The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

I have mentioned a number of times a book of my dad's from the late 80s called The Rise and Fall of theGreat Powers. It took me a long time to finish, which is I guess why I mentioned it over a long course of time in multiple blog posts.

I finally finished this book, and wanted to share a few final impressions. First off, I was surprised time and again by the analyses and projections at the end of the book, which lay out possible futures for the US, China, Japan, the EU, and the USSR. Many of them were remarkably prescient—the inevitable demographic and political decline of the Soviet Union (and the radicalization that would work at the heart of its Muslim populations in the wake of the Afghanistan invasion), the uncertain future of the EU which could either go really well or really poorly, the meteoric rise of China. Obviously the author didn't precisely predict the fall of the Eastern bloc, and was pessimistic about the possibility of the EU's consolidating a common currency. He underestimated the pace of China's economic growth, and didn't foresee the stagnation of 1990s Japan.

Most striking to me though was the continued relevance of the themes explored in the book thirty years ago. There is a lot of discussion of nuclear war planning, of the rise of ethnic nationalism and totalitarianism in the 20th century around the Second World War, the inevitable tensions between the US and Russia as leading superpowers, the unresolved detente of the Korean War.  I am sad to say that these themes are regaining relevance today.  If I'd read the book ten years ago, I probably would have thought that it was dated, that nuclear war and a renewed Cold War with Russia were a threat that we just didn't have to worry about anymore.  I likewise wouldn't have dwelled too much on the 1980s tensions in the Korean peninsula.  And the appeal of ethnic nationalism to a defeated people would have been an interesting study in German history, but I wouldn't have so tangibly and immediately applied it to my own country, today.  But these themes that I would have glossed over as relics of the past now seem more relevant than ever.

Another major theme throughout the book's arc, from the Hapsburg era to the 1980s, is the escalating cost of war and weaponry. In this respect, Kennedy predicts that the US and maybe a few others will remain the only superpowers, since it is so expensive to build up a modern military and weaponry systems. However, this is somehwat challenged by the recent trend toward disruption as opposed to full-on major power confrontation. Even important powers like China and Russia are apparently opting for morevolume of lower-tech weapons, because with low-tech weaponry you can disrupt the dominance of a high-tech superpower at a fraction of the cost of maintaining that dominance.  From a recent Reuters article, "Carriers, ... give Washington’s rivals a cheap opportunity to score big. For the cost of a single carrier, ... a rival can deploy 1,227 anti-carrier missiles".

I will close with a long quote from a long-time employee of the State Department on the occasion of his more or less forced retirement.  I think it does a good job of explaining how the US can, or cannot, succeed in diplomacy.  He says that the only way for us to continue to advance our interests in the long-term is by stressing our values and principles.  If we try to dominate through propaganda and misinformation, we will lose out to Russia; we can't compete with them in that field.  If we try to treat diplomacy as a commercial transaction, we will lose out to China, the master of that approach.  But if we appeal to the hope, liberty, the ideals and principles that we stand for, we can continue to hold the attention and the sympathy and the admiration of the rest of the world.

The United States is the world’s greatest economic power, the world’s greatest military power, and with your vigilance, it always will be.  But the greatest power we project is hope, the promise that people can establish liberty in their own country without leaving it....

If we wall ourselves off from the world, we will extinguish Liberty’s projection, as surely as if, as the Gospel says, we hid our lamp under a bushel basket.  If we do not respect other nations and their citizens, we can not demand respect for our citizens.   If our public statements become indistinguishable from disinformation and propaganda, we will lose our credibility.  If we choose to play our cards that way, we will lose that game to the masters in Moscow.  If our interaction with other countries is only a business transaction, rather than a partnership with Allies and friends, we will lose that game too.  China practically invented transactional diplomacy, and if we choose to play their game, Beijing will run the table.

Business made America great, as it always has been, and business leaders are among our most important partners.  But let’s be clear, despite the similarities.  A dog is not a cat.  Baseball is not football.  And diplomacy is not a business.  Human rights are not a business.  And democracy is, most assuredly, not a business.

Ungrateful refugees

This is an article from a woman who came to the US as a child, a refugee from Iran.  She makes the case that refugees should be no more grateful than anyone else, and that the case for accepting refugees is not because they make your country great (because not all of them will, though I personally would argue that countries with more diverse populations are in fact better off), but because it's simply the right thing to do.  These are similar arguments to ones I've expressed, not in relation to refugees but just in terms of providing a decent, dignified life for everyone in a society, not just the lucky few that our supposed meritocracy deems worthy of respect.

In her own, stronger words, Ms. Nayeri explains why she shouldn't be particularly grateful for having been received as a refugee to the US when she was a kid:

what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories. Even if we remain a bunch of ordinary Iranians, sometimes bitter or confused. Even if the country gets overcrowded and you have to give up your luxuries, and we set up ugly little lives around the corner, marring your view. If we need a lot of help and local services, if your taxes rise and your street begins to look and feel strange and everything smells like turmeric and tamarind paste, and your favourite shop is replaced by a halal butcher, your schoolyard chatter becoming ching-chongese and phlegmy “kh”s and “gh”s, and even if, after all that, we don’t spend the rest of our days in grateful ecstasy, atoning for our need.

