Profile: Sir Mark Sykes, midwife to the modern Middle East

Returning to his country estate one day in the waning years of the Edwardian era, the British diplomat and Orientalist Sir Mark Sykes was met by the tears of his infant son. Informed by his wife Edith that the child was inconsolable, Sykes bundled him into his arms and disappeared into the drawing room. Within minutes the crying stopped, prompting Edith to inquire what he had done. Replied Sykes, who would soon emerge as midwife to the modern Middle East and the century of war and dispossession that followed: ‘I just reasoned with him.’

Together with his French co-conspirator, François Georges-Picot, Sykes would draft the accord that defined the contours of the post-First World War Arab world amid the ashes of Ottoman rule: a patchwork of new nation states as Anglo-French proxies and a Jewish enclave in Palestine.

Contempt for the agreement still resonates, particularly among those who have endured it. This year, when militant Islamists declared that they had established a so-called caliphate in war-torn Iraq and Syria, its leaders proclaimed that they were eradicating the despised demarcations.

For those close to Sykes, either through scholarship or blood relations, it is an undeserved infamy. A model father and husband, even-tempered and wry – he regularly embellished his letters with cartoons and caricature – he was pinioned between the nationalist passions of the peoples of the Levant and the imperial ambitions of Britain. As an agent of empire, he was compelled to make conflicting guarantees of sovereignty to rival Arab and Zionist leaders and, inevitably, satisfied no one.

Christopher Sykes, the writer and photographer, told me in a 2000 interview that his grandfather ‘had a refreshing, if naïve belief that he could avoid conflict by encouraging parties to be forthright and reasonable with each other’. George Antonius, in his book The Arab Awakening, slams the Sykes- Picot Treaty – primarily the work of the Foreign Office – but praises Sykes for his good-faith labour.

Even as a boy, Sykes was forced to tread a perilous middle ground. His father, Sir Tatton, drank heavily and beat him. His glamorous mother Jessica was a compulsive gambler who would visit her son at the Beaumont Jesuit School, in Berkshire, intoxicated. While still a student, Sykes was obliged to give testimony at his parents’ highly public divorce trial.

The young Sykes found solace and adventure travelling throughout the Eastern empire, particularly the Levant. A photograph from one expedition captures him in a pith helmet, a tweed hunting jacket, riding boots and breeches. He is cradling a hunting rifle, a Bedouin guide by his side. Back at St John’s, his Cambridge college, sporting a fez and smoking a water pipe, he would regale students and dons with his travels. These he would crystalize into best-selling travelogues on the Indo-Arabian world, and in 1911 he was elected as a Conservative MP.

Sykes also rose to the rank of captain in the Boer War. Like Winston Churchill, whom he met and befriended during the conflict, he had an irreverent wit. England, he once noted, was great ‘not because of Liberalism, but because of our extraordinary geographical position which has permitted of our playing the fool; and the Germans with a vile geographical position have by Iron, Blood, Discipline, Brutality, Labour, Sweat, Ruthlessness, Devotion, Pertinacity made themselves of some account ... If the Germans had had politicians like Gladstone and Cobden ... they would either be ruled by Russia, France or Turkey.’

Once resettled from the Transvaal to his native Yorkshire, Sykes invented the idea of camouflage patterns to hide artillery pieces and founded the Wagoner’s Special Reserves, a logistical support unit that was deployed to France in 1914. Impressed, Lord Kitchener assigned him to the General Staff for Eastern service.

The primary objective of the Sykes-Picot Treaty, according to Sykes and others in the War Office, was to create a Franco-British buffer in the Middle East that would deter Russian predations on the land bridge between Europe and India. Sykes’s main initiative to give Mosul to the French, was overruled by the Foreign Office. A partitioned Arabia would also allow for a Jewish state, which the ardently Zionist Sykes believed could co-exist peacefully with its predominantly Muslim neighbours.

On February 16, 1919, the influenza epidemic that was to kill more Europeans than the war itself claimed Sykes, a loss Antonius described as ‘nothing short of a calamity’ for Jews, Arabs and British alike. Sykes’s charger, Punch, led the funeral procession, saddle empty and with the deceased’s boots fixed in the stirrups.

