From today’s New York Times editorial about Obama’s foreign policy team: 

Another failing of the Bush administration was that neither the president nor his two secretaries of state were “closers” who could set a foreign-policy goal (Israeli-Palestinian peace, for instance) and then develop and execute a strategy to achieve it. We have more faith that the Obama-Clinton duo will do so.

Look, there’s a lot of fault to find in the current administration, but if the bar for success is closing the deal on an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, well, then every administration in American history has failed. 

I have marginally greater confidence that an Obama-Clinton team can move the ball forward on a peace deal.  I have no faith in any American administration to actually achieve real peace in the region anytime soon.   

There’s a difference between having an ideological affinity for a politician and consuming multiple shots of Kool-Aid within a single minute.  I think this editorial falls under the latter category.

As Anton Ego would say, the NYT editorial team could use some perspective.  They should go read this Robert D. Kaplan essay.

Tagged as: Mediasphere, U.S. foreign policy

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Michael Lewis’ long article in Portfolio provides one of the more accessible explanations for how and why Wall Street investors managed to act so recklessly with regard to the subprime mortgage market.

Lewis also makes clear why none of the Cassandras were heard by the rest of the market.  Lewis’ hero is Steve Eisman, who predicted the collapse of the housing market to anyone who asked.  The problem was, Eisman could be really, really annoying in doing so. Consider this anecdote from Lewis’ story: 

By now, Eisman knew everything he needed to know about the quality of the loans being made. He still didn’t fully understand how the apparatus worked, but he knew that Wall Street had built a doomsday machine. He was at once opportunistic and outraged.

Their first stop was a speech given by the C.E.O. of Option One, the mortgage originator owned by H&R Block. When the guy got to the part of his speech about Option One’s subprime-loan portfolio, he claimed to be expecting a modest default rate of 5 percent. Eisman raised his hand. Moses and Daniel sank into their chairs. “It wasn’t a Q&A,” says Moses. “The guy was giving a speech. He sees Steve’s hand and says, ‘Yes?’”

 “Would you say that 5 percent is a probability or a possibility?” Eisman asked.

A probability, said the C.E.O., and he continued his speech.

Eisman had his hand up in the air again, waving it around. Oh, no, Moses thought. “The one thing Steve always says,” Daniel explains, “is you must assume they are lying to you. They will always lie to you.” Moses and Daniel both knew what Eisman thought of these subprime lenders but didn’t see the need for him to express it here in this manner. For Eisman wasn’t raising his hand to ask a question. He had his thumb and index finger in a big circle. He was using his fingers to speak on his behalf. Zero! they said.

 “Yes?” the C.E.O. said, obviously irritated. “Is that another question?”

“No,” said Eisman. “It’s a zero. There is zero probability that your default rate will be 5 percent.” The losses on subprime loans would be much, much greater. Before the guy could reply, Eisman’s cell phone rang. Instead of shutting it off, Eisman reached into his pocket and answered it. “Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “But I need to take this call.” And with that, he walked out.

Eisman was right, but his behavior here suggests why he was such a lonely prophet.  Furthermore, based on that kind of behavior, one could be orgiven for thinking that Eisman was merely the latest in a long line of obnoxious market analysts. 

It’s not enough to be right — it’s also important to have the emotional intelligence necessary to persuade others that you are right. 

Tagged as: economics

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Your humble blogger has been a fan of Defense Secretary Robert Gates for some time now.  So it’s gratifying to see that I’m not the only one who’s noticed the under-the-radar quality of competence that Gates has brought to the Bush administration. 

David Sanger provides a pretty shrewd analysis in the New York Times of how Obama’s team of centrists will be executing a pretty radical rethink of foreign policy: 

all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena….

The [Obama] adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years….

A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Mr. Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. He made popular the statistic, quoted by Mr. Obama, that the United States has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers.

He also denounced “the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist and communicate with other parts of the world — the ‘soft power’ which had been so important throughout the cold war.” He blamed both the Clinton and Bush administrations and said later in an interview that “it is almost like we forgot everything we learned in Vietnam.”

Mr. Obama’s choice for national security adviser, General Jones, took the critique a step further in a searing report this year on what he called the Bush administration’s failed strategy in Afghanistan, where Mr. Obama has vowed to intensify the fight as American troops depart from Iraq. When the report came out, General Jones was widely quoted as saying, “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan,” a comment that directly contradicted the White House.

But he went on to describe why the United States and its allies were not winning: After nearly seven years of fighting, they had failed to develop a strategy that could dependably bring reconstruction projects and other assistance into areas from which the Taliban had been routed — making each victory a temporary one, reversed as soon as the forces departed.

Several times during his presidency, Mr. Bush promised to alter that strategy, even creating a “civilian reserve corps” of nation-builders under State Department auspices, but the administration never committed serious funds or personnel to the effort. If Mr. Obama and his team can bring about that kind of shift, it could mark one of the most significant changes in national security strategy in decades and greatly enhance the powers of Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state.

 In related news, Kevin Drum eats his hat. 

