
as will innovations in electricity storage, whether hydrogenrun fuel cells or some innovation yet to be produced.

they faced signicant opposition from a public that was skittish about nuclear power. But government and industry alike
took the opposite tack from that of the United States, ensuring that stakeholders ranging from Greenpeace to citizens
groups to the nuclear industry were included in discussions.
Many locations were up for scientic investigation and public debate, and the process of choosing one was transparent
and based on the best geological information. The storage facility is planned to be fully operational in 2020 and expected
to last for 100,000 years. Its the lesson of the meltdowns all
over again: The biggest risks posed by nuclear power come
not from the technology, but from the human institutions
that govern how we use it.

Radioactive Waste Is the Achilles

Heel of Nuclear Power.

Windmills Can Replace Reactors.

wrong.
Nuclear waste is a solvable problem, as long as you get the
technology and the politics rightand in that order. Radioactive materials can be kept from contaminating land and
water supplies for tens of thousands of years if you bury
them in the right geological formation, such as stable granite
rock, or for at least a century if you put them in dry storage
casks (a course that presumably offers enough time for scientists to gure out a more permanent solution). Germanys
Morsleben facility, in a former rock-salt mine, has housed
nuclear waste safely for three decades; at the Surry Power
Station in Virginia, the cask method has worked without incident for a quarter-century.
When storage plans have gone badly, its
been because politics have trumped technical concerns and have been handled poorly.
Perhaps the most notorious example is the
Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository,
a planned containment complex in the
Nevada desert that would have cost more
than $50 billion but was scrapped amid
controversy in 2009. The site was chosen
in the 1980s not because it was geologically ideal for containing nuclear wasteit
wasntbut because Nevadas representatives in Washington were comparatively weak and were outmaneuvered by states that would have provided more and
better storage locations, such as Texas. After more than $12
billion spent on the Yucca Mountain project, the Obama administration pulled the plug in a hasty, politically motivated
manner that could cost taxpayers billions of dollars more
and delay by at least 20 years the development of an alternative, according to an April 2011 report by the Government
Accountability Ofce.
In contrast, consider Swedens experience with the Forsmark nuclear power plant. When the Swedes set about planning their nuclear waste storage facility three decades ago,

not for decades to come.

In an ideal world, our energy supply wouldnt come with
the asterisks of planet-imperiling climate change on one hand
or waste that stays hazardous for thousands of years on the
otherand this, of course, is the promise of renewable energy.
Its true that renewable technologies have made great strides in
recent years; in fact, theyre the fastest-growing energy sector,
with solar photovoltaic capacity expanding an average of 40
percent a year since 2000 and wind power growing an average
of 27 percent annually since 2004.
But context matters. These are still strictly niche sources,
and even today they still account for only 3 percent of the
worlds electricity portfolio. Solar energy still requires major
government subsidies to reach cheaper prices and greater economies of scale; $535 million in U.S. Energy Department grants
wasnt enough to save solar panel manufacturer Solyndra, which declared bankruptcy
in August. Until smart-grid technologies and
energy storage systems improve and spread
widely, wind and solar energy will be too
intermittent to provide anything like the reliable base-load power offered by nuclear and
fossil fuels. Hydropower plays a signicant
role in the energy mix of the United States
and several other countries, but environmental concerns about the damage caused by
dams have severely limited its growth.
In short, all energy supplies come with drawbacksnot least
nuclear, which since its inception has been haunted by its early
boosters starry-eyed projections of incredibly cheap and abundant energy that have yet to come to pass. As we look at all of
the energy sources available to us, we need to understand and
face these costs and risks honestly. Doing so is the rst step toward realizing that we can no longer demand more and more
energy without being willing to pay the price.

The biggest risks

posed by nuclear
power come not
from the technology,
but from the human
institutions that
govern how we use it.

Charles D. Ferguson is president of the Federation of American Scientists and author of Nuclear Energy: What Everyone
Needs to Know.

November 2011

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56 AMERICAS
PACIFIC CENTURY

The future of geopolitics will be

decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or
Iraq, and the United States should
be right at the center of the action.
BY HILLARY CLINTON

64 WHAT AILS AMERICA?

We went around the world to ask about

the problems of the one global superpower.
Imperial Hubris By Ian Buruma The Presidency
By Sunil Khilnani Gluttony By Vaclav Smil
The Fed By Heleen Mees The Dollar By Fan Gang
Education By Mishaal Al Gergawi

BAY MINETTE, ALABAMA. MAY 2010 BY CAROL M. HIGHSMITH/

GEORGE F. LANDEGGER COLLECTION OF ALABAMA PHOTOGRAPHS/
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAN BENAVIDES

THEAMERICAISSUE

71 an fp debate

Just How special is america anyway?

American exceptionalism is a myth.
By Stephen M. Walt

We really were that great (but that doesnt

mean we are now).
By thoMaS l. FriedMan and Michael MandelBauM

79 tHe elepHants in tHe room

Barack Obamas Republican challengers are

trying hard not to talk about the rest of the world.
It shows.
By jaMeS trauB

tHe fp survey:

Is there a gop foreign policy?

THE
AMERICA
ISSUE

AMERICAS
PACIFIC CENTURY
THE FUTURE OF GEOPOLITICS WILL BE DECIDED IN ASIA, NOT IN AFGHANISTAN OR IRAQ,
AND THE UNITED STATES SHOULD BE RIGHT AT THE CENTER OF THE ACTION.

BY HILLARY CLINTON
56

Foreign Policy

coolbiere photograph

s the war in Iraq winds down and America begins

to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United
States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years,
we have allocated immense resources to those two
theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart
and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to
sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance
our values. One of the most important tasks of American
statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a
substantially increased investmentdiplomatic, economic,
strategic, and otherwisein the Asia-Pacic region.
The Asia-Pacic has become a key driver of global politics. Stretching from the Indian subcontinent to the western

shores of the Americas, the region spans two oceansthe Pacic and the Indianthat are increasingly linked by shipping
and strategy. It boasts almost half the worlds population. It
includes many of the key engines of the global economy, as
well as the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. It is home to
several of our key allies and important emerging powers like
China, India, and Indonesia.
At a time when the region is building a more mature security
and economic architecture to promote stability and prosperity,
U.S. commitment there is essential. It will help build that architecture and pay dividends for continued American leadership
well into this century, just as our post-World War ii commitment to building a comprehensive and lasting transatlantic network of institutions and relationships has paid off many times
overand continues to do so. The time has come for the United
States to make similar investments as a Pacic power, a strategic
course set by President Barack Obama from the outset of his
administration and one that is already yielding benets.
With Iraq and Afghanistan still in transition and serious
economic challenges in our own country, there are those on
the American political scene who are calling for us not to
reposition, but to come home. They seek a downsizing of our
foreign engagement in favor of our pressing domestic priorities. These impulses are understandable, but they are misguided. Those who say that we can no longer afford to engage
with the world have it exactly backwardwe cannot afford
not to. From opening new markets for American businesses
to curbing nuclear proliferation to keeping the sea lanes free
for commerce and navigation, our work abroad holds the key
to our prosperity and security at home. For more than six decades, the United States has resisted the gravitational pull of
these come home debates and the implicit zero-sum logic
of these arguments. We must do so again.
Beyond our borders, people are also wondering about Americas intentionsour willingness to remain engaged and to lead.
In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we
are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether
we can makeand keepcredible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with
action. The answer is: We can, and we will.
Harnessing Asias growth and dynamism is central to
American economic and strategic interests and a key priority
for President Obama. Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment,
trade, and access to cutting-edge technology. Our economic
recovery at home will depend on exports and the ability of
American rms to tap into the vast and growing consumer
base of Asia. Strategically, maintaining peace and security
across the Asia-Pacic is increasingly crucial to global progress, whether through defending freedom of navigation in
the South China Sea, countering the proliferation efforts of
North Korea, or ensuring transparency in the military activities of the regions key players.
Just as Asia is critical to Americas future, an engaged America

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is vital to Asias future. The region is eager for our leadership
and our businessperhaps more so than at any time in modern
history. We are the only power with a network of strong alliances in the region, no territorial ambitions, and a long record
of providing for the common good. Along with our allies, we
have underwritten regional security for decadespatrolling
Asias sea lanes and preserving stabilityand that in turn has
helped create the conditions for growth. We have helped integrate billions of people across the region into the global economy by spurring economic productivity, social empowerment,
and greater people-to-people links. We are a major trade and
investment partner, a source of innovation that benets workers
and businesses on both sides of the Pacic, a host to 350,000
Asian students every year, a champion of open markets, and an
advocate for universal human rights.
President Obama has led a multifaceted and persistent effort to embrace fully our irreplaceable role in the Pacic,
spanning the entire U.S. government. It has often been a
quiet effort. A lot of our work has not been on the front
pages, both because of its naturelong-term investment is
less exciting than immediate crisesand because of competing headlines in other parts of the world.
As secretary of state, I broke with tradition and embarked on
my rst ofcial overseas trip to Asia. In my seven trips since, I
have had the privilege to see rsthand the rapid transformations
taking place in the region, underscoring how much the future
of the United States is intimately intertwined with the future
of the Asia-Pacic. A strategic turn to the region ts logically
into our overall global effort to secure and sustain Americas
global leadership. The success of this turn requires maintaining
and advancing a bipartisan consensus on the importance of the
Asia-Pacic to our national interests; we seek to build upon a
strong tradition of engagement by presidents and secretaries of
state of both parties across many decades. It also requires smart
execution of a coherent regional strategy that accounts for the
global implications of our choices.

hat does that regional strategy look like? For starters,

it calls for a sustained commitment to what I have called
forward-deployed diplomacy. That means continuing to dispatch the full range of our diplomatic assets
including our highest-ranking ofcials, our development
experts, our interagency teams, and our permanent assetsto
every country and corner of the Asia-Pacic region.
Our strategy will have to keep accounting for and adapting to the rapid and dramatic shifts playing out across Asia.
With this in mind, our work will proceed along six key lines
of action: strengthening bilateral security alliances; deepening
our working relationships with emerging powers, including
with China; engaging with regional multilateral institutions;
expanding trade and investment; forging a broad-based mili-

58

Foreign Policy

tary presence; and advancing democracy and human rights.

By virtue of our unique geography, the United States is both
an Atlantic and a Pacic power. We are proud of our European
partnerships and all that they deliver. Our challenge now is to
build a web of partnerships and institutions across the Pacic
that is as durable and as consistent with American interests and
values as the web we have built across the Atlantic. That is the
touchstone of our efforts in all these areas.
Our treaty alliances with Japan, South Korea, Australia,
the Philippines, and Thailand are the fulcrum for our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacic. They have underwritten regional
peace and security for more than half a century, shaping the
environment for the regions remarkable economic ascent.
They leverage our regional presence and enhance our regional leadership at a time of evolving security challenges.
As successful as these alliances have been, we cant afford
simply to sustain themwe need to update them for a changing world. In this effort, the Obama administration is guided by
three core principles. First, we have to maintain political consensus on the core objectives of our alliances. Second, we have
to ensure that our alliances are nimble and adaptive so that they
can successfully address new challenges and seize new opportunities. Third, we have to guarantee that the defense capabilities
and communications infrastructure of our alliances are operationally and materially capable of deterring provocation from
the full spectrum of state and nonstate actors.
The alliance with Japan, the cornerstone of peace and
stability in the region, demonstrates how the Obama administration is giving these principles life. We share a common vision of a stable regional order with clear rules of the
roadfrom freedom of navigation to open markets and fair
competition. We have agreed to a new arrangement, including a contribution from the Japanese government of more
than $5 billion, to ensure the continued enduring presence of
American forces in Japan, while expanding joint intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance activities to deter and react
quickly to regional security challenges, as well as information sharing to address cyberthreats. We have concluded an
Open Skies agreement that will enhance access for businesses
and people-to-people ties, launched a strategic dialogue on
the Asia-Pacic, and been working hand in hand as the two
largest donor countries in Afghanistan.
Similarly, our alliance with South Korea has become stronger
and more operationally integrated, and we continue to develop
our combined capabilities to deter and respond to North Korean provocations. We have agreed on a plan to ensure successful
transition of operational control during wartime and anticipate
successful passage of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.
And our alliance has gone global, through our work together
in the G-20 and the Nuclear Security Summit and through our
common efforts in Haiti and Afghanistan.

Clinton, Chinese state CounCilor Dai Bingguo, anD u.s. assistant seCretary of state for east asian anD PaCifiC affairs Kurt CamPBell.