The World Today is a bi-monthly journal published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

The Blind Side of Empire

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." - Newton’s third law of motion.

A new book by University of California historian Hugh Wilford reveals how two CIA fixers, Archie Roosevelt and Miles Copeland, almost single-handedly subverted the Arab world and Iran along with U.S. interests there. Reviewing America’s Great Game: The CIA’s secret Arabists and the shaping of the modern Middle East, Levantine hand Charles Glass recommends Wilford’s “absorbing account of romantics enchanted by Kiplingesque myths … who cynically harbored the self-contradictory ambition of democratizing [the region] while arrogating all decisions to themselves.” The author reveals how Copeland and Roosevelt launched civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen while financing Islamist groups against nationalists and leftists they regarded as threats to American imperium. Their seismic intrigues included the overthrow in 1953 of Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s freely elected Prime Minister who had offended the West by nationalizing the country’s petroleum fields.

The coup, which was followed by the retrenchment of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, made Persian crude safe for foreign exploitation but it also greased the rails for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Shiite revolution that convulses the region today.

In his otherwise thoughtful review, Glass characterizes Copeland and Roosevelt as rogue agents who “did more to mold the modern Middle East than the so-called policy-makers in Washington.” In fact, the decision to take down Mossadegh came directly from then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a foul, paranoid kingmaker who saw the communist menace flickering in his postprandial tumblers of Old Overholt and who despised leaders he could not control.

Nor was there anything particularly rogue or exceptional about Dulles. The history of empire is lousy with apparatchiks and overlords unable to anticipate the consequences of their own bone-headed behavior. In the eleventh century A.D., for example, the kingdoms of England and France - unprovoked, and with the imprimatur of a rapacious Catholic Church - laid siege to the Arab-controlled Levant, unleashing two centuries of war that ended in ruins for the aggressors. A thousand years later those same powers unilaterally partitioned the Arab world and in the process set aside a particularly coveted parcel of land for a Jewish state. The result has been a century of war, autocracy, and economic decay - an inheritance that grows more toxic by the day.

In both cases the aggrandizing powers failed to consider the ancillary costs of their actions and learned nothing from their mistakes. Indeed, in 1920 French General Henri Gouraud, having subdued Syrian militias resisting his advance on Damascus, famously rested his boot on the tomb of Saladin, the twelfth-century hero of the anti-crusaders forces, and declared “Arise, we have returned.” Only for a time, as it turned out.

The CIA isn’t much for self-reflection either. To this day, its role in Mossadegh’s destruction has been withheld from the State Department’s official history of U.S. Iran policy and the agency has refused to make public its own account of the upheaval. Such stonewalling has provided cover for primitives in Congress who deny a CIA role in the coup as part of their efforts to derail President Obama’s outreach to Tehran.

Such are the occluding properties of dominion. The laws of unintended consequences, like Newtonian physics, are as unyielding as the refusal among militarists to acknowledge causality between policy and reprisal. This unwillingness was expressed most grotesquely in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when America’s ruling elites rejected any suggestion - including those made by Osama bin Laden itself - that the attacks were in response to U.S. Middle East policy. As the late intellectual Tony Judt put it in his final book, “I was struck [after 9/11] by this perverse contemporary insistence on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas at home and abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.”

American wars waged in the postwar era, according to the U.S. Congress and Brown University, are estimated to have cost as much as $7 trillion in constant 2011 dollars. The human toll, as calculated in a 2012 Washington Post study, could number some six million dead. Carnage on such a scale begs for a reduced U.S. role in global affairs rather than a larger one. Yet the war on context - a propaganda war that provides oxygen for the real thing - is well underway, particularly in Asia. Writing in the New York Times this week, Tuong Lai, an adviser to two Vietnamese prime ministers appealed to Americans to redeem the vision of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh: an American-Vietnamese alliance in Asia. That includes, he wrote, “the sort of close economic and military relations Ho had wanted after World War II …. That is the only way to defeat the new Chinese expansionism.”

As with similar entreaties from Asian states for the U.S. to deepen its already vast military commitments in the region, Tuong’s intentions are cleverly unburdened by context. By understating the magnitude of America’s decade-long quagmire in Indochina, he hopes to make palatable a U.S. cold war, if not a hot one, with China itself. Sadly, there are plenty of interested parties in Washington - as short on memory and perspective as their are long on power and influence - who would indulge them.