I would add, from a non-refugee viewpoint, that my reading (or my twisting) of her argument is that it is not a paean to ingratitude, but rather a call that we should all be grateful, all of us who are alive.  If the US is a great place to live, then the native-born should be just as grateful as the refugee to be there.  And ideally committed to making the entire world a decent place to live, for all of its people.

Despite herself, Ms. Nayeri does end on a note that seems to reiterate the benefit to the receiver country, an argument she explicitly rejects earlier in the essay:

the world is duller without [immigrants] – even more so if they arrived as refugees. Because a person’s life is never a bad investment, and so there are no creditors at the door, no debt to repay. Now there’s just the rest of life, the stories left to create, all the messy, greedy, ordinary days that are theirs to squander.

The bottom line is that offering sanctuary to those in need is just common decency, and the refugee should only be as grateful to live somewhere as the native-born are to live there.  And in the end, common decency is rewarding to all, because it allows those who are helped to realize their potential in a way they wouldn't have otherwise, which in turn enriches the world for the rest of us..

Black heroism in Night of the Living Dead

I'm not a big horror movie fan.  But when I was in college, I saw Night of the Living Dead during a dorm Halloween movie night, and I was pretty impressed.  Actually my first reaction on seeing it was that I was glad I hadn't seen it when I was younger, because the whole zombies-breaking-into-a-house motif would have scared the wits out of me.  I mean, I was terrified of that premise even without having seen the movie, just having heard about it as a kid.

Anyway, what I thought was really interesting about the movie was that it seemed to offer a subtle challenge to the prevailing order of racial oppression and disdain in 1960s America.  The smartest, most level-headed character was a black man, and after weathering the storm of the zombie attack, he is anticlimactically shot down by a police helicopter that thinks he himself is a zombie.  An ambiguous but very thought-provoking set of images.

I had long wondered if anyone else shared my reading, until recently when I came across this article that advances and develops a much more detailed and thought-out version of my interpretation.

Ashenden or the British Agent

I just read Ashenden (also called The British Agent) by Somerset Maugham.  I'd never read anything before by him, but I knew that he was considered a godfather of spy literature, so I had to try it out.  I really enjoyed the book--it reads like a proto-LeCarre, with the antihero spy, the quiet, non-James Bond action, and the detailed reading of British class idiosyncracies.  It's off-copyright now, so you can download it for free here.  It is fascinating to see how much of World War One-era culture and espionage is similar to how we still do things today.  It's from a hundred years ago, but the characters don't seem antiquated or old-timey at all.  It's also a fun coincidence that lately I've been watching the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles with my sons, since much of the series depicts Indy's espionage escapades in the same war and the same era.

Anti-fascist video from the US War Department

This is a pretty lucid take-down of ethno-nationalism and fascism more generally, dating from 1947.

Lost City of the Monkey God

I just finished reading The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston.  It is a wide-reaching account of the National Geographic-funded expedition to rediscover the remains of a major civilization in the dense jungle of the Mosquitia region in Honduras.  Wide-reaching because the author deftly goes into recent, colonial-era, and pre-Hispanic history of the region, as well as offering detailed considerations of archeological practice and even human epidemiology.

Early on in the book there are a few more predictable passages of Preston's first impressions of a country he's never been to and is linguistically and culturally unequipped to understand.  The mundane details of modern Tegucigalpa read as exotic landscape, rife with poverty and pollution and violence that seems sometimes more informed by a lurid imagination than by what's in front of him.  It doesn't help that his initial guides are often hucksters that want to play up their own derring-do and heroism by spinning tall tales about how rough everything is in Honduras, and by extension how tough they are for surviving it.  Those of us who have spent a lot of time as expats in developing countries have surely seen this a fair amount, and perhaps been tempted to ourselves partake in the trend, swapping stories of how badass we are for coolly confronting the exagerrated dangers of our adopted homes.

But it is to Preston's credit that, as he the person becomes more familiar with the nuance of the country he's visiting, his narrative becomes less wide-eyed and sensationalist, and you feel that he is really picking up on a lot of the essence of what he's seeing. 

Anyway, here's a better review of the book that should give you an idea of if you want to read it for yourself.

A Tuskegee airman reflects on racism

Here is a sad reflection from the oldest of the living Tuskegee airmen.  Firstly sad because, despite his service to country during the Second World War, he was excluded from civilian jobs and full civic and economic participation in his country after the war.  And secondly because, with his 102 years of experience, he feels that racism is a pernicious problem that doesn't seem to go away.

How does foreign aid help middle America?

A lucid contribution on how foreign aid helps domestic wellbeing within the US.  The focus in on aid to Central America, but it is more broadly applicable.