We are also expanding our alliance with Australia from

a Pacic partnership to an Indo-Pacic one, and indeed a
global partnership. From cybersecurity to Afghanistan to the
Arab Awakening to strengthening regional architecture in the
Asia-Pacic, Australias counsel and commitment have been
indispensable. And in Southeast Asia, we are renewing and
strengthening our alliances with the Philippines and Thailand,
increasing, for example, the number of ship visits to the Philippines and working to ensure the successful training of Filipino
counterterrorism forces through our Joint Special Operations
Task Force in Mindanao. In Thailandour oldest treaty partner in Asiawe are working to establish a hub of regional humanitarian and disaster relief efforts in the region.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/GEtty ImAGES

s we update our alliances for new demands, we are

also building new partnerships to help solve shared
problems. Our outreach to China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, New Zealand, Malaysia, Mongolia, Vietnam,
Brunei, and the Pacic Island countries is all part of a
broader effort to ensure a more comprehensive approach to
American strategy and engagement in the region. We are asking these emerging partners to join us in shaping and participating in a rules-based regional and global order.
One of the most prominent of these emerging partners is, of
course, China. Like so many other countries before it, China
has prospered as part of the open and rules-based system that
the United States helped to build and works to sustain. And
today, China represents one of the most challenging and consequential bilateral relationships the United States has ever had
to manage. This calls for careful, steady, dynamic stewardship,

an approach to China on our part that is grounded in reality,

focused on results, and true to our principles and interests.
We all know that fears and misperceptions linger on both
sides of the Pacic. Some in our country see Chinas progress as
a threat to the United States; some in China worry that America
seeks to constrain Chinas growth. We reject both those views.
The fact is that a thriving America is good for China and a
thriving China is good for America. We both have much more
to gain from cooperation than from conict. But you cannot
build a relationship on aspirations alone. It is up to both of
us to more consistently translate positive words into effective
cooperationand, crucially, to meet our respective global responsibilities and obligations. These are the things that will
determine whether our relationship delivers on its potential in
the years to come. We also have to be honest about our differences. We will address them rmly and decisively as we pursue
the urgent work we have to do together. And we have to avoid
unrealistic expectations.
Over the last two-and-a-half years, one of my top priorities
has been to identify and expand areas of common interest, to
work with China to build mutual trust, and to encourage Chinas active efforts in global problem-solving. This is why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and I launched the Strategic
and Economic Dialogue, the most intensive and expansive talks
ever between our governments, bringing together dozens of
agencies from both sides to discuss our most pressing bilateral
issues, from security to energy to human rights.
We are also working to increase transparency and reduce the
risk of miscalculation or miscues between our militaries. The
United States and the international community have watched

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issue
Chinas efforts to modernize and expand its military, and we
have sought clarity as to its intentions. Both sides would benet
from sustained and substantive military-to-military engagement
that increases transparency. So we look to Beijing to overcome
its reluctance at times and join us in forging a durable militaryto-military dialogue. And we need to work together to strengthen the Strategic Security Dialogue, which brings together military and civilian leaders to discuss sensitive issues like maritime
security and cybersecurity.
As we build trust together, we are committed to working
with China to address critical regional and global security issues. This is why I have met so frequentlyoften in informal
settingswith my Chinese counterparts, State Councilor Dai
Bingguo and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, for candid discussions about important challenges like North Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and developments in the South China Sea.
On the economic front, the United States and China need
to work together to ensure strong, sustained, and balanced
future global growth. In the aftermath of the global nancial
crisis, the United States and China worked effectively through
the G-20 to help pull the global economy back from the brink.
We have to build on that cooperation. U.S. rms want fair opportunities to export to Chinas growing markets, which can
be important sources of jobs here in the United States, as well
as assurances that the $50 billion of American capital invested
in China will create a strong foundation for new market and
investment opportunities that will support global competitiveness. At the same time, Chinese rms want to be able to buy
more high-tech products from the United States, make more
investments here, and be accorded the same terms of access
that market economies enjoy. We can work together on these
objectives, but China still needs to take important steps toward
reform. In particular, we are working with China to end unfair
discrimination against U.S. and other foreign companies or
against their innovative technologies, remove preferences for
domestic rms, and end measures that disadvantage or appropriate foreign intellectual property. And we look to China
to take steps to allow its currency to appreciate more rapidly,
both against the dollar and against the currencies of its other
major trading partners. Such reforms, we believe, would not
only benet both our countries (indeed, they would support
the goals of Chinas own ve-year plan, which calls for more
domestic-led growth), but also contribute to global economic
balance, predictability, and broader prosperity.
Of course, we have made very clear, publicly and privately,
our serious concerns about human rights. And when we see
reports of public-interest lawyers, writers, artists, and others
who are detained or disappeared, the United States speaks
up, both publicly and privately, with our concerns about human rights. We make the case to our Chinese colleagues that
a deep respect for international law and a more open politi-

60

Foreign Policy

cal system would provide China with a foundation for far

greater stability and growthand increase the condence of
Chinas partners. Without them, China is placing unnecessary limitations on its own development.
At the end of the day, there is no handbook for the evolving
U.S.-China relationship. But the stakes are much too high for us
to fail. As we proceed, we will continue to embed our relationship with China in a broader regional framework of security
alliances, economic networks, and social connections.
Among key emerging powers with which we will work
closely are India and Indonesia, two of the most dynamic and
signicant democratic powers of Asia, and both countries
with which the Obama administration has pursued broader,
deeper, and more purposeful relationships. The stretch of
sea from the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Malacca
to the Pacic contains the worlds most vibrant trade and
energy routes. Together, India and Indonesia already account
for almost a quarter of the worlds population. They are key
drivers of the global economy, important partners for the
United States, and increasingly central contributors to peace
and security in the region. And their importance is likely to
grow in the years ahead.
President Obama told the Indian parliament last year that
the relationship between India and America will be one of
the dening partnerships of the 21st century, rooted in common values and interests. There are still obstacles to overcome and questions to answer on both sides, but the United
States is making a strategic bet on Indias futurethat Indias
greater role on the world stage will enhance peace and security, that opening Indias markets to the world will pave the
way to greater regional and global prosperity, that Indian
advances in science and technology will improve lives and
advance human knowledge everywhere, and that Indias vibrant, pluralistic democracy will produce measurable results
and improvements for its citizens and inspire others to follow a similar path of openness and tolerance. So the Obama
administration has expanded our bilateral partnership; actively supported Indias Look East efforts, including through
a new trilateral dialogue with India and Japan; and outlined
a new vision for a more economically integrated and politically stable South and Central Asia, with India as a linchpin.
We are also forging a new partnership with Indonesia, the
worlds third-largest democracy, the worlds most populous
Muslim nation, and a member of the G-20. We have resumed
joint training of Indonesian special forces units and signed a
number of agreements on health, educational exchanges, science and technology, and defense. And this year, at the invitation of the Indonesian government, President Obama will
inaugurate American participation in the East Asia Summit.
But there is still some distance to travelwe have to work
together to overcome bureaucratic impediments, lingering

U.S.S. John S. Mccain at tien Sa port in VietnaM

historical suspicions, and some gaps in understanding each

others perspectives and interests.

HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty IMAGes

ven as we strengthen these bilateral relationships, we have

emphasized the importance of multilateral cooperation, for
we believe that addressing complex transnational challenges of the sort now faced by Asia requires a set of institutions
capable of mustering collective action. And a more robust
and coherent regional architecture in Asia would reinforce the
system of rules and responsibilities, from protecting intellectual
property to ensuring freedom of navigation, that form the basis of an effective international order. In multilateral settings,
responsible behavior is rewarded with legitimacy and respect,
and we can work together to hold accountable those who undermine peace, stability, and prosperity.
So the United States has moved to fully engage the regions
multilateral institutions, such as the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (asean) and the Asia-Pacic Economic Cooperation (apec) forum, mindful that our work with regional institutions supplements and does not supplant our bilateral ties.
There is a demand from the region that America play an active
role in the agenda-setting of these institutionsand it is in our
interests as well that they be effective and responsive.
That is why President Obama will participate in the East
Asia Summit for the rst time in November. To pave the way,
the United States has opened a new U.S. Mission to asean
in Jakarta and signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation
with asean. Our focus on developing a more results-oriented
agenda has been instrumental in efforts to address disputes in
the South China Sea. In 2010, at the asean Regional Forum
in Hanoi, the United States helped shape a regionwide effort

to protect unfettered access to and passage through the South

China Sea, and to uphold the key international rules for dening territorial claims in the South China Seas waters. Given that
half the worlds merchant tonnage ows through this body of
water, this was a consequential undertaking. And over the past
year, we have made strides in protecting our vital interests in
stability and freedom of navigation and have paved the way for
sustained multilateral diplomacy among the many parties with
claims in the South China Sea, seeking to ensure disputes are
settled peacefully and in accordance with established principles
of international law.
We have also worked to strengthen apec as a serious leaderslevel institution focused on advancing economic integration
and trade linkages across the Pacic. After last years bold call
by the group for a free trade area of the Asia-Pacic, President
Obama will host the 2011 apec Leaders Meeting in Hawaii
this November. We are committed to cementing apec as the
Asia-Pacics premier regional economic institution, setting the
economic agenda in a way that brings together advanced and
emerging economies to promote open trade and investment, as
well as to build capacity and enhance regulatory regimes. apec
and its work help expand U.S. exports and create and support
high-quality jobs in the United States, while fostering growth
throughout the region. apec also provides a key vehicle to drive
a broad agenda to unlock the economic growth potential that
women represent. In this regard, the United States is committed
to working with our partners on ambitious steps to accelerate
the arrival of the Participation Age, where every individual, regardless of gender or other characteristics, is a contributing and
valued member of the global marketplace.
In addition to our commitment to these broader multilateral

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institutions, we have worked hard to create and launch a number of minilateral meetings, small groupings of interested
states to tackle specic challenges, such as the Lower Mekong
Initiative we launched to support education, health, and environmental programs in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, and the Pacic Islands Forum, where we are working to
support its members as they confront challenges from climate
change to overshing to freedom of navigation. We are also
starting to pursue new trilateral opportunities with countries as
diverse as Mongolia, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, and South
Korea. And we are setting our sights as well on enhancing coordination and engagement among the three giants of the AsiaPacic: China, India, and the United States.
In all these different ways, we are seeking to shape and
participate in a responsive, exible, and effective regional
architectureand ensure it connects to a broader global architecture that not only protects international stability and
commerce but also advances our values.

ur emphasis on the economic work of apec is in keeping with our broader commitment to elevate economic
statecraft as a pillar of American foreign policy. Increasingly, economic progress depends on strong diplomatic
ties, and diplomatic progress depends on strong economic
ties. And naturally, a focus on promoting American prosperity means a greater focus on trade and economic openness in
the Asia-Pacic. The region already generates more than half
of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to
meet President Obamas goal of doubling exports by 2015, we
are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia.
Last year, American exports to the Pacic Rim totaled $320 billion, supporting 850,000 American jobs. So there is much that
favors us as we think through this repositioning.
When I talk to my Asian counterparts, one theme consistently stands out: They still want America to be an engaged and creative partner in the regions ourishing trade
and nancial interactions. And as I talk with business leaders
across our own nation, I hear how important it is for the
United States to expand our exports and our investment opportunities in Asias dynamic markets.
Last March in apec meetings in Washington, and again
in Hong Kong in July, I laid out four attributes that I believe characterize healthy economic competition: open, free,
transparent, and fair. Through our engagement in the AsiaPacic, we are helping to give shape to these principles and
showing the world their value.
We are pursuing new cutting-edge trade deals that raise
the standards for fair competition even as they open new
markets. For instance, the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement
will eliminate tariffs on 95 percent of U.S. consumer and
industrial exports within ve years and support an estimated
70,000 American jobs. Its tariff reductions alone could in-

62

Foreign Policy

crease exports of American goods by more than $10 billion

and help South Koreas economy grow by 6 percent. It will
level the playing eld for U.S. auto companies and workers.
So, whether you are an American manufacturer of machinery or a South Korean chemicals exporter, this deal lowers
the barriers that keep you from reaching new customers.
We are also making progress on the Trans-Pacic Partnership (tpp), which will bring together economies from across the
Pacicdeveloped and developing alikeinto a single trading
community. Our goal is to create not just more growth, but
better growth. We believe trade agreements need to include
strong protections for workers, the environment, intellectual
property, and innovation. They should also promote the free
ow of information technology and the spread of green technology, as well as the coherence of our regulatory system and
the efciency of supply chains. Ultimately, our progress will be
measured by the quality of peoples liveswhether men and
women can work in dignity, earn a decent wage, raise healthy
families, educate their children, and take hold of the opportunities to improve their own and the next generations fortunes.
Our hope is that a tpp agreement with high standards can serve
as a benchmark for future agreementsand grow to serve as a
platform for broader regional interaction and eventually a free
trade area of the Asia-Pacic.
Achieving balance in our trade relationships requires a twoway commitment. Thats the nature of balanceit cant be
unilaterally imposed. So we are working through apec, the
G-20, and our bilateral relationships to advocate for more open
markets, fewer restrictions on exports, more transparency, and
an overall commitment to fairness. American businesses and
workers need to have condence that they are operating on a
level playing eld, with predictable rules on everything from
intellectual property to indigenous innovation.

sias remarkable economic growth over the past decade and its potential for continued growth in the future
depend on the security and stability that has long been
guaranteed by the U.S. military, including more than
50,000 American servicemen and servicewomen serving
in Japan and South Korea. The challenges of todays rapidly changing regionfrom territorial and maritime disputes
to new threats to freedom of navigation to the heightened
impact of natural disastersrequire that the United States
pursue a more geographically distributed, operationally resilient, and politically sustainable force posture.
We are modernizing our basing arrangements with traditional allies in Northeast Asiaand our commitment on
this is rock solidwhile enhancing our presence in Southeast
Asia and into the Indian Ocean. For example, the United
States will be deploying littoral combat ships to Singapore,
and we are examining other ways to increase opportunities
for our two militaries to train and operate together. And

the United States and Australia agreed this year to explore

a greater American military presence in Australia to enhance
opportunities for more joint training and exercises. We are
also looking at how we can increase our operational access
in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region and deepen
our contacts with allies and partners.
How we translate the growing connection between the Indian and Pacic oceans into an operational concept is a question
that we need to answer if we are to adapt to new challenges in
the region. Against this backdrop, a more broadly distributed
military presence across the region will provide vital advantages. The United States will be better positioned to support
humanitarian missions; equally important, working with more
allies and partners will provide a more robust bulwark against
threats or efforts to undermine regional peace and stability.
But even more than our military might or the size of our
economy, our most potent asset as a nation is the power of
our valuesin particular, our steadfast support for democracy and human rights. This speaks to our deepest national
character and is at the heart of our foreign policy, including
our strategic turn to the Asia-Pacic region.
As we deepen our engagement with partners with whom we
disagree on these issues, we will continue to urge them to embrace reforms that would improve governance, protect human
rights, and advance political freedoms. We have made it clear,
for example, to Vietnam that our ambition to develop a strategic partnership requires that it take steps to further protect
human rights and advance political freedoms. Or consider Burma, where we are determined to seek accountability for human
rights violations. We are closely following developments in Nay
Pyi Taw and the increasing interactions between Aung San Suu
Kyi and the government leadership. We have underscored to
the government that it must release political prisoners, advance
political freedoms and human rights, and break from the policies of the past. As for North Korea, the regime in Pyongyang
has shown persistent disregard for the rights of its people, and
we continue to speak out forcefully against the threats it poses
to the region and beyond.
We cannot and do not aspire to impose our system on other countries, but we do believe that certain values are universalthat people in every nation in the world, including
in Asia, cherish themand that they are intrinsic to stable,
peaceful, and prosperous countries. Ultimately, it is up to the
people of Asia to pursue their own rights and aspirations,
just as we have seen people do all over the world.