The West’s Hundred-Year War on the Arabs

If, as the saying goes, failure is an orphan, then the fruit of Western intercourse with the Middle East must be the most forlorn love-child in the history of foreign affairs. London and Paris, for example, have yet to officially acknowledge the damage they did to the Arab world by imposing its partition at the end of World War I. Nor is the Zionist movement likely to assume a shred of culpability for the Middle East’s mess for erecting a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. And now former Bush cadres are trying to cast blame for the consequences of their disastrous war on Iraq at the Obama administration.

Neoconservative fabulism to the contrary, paternity for Iraq’s current misery rests with those who frog-marched the world into war a decade ago and then botched the job thoroughly enough to realize an epochal, sectarian holocaust. The New York Times last week could not have been more compelling or concise. The Sunni-jihadi horde that is now tearing Iraq apart, it reported earlier this month, “is directly connected to the American legacy in Iraq. The American prisons [established immediately after the invasion] were fertile grounds for jihadist leaders and virtual universities where leaders would indoctrinate their recruits with hard-line ideologies.”

Among the group’s objectives, apparently, is to nullify the borders drawn under a century-old Franco-British scheme to Balkanize the Middle East into assorted states and emirates and to provide geographical definition for a Jewish state in Palestine. The agreement, codified in secret by the notorious Sykes-Picot Treaty and then ratified in several international forums, betrayed Western promises to Arab elites for statehood in exchange for their help in ousting the Germans and Turks from the Levant during World War I. It was, as George Antonius wrote in his masterful book “The Arab Awakening,” published in 1938, “a shocking document …, not only the product of greed at its worst [but] greed allied to suspicion and so leading to stupidity: it also stands out as a startling piece of double-dealing.”

Dismemberment doomed the Arab world economically as well as politically after four centuries of relatively peaceful and prosperous Ottoman rule. (For a detailed analysis of the economic costs of partition, see “A History of Middle East Economies in the Twentieth Century,” by Roger Owen and Sevket Pamuk.) The process would be accelerated by Bush’s assault on Iraq, a prospect not lost on Iraqis who, by then cruelly acquainted with Washington’s fecklessness and  ignorance of the Arab world, made peace with their fate even before the smoke of the April 2003 invasion had cleared.

“George Bush gave Iraq to Iran,” a Sunni-Iraqi friend told me in Baghdad a few weeks after the removal of Saddam Hussein. “And he did it for free.”

It is a revealing comment, steeped as it is in the pathos and cynicism that comes with being Arab - particularly an Iraqi one - in the post-war world. After decades of torment members of Iraq’s once prosperous and secular middle class now regard their country as barter rather than a sovereign state worth defending - thus the Iraqi army’s inability or unwillingness to resist assaults from lightly armed and vastly outnumbered jihadi militias. It is a hard-boiled merchant’s conceit; the fact that a powerful leader like the president of the United State would hand his purloined loot to a third party without getting something in return was almost as scandalous as the theft itself.

Long before the last American troop withdrew from Iraq in 2011, Iraq had become the sovereign equivalent of the goat carcass Afghan tribesman battle to control in a game of Buzkashi. The average Iraqi today has known nothing but foreign occupation, tyranny, and conflict. They warred with Iran throughout the 1980s and then battled the U.S. over Kuwait, reaping a generation of  sanctions that remained in place even after the  2003 invasion. There are Iraqi’s today who can remember the humiliation of British colonial rule - during which Iraq was stripped of the oil-rich parcel of land that became Kuwait - followed by a succession of monarchs and dictators that led to Hussein’s sadistic twenty-five year rule.

It wasn’t always like this. Last month I attended an exhibition at Paris’ Institut du Monde Arab of the Orient Express, the luxury passenger train that once carried travelers from London to Istanbul and onto the Arab world. The exhibit, according to the catalog, celebrated “the wealth of relationships formed between France and the countries of the Middle East.” There was, needless to say, little mention of the Sykes-Picot agreement and its fateful consequences.