UPDATE:  In another related story, I’m quoted at length in this Erika Niedowski story in The National about the Obama-Clinton pairing.  My favorite quip was about their attitudes towards Bill Clinton: 

“I’m pretty sure the one thing that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have in common is they don’t want Bill Clinton to open his mouth very much.” 

Tagged as: U.S. foreign policy

Posted by Dan     8 Comments »

As Barack Obama prepares to announce his foreign policy and national security team, I find myself reflecting on something Dani Rodrik blogged about last week: 

If you are bright and are contemplating a potential career in American politics, you go to a top law school–not a public policy school.  This does not seem to have changed much in recent decades despite everything [Harvard's Kennedy School of Government] has done to make itself visible and relevant.

While I’m glad that the Fletcher School can claim at least one cabinet appointment, Rodrik raises an interesting question — why do law school grads get the foreign policy jobs coveted by public policy school grads? 

I can think of a couple of reasons.  The first is really simple — if you’re going to be writing laws, it helps to be a lawyer. 

The second reason is simple path dependence.  The original gangsters of the foreign policy community were lawyers.  The best way to get a top policymaking job is to made your mark by serving as a loyal deputy to past top policymakers.  Since people are more likely to hire their own, it’s not surprising that lawyers would hire other lawyers. 

The second reason is signaling.  Follow this logic:

1. A top policymaking job requires three key attributes:  leadership, discipline, and policy expertise
2. Policy expertise can be earned from various sources — a public policy degree is one avenue, but hardly the only one
3. A public policy degree, on the other hand, is much more fun to earn than a law degree.  Which means it requires less discipline.
4. By getting a law degree, aspirants to top policymaking jobs are signaling to observers that they can grind their way through a serious amount of drudgery.  
5. Ergo, lawyers with significant policymaking experience are more likely to have the discipline necessary to be good at their jobs.

Commenters are encouraged to proffer more reasons in the comments. 

On the other hand, I have no explanation for this: 

Of the first 15 cabinet and White House appointments announced by president-elect Barack Obama… three earned degrees from the nondescript buildings off the Strand that house the London School of Economics.

The selections of Peter Orszag as budget director and Pete Rouse and Mona Sutphen to the senior White House staff means the LSE only has two less graduates than Harvard in team Obama.

LSE currently has one more than traditional American powerhouse universities Princeton (Michelle Obama’s alma mater); Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Michigan Law School. Mighty Yale can boast only one graduate, Gregory Craig, the next presidential legal counsel, though Hillary Clinton and James Steinberg will triple the score if they end up at the state department.

Tagged as: U.S. foreign policy, law, politics

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Thankfully, you don’t see the phrase “Hobbesian frenzy” all that often in newspaper prose.  The International Herald-Tribune’s Jack Healy and Angela Macropoulos manage to get it into their lead paragraph, for very regrettable reasons: 

A Wal-Mart employee in suburban New York was trampled to death by a crush of shoppers who tore down the front doors and thronged into the store early Friday morning, turning the annual rite of post-Thanksgiving bargain hunting into a Hobbesian frenzy.

At 4:55 a.m., just five minutes before the doors were set to open, a crowd of 2,000 anxious shoppers started pushing, shoving and piling against the locked sliding glass doors of the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, New York, Nassau County police said. The shoppers broke the doors off their hinges and surged in, toppling a 34-year-old temporary employee who had been waiting with other workers in the store’s entryway.

People did not stop to help the employee as he lay on the ground, and they pushed against other Wal-Mart workers who were trying to aid the man. The crowd kept running into the store even after the police arrived, jostling and pushing officers who were trying to perform CPR, the police said.

Let’s hope that Healy and Macropoulos find a story where they manage to use the phrase “Kantian bliss” appopriately.

Readers are encouraged to write their own lead paragraph for a story that involves their favorite philosophical concept — Lockean civility, Nietzschean absurdity, Machiavellian lust, etc.   

Tagged as: Academia, culture, economics

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Comment away on the terrorist attacks that have stunned Mumbai over the past 48 hours.  I don’t have a lot to add, except that this doesn’t feel like a linked-with-Al Qaeda attack.  While there’s been carnage, these attacks have also been sloppy and messy.  Because of the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., the timing of these attacks guaranteed a low level of American targets and a low level of Ameican attention. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Sadanand Dhume places some of the blame for the attacks on India’s feckless anti-terrorism policies:   

The country’s antiterrorism effort is reactive and episodic rather than proactive and sustained. Its public discourse on Islam oscillates between crude, anti-Muslim bigotry and mindless sympathy for largely unjustified Muslim grievance-mongering. Its failure to either charm or cow its Islamist-friendly neighbors — Pakistan and Bangladesh — reveals a limited grasp of statecraft.

Finally, India’s inability to modernize its 150-million strong Muslim population, the second largest after Indonesia’s, has spawned a community that is ill-equipped to seize new economic opportunities and susceptible to militant Islam’s faith-based appeal….