n the last decade, our foreign policy has transitioned

from dealing with the post-Cold War peace dividend to
demanding commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. As
those wars wind down, we will need to accelerate efforts
to pivot to new global realities.
We know that these new realities require us to innovate, to

compete, and to lead in new ways. Rather than pull back

from the world, we need to press forward and renew our
leadership. In a time of scarce resources, theres no question that we need to invest them wisely where they will
yield the biggest returns, which is why the Asia-Pacic represents such a real 21st-century opportunity for us.
Other regions remain vitally important, of course. Europe,
home to most of our traditional allies, is still a partner of rst
resort, working alongside the United States on nearly every
urgent global challenge, and we are investing in updating the
structures of our alliance. The people of the Middle East and
North Africa are charting a new path that is already having profound global consequences, and the United States is
committed to active and sustained partnerships as the region
transforms. Africa holds enormous untapped potential for
economic and political development in the years ahead. And
our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere are not just our
biggest export partners; they are also playing a growing role
in global political and economic affairs. Each of these regions
demands American engagement and leadership.
And we are prepared to lead. Now, Im well aware that
there are those who question our staying power around the
world. Weve heard this talk before. At the end of the Vietnam
War, there was a thriving industry of global commentators
promoting the idea that America was in retreat, and it is a
theme that repeats itself every few decades. But whenever the
United States has experienced setbacks, weve overcome them
through reinvention and innovation. Our capacity to come
back stronger is unmatched in modern history. It ows from
our model of free democracy and free enterprise, a model that
remains the most powerful source of prosperity and progress
known to humankind. I hear everywhere I go that the world
still looks to the United States for leadership. Our military is
by far the strongest, and our economy is by far the largest in
the world. Our workers are the most productive. Our universities are renowned the world over. So there should be no
doubt that America has the capacity to secure and sustain our
global leadership in this century as we did in the last.
As we move forward to set the stage for engagement in
the Asia-Pacic over the next 60 years, we are mindful of
the bipartisan legacy that has shaped our engagement for
the past 60. And we are focused on the steps we have to
take at homeincreasing our savings, reforming our nancial systems, relying less on borrowing, overcoming partisan divisionto secure and sustain our leadership abroad.
This kind of pivot is not easy, but we have paved the way
for it over the past two-and-a-half years, and we are committed to seeing it through as among the most important
diplomatic efforts of our time.
Hillary Clinton is U.S. secretary of state.

November 2011

63

the
america
issue

what
ails
america?

We Went around the

World to ask about
the problems of the
one global superpoWer.

imperial hubris
BY IAN BURUMA

64

Foreign Policy

oo much power is not good for a person, or for a

nation. It leads to hubris, to the childish illusion of omnipotence, and, even when driven by good intentions,
to abuse.
In the case of the United States, the illusion of being
exceptional, the idea that the Greatest Nation in the
History of the World can do anything, is doubtless
fed by the manner of the countrys inception. France
and the United States are the only Western democracies born from revolutions. Like France, the American republic likes to claim that it represents not only the hopes of
humankind, but universal values. The American way is the
global way, or it jolly well should be.
What the French call la mission civilisatrice has also been
a driving force for Americans. The national destiny is to civilize the benighted world. To believers in this missionwho
are not always in the mainstream of U.S. politics, but have
enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in the decade since the 9/11
attacksit is not sufcient for the United States to be an example to the world. It is incumbent on the republic to export
freedom and democracy, by force if necessary.
This is the Napoleonic side of U.S. foreign policy. As was
true of France, the Napoleonic urge is rooted in the Christian
tradition. French and American democracies may be secular,
but the missionary zeal and the claims of universality surely
owe something to the countries religious past.
Still, the illusion of American omnipotence was held in
check by other powers, notably by the British Empire, and later
by the Soviet Union, for much of Americas history. This is not
to extol the virtues of the Soviet system, which were limited,
to say the least. But Moscow at a minimum played the role of
keeping things in perspective.
After 1989, there was ostensibly nothing to stop the American dream of shaping the world to its liking. You might say it
was Americas Palmerstonian moment, when it acted like Victorian Englands Lord Palmerston, who believed that Britains
duty was to use its might to reorder other nations, from Belgium
to Afghanistan to China. Bush the Elder was still too cautious
to fully embrace Palmerstons liberal interventionism. His son
was not. It was 9/11 that released American hubris in full force.
We dont want to ght, but by Jingo if we do: Weve got the
ships, weve got the men, weve got the money too. These
were the words of a popular music-hall ditty in London in the
1870s, but they might have been sung in the streets of Washington around 2003.
But this American hubris, mixed with an atmosphere of
paranoia, has brought disastrous results for others, and for the
United States itself. Unnecessary wars, sometimes undertaken
with true missionary zeal, are bleeding the countrys treasury
and costing countless lives.
Not all the costs are direct. The gradual militarization of
American societythe ritual genuections to our men and
women in uniform, the bloated military budgets, the fawning attitude to generalshas resulted in something more often
associated with tin-pot dictatorships in the developing world:

crumbling bridges, potholed roads, rotten schools, and an overbearing military loaded with all the best and latest hardware.
This is clearly not good for most Americans. But it isnt
good for U.S. allies, either. Sick of waging wars, for excellent
reasons, Europeans and the Japanese have become like spoiled
adolescents, almost totally dependent for their security on the
big American father. Too indolent, or scared, to take more responsibility for their own protection, they express the humiliation of their dependency in ts of anti-American pique.
In East Asia, Pax Americana still rules, not only because the
Japanese cant make up their minds about whether to change
their (American-written) pacist constitution, but also because
China, too, has long preferred the status quo. The alternative
to being ringed by U.S. bases, after all, is to see the Japanese
take over.
There are some signs that Europeans are beginning to wean
themselves from the American parent. Yet the form this takes
seems to be attery through imitation. Just a few years ago,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair still believed that it was Britains role to be an obedient, even zealous junior partner in the
U.S. military mission to spread light unto the world. The latest
venture in Libya, however, showed a more independent European spirit, led, unsurprisingly, by the French. It was as if President Nicolas Sarkozy, cheered on by some prominent French
chauvinists, wanted to hitch the tricolor once more to its own
mission civilisatrice. This time, the United States, exhausted by
too many recent failures, took a back seat. Nonetheless, even
this Franco-British mission could never have had any success
without the wherewithal of U.S. power.
There is much talk, none of it very new, of the decline of the
West, and of the United States in particular. China, so people
claim, and in the long run perhaps India too, will assume the
mantle of world power, just as Washington once took over
from London. Perhaps this will come to pass. All great powers
come to an end.
Yet neither China nor India, nor any other country, is likely
to dominate the world soon in the way the United States has
done. Chinas ambition does not stretch beyond its Asian periphery, and India is still too poor and too battered by domestic rebellions to control its own territory successfully, let
alone anywhere beyond Kashmir. American decline might still
be a lengthy process. Failures in some sectors of the economy
are partly made up for by successes in others: For all the Detroit plant closures, theres a Google, a Microsoft, a Facebook.
And whatever people might say to criticize America, many
still wish to bask a bit longer in the security it claims to provide. But if history offers any indication, Napoleonic, or even
Palmerstonian, politics always end up in mental and physical exhaustion. There is little doubt in my mind that the illusion of omnipotence, rather than lengthening the days of Pax
Americana, has speeded up its eventual demise.
Dutch writer Ian Buruma, currently a Cullman Fellow at the
New York Public Library, is author, most recently, of Taming
the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents.

illustrations by Javier Jan Benavides for fp

November 2011

65

THE
AMERICA
ISSUE

THE PRESIDENCY
s the U.S. president struggles to assert his will
and break a long season of political frustration and
national impasse, both his enemies and his erstwhile
supporters remain overly focused on him and his role
in Americas new age of gridlock. Those on Barack
Obamas right see him as a hard-driven ideologue trying to frog-march Americans into an imagined socialist dystopia. Those to his left view him as pusillanimous,
compromising and conceding his liberal beliefs to appeal to
the mushy middle.
But what ails the United States has less to do with the personality traits and defects that Obamas critics, on the left and
right, are so ready to identify, and more to do with the compulsions of the countrys democratic routines. Its not Obama
who is the problem; its Americas broken political system.
Those routines no sooner deliver a new leader into ofce
than he is required immediately to begin a new campaign
for reelection. In an age of heightened media scrutiny, where
any mistake has the potential to go viral and can in hours
destroy political ambitions, timidity and trimming invariably become the order of the day for even the most visionary
leaders. One can enter ofce clear-eyed about how to tackle
Americas irrational energy consumption or its massive debt
overhang, but policy fogs up fast when one is trying to keep
potential funders and voters happy. So U.S. presidents spend
their days waking to the prospect of bland compromise and
turn in having abjectly sold out.
Americans pride themselves on their democracy
by any standard an extraordinary achievement (though
sometimes they wish it upon the rest of us a little too
pressingly). But perhaps Americans need to reect more
self-critically on some of the basic premises of their own
democracy, in a way more in line with the general spirit
of self-improvement and experimentation that pervades
American society.

66

Foreign Policy

Is it really such a great idea to require presidential leaders to spend so much of their rst four years in ofce xated on securing another four years in the same ofce?
Each rst-term presidency becomes in effect an election
campaign in which presidents are condemned to making
themselves likable rather than solving the countrys problemsforget about pushing through hard choices. Over
the next few decades, much as its economy will have to be
reimagined, Americas democracyone of the most successfully adaptive political systems of the modern ageis
going to have to reinvent itself, too.
To get things started, how about doing away with the
two-term presidency? Instead, establish one six-year term.
(And here Americans shouldnt be put off by the lousy examples of countries that currently have six-year presidential
terms, which include Russia and Mexico. It wont take much
American ingenuity to make their own version work innitely better.) The U.S. political system has, thanks to its founders, enough checks and balances, divided and countervailing
powers, to minimize any damage that a six-year presidential
term might produce. And fortunately, unlike my country of
India, the United States has a deep bench of idealistic women
and men who are willing to enter politics and who believe
in government as a way of trying to improve their country.
Let them, then, have one long shot at writing themselves
into the history booksand at altering their countrys path.
Give them six years to focus on the job in hand, rather than
on dialing for dollars and desperately avoiding anything that
might alienate voters. A little less fascination with the individual ofceholder, remarkable as the current one is, and a
bit more attention to xing the system might allow the next
remarkable president to actually accomplish something.
Sunil Khilnani is a professor of politics and director of the
Kings India Institute at Kings College London.

MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

BY SUNIL KHILNANI

Automobiles are even worse. Incredibly, the

THE PROBLEMS THAT AIL the U.S. economy and
American society are one and the same: Both
overall efciency of Americas cars, vans, and SUVs
consume too much and refuse to make badly
didnt budge between 1986 and 2006, and subseneeded changes. This is true above all in the realm
quent improvements have been risible compared
of energy. The United States doesnt need exotic
with the doubling of efciency that the countrys
biofuels or balloon-borne wind turbines. Its real
automotive eet managed between 1975 and
problems are wasteful private energy use and the
1985. If that trend had continuedwhich was
near-total absence of effective, down-to-earth,
well within the realm of technical possibilitythe
BY VACLAV SMIL average American would be driving a 50 mileslong-term policies.
Energy use is merely a means to many
per-gallon vehicle now rather than todays 30 mpg
rewarding ends: economic security, education,
clunker. And thats nothing next to what could have
health. The United States consumes nearly twice as much energy
been saved had the United States nally joined the 20th century
per capita as the richest countries of the European Union, which
and built rapid trains on par with Frances trains grande vitesse to
raises the question: What has it gotten in return? Are Americans
serve high-population-density regions such as the corridor between
twice as rich as the French? Are they twice as educated as the
Boston and Washington. (Amtraks Acela? Please.)
Germans? Do they live twice as long as the Swedes? Are they twice
The parallels with Americas great public-health epidemic of
as happy as the Danes or twice as safe as the Dutch? The obviobesity are inescapable. Even after throwing away some 40 percent
ous answer for all of the above is no; indeed, many of Americas
of its abundant food supply, the United States still has the industriquality-of-life indicatorsincluding infant mortality, longevity, and
alized worlds most overweight population. America similarly proeducational achievementdo not even rank among the worlds
duces more energy per capita than any other major rich economy
top 10!
so much so that if the United States were to consume that energy
Its not as though Americans dont know better. U.S. indusat a rate comparable to Germany or France, it would be a massive
tries from steel-making to plastics synthesis are among the worlds
energy exporter. Instead, America imports more than 25 percent
most energy-efcient; American agriculture is highly productive,
of its energy, paying more than $2 trillion for the privilege over the
as are Americas railroads. But for decades, Americans themselves
past decadeand still ends up with little to show for it. The United
have been living beyond their means, wasting energy in their
States now faces the choice of curbing its energy appetite with dehouses and cars and amassing energy-intensive throwaway prodliberation, commitment, and foresight, or waiting for the unraveling
ucts on credit. The size of the average American house has more
economy to put it on a painful crash diet.
than doubled since the 1950s, and they are more often than not
poorly insulated, inefciently heated in the winter, and cooled to
Vaclav Smil is distinguished professor in the University of Maninear-arctic temperatures in the summer.
tobas department of environment and geography.