The show began with a tour of several exquisitely restored passenger cars, their cabins staged to recall such famous travelers as the dancer Josephine Baker - silk gowns strewn over an opened steamer-trunk, a copy of Le Monde, circa 1928, tucked under a portable Victrola on the couchette - and writers like Agatha Christie and Graham Greene as well as diplomats, journalists and monarchs. That was followed by a dazzling display of Orient Express memorabilia: purser uniforms, tea sets, silverware, serving plates and linen bearing the train’s monogram, along with paintings and photographs of moon-lit desert landscapes, libidinous pashas and languid harems girls - camp but quaint Western renderings compared to the malign caricatures to come.

The final viewing hall showcased epic posters announcing the Orient Express’ Levantine attractions: Istanbul, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus. Two in particular caught my attention. An oil portrait of Aleppo’s stout, crenelated citadel, painted in 1925 when there was no reason to believe the city would be anything but eternal, and a poster drawn fifteen years earlier beguiling travelers to “Go see  Baghdad, Karbala, Ur, Mosul and Basrah.” The names were stacked up one after the other and crowned by a stone lion of Babylon. It was a charming display made achingly poignant by the Arab world’s subsequent decent into madness. Aleppo is now in ruins, destroyed by many of the same zealots who now control Mosul and menace Baghdad.

A century ago, when the Orient Express surged through a borderless Arabia, the exploitation between visitor and host was mutually enriching. Partition - “to cut up the Arab rectangle in such a manner as to place artificial obstacles in the way of unity,” according to Antonius - made the Arabs slaves to the European powers and ultimately, amid the chaos of decolonization, to each other. The engineers of America’s war on Iraq were only the most recent, and in many ways the most destructive, aggressors in that offensive. To suggest otherwise is to betray a profound ignorance that explains why Americans keep getting snagged in unwinnable wars in places they do not understand.

Getting Past the Narrative

I recommend to readers a recent New York Times story on political friction between the U.S. and Israel - less for its reporting then as an instructive specimen of Beltway narrative.

The article, by White House correspondent Mark Landler, chronicles the rupture between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over a Palestinian unity government that includes the militant Islamist group Hamas. The White House has said it will work with the new regime towards a revival of peace efforts, pointing out that Hamas has been relegated to junior-partner status relative to its secular partner, Fatah, and that in joining the ruling circle it has renounced violence. The Israelis insist they will not negotiate with any authority that includes Hamas, which it fears could dominate the cabinet should it poll well in elections to be held six months from now.

As a cautionary tale, Landler cites the January 2006 Palestinian elections that swept  Hamas to power. The ballot was encouraged by then-President George W. Bush as part of his policy to promote democracy in the Middle East, but also because “nobody thought [Hamas] had a chance of winning,” writes Landler. The decision to allow Hamas to contest the ballot was “a mistake,” Elliot Abrams, who served as a Middle East envoy during the Bush years, told the Times. “And I hope we will will not make the same mistake twice.” 

Like most political conceits, Landler’s account is conspicuous for what it omits. He quotes Abrams at length but fails to mention how the career civil servant negotiated Israel’s 2005 withdraw of Jewish settlers from Gaza  - a unilateral exercise deeply resented by Fatah - followed by Gaza’s internment inside an Israeli-controlled concrete wall. It is also worth noting that Abrams, while working as a senior aide in the Reagan administration and under pressure of indictment for his conduct during the Iran-Contra scandal, pled guilty to lesser charges of withholding information from Congress.

Tellingly and without irony, Landler allows that Abrams “sympathized” with White House fears that isolating the Fatah-Hamas government could trigger a  financial crisis in occupied Palestine which, according to the reporter, “would be dangerous for Israel’s security.” If Abrams - or Landler, for that matter - were concerned about the welfare of Palestinians in the event of such a collapse there is no mention of it. Either way, given Abrams’ rap sheet and his reputation as a Likudnik functionary, one wonders why Landler couldn’t have solicited the views of another Middle East expert in a city lousy with them.

Landler’s reference to the 2006 election is misleading for its lack of context. For one thing, while Hamas’ victory was a surprise in Washington it was widely anticipated in the Arab world and in Palestine itself, where prospective voters made their intentions clear to election monitors before the balloting began. I was attending a dinner party in Riyadh on the day the election results were announced and it was the Bush administration’s panicked response more than Hamas’ victory that aroused my fellow guests. Here was more proof, as if any were needed, of the deep chasm between Middle Eastern reality and Washington’s queered comprehension of it.

