The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Quartet: A Columnist’s Farewell: How to Read a Column

In honor of William Safire, former speechwriter, columnist, and expert political language maven, who passed away on Sunday after a battle with pancreatic cancer.  Considerhis dozen rules for reading a political column:

via The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Quartet: A Columnist’s Farewell: How to Read a Column.

If you haven’t heard of him or discovered his lovely language column, give it a try.  And, keep in mind his most interesting advice–something we will remember as we head into General Conference with some very hard-working septuagenarians–”Never retire.”

At U.N., Views on Iran and N. Korea Are Divided – NYTimes.com

What to do with Iran an North Korea?

As dozens of world leaders began gathering here on Monday for the General Assembly, the puzzle of how to confront Iran and another defiant, nuclear-minded state, North Korea, continued to stymie diplomats. Old strategies have proved fruitless, but it is difficult to build support for bold new ones.

Submit your links for the best policy suggestions and see if you can do well as an special political advisor:

Policy Matters | How a Daily Brief Shaped Presidential Decisions

Can the work produced by competent analysts, regional experts, and others–vetted through a careful process–really have an impact?  Should it?  A new report analyzies the role of a key daily document and its impact (Via the LDS National Security Listserv and Professor Valerie Hudson):

Under President George W. Bush, the President’s Daily Brief — the highly classified intelligence paper delivered each morning to the White House — rose to “an unprecedented level of importance,” with negative consequences for the intelligence community, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution.

These included “skewing intelligence production away from deeper research and arms-length analysis” and driving analysts to choose “the latest, attention-grabbing clandestine reports from the field,” says the study, released Tuesday, called “The U.S. Intelligence Community and Foreign Policy: Getting Analysis Right.”

The importance that Bush placed on the PDB caused problems among analysts “who came to see much of their raison d’ etre

Via WP.com, Study Faults Bush’s Emphasis On Daily Intelligence Brief

Book Review – ‘The Hawk and the Dove – Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,’ by Nicholas Thompson – Review – NYTimes.com

Meet two giants in the field of U.S. foreign policy, Nitze and Kennan, or the “Hawk” and the “Dove.”  Herein originated the policy of containment, as well as a vigorous debate:

Who was right? Did the United States put too much stock in military preparedness, unnecessarily antagonizing the Soviets while guaranteeing that the East-West rivalry would play out in the sole arena where Moscow could compete? Or did Americans act sensibly in response to a clear and present danger of Soviet aggression? Nicholas Thompson insists in “The Hawk and the Dove,” his thoroughly engrossing, if not altogether satisfying, dual biography of Nitze and Kennan, that both men had valid points.

“Each was profoundly right at some moments and profoundly wrong at others,” Thompson asserts of their long, inter­twined careers as statesmen, policy makers and public intellectuals. The two men “pulled in different directions” but “complemented each other” and, Thompson suggests, contributed in distinct ways to America’s victory in the cold war. They even managed to remain friends despite their differences.

via Book Review – ‘The Hawk and the Dove – Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War,’ by Nicholas Thompson – Review – NYTimes.com.

U.N. Reports on Developing Nations’ Energy Needs – NYTimes.com

And you thought dating was expensive? Try picking up the tab for the developing worlds’ energy needs…500-600 billion per year for 10 years!  The actual request at a recent meeting, was slightly more reasonable:

Developing nations want a commitment from the developed world of financial support for reducing current and future emissions, but no concrete commitments have been forthcoming. At the summit meeting of African Union leaders this week in Tripoli, Libya, members agreed to ask the industrialized world for $67 billion annually, including compensation for the consequences of global warming it created, according to news reports.

via U.N. Reports on Developing Nations’ Energy Needs – NYTimes.com.

Fatalism About War Misguided

The complex interplay between war and peace–a la Tolstoy–as well as the constant list of challenges (see previous post) might lead to disillusionment, dispair, or fatalism.  Such a view is misguided, according to John Horman at Slate:

If war is not inevitable, neither is peace. “This past year saw increasing threats to security, stability, and peace in nearly every corner of the globe,” warns the SIPRI 2009 Yearbook. Global arms spending—especially by the United States, China, and Russia—has surged, and efforts to stem nuclear proliferation have stalled. An al-Qaida operative could detonate a nuclear suitcase bomb in New York City tomorrow, reversing the recent trend in an instant. But the evidence of a decline in war-related deaths shows that we need not—and should not—accept war as an eternal scourge of the human condition.In fact, this fatalistic view is wrong empirically and morally. Empirically, because war clearly stems less from some hard-wired “instinct” than from mutable cultural and environmental conditions; much can be done, and has been done, to reduce the risks it poses. Morally, because the belief that war will never end helps perpetuate it. The surer we are that the world is irredeemably violent, the more likely we are to support hawkish leaders and policies, making our belief self-fulfilling. Our first step toward ending war is to believe that we can end it.

This doesn’t mean the threats–such as nuclearn proliferation-are not dire.  A new multimedia learning module from CFR offers polished video intros on the nature of that particular threat, as well as timelines, key issues, and recommendation–all in a non-wonky, accessible format.

Film List | Armando Iannucci’s ‘In the Loop’ – What’s So Funny About War? – NYTimes.com

A film about politics, policy, diplomacy and war? You had me at ‘hello.’