GLUTTONY

November 2011

67

THE
AMERICA
ISSUE

THE FED
ocumentaries like Inside Job and books like Michael Lewiss The Big Short have spun a narrative of
Americas economic crisis that stars Wall Street bankers and credit-rating agencies as the ultimate villains.
But despite popular belief, subprime mortgages with
exotic features had little to do with the housing bubble and the current debt overload weighing down U.S.
households. They accounted for a mere 5 percent of mortgages at the time. The story line is just wrong.
The real culprit was the Federal Reserve. With its ultraloose
monetary policy in the early 2000s, the Fed single-handedly created the renancing boom and ushered in the housing bubble.
The record-low interest rates not only fed the boom that had to
go bust, but also favored that sector of the U.S. economy that

68

Foreign Policy

is predominantly nanced with debt, i.e., the nancial sector, at

the expense of sectors that are more reliant on risk capital, such
as manufacturing. That might explain why, by the mid-2000s,
bank prots accounted for 30 percent of all prots reported by
S&P 500 companies. In other words, Americans stopped making stuff and relied on paper earnings instead.
Yet the only prescription being applied to the depressed
U.S. economy today is basically what it was a decade ago: cutting interest rates in an attempt to inate prices for assets like
houses and stocks and boost consumption. Because the federal
funds rate is already close to zero, the Fed has been buying up
bonds with a longer maturity to drive down long-term interest
rates. Although the latest bond-buying programnicknamed
qe2ended in June, its effect on interest rates will continue

JIM LO SCALZO/EPA/CORBIS

BY HELEEN MEES

as long as the Fed holds onto the bonds. A third round of

what economists call quantitative easing is imminent. But if
consumption, the very hallmark of American culture, did not
save the day in the 2000s, why would it do so today? It was
China, not the United States, that prospered from Americans
spending binge as hundreds of millions of Chinese were lifted
out of poverty.
In this years State of the Union address, President Barack
Obama invoked the idea of a Sputnik moment for this generation, implying that the United States was besieged by China as it had been half a century before by the Soviet Union.
According to Obama, the country needed historic new levels
of research and development akin to the massive investment
that fueled the space race with the Soviets in the 1960s. But
instead of backing up his vision with money, as President
John F. Kennedy had, Obama announced a spending freeze,
boasting that it would bring discretionary spending down to
levels not seen since President Dwight Eisenhower. Its hard to
miss the irony here.
And lower interest rates wont do the trick, as they wont
bring down the cost of risk capital. For much of the 1980s
and 1990s, any decrease in interest rates was mirrored by a
similar drop in the cost of risk capital, spurring innovation.
Since 2000, however, the cost of risk capital has gone up in
spite of dramatically falling interest rates. The expected yield
is now more than three times the yield on 10-year Treasurys.
The mechanism behind this is quite simple. U.S. consumption
spurs economic growth and savings in China. But Chinas
savings are mainly invested in risk-free assets, perhaps because the Chinese are culturally risk-averse, but also because
the nancial markets in China are still underdeveloped and
not fully liberalized.
Whatever the reason, its now clear that monetary policy
is not an effective way to promote innovation. China and
Germany both have a tradition of promoting new investment
and innovation through state subsidies. The German governments subsidies for research, development, and innovation
are four times as high as Britains, and the Chinese government is luring investors with free land and other subsidies up
to 40 percent of capital cost.
It should not come as a surprise that the economies of
China and Germany have been thriving. Economic growth
in China this year has been close to 10 percent, and it might
have been even higher were it not for the Peoples Bank of
Chinas successful attempts to cool down the economy. And
even though economic growth in Germany somewhat disappointed in this years second quarter, the unemployment rate
hit a historic low. No jobless recovery there.
Thirty years ago, Chinese leaders realized that for China
to become relevant, it had to look more like the United States.
Now its time for Americans to realize that to stay relevant,
the United States will have to look more like China.
Heleen Mees is assistant professor in economics at Tilburg
University in the Netherlands.

THE HONOR OF PRINTING the

worlds reserve currency did
not come accidentally, or easily, to the United States; the
dollars post-World War II ascent to global primacy would
not have happened had America not demonstrated the unriBY FAN GANG
valed economic, military, and
technological power to back it
up. But being the worlds banker comes with benets as well as obligationsand rst among them is that the whole world wants to make
sure you dont default on your debt. If you are in a position to repay
your obligations by just printing more money, you might never default.
What is a blessing in the short run, however, could turn out to
be a curse in the long run. A country that controls the international
currency runs less nancial risk when it borrows, but is thus likely
to be less alert to the risk of nancial bubbles. Costs can be underestimated, and problems undiscovered, for a long time. The United
States is now learning this lesson in a very big way.
For many countries, such as Argentina and Vietnam, a budget
decit of more than 3 percent of GDP or a 5 percent current account
decit has been enough to plunge them into a nancial crisis. The
United States, by contrast, maintained about the same gures on
its balance sheet for a decade while enjoying a period of economic
expansion. The result was overcondence and a awed vision of
limitless potential growth, as if Americans could keep spending
without saving to no ones detriment. Some economists even claimed
this was a result of the super-efciency of the U.S. economy.
You can see the logical consequences of this illusion in todays
overleveraged, debt-plagued U.S. economy, the major cause of both
the 2008 global nancial crisis and the current concerns over U.S.
government debt. The lesson is clear: The United States may enjoy a
greater line of credit than everyone else in exchange for providing the
dollar, but even the most forgiving balance sheet in the world has its
limits. Americas long experiment with ballooning debt and an everexpanding nancial sector has left the country with other problems, too.
Wall Streets disproportionate size in comparison with real sectors of
the U.S. economy such as manufacturing has resulted in deteriorating
industrial competitiveness, growing trade decits, and unemployment.
We cannot and should not attribute all of Americas current
problems to the dollars special status and the illusions that come
with it. But without it, we cannot explain why the United States did
not make the hard economic choices that less-privileged countries
would have had to make, and long ago. Today, even the worlds
banker cant put off the reckoning any longer.

THE DOLLAR

Fan Gang is a Peking University economics professor, director of

China's National Economic Research Institute,
and chairman
of the China Reform Foundation.

THE
AMERICA
ISSUE

EDUCATION
merica today is akin to the Ottoman Empire at the end of its
days. Immensely important, commanding huge global inuence,
badly run under mounting debt, it is not the leader of the world,
but the sick man of it.
At the root of Americas problems today is one that Americans
themselves created: the knowledge economy. That economy and
its associated technological advances, from outsourcing to Internet
telephony, has displaced many Americans from work even as it has made
rms like Apple among the worlds richest and most admired companies.
The three-year-old economic crisis has only accelerated that process,
but in no way started it. As in Europes transition from an agrarian
economy to an urban powerhouse during the Industrial Revolution,
there will be many whose skill sets just wont be needed in this new age.
But the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google put together
cannot employ the people laid off by Ford and General Motors. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the manufacturing industrys employment numbers went from 17.6 million in 1998 to 13.4
million in 2008; they are projected to decrease to 12.2 million by 2018.
The it industrys employment numbers are projected to grow to only
3.1 million by the same year. Designing more Facebook clones and iPad
apps wont close this gap.
And thats at least in part because, for all the incredible quality of
U.S. discourse, the American education system is in an abysmal state.
Its universities are still the envy of the world, but the United States
has a 30 percent high-school dropout rate and recently ranked 31st of
65 countries in math prociency in a ranking compiled by the oecd.
What will those people do? How will they live? No wonder Americas
Ph.D. students, especially in science and engineering, come increasingly from overseas.
If the United States continues to look to the tech sector to lead it
out of recession while maintaining unemployment close to 10 percent,
it may well have nothing more than a feudal recovery, one in which
those who have the immediate skills or the wealth to take part in it
do so and those who dont remain unemployeda techno-aristocracy
of sorts.
I recently asked an American businessman what many unemployed
Americans will do if they cant nd new jobs comparable to their old
ones. Go back to farming, he said. And it didnt entirely sound like
a joke.
Mishaal Al Gergawi is an Emirati political commentator.

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CASS TECH HIGH SCHOOL, DETROIT 2010 BY ERIC KLOOCK/VISARG.COM

BY MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

an fp debate

just how special

is america anyway?
stephen m. walt

american
exceptionalism
is a myth

72

thomas l. friedman
and michael mandelbaum

we really were that great

(but that doesnt mean we are now)

76

the myth

of american
exceptionalism
by stephen m. walt

ver the last two centuries, prominent Americans

have described the United States as an empire of liberty, a shining city on a hill, the last best hope
of Earth, the leader of the free world, and the
indispensable nation. These enduring tropes explain why all presidential candidates feel compelled
to offer ritualistic paeans to Americas greatness and
why President Barack Obama landed in hot water for saying that while he believed in American exceptionalism,
it was no different from British exceptionalism, Greek
exceptionalism, or any other countrys brand of patriotic
chest-thumping.
Most statements of American exceptionalism presume that Americas values, political system, and history are
unique and worthy of universal admiration. They also imply
that the United States is both destined and entitled to play a
distinct and positive role on the world stage.
The only thing wrong with this self-congratulatory por-

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trait of Americas global role is that it is mostly a myth.

Although the United States possesses certain unique qualitiesfrom high levels of religiosity to a political culture that
privileges individual freedomthe conduct of U.S. foreign
policy has been determined primarily by its relative power
and by the inherently competitive nature of international
politics. By focusing on their supposedly exceptional qualities, Americans blind themselves to the ways that they are a
lot like everyone else.
This unchallenged faith in American exceptionalism
makes it harder for Americans to understand why others
are less enthusiastic about U.S. dominance, often alarmed
by U.S. policies, and frequently irritated by what they see as
U.S. hypocrisy, whether the subject is possession of nuclear
weapons, conformity with international law, or Americas
tendency to condemn the conduct of others while ignoring
its own failings. Ironically, U.S. foreign policy would probably be more effective if Americans were less convinced of
their own unique virtues and less eager to proclaim them.
What we need, in short, is a more realistic and critical
assessment of Americas true character and contributions.
In that spirit, I offer here the Top 5 Myths about American
Exceptionalism.

Myth 1
There Is Something Exceptional
About American Exceptionalism.
Whenever American leaders refer to the unique responsibilities of the United States, they are saying that it is
different from other powers and that these differences require them to take on special burdens.
Yet there is nothing unusual about such lofty declarations;
indeed, those who make them are treading a well-worn path.
Most great powers have considered themselves superior to
their rivals and have believed that they were advancing some
greater good when they imposed their preferences on others.
The British thought they were bearing the white mans burden, while French colonialists invoked la mission civilisatrice
to justify their empire. Portugal, whose imperial activities
were hardly distinguished, believed it was promoting a certain
misso civilizadora. Even many of the ofcials of the former
Soviet Union genuinely believed they were leading the world
toward a socialist utopia despite the many cruelties that communist rule inicted. Of course, the United States has by far
the better claim to virtue than Stalin or his successors, but
Obama was right to remind us that all countries prize their
own particular qualities.
So when Americans proclaim they are exceptional and indispensable, they are simply the latest nation to sing a familiar old song. Among great powers, thinking youre special is
the norm, not the exception.

previous page: Matt Cohen/southCreek global/ZuMapress.CoM; right: tiMe-life piCtures via getty iMages

the
america
issue

Tokyo burning after an allied bombing raid.

Myth 2
The United States Behaves Better
Than Other Nations Do.

If the U.S. lost the war, we would

be prosecuted as war criminals.
Gen. Curtis LeMay

Declarations of American exceptionalism rest on the belief that the United States is a uniquely virtuous nation, one
that loves peace, nurtures liberty, respects human rights, and
embraces the rule of law. Americans like to think their country behaves much better than other states do, and certainly
better than other great powers.
If only it were true. The United States may not have been
as brutal as the worst states in world history, but a dispassionate look at the historical record belies most claims about
Americas moral superiority.
For starters, the United States has been one of the most
expansionist powers in modern history. It began as 13 small
colonies clinging to the Eastern Seaboard, but eventually
expanded across North America, seizing Texas, Arizona,
New Mexico, and California from Mexico in 1846. Along
the way, it eliminated most of the native population and
conned the survivors to impoverished reservations. By the
mid-19th century, it had pushed Britain out of the Pacic
Northwest and consolidated its hegemony over the Western
Hemisphere.
The United States has fought numerous wars since then
starting several of themand its wartime conduct has hardly
been a model of restraint. The 1899-1902 conquest of the
Philippines killed some 200,000 to 400,000 Filipinos, most
of them civilians, and the United States and its allies did not
hesitate to dispatch some 305,000 German and 330,000
Japanese civilians through aerial bombing during World War
ii, mostly through deliberate campaigns against enemy cities.
No wonder Gen. Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing
campaign against Japan, told an aide, If the U.S. lost the
war, we would be prosecuted as war criminals. The United
States dropped more than 6 million tons of bombs during the
Indochina war, including tons of napalm and lethal defoliants like Agent Orange, and it is directly responsible for the
deaths of many of the roughly 1 million civilians who died
in that war.
More recently, the U.S.-backed Contra war in Nicaragua
killed some 30,000 Nicaraguans, a percentage of their population equivalent to 2 million dead Americans. U.S. military
action has led directly or indirectly to the deaths of 250,000
Muslims over the past three decades (and thats a low-end estimate, not counting the deaths resulting from the sanctions
against Iraq in the 1990s), including the more than 100,000
people who died following the invasion and occupation of
Iraq in 2003. U.S. drones and Special Forces are going after suspected terrorists in at least ve countries at present
and have killed an unknown number of innocent civilians in
the process. Some of these actions may have been necessary

November 2011

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the
america
issue

The United States talks a good game

on human rights but has been too
willing to cozy up to dictators.