Nor does Landler mention the short-lived Hamas-Fatah unity government brokered a month after the election by Saudi intermediaries. Under its terms, Hamas authorized Fatah leader and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to negotiate peace with Israel. Though far from the de jure acceptance of the Jewish state demanded from Hamas by the international community, it signaled an implied recognition that went far beyond what the Islamist group allowed Yasser Arafat, Abbas’ predecessor. In the Levantine world, such gestures matter.

Rather than exploit Hamas’ concession, however, Washington imposed a crippling embargo on the Palestinian Authority with a raft of legislation authored by the American-Israel Political Action Committee, Israel’s primary influence peddler in Washington. AIPAC had drafted the bills well before the election as a contingency against an “upset” Hamas victory, after which both chambers of Congress enthusiastically wove them into law.

The collapse of the Mecca accords was followed by a Palestinian civil war that the Bush administration attempted to manipulate with disastrous results. In July, Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan, with furtive assistance from the U.S., led a failed coup against Hamas in its Gaza stronghold. Hamas counter-attacked, killing scores of Fatah fighters and driving the rest out of Gaza.

If, as Abrams puts it, allowing Hamas to contest the 2006 vote was a mistake, so too was his administration’s decision to intervene on behalf of a corrupt apparatchik like Dahlan, entrenching the Palestinian divide and associating the U.S., yet again, with the losing side in an historically free Arab election. (At the same time the White House was meddling in Gaza, it was signaling a green light to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to crack down on members of the Muslim Brotherhood who done well in similar balloting.)

It may sound churlish to expect Landler and other Beltway reporters to clutter their stories with facts that inconvenience the narratives framed by Likudnik shills like Abrams. To suggest, for example, that the Zionist movement in its formative stage employed terrorist acts in pursuit of its objectives not unlike Hamas would be as enlightening for many readers as it would be condemned by Washington elites. (The comparison is far from perfect. As far as I know Hamas has yet to assassinate foreign envoys; the Zionist group Lehi, on the other hand, famously gunned down Britain’s Lord Moyne and Sweden’s Folke Bernadotte in the 1940s.)

Absent such historical points of reference, readers are left with a flat, compartmentalized landscape from which to survey a part of the world where both the past and the present battle over the same bloody terrain.

Which, needless to say, is exactly the way Netanyahu and his proxies in Washington would have it.

What the Pentagon is Doing in Africa, Part II

In a recent post I encouraged readers to consider what the Pentagon is doing in Africa, a line of inquiry prompted by U.S. commitments to help locate and rescue the nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls held hostage by the radical Islamist group Boko Haram.

This worthy objective has been hobbled by laws that prohibit U.S. troops from engaging foreign armed forces and law enforcement agencies with a history of human rights abuse. As it turns out, the Nigerian army has been linked to several atrocities, prompting a Pentagon spokesman to lament how “We have struggled a great deal in the past to locate units we can deal with.” Finding unsullied units, she said, has been “a very persistent and troubling limitation.”

An article this week in The New York Times suggests, however, that the Pentagon has a lot more going on in Africa than meets the eye and it very much includes Nigeria in its plans. American special operations units, according to the report, are secretly developing elite counter-terrorism units in North and West Africa, part of a U.S. proxy war against “the widening war against Al Qaeda’s affiliates and associates on the continent.” The clandestine program, financed by a hidden Pentagon account and budgeted at $70 million, was launched last year to “instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.” The article also stressed that “American military specialists are helping Nigerian officers in their effort to rescue” the abducted school girls.

As I noted in my post, the Defense Department has been financing such programs from its own accounts since 2006, when it requested funding authority independent of the State Department, for decades Washington’s lead agency for foreign assistance. That writ has expanded dramatically over the years, prompting concerns among Congressional watchdogs about inadequate oversight and its consequences. It took the Times story, for example, to reveal serious setbacks for the Pentagon’s secret Africa operations. In Mali, U.S.-trained commanders, while leading a campaign against Islamic insurgents last year, defected to the other side. In Libya, an American training center near Tripoli was shut down last August after a group of armed insurgents overpowered guards and stole “hundreds of automatic weapons, night-vision goggles, vehicles and other equipment.”