RAISE act

This is an informed and astute analysis of the RAISE Act, the Republican-sponsored immigration reform bill.  The analysis is written by Lyman Stone, a conservative blogger who writes what I think are fair, honest, and relatively hate-less thoughts on migration dynamics in the US and elsewhere.  More than anything, I appreciate that in this and in other articles I've read from him the fact that he is a sincere conservative, meaning that he has certain ideas or preferences for how a society should be run, but he is very conscious of and averse to the ethnic nationalism that has stained the Right Wing in the US and elsewhere.

In his analysis of the RAISE act, Stone is overly concerned in my opinion with the idea of integration of immigrants in US society.  I'm not saying that it's not important for a society to have cohesion and interaction among its members.  But Stone harps a lot on ethnic enclaves whose members don't integrate into US society.  I would offer a few arguments for why this is a misplaced concern. 

First off, US society is constantly evolving and changing.  This is inherent to the society.  Think of all the things that are now "typically American" that are really inheritances from Irish or German or Italian or Mexican immigrants, all of whom maintained certain cultural idiosyncracies because there were so many of them and they maintained ethnic enclaves where their food and language and ideas were preserved, developed, and evolved while they gradually entered the US mainstream.  If all our immigrants in the past had been evenly spaced across the Anglo population instead of concentrated into certain enclaves, and encouraged to rapidly adopt Anglo-American cultural practices, we wouldn't have the pizza or beer or hot dogs or hamburgers or music or movies or politics or philosophy that have enjoyed such important specific contributions from strong ethnic components.  We'd still be eating corn pone and talking like Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Our US culture today would probably be unrecognizable to an American of 1885, and I am glad for it.  If we try to freeze our society at one point in time and demand that any newcomers just maintain that status quo, it is an arbitrary and silly exercise, and it keeps us from the constant change and evolution that has been one major hallmark of our society.

More importantly than this, I think Stone's focus on immigrants' apparent hesitation to integrate into US society is grounded on some fallacies.  Namely, I don't think immigrants are in fact that hesitant to integrate into US society.  My understanding is that, by many measures, immigrants today are integrating faster than those of the past.  There is more intermarriage, quicker learning of English, etc.  Immigrants in the early 20th century often didn't learn English for decades, and their kids took a long time to as well.  Immigrants today, and especially their kids, have to pick up English almost immediately.  I think that many monolingual Americans see immigrants speaking a different language with each other and assume it is because they can't speak English.  But the fact that you know a second or third or fourth language doesn't mean you don't speak English.  So one fallacy is that immigrants are in fact hesitant to or unable to integrate into US society.  This has been totally counter to my experience. 

Another fallacy that Stone seems to rely on is that there is one "US culture" to integrate into.  By his own admission (in other writings), Mr. Stone dislikes and dismisses cities in general, refuses to spend much time in them, and is a proud Kentuckian.  All of these run counter to the mainstream of US society--most of us are not rural, spend a lot of time in cities, and are not from Kentucky.  Is Mr. Stone's unwillingness to adapt and "integrate" into mainstream US society a cause for concern or censure?  I would say not.  If he wants to live his American identity a certain way, that's his right and prerogative, and the rest of us are also in fact richer for it.  The same goes for a Pakistani-American who likes living in a certain area of Chicago and hanging out with a lot of other South Asians.

But the last and most important fallacy I pick up from Mr. Stone is the idea that immigrants live in segregated enclaves mainly due to their own personal choice.  Obviously there is merit to the idea that many people of a certain background seek out others of that background when they arrive somewhere new.  This provides support networks, familiar faces and ideas, a certain degree of safety.  Of course you will seek out some people of your own background to help you settle in.  But I don't think many people migrate to the US from elsewhere in order to be exclusively around people from their origin country.  Those who leave their countries are preseumably the most open to new experiences, to being around different people, sometimes even to rejecting their home culture.  No, I would argue that the existence of monolithic ethnic enclaves is largely a result of "mainstream" white Americans not wanting to be around too many other kinds of people.  Chicago's Latino neighborhoods have undergone a massive influx of Latinos since the 1980s, but equal to or greater than this influx has been the flight of the whites from these neighborhoods.  The first Latinos arriving in these areas chose to live in white neighborhoods.  It was the whites that fled.  Likewise, Chicago's black neighborhoods were initially forced to be all black by laws, and in the and 1960s when this de jure segregation was struck down, blacks sought to live around whites.  It was the whites who fled.  And it is the whites who continue to refuse to look in now-nonwhite neighborhoods when they are making housing decisions.  So to summarize, I think that the bogeyman of immigrants' self-segregating is at the very least exagerrated, if not totally invalid.

All this said, I would encourage my readers to check out Lyman Stone's (much more statistically-informed) thoughts on migration.  I certainly will be doing so.

A brief breakdown of the new school segregation

Here is a pretty comprehensive, easy-to-understand explanation of how schools have been and are being resegregated even after the legal desegregation efforts after the Brown vs. Board decision.  This happens in part through the creation of new school districts that cut out people of color and lower-income communities.  I've written a fair amount about this before.

A funny take on white oppression

Here is a tongue-in-cheek interview with a made-up professor who explains why some white folks in the US are feeling oppressed, or even think they're victims of a white genocide.