Myth 3
Americas Success Is Due
to Its Special Genius.
The United States has enjoyed remarkable success, and
Americans tend to portray their rise to world power as a
direct result of the political foresight of the Founding Fathers,
the virtues of the U.S. Constitution, the priority placed on individual liberty, and the creativity and hard work of the American people. In this narrative, the United States enjoys an exceptional global position today because it is, well, exceptional.
There is more than a grain of truth to this version of
American history. Its not an accident that immigrants came to
America in droves in search of economic opportunity, and the
melting pot myth facilitated the assimilation of each wave
of new Americans. Americas scientic and technological
achievements are fully deserving of praise and owe something
to the openness and vitality of the American political order.
But Americas past success is due as much to good luck
as to any uniquely American virtues. The new nation was
lucky that the continent was lavishly endowed with natural
resources and traversed by navigable rivers. It was lucky to
have been founded far from the other great powers and even

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Foreign Policy

luckier that the native population was less advanced and

highly susceptible to European diseases. Americans were fortunate that the European great powers were at war for much
of the republics early history, which greatly facilitated its
expansion across the continent, and its global primacy was
ensured after the other great powers fought two devastating
world wars. This account of Americas rise does not deny
that the United States did many things right, but it also acknowledges that Americas present position owes as much to
good fortune as to any special genius or manifest destiny.

Myth 4
The United States Is Responsible
for Most of the Good in the World.
Americans are fond of giving themselves credit for positive international developments. President Bill Clinton believed the United States was indispensable to the forging of
stable political relations, and the late Harvard University
political scientist Samuel P. Huntington thought U.S. primacy was central to the future of freedom, democracy, open
economies, and international order in the world. Journalist Michael Hirsh has gone even further, writing in his book
At War With Ourselves that Americas global role is the
greatest gift the world has received in many, many centuries, possibly all of recorded history. Scholarly works such
as Tony Smiths Americas Mission and G. John Ikenberrys
Liberal Leviathan emphasize Americas contribution to the
spread of democracy and its promotion of a supposedly
liberal world order. Given all the high-ves American leaders have given themselves, it is hardly surprising that most
Americans see their country as an overwhelmingly positive
force in world affairs.
Once again, there is something to this line of argument,
just not enough to make it entirely accurate. The United
States has made undeniable contributions to peace and
stability in the world over the past century, including the
Marshall Plan, the creation and management of the Bretton
Woods system, its rhetorical support for the core principles
of democracy and human rights, and its mostly stabilizing
military presence in Europe and the Far East. But the belief
that all good things ow from Washingtons wisdom overstates the U.S. contribution by a wide margin.
For starters, though Americans watching Saving Private
Ryan or Patton may conclude that the United States played the
central role in vanquishing Nazi Germany, most of the ghting
was in Eastern Europe and the main burden of defeating Hitlers war machine was borne by the Soviet Union. Similarly,
though the Marshall Plan and nato played important roles
in Europes post-World War ii success, Europeans deserve at
least as much credit for rebuilding their economies, construct-

MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP/Getty IMAGes

to make Americans more prosperous and secure. But while

Americans would undoubtedly regard such acts as indefensible if some foreign country were doing them to us, hardly
any U.S. politicians have questioned these policies. Instead,
Americans still wonder, Why do they hate us?
The United States talks a good game on human rights
and international law, but it has refused to sign most human rights treaties, is not a party to the International Criminal Court, and has been all too willing to cozy up to dictatorsremember our friend Hosni Mubarak?with abysmal
human rights records. If that were not enough, the abuses
at Abu Ghraib and the George W. Bush administrations
reliance on waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, and
preventive detention should shake Americas belief that it
consistently acts in a morally superior fashion. Obamas decision to retain many of these policies suggests they were not
a temporary aberration.
The United States never conquered a vast overseas empire
or caused millions to die through tyrannical blunders like
Chinas Great Leap Forward or Stalins forced collectivization. And given the vast power at its disposal for much of the
past century, Washington could certainly have done much
worse. But the record is clear: U.S. leaders have done what
they thought they had to do when confronted by external
dangers, and they paid scant attention to moral principles
along the way. The idea that the United States is uniquely virtuous may be comforting to Americans; too bad its not true.

The United States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases
and thus a principal cause of the adverse changes that are
altering the global environment.
ing a novel economic and political union, and moving beyond
four centuries of sometimes bitter rivalry. Americans also tend
to think they won the Cold War all by themselves, a view that
ignores the contributions of other anti-Soviet adversaries and
the courageous dissidents whose resistance to communist rule
produced the velvet revolutions of 1989.
Moreover, as Godfrey Hodgson recently noted in his sympathetic but clear-eyed book, The Myth of American Exceptionalism, the spread of liberal ideals is a global phenomenon
with roots in the Enlightenment, and European philosophers
and political leaders did much to advance the democratic ideal.
Similarly, the abolition of slavery and the long effort to improve
the status of women owe more to Britain and other democracies than to the United States, where progress in both areas
trailed many other countries. Nor can the United States claim
a global leadership role today on gay rights, criminal justice, or
economic equalityEuropes got those areas covered.
Finally, any honest accounting of the past half-century must
acknowledge the downside of American primacy. The United
States has been the major producer of greenhouse gases for
most of the last hundred years and thus a principal cause of
the adverse changes that are altering the global environment.
The United States stood on the wrong side of the long struggle
against apartheid in South Africa and backed plenty of unsavory
dictatorshipsincluding Saddam Husseinswhen short-term
strategic interests dictated. Americans may be justly proud of
their role in creating and defending Israel and in combating global anti-Semitism, but its one-sided policies have also prolonged
Palestinian statelessness and sustained Israels brutal occupation.
Bottom line: Americans take too much credit for global
progress and accept too little blame for areas where U.S. policy has in fact been counterproductive. Americans are blind
to their weak spots, and in ways that have real-world consequences. Remember when Pentagon planners thought U.S.
troops would be greeted in Baghdad with owers and parades? They mostly got rpgs and ieds instead.

J.D. Pooley/Getty ImaGes

Myth 5
God Is on Our Side.
A crucial component of American exceptionalism is the
belief that the United States has a divinely ordained mission
to lead the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan told audiences
that there was some divine plan that had placed America
here, and once quoted Pope Pius xii saying, Into the hands
of America God has placed the destinies of an aficted mankind. Bush offered a similar view in 2004, saying, We have
a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom. The
same idea was expressed, albeit less nobly, in Otto von Bismarcks alleged quip that God has a special providence for
fools, drunks, and the United States.

Condence is a valuable commodity for any country. But

when a nation starts to think it enjoys the mandate of heaven
and becomes convinced that it cannot fail or be led astray by
scoundrels or incompetents, then reality is likely to deliver a
swift rebuke. Ancient Athens, Napoleonic France, imperial
Japan, and countless other countries have succumbed to this
sort of hubris, and nearly always with catastrophic results.
Despite Americas many successes, the country is hardly
immune from setbacks, follies, and boneheaded blunders. If
you have any doubts about that, just reect on how a decade
of ill-advised tax cuts, two costly and unsuccessful wars, and
a nancial meltdown driven mostly by greed and corruption
have managed to squander the privileged position the United
States enjoyed at the end of the 20th century. Instead of assuming that God is on their side, perhaps Americans should
heed Abraham Lincolns admonition that our greatest concern should be whether we are on Gods side.

iven the many challenges Americans now face,

from persistent unemployment to the burden of winding down two deadly wars, its unsurprising that they nd
the idea of their own exceptionalism comfortingand that
their aspiring political leaders have been proclaiming it
with increasing fervor. Such patriotism has its benets, but not
when it leads to a basic misunderstanding of Americas role in
the world. This is exactly how bad decisions get made.
America has its own special qualities, as all countries do,
but it is still a state embedded in a competitive global system.
It is far stronger and richer than most, and its geopolitical
position is remarkably favorable. These advantages give the
United States a wider range of choice in its conduct of foreign
affairs, but they dont ensure that its choices will be good ones.
Far from being a unique state whose behavior is radically different from that of other great powers, the United States has
behaved like all the rest, pursuing its own self-interest rst and
foremost, seeking to improve its relative position over time,
and devoting relatively little blood or treasure to purely idealistic pursuits. Yet, just like past great powers, it has convinced
itself that it is different, and better, than everyone else.
International politics is a contact sport, and even powerful
states must compromise their political principles for the sake of
security and prosperity. Nationalism is also a powerful force,
and it inevitably highlights the countrys virtues and sugarcoats
its less savory aspects. But if Americans want to be truly exceptional, they might start by viewing the whole idea of American
exceptionalism with a much more skeptical eye.
Stephen M. Walt, an fp contributing editor, is Robert and
Rene Belfer professor of international affairs at Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government. He blogs at walt.
foreignpolicy.com.

November 2011

75

THE
AMERICA
ISSUE

AMERICA
REALLY WAS
THAT GREAT
(BUT THAT DOESNT
MEAN WE ARE NOW)

s America still exceptional? The question has become a contentious issue in American politics over the
last few years. But the answer has implications that go
well beyond the political fortunes of Republicans and
Democrats in the United States. It affects the stability and
prosperity of the entire world.
President Barack Obamas Republican critics now
routinely accuse him of denying Americas history as an exceptional country because, when asked about the concept
in 2009, he replied, I believe in American exceptionalism,
just as I suspect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism
and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. (He then
went on to list some of the features that, in his view, make
America exceptional.)
But the idea of American exceptionalism does have real
intellectual grounding. As used by scholars, it refers to the

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ways the United States has differed historically from the

older countries of Europe: the fact that it was founded on
a set of ideas; that it lacked a hierarchical social order with
a hereditary aristocracy at the top; that the Europeans who
settled North America did so in a huge, sparsely populated
territory; and that it attracted immigrants from all over the
world. In American politics, the term has come to have a
celebratory as well as an analytical meaning. It refers to what
makes America special: its wealth, its power, the economic
opportunity it has provided for its citizens, and the expansive role it has played in the world, including the example of
liberty and prosperity that it has set.
The fuss over exceptionalism represents, in one sense,
politics as usual in the United States, with one side accusing
the other of being out of touch with the countrys deepest
values. It also, however, taps into the national current of un-

PRINT BY CHRISTIAN INGER VIA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

BY THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN AND MICHAEL MANDELBAUM

Detail from Liberty Brings to the Earth Justice and Peace c. 1863-64

ease about the country and its future, an unease that is, alas,
all too justied. No American politician will publicly question his or her countrys exceptional status, but it is worth
asking whether America really is still exceptional, especially
because so many Americans are beginning to worry privately
and some publiclythat it is not.
The question reminds us of a story attributed to Abraham
Lincoln. He asked, If you call a horses tail a leg, how many
legs does a horse have? He then responded, The answer
is four, because calling a horses tail a leg doesnt make it
one. Similarly, declaring that America is exceptionalthat
is, exceptionally wealthy, powerful, and dynamicdoesnt
make it so. Exceptionalism is not a distinction that is bestowed and then lasts forever, like an honorary degree from
a university; nor is it an entitlement like Social Security or
Medicaresomething all Americans automatically get to

enjoy at a certain age. It has to be earned continually, like

a baseball players batting average. And today, as so many
Americans fear, it is not being earned. Americas exceptionalism is now in play. To remain exceptional, America must
respond effectively to its four great 21st-century challenges:
the ones posed by globalization, the revolution in information technology, the countrys huge and growing decits, and
its pattern of energy consumption. America does not now
have in place the policies needed to master them.
The United States has not adapted its educational system to prepare Americans for well-paying jobs in a world
economy shaped by globalization and the revolution in information technology. It has not mustered the political will
to bring the decits of its federal government and many of its
state and local governments under control. It has not taken
effective steps to jump-start the long transition away from
heavy reliance on fossil fuels.
Underlying these specic failures is a national failure even
to pose the questions that must be answered as the starting
point for all public policies: What world are we living in, and
what do we need to do to thrive in it?
The stakes are exceptionally high. For Americans, whether the United States is able to answer these questions successfully will determine the countrys future rate of economic
growth, and that growth rate will in turn determine how
much Americans will be able to maintain the best features
of their society: opportunity, mobility, and social harmony.
For the rest of the world, the stakes are perhaps even higher.
Since 1945, and especially since the end of the Cold War,
the United States has provided to the world many of the services that governments generally furnish to the societies they
govern. While maintaining the worlds major currency, the
dollar, it has served as a market for the exports that have
fueled remarkable economic growth in Asia and elsewhere.
Americas Navy safeguards the sea lanes along which much
of the worlds trade passes, and its military deployments in
Europe and East Asia underwrite security in those regions.
The U.S. military also guarantees the worlds access to the oil
of the Persian Gulf, and American intelligence assets, diplomatic muscle, and occasionally military force resist the most
dangerous trend in contemporary international politics: the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. The global governance
the United States has provided, from which the rest of the
world has derived enormous benet, has rested on a vibrant
economy and the national unity and condence that have
arisen from it.
In 2011, a robust American global role continues to be
vital. With the Arab world in upheaval; with Europes common currency, the euro, in crisis and the future of the European Union itself in doubt; and with China, the worlds
fastest-growing economy and fastest-rising power, having

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the
america
issue
all but exhausted the possibilities of its model for economic
growth based on an undervalued currency and ever-rising
exports, a dynamic American economy and a stabilizing, reassuring American global presence are as important now as
they have ever been, if not more so. Sustaining them, though,
depends on Americas rising to meet its major challenges, and
doing so immediately.
Somehow it has fallen slightly out of fashion to talk about
American power. Those on the left often do not fully understand its constructive uses, concentrating instead on the occasional abuses that always attend the exercise of power. Those
on the right often do not fully understand its sourcesthat
American power is not simply a matter of will but of means,
and those means need to be constantly renewed and refreshed.
In the second decade of the 21st century, that depends on successfully meeting the countrys four major domestic challenges.
Can America respond to them in appropriate fashion? We
are optimistic that it can. While the country is paralyzed at
the topthe political system is stuck and is not generating the
necessary public policiesit remains extraordinarily vibrant
at the grassroots.
If one were to design a country ideally suited to ourish in
the 21st century, it would look more like the United States than
any other. In a world in which individual creativity is becoming
ever more important, America supports individual achievement
and celebrates the quirky. In a world in which technological
change takes place at warp speed, requiring maximal economic
exibility, the American economy is as exible as any on the
planet. In a world in which transparent, reliable institutions,
and especially the rule of law, are more important than ever for
risk-taking and innovation, the United States has an outstanding legal environment. In a world in which even the cleverest
inventors and entrepreneurs have to try and fail before succeeding, American business culture understands that failure is often
the necessary condition for success. None of these traits has
gone away during the current crisis.
Over the course of its history, the United States has rarely
failed to meet its major challenges. It is in fact the current failure
to do so that is unusualone might even say exceptional.
When tested, from the days of the revolution in the 18th century to the drawn-out Cold War struggle in the 20th, America
and Americans have found ways to excel.
To continue to do so, the country would do well to learn
from the experience of one of its iconic companies, ibm, which
is celebrating its centennial this year. ibm essentially invented
the personal computer, but didnt fully understand the implications of its own creation. The company, like too many Americans, came to think of its exceptional status as self-perpetuating
and permanent. This led to complacency and strategic mistakes
that almost proved fatal.
How did ibm lose sight of the world it invented? Listen care-