The timing of the Times story was conspicuous, coming as it did on the eve of President Barack Obama’s widely anticipated address on foreign policy this week at West Point. In it, the president told graduating cadets that the White House would avoid foreign entanglements while indirectly facing non-core threats like the jihadis that are entrenching themselves in troubled parts of the Middle East and Africa. In particular, Obama asked Congress to finance a $5 billion counter-terrorism fund to provide training to regimes exposed to violent groups.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with devolving responsibility for threats that are remote from the U.S. to the nations that have the most to gain by defeating them. (Indeed, Obama should go further, obliging Japan, South Korea, and NATO members to assume most, if not all, of the burden of  their national security needs.)

The U.S. has a long history of training and supplying commando units in the developing world, however, and it’s not a inspiring one. No doubt the people engaging host nations for counter-terrorism purposes believe they are making the world a safer place, but so did the architects of the Vietnam war pacification program known as Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support. CORDS, as it was known, was designed to be a model of inter-agency cooperation, with U.S. civilian, military, and intelligence elements working jointly. Unable to meet its authors’ metrics for success, however, it evolved into a more militarized version of itself: the notorious Phoenix Program. By the time Phoenix had been dissolved in 1973 it had become identified with some of the war’s worst excesses: extra-judicial killings, torture, kidnapping, and incarceration. Melvin Laird, the then-Secretary of Defense, called it “a fiasco.”
Phoenix was only one of many U.S. counter-insurgency operations that took on a life of their own.

As J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, pointed out in the Times story, sovereign recipients of U.S. weapons, equipment and expertise must “have the political will to fight terrorism, not just the desire to build up an elite force that can be used for regime protection. And the military has to be viewed well or at least neutrally by a country’s population.”

Such conditions are difficult to satisfy under the best of circumstances, let alone in unstable Africa and the Middle East. Like so many other Pentagon initiatives, however, counter-insurgency operations can become less means to an end than ends in themselves. And that’s when they create more problems than they solve.

I’m With Frank …

It was hard not to imagine Benjamin Netanyahu’s knickers bunching up as he watched Pope Francis pray for peace at the Israeli wall that segregates three million Palestinians from the outside world. While in Bethlehem, Francis celebrated the Vatican’s good relations with the “state of Palestine,” a gesture to Palestinian yearnings normally resisted by VIPs fearful of offending the imperial power next door. Francis also invited representatives from Israel and Palestine to negotiate peace in his Vatican apartment - certainly a doomed effort but at least a sincere one, unlike the cynical box-checking that stands for Middle East peacemaking in Washington.

Since his elevation just over a year ago, Francis has spoken out in favor of a more progressive and transparent Catholic Church and he has outmaneuvered some of the Vatican’s more unsavory cadres with subtle reforms. His tour of the Holy Land, however, offered a rare occasion of statesmanship which, in case you’ve forgotten, is what happens when leaders of integrity speak truthfully and act decisively in response to the desperation, venality, or ineptitude of others. It wasn’t just American and Israeli fecklessness that Francis exposed with his unscripted appeals for reason and humanity; rarely has visionary leadership been as broadly and pitifully lacking as it is today.

Nowhere it that more obvious than in Europe, where parliamentary elections this week turned out a slate of insurgent, ultra-right nationalists who would dissolve the European Union, end immigration, and inter its citizens into gated nation states. Blame establishment elites on both ends of the political spectrum. Having failed to anticipate the economic and social impact of the 2008 financial collapse, they indulged themselves with expedient cant over meaningful reform. The result was years of stagnant growth, chronic unemployment, and an abundant harvest of bigoted populism.