In sum, the Indian approach to terrorism has been consistently haphazard and weak-kneed. When faced with fundamentalist demands, India’s democratically elected leaders have regularly preferred caving to confrontation on a point of principle. The country’s institutions and culture have abetted a widespread sense of Muslim separateness from the national mainstream. The country’s diplomats and soldiers have failed to stabilize the neighborhood. The ongoing drama in Mumbai underscores the price both Indians and non-Indians caught unawares must now pay.

Wha do you think?

Tagged as: Area studies, international relations

Posted by Dan     14 Comments »

A Happy Thanksgiving to all of the hard-working staff at danieldrezner.com!  And a very Happy Thanksgiving to all of the readers! 

Your humble blogger is thankful for his family, his friends, and his countercyclical area of interest. 

Given that he is spending the holidays with his extended family, he is particularly thankful to Slate’s John Dickerson for this guide to debating politics around the dinner table. 

Readers are warmly encouraged to post what they are thankful for in the comments…. or their favorite stuffing recipe. 

Tagged as: culture

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Ezra Klein and Megan McArdle have divergent takes on the caliber of Obama’s incoming cabinet vs. Bush’s incoming cabinet back in 2000.  Intriguingly, on this issue they go against their ideological predilections.

Klein first: 

“Isn’t it amazing,” asks Krugman, “just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent.” That certainly feels true. But the Bush administration started out with a fairly deep bench. Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Paul O’Neill –a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and a past chairman of the RAND Corporation — as Secretary of the Treasury. Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice providing foreign policy expertise. Indeed, the Bush team was lauded for being such a natural entity of governance: These were figures from the Nixon and Ford and Bush administrations, and they were backed by graybeards like Baker and Scowcroft and Greenspan. What could go wrong?

McArdle dissents: 

Obama’s got a much, much better economics team than Bush started out with.  I agree with his endorsement of Glenn Hubbard.  But Paul O’Neill wasn’t exactly an a-lister even before he turned out to have fantastic(ally entertaining!) verbal impulse control problems.  And Larry Lindsay did not match up to Larry Summers in stature, though of course what he got fired for was not being incompetent, but telling the truth.  Bush’s second term team has actually been pretty stellar, but his first term left a lot to be desired. 

I actually think they’re both right.  Klein is correct that, John Ashcroft excepted, Bush’s first cabinet was viewed at the time in largely glowing terms.  Remember when everyone thought Tommy Thompson was the perfect guy to take over HHS?  When Bush deciding to keep George Tenet and Norm Mineta in his cabinet were acts of statesmanlike bipartisanship?  Ironically, Ashcroft is likely the only first-term cabinet member whose reputation has gone up in retrospect. 

At the same time, McArdle is correct that the economic team was not considered the strength of the cabinet — the national security team had the all-stars in Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, etc. 

The simple fact is that what matters in any organization is the leadership from the top.  George W. Bush put together a group of strong-willed individuals, but displayed little interest in refereeing disputes among them.  Will Obama do better?  I’m cautiously optimistic, but we won’t know for a while. 

Tagged as: Uncategorized, politics

Posted by Dan     7 Comments »

That’s the title of my latest essay over at The National Interest Online, which discusses Tim Geithner and the rest of Obama’s economic team.  Go check it out. 

This is not the key paragraph, but it is the one I enjoyed writing the most: 

[O]ne could forgive Geithner right now if his head swelled just a little bit. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up five hundred points on Friday as word of his appointment leaked. The Dow jumped close to another four hundred points yesterday after Obama officially introduced him. One has to wonder if, sometime this week, when Geithner’s wife asks him to do the dishes, he will be tempted to respond, “Have you caused the Dow to jump by more than ten percent? I didn’t think so!”

Tagged as: economics, politics

Posted by Dan     1 Comment »

Shadi Hamid points out that the left-right spectrum doesn’t work terribly well when thinking about U.S. foreign policy.

Matthew Yglesias spells out why with a little bit more detail: 

To understand the context for this, it’s important to recall that the ideological spectrum around foreign policy elites isn’t sorted all that well. On economic issues, moderate Republicans are almost all still to the right of moderate Democrats. But on foreign policy, traditional Republican realists have a lot more in common with liberal Democrats than either do with Democratic hawks. Both are likely to have opposed the Iraq War or soured on it early. Both are likely to be skeptical of the idea that we should base our foreign policy on self-righteousness. Both are likely to appreciate the importance of taking a balanced approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. And both are likely to be skeptical of the idea that the highest expresion of humanitarian impulses is launching unilateral wars surrounded by high-minded rhetoric. 

This sounds about right, but Yglesias omits a key driver behind this policy confluence.  The performance of the Bush administration has eliminated the two largest points of disagreement between these two groups.  Liberal Democrats used to place a much higher premium on human rights questions than realists — but the Bush administration soured the idea of putting this issue front and center. 

Similarly, realists were much more willing to act unilaterally than those on the left.  The intense blowback from the Bush administration’s unilateralist policies, however, have blunted that impulse to some degree.  So now realists are saying that we need to work closely with allies and liberals saying the U.S. should perfect its own human rights regime before looking for foreign causes. 

Tagged as: U.S. foreign policy, politics

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