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fully to the answer of Samuel Palmisano, ibms current chairman and ceo, when we asked him that question: You spend
more time arguing amongst yourselves over a shrinking pie
than looking to the future, he said, and so you miss the big
turn that you have entered, even a turn that your own company invented. When you mistakenly start thinking of other
departments and colleagues in your own company as the oppositionrather than the other companies against which you
must competeyou have lost touch with the world in which
you are operating. This can be as lethal for countries as it is
for companies. Americas political parties today have strayed
off course, Palmisano told us, because they have focused on
themselves more than on the priorities of the country as a
whole. ibm got back on track, under new leadership, by focusing on and coming to understand the new environment in
which it was operating and then mobilizing and inspiring the
whole company to master the next big change in technology,
networked computing.
America needs to do something similar. It is obvious what
its core competency is in the 21st century. The United States
has greater potential than any other country to thrive in the
future by becoming the worlds most attractive launching pad
the place where everyone wants to come to work, invent, collaborate, or start something up to get the most out of our new
hyperconnected world. And they will want to come to America
because it has the best infrastructure, the most dynamic schools,
the most open economy, the most inviting immigration policies,
the most efcient and stable markets, the most governmentfunded research, and the best rules to promote risk-taking and
prevent recklessness. That is how America remains as exceptional in this century as it was in the last twonot by launching another moon shot but by becoming the worlds favorite
launching pad for millions of moon shots.
American power and prosperity, and global stability and
prosperity, are all riding on the countrys success in meeting
its challenges. A world inuenced by a United States powerful enough to provide political, economic, and moral leadership will not be a perfect world, but it will be a better world
than any alternative we can envision. That means that the
status of American exceptionalism is more than an academic
controversy or a partisan political squabble in the United
States. Everyone, everywhere, has an interest in America taking the steps necessary to remain an exceptional country.
Thomas L. Friedman is foreign-affairs columnist for the
New York Times. Michael Mandelbaum is Christian A. Herter professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins
Universitys School of Advanced International Studies. This
essay is adapted from their book, That Used to Be Us: How
America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We
Can Come Back.

THE ELEPHANTS

IN THE ROOM
BARACK OBAMAS REPUBLICAN CHALLENGERS ARE TRYING HARD
NOT TO TALK ABOUT THE REST OF THE WORLD. IT SHOWS.
BY JAMES TRAUB

November 2011

79

n June, Republican presidential candidate Tim

Pawlenty delivered a speech at the Council on Foreign
Relations. Speaking before the council or writing an essay in its house organ, Foreign Affairs, had for decades
offered candidates a means of proving their foreignpolicy gravitas. And the former Minnesota governor was
running his campaign by a traditional script. But in a gop
eld where contempt for the foreign-policy establishment
has become the norm, Pawlentys aspiration for its imprimatur seemed almost touching. Pawlenty presented himself as a
champion of the Arab Spring and a voice for moral clarity.
What is wrong, he bluntly warned, is for the Republican
Party to shrink from the challenges of American leadership
in the world.
Pawlenty quickly became the darling of conservative foreign-policy experts. And then his candidacy sank like a stone.
By August, after a dismal showing in the Ames straw poll in
Iowa, he withdrew. He probably spent too much time on
foreign policy, one rueful conservative activist told me.
The world beyond Americas borders just doesnt gure in
the 2012 campaign. In the 2008 Republican debates, candidates regularly crossed swords on the war in Iraq, the nuclear showdown with Iran, and the proper conduct of the war
on terror. At this years rst real debate, held in Manchester,
New Hampshire, the rest of the world wasnt even mentioned
until more than 90 minutes into the two-hour event. Given
the focus on economic issues, its difcult to get the candidates interested in foreign policy, laments Jamie Fly, head
of the Foreign Policy Initiative, which acts as a transmission
belt between conservative intellectuals and politicians. Audiences seem similarly apathetic. The heartiest applause often
goes to libertarian Rep. Ron Paul when he calls for as little
foreign policy as possible, as he did recently in Iowa during a
discussion of the Middle East. His prescription: Stay out of
their internal business. Dont get involved in these wars. And
just bring our troops home. This is precisely the disengagement of which Pawlenty was warning.
Sometimes, of course, foreign policy really is politically
salient. Strange though it sounds today, for much of the
2008 campaign Barack Obama thought that his worldview
would be the campaigns dening issue. He was the candidate who would eliminate nuclear weapons, stop browbeating Americas allies, bring the troops back from Iraq, and
end the color-coded politics of fear. In the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton attacked him for his lack of foreignpolicy experience (remember the 3 a.m. phone call ad?), and
the two had a genuinely telling difference of opinion about
whether a policy of engagement should extend to talking
with tyrants without preconditions.
Then the economic crisis hit. Although Obama and Republican nominee John McCain dueled over Iraq, foreign

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policy quickly receded from center stage. As president,

Obama has disappointed many of his liberal supporters, but
also blunted Republican lines of attack on his foreign policy
by pursuing the war on terror much as George W. Bush did
and adding 30,000-plus troops to Afghanistan; by killing
Osama bin Laden, he has strengthened his hand with voters across the political spectrum. But Obama is also terribly
exposed on jobs and the faltering economy, issues on which
the gop candidates have good reason to believe that they
can ride national dissatisfaction to the White House. So its
no surprise that foreign affairs has gotten so little attention.
Even in less navel-gazing moments, foreign policy is a
marginal topic for most presidential contenders. We talk
about their views, but many barely have views. Few candidates, and especially the former governors who have occupied the White House for 28 of the past 50 years, have had
to think in very specic terms about Americas place in the
world. So candidates ask themselves, in effect, What kind
of foreign policy would a person like me have? This is not
necessarily a useful guide to their later behavior. Bill Clinton
thought he was a human rights-driven idealist until he found
out how hard it is to do the right thing; Bush thought he was
a hardheaded realist until the 9/11 attacks turned him into
a true-believing democracy promoter. Who they are probably matters more than what they think, or what they think
they think. As Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative ex-aide to
Bush and Ronald Reagan, says, What really matters in the
end is character.
Some of the 2012 candidates mimic McCains muscular idealism, but their hearts dont seem to be in it. Pawlenty was a
McCain acolyte who traveled abroad with him and absorbed
much of his worldview; he warned the Council on Foreign Relations about the isolationist sentiments newly ascendant in
the gop. But the rise of the Tea Party in recent years has reshaped Republican politics entirely, not only on domestic policy
but also on foreign policy. The Tea Party is the faction of Less
less spending, less government, and, generally, less engagement
abroad. And all the Republicans aspiring to win the 2012 nomination have responded to this powerful new voice in one way
or another. None of the candidates save Paul can genuinely be
called isolationistand perhaps not even he. But Rep. Michele
Bachmann shares the Tea Partys suspicion of foreign interventions and foreign countries more generally; former Utah governor Jon Huntsman has called for nation-building at home
rather than nation-building in Afghanistan or elsewhere; and
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has warned vaguely of military adventurism. Rick Santorum, a fringe candidate like Paul, anchors
the opposite end of the foreign-policy spectrum, the pole of
bristling aggression and furious denunciation (both of Obama
and of Paul). And Mitt Romney falls somewhere in the middle,
which seems to be where he falls whenever he is dropped.

previous page: illustration by matt dorfman for fp

the
america
issue

JON HUNTSMAN
The time has come for us to get out of
Afghanistan. We dont need 100,000
troops in Afghanistan nation-building at
a time when this nation needs to
be built.

MITT ROMNEY
Its time for us to bring our troops
home as soon as we possibly can,
consistent with the word that comes
from our generals.

RICK PERRY
MICHELE BACHMANN
As happened in Iran in 1979, as these
[Arab] tyrannies are toppled, the populist forces
most prevalent today harbor radical,
illiberal values and interests that are
antithetical to Americas values
and interests.

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

n foreign affairs, as on domestic policy, Romney

serves as a faithful gauge of party orthodoxy, as well
as of shifts in that orthodoxy. In 2008, the former
Massachusetts governor sought to distinguish himself
from the other Bush epigones by proposing the use
of soft power as well as hard power in the Middle
East by the United States and its allies: We as great
nations, he said in a debate in January 2008, need to help
them have the rule of law, have good schools that are not
Wahhabi schools, strengthen their economies.
Four years later, Romney no longer talks about reforming
madrassas. He has made modest adjustments in his views to
conform to the Republican Partys current ideological line,
which one former ofcial in the Bush White House described
to me as free trade, strong defense, skepticism about China, a robust view of the war on terror. Romney has relatively little to say about Iraq or Afghanistan and does not
share Pawlentys enthusiasm for spreading Americas values
abroad. The core of his foreign-policy message is that America is threatened in ways that Obama cannot or will not recognize. His latest book, last years No Apology: The Case
for American Greatness, sets forth a formulation of these
threats that, one conservative policy gure told me, Romney
developed on his own and of which he is quite proud. In
the book and his speeches, Romney argues, There are four
competing nations or groups of nations that are vying to
lead the world before the end of this century: China, Russia, jihadists, and, of course, us, the democracies. Only if

We cannot concede the

moral authority of our nation to
multilateral debating societies.

America wins this existential battle, Romney warns, will

freedom endure. Never mind that jihadism is not a geographical or even organizational entity, and that Russia is
not a potential threat to U.S. security on a par with China;
these are not the kinds of distinctions that make their way
into presidential debate.
America, in short, faces the same threat it has faced since
9/11, and several new ones too. The country thus must rearm itself, even though the historic increases in defense spending during the Bush years mean that the Pentagons budget
is now greater, in real terms, than at any time since World
War ii. Here Romney, to his credit, has been specic: Pentagon spending, excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, must be at least 4 percent of gdp. This would
increase annual defense spending to $600 billion or more, and
overall military spending to about $720 billionthough how
he would do this while balancing the budget is anyones guess.
But its not always clear quite how ardently Romney
himself embraces the partys orthodoxy. He has, to put it
gently, an acute sense of what the market will bear, which
makes him almost as useful a barometer of the misgivings
of gop primary voters as he is of elite opinion. Asked about
Afghanistan during the Manchester debate, he said, Its
time for us to bring our troops home as soon as we possibly
canthe standard critique of Obama policy from the left
consistent with the word that comes from our generals, an
allusion to the critique from the right that Obama adopted
a schedule of withdrawal quicker than the one proposed by

November 2011

81

the
america
issue
David Petraeus, then his commanding general. It is hard to
recognize the spirit of Reagan, or McCain for that matter, in
this artful wafe; Danielle Pletka of the conservative American Enterprise Institute called him a little bit of a weather
vane. Romney used the next debate to clarify his views
i.e., rectify his mistakeby repeating the second half of the
formulation without the rst.
But Romneys sense of the weather may be quite accurateand his ambivalent answer may well reect his ambivalent party. One of the underlying realities of 2011 is that
the gop rank and le has less taste for gung-ho internationalism than party elites do. A January poll of self-described
conservatives, for example, found that two-thirds thought
that the United States should either reduce troop levels in Afghanistan or leave right awaypresumably no matter what
the generals say. Even Romneys pet cause of defense spending, a classic Republican litmus-test issue, has become an embattled subject. Many small-government conservatives, like
anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, have accepted the logic
of defense cuts as part of an overall reduction in the size of
the state. Others, like Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, a strong
Tea Party advocate, have joined liberal Democrats in calling for a rapid drawdown of troops from Afghanistanthe
sentiment to which Romney briey catered before thinking
better of it. Fly, of the Foreign Policy Initiative, says that he
worries about the potency of the argument that our real
problems are at home, not abroad.

his raises the intriguing question of whether it

is possible to hang onto ones claims of presidential
mettle while catering to the do-less-abroad wing of
the Republican Party. Not long ago, this territory belonged exclusively to Paul, who in 2007 was a lonely
voice on the Republican stage when he had the temerity to argue that the United States should withdraw
from Iraq. Now Paul has company in the form, remarkably,
of Huntsman, the only representative in the race of oldfashioned moderate Republicanisma vestige, it would
seem, of a vanished view. Huntsman has called for reducing
Americas troop strength in Europe and Asia and for pulling all but 15,000 soldiers out of Afghanistan. C. Boyden
Gray, one of Huntsmans foreign-policy advisors, says that
the former ambassador to China thinks that defense spending should not be off-limits in budget talks.
Daniel Senor, a former Bush ofcial who advises Romney,
retorts that Huntsman is simply beyond the pale: He would
take the country and the party in a really bad direction. The
dispute speaks to a striking realignment within the Republican Partys ranks. The Republican establishment has long
been dened by non-ideological moderates and realists
like Brent Scowcroft, Richard Armitage, and Richard Haass.