“I’ve always wanted to make a funny film with lots of one-liners, like a screwball comedy,” Mr. Iannucci said in a telephone interview. “I was reading and researching into the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, reading about all the dysfunction and competition in Washington and how the Brits got star-struck and were lured into it. I thought: Either you can scream your head off about how terrible this is, or you can say, ‘This is a farce.’ And then I thought, ‘That’s the story. That’s the film I want to make.’ ”

To get his foreign nuances right, Mr. Iannucci traveled to Washington and quizzed officials in Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department about the minutiae of their working lives. Among the Americans in the cast are a punchy James Gandolfini, playing a dovish general with a robust temper, and Mimi Kennedy and David Rasche, as mortal enemies in the upper echelons of the State Department. Anna Chlumsky and Zach Woods play aides intent on derailing each other’s careers; Mr. Woods’s character is named Chad, which gives rise to the obvious joke.

“We also did our own swearing research,” Mr. Iannucci said. That was necessary; characters in “In the Loop” curse with Shakespearian inventiveness. Interestingly, Mr. Iannucci said, he found that people in the Pentagon swear a great deal more than people in the State Department, and that “four-star generals are very foulmouthed.”

via Armando Iannucci’s ‘In the Loop’ – What’s So Funny About War? – NYTimes.com.

Booklist | History as a Key for Policymakers in Foreign Affairs

Too often the long view or the hard questions lose out–perhaps because of process but also likely due to lack of awareness.  Kudos to the late Harvard professor Ernest May.  The idea that those making the big decisions need to consider the past is praised by Stephen Walt on FP.com:

His book “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Abuse of History in American Foreign Policy in one of the first IR courses I ever took, and its central message — about the ways that historical interpretations shape (and more often, distort) policymaking — has resonated with me ever since.

…leading into his other important work on this idea…

Professor May developed a course on the systematic use of historical comparisons to determine current public policy choices. They also wrote a book on the subject, “Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers” (Free Press, 1986), whose methodology has since been used by “a cadre of historians” and students.  [via Ernest May, International Relations Expert, Dies at 80 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com.]

One brief synopsis in Foreign Affairs 1986, notes:

Professional historians, enjoying the luxury of unhurried reflection, might say that the book’s “method” is no more than a systematic and common-sense statement of the obvious-but the authors demonstrate that the “obvious” has too often been ignored, with unfortunate results.

Its also wonderful to find the public/private qualities of May’s greatness in sync, with some of his former students praising his name as a gentleman and a scholar.

Thinking Big, as in a few pithy thoughts on “Grand Strategy”

One colleague mentioned recently that we can’t ‘do’ grand strategy—its really only known years after policy has been argued and events played out.  I’m not sure what I think about that, but I do like to think about it…first being exposed to it reviewing the syllabus for John Lewis Gaddis’ application-only course at Yale (co-taught with Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill.)

Gaddis has noted that academics have a hard time doing the big think–listing several reasons. I agree that the lost art of teaching rhetoric has a great deal to do with it (which still survives at BYU, thanks in no small part to people such as Greg Clark and Gideon Burton).

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art – which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings – and that consequences come from using them.

A new book by Leslie Gelb, reviewed by historian Michael Beschloss captures the practice of this shall-we-say-not-yet-but-soon-to-be-lost-art, a “plea for greater stragtegic thinking.”

Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, persuasively argues that the most effective presidents try to fashion a coherent strategy, explain it forthrightly to the public and resist the temptation to be distracted by sudden opportunities and crises. Others have made this point before. (See, for instance, John Lewis Gaddis’s landmark history “Strategies of Containment,” which shows how six presidents fought the cold war.) But Gelb’s treatment is distinctive, adorned with astute historical examples and reminiscences from his own high-level service in Johnson’s Pentagon and Carter’s State Department. It is filled with gritty, shrewd, specific advice on foreign policy ends and means that will be especially useful for a new president and secretary of state without deep experience dealing with the world (although the bulk of the book was clearly written before the world economic calamity of the past months).

via Book Review – ‘Power Rules – How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy,’ by Leslie H. Gelb – Review – NYTimes.com.

Solving the Arab/Israeli Conflict Requires Language & Negotiation

Not long ago I  hosted Ethan Bronner, a very talented journalist, on campus  and it was discouraging to hear from him how reporting on the Middle East is a quick ride to making enemies on all sides.  This story by him captures how difficult the barriers for peace are for a new U.S. president, including the use of different vocabularies to explain the various perspectives. (He has been covering the Gaza conflict for the last month, so its freshly informed by current events.)

I have written about the Arab-Israeli conflict on and off for more than a quarter-century and have spent the past four weeks covering Israel’s war in Gaza. For me, Mr. Husseini’s story sums up how the two sides speak in two distinct tongues, how the very words they use mean opposite things to each other, and how the war of language can confound a reporter’s attempts to narrate — or a new president’s attempts to mediate — this conflict in a way both sides can accept as fair.

One step further, this Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges’ research on  conflict shows a common-sense but critical distinction–putting the economists out in the cold on this one.  People fight for deeply-held values and beliefs, even if its against their economic or other well-being:

Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

This is important because oft-tired diplomatic and development-related projects often appear at the center of apparently ‘reasonable’ efforts to broker peace. Not so, they note:

Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters (electricity, water, agriculture, the economy and so on) will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues. But this is only a recipe for another Hundred Years’ War — progress on everyday material matters will simply heighten attention on value-laden issues of “who we are and want to be.”

So what works?  Symbolic gesture and concessions.  Good old fashioned negotiation.

Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.

Remarkably, our survey results were mirrored by our discussions with political leaders from both sides. For example, Mousa Abu Marzook (the deputy chairman of Hamas) said no when we proposed a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return. He became angry when we added in the idea of substantial American aid for rebuilding: “No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount.”  But when we mentioned a potential Israeli apology for 1948, he brightened: “Yes, an apology is important, as a beginning. It’s not enough because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that.” His response suggested that progress on sacred values might open the way for negotiations on material issues, rather than the reverse.