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These are the gures, associated more with the rst than the
second President Bush, whom Huntsman has been consulting and whose views he largely represents. And yet he, and
they, are now considered beyond the pale. A new conservative elite has by now almost wholly supplanted the graybeards within the gops ranks, and has gravitated to Romney
and Perry. The graybeards support the New start nuclear
arms deal with Russia negotiated by Obama and ratied this
year; the gop candidates and most of their advisors do not.
The old elite supports engagement with China; the new ones
regard China as a military threat. In short, todays conservatives see the world as fundamentally more threatening than
do the old-school pragmatists.
The split is hardly new, but it has become much more
pronounced in the last few years. And this is in part because
the realists themselves have moved. No less a pillar of the old
establishment than Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote a piece in Time titled Bringing Our Foreign Policy Home in which he argues that at
this moment of economic desperation, the United States
needs to adopt a policy he somewhat euphemistically calls
restoration, whose goal would be to rebalance the resources devoted to domestic challenges, as opposed to international ones, in favor of the former. This means fewer
wars of choice, like Libya, and a swift withdrawal from
Afghanistan. Haasss predecessor at the Council on Foreign
Relations, Leslie Gelb, has long made this argument; Huntsman has adopted it as his platform. In effect, then, the old
center of the gop has joined with the new radicals of the Tea
Party in advocating a policy of Less.
Perhaps, then, Huntsman is not so misguided for shing in some of the same waters that Paul does. Realists like
Huntsman arent isolationists, but the rank and le may be.
This is a matter of serious dispute. Robert Kagan, the neoconservative columnist and historian, argues that all parties
in opposition tend to be isolationist and says that the Republican Partys alleged intervention fatigue has more to
do with opposition to Obama than with intervention itself.
Kagan is surely right that a candidate can hardly be expected
to champion intervention at a time when its the other party
doing the intervening. But the tendency in todays debates to
reduce interventions to military adventurism is not solely
a matter of politics. Years of slaughter in Iraq and the demoralizing stalemate in Afghanistan have increasingly convinced
Americans of both parties that there is little good the United
States can do in the world. Democracy promotion, the keystone in the arch of Bush-era foreign policy, has come to be
seen as folly, nation-building as hubris, and intervention as
an invitation to disaster.
This loss of faith has thickened the ranks of the party of
Less. You can see this, above all, in the very tepid reception

Libya

In the five Republican primary debates between June

13 and Sept. 12, 2011, which countries and regions
were mentioned the most?
Middle East

Iran Iraq
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO THE GOP Afghanistan
China
Japan

India

Pakistan

Mexico

Israel

What do the 2012 Republican candidates have to say about foreign policy?

On Afghanistan
STAY THE COURSE
I firmly believe that we are at
a point where weve got to
stay the course, and weve
got to finish the job.

On Libya

Perry

Michele Bachmann
GET OUT LATER
I think the best way for us to
be able to impact that
country is to make a
transition to where that
countrys military is going to
be taking care of their people,
bring our young men and
women home, and continue
to help them build the
infrastructure that we need.

On China

A TRIUMPH
The crumbling of Muammar
Qaddafis reigna violent,
repressive dictatorship with
a history of terrorismis
cause for cautious
celebration.

Paul

HUG THE PANDA

I do not believe it is our
place, as members of the
U.S. Congress, to dictate
internal policy to the
Chinese government.
Ron Paul

Rick Perry

Romney

Huntsman

(speech opposing bill to honor imprisoned

Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo)

A BLUNDER
The current situation in
Libya may be a short-term
victory for empire, but it is a
Paul
loss for our American
republic. And, I fear, it may
be devastating to the Libyan
people.
Ron Paul
Huntsman

FEAR THE DRAGON

With all the money that we
owe China, I think you
Bachmann might correctly say, Hus
your daddy.

The time has come for us to

get out of Afghanistan. We
Huntsman dont need 100,000 troops in
Afghanistan nation-building
at a time when this nation
needs to be built.

CALIPHATE!
The only reports that we have
say that there are elements
of al Qaeda in North Africa
and Hezbollah in the opposition forces. Let
me ask you this: What possible benefit is
there to the United States by lifting up and
creating a toehold for al Qaeda in North
Africa to take over Libya?

STOP STEALING OUR JOBS

I will not stand by while
China pursues an economic
development policy that
relies on the unfair treatment of U.S.
companies and the theft of their intellectual
property. I have no interest in starting a
trade war with China, but I cannot accept
our current trade surrender.

Jon Huntsman

Michele Bachmann

Mitt Romney

Perry

Romney

Rick Perry
Gingrich
BRING THE KNIFE

Paul

Worst Slip of the Tongue

Maybe that was an
attempt to attract the
illegal voteI mean,
the Latino voters.

Santorum

Flip-Flop
[I would]
exercise a
no-fly zone
this evening.
March 7

Michele Bachmann
Perry

Retro-Redbaiting
I would not
have
intervened.

Newt Gingrich
on Libya

March 23

Bachmann

If you look at FDR,

LBJ, and Barack
Obama, this is really
the final leap to
socialism.

COMPILED BY JOSHUA E. KEATING INFORMATION DESIGN BY LAURA STANTON

November 2011

83

the
america
issue
within the gop to the nato-assisted war in Libya. Bachmann,
Huntsman, Paul, Santorum, Herman Cain, apparently Newt
Gingrich, and Romneysometimesopposed Obamas decision to join the bombing campaign there. Perrys views are
unclear, though he did say in a recent speech, We should
only risk shedding American blood and spending American
treasure when our vital interests are threatenedmuch the
same language the others used to oppose the effort. It may
be said of all of them that though they share the belief that
America is under siege from hostile states and nonstate actorsunlike those who argue that America is more secure
today than during the Cold War or right after 9/11they
are much more skeptical than the neocons are of Americas
ability to shape good outcomes abroad. Or maybe they just
dont care as much.
Beyond Libya, the Arab Spring has posed a vexing problem for many of the Republican candidates, exposing the
tension inside the partys core ideology between its idealistic
vision of democracy promotion and dark fears of crusading Islam. Pawlenty endeared himself to Kagan and others
of his ilk by wholeheartedly championing all the freedom
movements in the Arab world. Of the others, only Bachmann has been equally categorical, though on the other side
of the question. Bachmann views the Arab Spring as an outright threat to U.S. national security. As happened in Iran
in 1979, she has said, as these tyrannies are toppled, the
populist forces most prevalent today harbor radical, illiberal
values and interests that are antithetical to Americas values
and interests. Bachmann, who appears to have access to
her very own set of facts, warned about giving al Qaeda
in North Africapresumably a reference to al Qaeda in
the Islamic Maghreba chance to take over Libya and
cited a report out of Libya that as many as 30,000 civilians had been killed by nato bombing. And for all his bellicosity, Santorum opposed not only the American role in
the bombing of Libya, but Obamas ultimate repudiation of
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, viewing him as a steady
if autocratic ally.

s for the current leader in the polls, it has

become increasingly difcult to say where Perry
locates himself on the Pawlenty-Bachmann spectrum. The Texas governor is widely described as a
hawk internationalist, a term that foreign-policy
conservatives use to connote righteous thinking.
Several told me that Perry shares Romneys views
but really means them. The evidence for this, however, is
imsy. As he was preparing to run, Perry invited a circle of
foreign-policy gures, many of them former aides to Bushera Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to come to Texas to
brief him on national security issues. I spoke to several peo-

84

Foreign Policy

ple who attended that meeting, at which Perry was largely

asking questions rather than making assertions. One made
a point of saying that Perrys own views were well within
the gop mainstream and reminded me that in 2008 Perry
had supported Rudolph Giuliani, a tough-minded but also
secular-minded gure. Perry is a passionate advocate for Israelyou cant be too pro-Israel in these circlesbut unlike
Bachmann does not cite his Christian faith as the source of
his views. Instead, Perry talks about his experience serving in
the U.S. Air Force in the early 1970s, when he got to know
Israeli military ofcials, visited Israel, and came to admire
its pioneering spirit. On Afghanistan, I was told, he doesnt
understand the whole timetable thingthat is, he believes
that if the stakes are high, the United States should stay until
it succeeds.
But is that so? Perry recently gave a bafing speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in his own backyard of
San Antonio in which he vowed never to let America fall
subject to a foreign policy of military adventurism, a phrase
that sounded like it could have been a Democratic critique of
Bush. A spokesman further muddied the waters by explaining that Perry had not been making a specic reference to
previous or ongoing military operations. Presumably Perry
was signaling distaste for adventurism of the Democratic variety, especially because he added, We cannot concede the
moral authority of our nation to multilateral debating societies. Or perhaps Perry has not yet put his foreign-policy
clichs in order. Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin commented that Perrys string of conicting banalities suggests
a whatever attitude toward serious policy issues.
Or perhaps its more like whatever works. At a September debate, Perry nally came out of the closet on Afghanistan, and not as a hawk internationalist. I agree with Governor Huntsman, he said, when we talk about its time to
bring our young men and women home and as soon and obviously as safely as we can. And I think the entire conversation about how do we deliver our aid to those countries, and
is it best spent with 100,000 military who have the target on
their back in AfghanistanI dont think so at this particular
point in time. Perry may have spurs that go jingle, jangle,
jingle, but for now his six-guns are staying in their holsters.
Maybe we should feel relieved that Perry, who considers
Social Security a monstrous hoax and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke a traitor, holds such restrained views of
the larger world. Or maybe he hasnt yet started to pay attention. Heaven protect us if he does.
James Traub, a weekly columnist on ForeignPolicy.
com, is a contributing writer for the New York Times
Magazine and a fellow of the Center on International
Cooperation.

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IN OTHER

WORDS

hen we looked for the words that mattered the most this year, the ones that kept popping up were written on walls: from Syria, where protests erupted after a group of teenagers were jailed for tagging a wall with The People Want the Regime to End, to Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, where caustic portraits of tumbling dictators tracked their fall
from power. For this In Other Words special grafti edition, we turned to a prominent expert on the

art on its home turf: Roger Gastman, co-author of The History of American Grafti and co-curator of the recent Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art exhibit, Art in the Streets. Over the next pages, he walks us
through some of 2011s most explosive expressions, seen on walls from Tripoli to Cairo to Kabul and beyond.

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PATRICK BAZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

GRAFFITI EDITION

Page 92

Page 94

It is as though Coca-Cola turned out to

be a great nutritional drink. Blake Gopnik
on Americas most potent visual export

Behave or We Will Send

in the Waiters
Paul Salopek on the mysteries of grafti in war zones

Tripoli, Libya, Sept. 1

For me, how I dene grafti is writing your name over and over again for the sake of fame, which started in Philadelphia in the mid-to-late
1960s and in New York City and has continued and spread. When I see those political messages, I call them pedestrian grafti
as in, I want to go write on this wall and put a message there, or I am really pissed off about these taxes or this leader doing x, y, and z
or not doing x, y, and z. A lot of times these people might be artists, but they are not necessarily grafti artists. They just see spray
paint or smearing oil on a wall or whatever it is as a medium to get their message across. Often, of course, these messages have a
much deeper meaning than just someones name.
Roger Gastman

November 2011

87

in other words

roger gastmans take

Racismlike this anti-Semitic Qadda as

moneybagsis not really prevalent in traditional
American grafti. But if everyones making jokes about
Qadda and money, thats how the artist is going to
paint him, because itll get a rise out of people. Still,
this is beautifully rendered by an artist. To me, this is
one of the more traditional grafti walls that you would
see in any city from Paris to London to New York
except its in a much crazier, crazier place.
Benghazi, Libya, March 14

Despite the swastika, Im guessing this

is meant to be humorous. When I say
pedestrian grafti, this is what Im talking about. It is crude. At the same time,
you can tell this person has done grafti
before just by the handwriting.
Benghazi, April 30

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Benjamin Lowy/edit By Getty imaGes; saeed KHan/aFP/Getty imaGes

This is real grafti done

by someone who knows what
they are doing. Its just put
together well. The letters have
distinct styles to them, and
even the handwriting at the
bottom is done in a very good
clear grafti hand style.
House of Imed Trabelsi, nephew
of ousted Tunisian President Zine
el-Abidine Ben Ali; La Marsa,
Tunisia, May 2

These grafti in Kabul denitely look like theyre done by a traditional grafti writer.
This to me looks like someone who knows what is up with a can of paint.
Kabul, March 28

FETHI BELAID/AFP/GETTy ImAGEs; mAssOUD HOssAINI/AFP/GETTy ImAGEs

November 2011

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in other words

roger gastmans take

This is denitely done by kids who are into grafti. You can tell by the lettering in the name Vince Seven on the
left side. It looks like three different people painted it. The one on the left is the best one, the most experienced.
Jerusalem, May 15

This is probably just done with a brush. The lines dont really look like spray paint.
It ts the environment. It is quiet. Its to the point. You understand what is going on.
And its probably less likely to get cleaned. The more something blends in with the
environment and doesnt make a stink, the more likely its going to stay, probably.
Twama, Libya, July 15

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this page by MaRCO LONgaRi/aFp/getty iMages

 This is just three cans of spray paint, a

black, a green, and a white. Just one little
ghosted character on the wall that shows the
desperation of the place. If they would have
buffed the wall and painted something big
and bold and pretty, it would have livened the
place up, but it wouldnt t the surroundings.
Site of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant;
Pripyat, Ukraine, April 4

This is freaking hilarious.

Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Jan. 25

SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/GEttY ImAGES; UlEt IFANSAStI/GEttY ImAGES

November 2011

91

in other words

Revolution
in a can

Grafti is as American as apple

pie, but much easier to export.
BY Blake Gopnik

he worst moment in the history

of grafti came during what was
also its heyday, in the early 1980s
in New York. That was when
mainstream culture adopted grafti as something called art. A
counterculture medium that had, at least
for a bare moment, been about communication and empowerment became saddled
with the oldest high-culture clichs. Grafti came to be about personal style,
aesthetic innovation, and artistic selfexpression; about looking good and
catching the eye; about stylistic inuence
and the creation of a self-conscious visual
tradition. That left it perfectly positioned
to be co-opted by consumerist culture. You
could say that the grand murals of grafti
art, known to their makers as pieces
short for masterpieces, another hoary
clichwere a kind of stand-in for missing advertising billboards, made by artists
from neighborhoods that had been left
out of Calvin Kleins underwear ad buy. It
was only by chance that those murals had
no commodity to selluntil they realized
they could sell themselves, as that highend good called art.
Then, by way of contrast, think about
grafti as it appears to us around the
world today, in places where painting on
a wall is about speaking truth to power.
The Arab Spring was marked by spraypainted taunts to dictators, and Haitis
chaos led to impassioned scrawls. A
crackdown against anti-regime grafti in
the town of Daraa was even the inspiration this year for Syrias tank-defying protest movement. In many of these cases,

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CloCkwise from top left: tobruk, libya: patriCk baZ/getty images; benghaZi, libya: saeeD khan/getty images; manama,
bahrain: Jonathan saruk/getty images; Cairo, egypt: Chris honDros/getty images; port-au-prinCe, haiti: allison shelley/
getty images; guatemala City, guatemala: Johan orDoneZ/afp/getty images

the artfulness of the grafti takes a distant

second place to what someone is actually
trying to say. Free doomGet out Hamad, reads one spray-painted text from
Bahrain. During the rebellion in Libya,
Freedom=Aljazeera written on a wall
makes the value of a free press perfectly
clear; on another wall, the simple tracing
of an ak-47 is enough to invoke an entire ethos of rebellion. In Guatemala City,
stenciled portraits of the disappeared of
Guatemalas long civil war, with the Spanish words for Where are they? written
below, stand as eloquent witness to one of
the countrys most crucial concerns. (The
portrait style is loosely derived from the
British street artist Banksy.)
In all these cases, grafti is being used as
a true means of communication rather than
as purely aesthetic exchange. These 21stcentury scrawls leapfrog back to a prehistory of grafti, when wall writing was mostly
about voicing forbidden thoughts in public.
And they take us back to the rst years of

cades, and yet their point is not to function

as art but to work as carriers of content and
opinion. In Managua, the swooping letters
developed for New York grafti spell out
the initials of the Sandinista party. In the
Palestinian West Bank, a big-eyed gure
youd expect to see decorating a wall in Los
Angeles wears a kefyeh and proclaims a
longing for a free Palestine, as the text
beside him says, in English.
Its not clear whether the use of English
in so much of this wall-painting represents
a desire to speak to Western eyes or whether English has simply become the standard
idiom for political protest, even of the local
variety. (It could be that the two are almost
the same.) But it does seem clear that the
stylistic clichs of grafti in the Westthe
huge loopy letters, the exaggerated shadows dropped behind a wordhave become
an international language that can be read
almost transparently, for the content those
clichs transmit. Look at New York-style
grafti letters spelling Free Libya on a

The most elaborate images from Egypt, Libya, and

Haiti today look very much like 1980s paint jobs on
New York subway cars.

grafti in New York, when some members

of the underclass declared their incontrovertible presence by tagging every square
inch of the city as they transgressed the
normal boundaries set by class and race. As
German scholar Diedrich Diederichsen has
written, grafti was a form of cultural and
artistic production that was illegible from
the dominant cultural perspective. When
some of those same taggers realized that
they could also make pieces that would
count as something called art, they began quickly buying into the values of the
mainstream theyd once confronted.
By now, grand grafti gestures are as
tired as could be, at least in the context of
the Western art world. But across the rest of
the planet, the static language of the American piece has moved on to a second life
as the visual lingua franca of genuine political speech. The most elaborate images
from Egypt, Libya, and Haiti today look
very much like the 1980s paint jobs on
New York subway cars and warehouse fa-

wall in Benghazi or proclaiming revolution in Tahrir Square: Rather than aiming at a new aesthetic effect, they take advantage of an old one thats so well-known
it barely registers.
That thing called art in the West is
essentially an insiders game, thrilling to
play but without much purchase on the
larger reality outside. We have to look
at societies that are truly in crisis to be
reminded that imageseven images we
have sometimes counted as artcan be
used for much more than game-playing.
In a strange reversal, the closer grafti
comes to being an empty visual commodity in the West, the better it serves the
needs of the rest of the worlds peoples,
who eagerly adopt it to speak about their
most pressing concerns. It is as though
Coca-Cola, as it spread across the globe,
turned out to be a great nutritional drink.
Blake Gopnik writes about art for Newsweek and its
website, TheDailyBeast.com.

November 2011

93

The art of war.

BY Paul SaloPek

lue, white, and orange stripes began appearing on

roadside boulders in South Africa a few years ago: the
jarring tricolor of the old apartheid ag.
White extremists, mostly disgruntled Afrikaners, were
emboldened enough to paint them at night in the remote
north of the country. Government road crews toiled
furiously to blot them out. But the masking paint never quite
matched the color of the rocks. And so the clumsy erasures only
served to draw more attention to each new hateful act of vandalism. In this waythrough an obscure little grafti warthe
racial neuroses that still plague South Africa were exposed more
vividly than in any news article or tv talk show.
In the murky convulsions of the worldregime changes,
revolutions, wars, uprisings, crackdowns, contested electionshasty scrawls on public walls seethe with deeper
meanings, counternarratives, revelatory lies, ground truths.
Sifting such tangled messaging can be surprisingly tough.
The key nuances are often obscured: a partly cracked war-

94

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ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/GEtty IMAGES

ConfliCt graffiti

time code. Expert graftiologists, also known as foreign correspondents on deadline, must accept that there is both more
and less to a sloppy stencil of el ch than meets the eye.
Like whether it appears in backwater Chiapas or a swish
quarter of Beirut.
Often, grafti breaks a big story pithily. A gigantic boot
swings down, as if from heaven, to connect with the upturned
rump of a dictator cringing over a hoard of cash. The boot
is polished in the hues of an insurgent ag. The toe ashes a
tiny smilethe sardonic grin of victory. You know right then
the tyrant is doomed.
That exuberant street cartoon of a toppled Col. Muammar
al-Qadda aside, however, I suspect the nest political and
wartime grafti, like most humor, isnt nearly so universal
its never the obvious, apprehensible stuff.
nato nato nato, stamped across liberated Kosovo,
seemed a banal plug for a popular detergent brand. But a
jaunty message left near the bodies of an entire family incinerated in their house could stop your breathing: Behave
or We Will Send in the Waiters. Who were the waiters? A
Serbian death squad? Kosovar rebels avenging themselves on
collaborators? A macabre joke? That single haiku distilled all
the darkness of the Balkan wars. Its sinister absurdity, its very
inscrutability, made your skin crawl.
Similarly, in authoritarian 1970s Mexico, where I grew up,
the adobe walls were often splashed with what seemed like the
nonsense verses of Edward Lear. One tag, for example, was a serial exclamation: Eche-birria! It meant nothing. Then it slow-

ly materialized into the surname of a handpicked president of that time, Luis Echeverra. Finally, a sly gibe emerged from within the letters: It translated, literally, as
Vomit [your] goat stew! Try squeezing that baroque bank shot into a soundbite.
Mexico, in fact, has a venerable history of conict grafti.
Unlike the young Arab Spring demonstrators, who only recently discovered the
overlapping pleasures of adolescent and political rebellion, Mexicans draw on a
long and rich tradition of visual protest. (Think of Jos Posadas famed posters of
skeletons dancing through the gore of the 1910 revolution.) Indeed, Mexicos latest
addition to the lexicon of public defacement and deance is even recyclable: narcomantas, or narco-banners. Drug cartels have taken to hanging cotton, plastic, or
paper sheets above busy intersections to get their messages across.
This creepy innovation may stretch the boundaries of traditional graftithe
yawp of the scofaw or the rebel. But it remains, like all genuine grafti, transgressive. Ruthlessly so. In July, for instance, in Ciudad Jurez, that narcotized
Mogadishu on the northern border, two large streamers appeared one morning
that threatened any U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spooks operating in
the city with death and dismemberment. Police quickly tore the warnings down.
Mexicos narco-banners can be snappy, if a bit retro. Laser-printed, punched with
neat wind holes, the fanciest ones look like car dealership advertisements or the sort
of signs that civic clubs carry in parades. Here, it isnt the words that are dadaesque.
Its the format thats in-joke surreal. The drug lords intentionally mimic the campaign clutter of Mexican political parties. Their tone is weirdly formal.
mister president caldern, read one of a series of banners uttering recently above the state of Sinaloa, a cartel stronghold, do you want

The first book to

trace the genesis of
modern business in
Western antiquity

to finish with the violence? then remove your support from

chapo guzmn in sinaloa. thats the solution.
Joaqun El Chapo Guzmn Loera is Mexicos most powerful drug kingpin.
Apparently, the polite advice emanated from rival maas. Well never know.
Narco-banners may now be an inescapable feature of the front lines of the
countrys bloody cartel wars (death toll: more than 35,000 and counting since
2006). But like all serious war grafti, they are anonymous, barring some brazen exceptions. Footage available on YouTube shows a group of sicarioscartel
assassinscoolly lming themselves as they erect a banner in Chihuahua City.
Its a sunny morning. Rush hour. The gunmen, waving ak-47s and wearing
balaclavas, direct trafc like jaded policemen. They possibly were policemen.
Mexican journalists assigned to the drug war have a tendency to get murdered. So more than other colleagues, they must rely on simply reporting the
grafti. Toting up the proliferation of narco-banners is a metric of cartel control.
Which brings up a truism of wartime grafti: You can generally guess whos
winning not just by the volume of their spray paint, but by the quality of their
exhortations.
Last year, I drove far into Mexico to say a nal goodbye to an old friend. His
cancer had metastasized after a family member, a niece who was a schoolteacher,
had been kidnapped, raped, and axed to death, seemingly for sport, by a gang of
cartel goons. As I negotiated Mexican Army checkpoints and sped south along
highways thinned of trafc by the relentless drug violence, I spotted faded government billboardsofcial graftilooming beside the roads. They urged whoever
still bothered to read them: Di no a las Drogas, or Just say no to Drugs.
With apologies to Nancy Reagan, who Im certain meant well: The government was screwed.
Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, is currently at
work on The Mule Diaries, a book about wandering.
FOREIGN POLICY (ISSN 0015-7228) November 2011, issue number 189. Published 7 times a year in January, March, May,
July, September, November, and December by the Slate Group, a division of The Washington Post Company, at 1899 L
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A lively story, worth thinking and

wondering about. I recommend it
warmly. William H.McNeill,
author of The Rise of the West,
recipient of the National
Humanities Medal
By placing his story within
changing political, social, and cultural settings and by presenting it
in a fascinating, well-written way,
[Roberts] opens a new field in the
discipline of business history.
Alfred D. Chandler, Harvard
Business School, winner of the
Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft
Prize

an imprint of columbia university press

November 2011

95

THE

THE FP SURVEY

AMERICA AT DUSK

FP asked a panel of writers from around the world

to tell us what the United States is doing wrong. We got an earful.

THE UNITED STATES IS

world.

SADANAND DHUME

peans love to hate.

Not the promised land anymore.

In decline.

HELEEN MEES

LJUBICA GROZDANOVSKA DIMISHKOVSKA

Lovesick, broke, and driftin.

CONOR OCLERY

A sick superpower, but still a superpower.

forget it from time to time).

hold.

ALEX MASSIE

BEPPE SEVERGNINI

MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

VACLAV SMIL

ALEX MASSIE

Not enjoying the (Tea) Party.

CONOR OCLERY

Too rich on rhetoric, very poor on action.

by the huge American security apparatus.
Wasting his sublime leadership gifts.
U.S. FOREIGN POLICY IS

the world.

JOSEF JOFFE

cal it was worse).

ANDREW MWENDA

IMTIAZ GUL

WEN LIAO

MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

JOSEF JOFFE

Still a wonder to be-

Among the nest American

Acting as a determined one-term presi-

GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY

An amateur.

Better in theory than in practice.

SADANAND DHUME

Not Hillary Clinton.

Struggling between ideal and reality.

A refreshing gure in world politics.

A decent president in indecent times.

FAN GANG

HELEEN MEES

Handicapped

LJUBICA GROZDANOVSKA DIMISHKOVSKA

BEPPE SEVERGNINI

Inept. The bully has turned into a teddy bear, and both have damaged Americas clout in

Better off without George W. Bush.

BEPPE SEVERGNINI

to a broken political system.

ANDREW MWENDA

Not up to the task.

In danger of heading toward electoral defeat.

VACLAV SMIL

MOSHARRAF ZAIDI

BARACK OBAMA IS The poster boy for overpromise and underdeliver.

dent.

Still a great country (but Americans tend to

At its best when it lives up to the ideals and principles

of its founders and its Constitutionboth for itself and for other countries.

MOSHARRAF ZAIDI

The country Euro-

Its own worst enemy because it

Facing a long spell of painful adjustments.

A great but waning power.

political talents in generations.

ISSANDR EL AMRANI

FAN GANG

WEN LIAO

refuses to recognize its most severe aws and then address them.

A force for good in the

Inconsistent.

ISSANDR EL AMRANI

HELEEN MEES

MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

Often naive (but when it pretended to be cyni-

Incoherent and indecisive.

Hopelessly muddled.

SADANAND DHUME

Hamstrung by its own inevitable, necessary contradictions.

ALEX MASSIE

Confused, vacillatory, and contradictoryespecially in Africa and the Middle East.

VACLAV SMIL

Hostage

Too focused on the short term.

Anti-American.

GEORGE B.N. AYITTEY

CONOR OCLERY

As mistake-prone

as any other countrys. But because the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world, the imprints of its mistakes are
deeper and longer-lasting.

MOSHARRAF ZAIDI

THE UNITED STATES IS UNPOPULAR AROUND THE WORLD BECAUSE Of all that comes with being No.1.
SMIL

Of ignorance or even denial of other peoples circumstances.

ent.

GADI TAUB

It wants to lead but never listens.

FAN GANG

ISSANDR EL AMRANI

It fails to see that others may be truly differ-

Its morally inconsistent.

Mr. Big, both in terms of raw power (push) and cultural attraction (pull).

JOSEF JOFFE

press. SADANAND DHUME Who says the U.S. is unpopular in the world?

VACLAV

MISHAAL AL GERGAWI

It is

Too many people read the American

LJUBICA GROZDANOVSKA DIMISHKOVSKA

THE COMPLETE

WHAT AILS AMERICA

PACKAGE 64

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Foreign Policy