Meanwhile, Asia, having leveraged its post-war peace to raise living standards and democratize its politics, is now savoring its own acid brew of nationalism. In India, voters this month elected as prime minister Narendra Modi, a charismatic strongman with a Muslim problem; Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who enraged the entire Far East by lionizing Class-A war criminals, is pushing constitutional reforms that would allow Tokyo to involve itself in conflicts abroad - the first step, many Japanese fear, towards remilitarization. China, meanwhile, is reviving its own regional hegemony with such ham-fisted imperiousness as to make war with its neighbors - beginning with Japan, a U.S. ally - all but inevitable. In Thailand, years of political unrest and economic malaise erupted last week in a military coup that was particularly un-Thai for its nastiness. Having received an endorsement from the Thai monarchy, coup leader Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha warned his fellow citizens against criticizing the new regime or “creating problems.”

And speaking of overweening brass-hats, Egyptian putschist Abdel Fatah al-Sissi was elected president this week in a landslide victory made hollow by a papyrus-thin turnout. Having ousted Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government in a coup last April, Sissi presided over a bloody crackdown on Islamists, many of them political innocents, in a country known for extreme piety. Sissi has expressed his admiration for Gamal Abdel Nasser, another Egyptian coup-leader who bled his country white with misbegotten wars over Yemen and Palestine and whose decision to nationalize the economy pauperized the nation for much of the post-war twentieth century. Given Egypt’s drearily predictable history, within a year Sissi will be cutting back-room deals with a resurgent Brotherhood to stay alive - a sure sign of his imminent betrayal.

Finally there are the Czarist delusions of Vladimir Putin and their ghastly toll on the people he presumes to lead. To paraphrase an old Irish saying: if the Dutch controlled Russia, they’d rule the world; if the Russians under Putin’s stewardship controlled the Netherlands, they’d drown. (All except the oligarchs, of course, who’d be following the disaster on Sky News from their hideous London piles.) Despite the powerful writ and bountiful natural resources at his disposal, the best Putin can deliver is a per-capita income level that ranks just above that of Malaysia and below Croatia. The Russian economy is staggering into recession, the consequence of Putin’s double-header with the West over Crimea, which he won, and Ukraine, where he has clearly struck out.

To make matters worse, Putin - who insists on carpet-bombing the world with publicity stills of himself bare-chested, like some aging Filipino film star - appears to be getting plastic-surgery referrals from Silvio Berlusconi. The horror.

It has come to this: the most prolific expression of political courage comes not from democratic republics or constitutional monarchies but the Vatican, which despite the Pope’s hopeful first year remains one of the most hierarchical and corrupt institutions on Earth. Perhaps his example may positively inspire our ruling establishment but given its small-minded, tactical sensibility my money is on Frank.

What is the Pentagon doing in Africa?

The New York Times reported last week that Pentagon efforts to find and rescue the more than 200 abducted schoolgirls in Nigeria are challenged by the fact that the Nigerian army - the prospective host to any U.S. forces deployed to the country - is steeped in human rights abuses.

“We have struggled a great deal in the past to locate units we can deal with,” a Defense Department official lamented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to the Times. Finding units unsullied by atrocity has been “a very persistent and troubling limitation.”

Though quick to condemn the Nigerian government for its failure to effectively pursue Boko Haram, the violent jihadi group that made off with the girls, the Senators failed to ask what should have been an obvious question: Where has the money gone? After all, far from being an American pariah, the Nigerian army has enjoyed U.S. patronage since it joined the African Contingency Operations Training and Assistance Program in 2005. ACOTA, according to the State Department, which manages the 25-nation program jointly with AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s newest combatant command, “provides extensive field training for African peacekeepers plus staff training and exercises for battalion, brigade, and multinational force personnel.” It is the centerpiece of Washington’s “Western money, African boots” approach to security assistance in Africa, a card to play in its rivalry with China over Africa’s natural resources, and the key to unfettered access to its ports, airspace and seaways.

Not surprisingly, the assembled lawmakers resisted this line of inquiry. Otherwise they’d have exposed one of the darker chambers of America’s militarized foreign policy: its web of devil’s deals with corrupt, brutish regimes as guarantors of its hegemony. There is nothing qualitatively new in this; Washington has kept a rogue’s gallery of dictators, sadists and confidence men on its imperial payroll throughout the post-war continuum. The difference is in scope. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the expansion of the Pentagon’s franchise into new business lines such as drug-interdiction, and the organizing rigor imposed by the War on Terrorism has made possible entire rosters of Pentagon proxies on a hemispheric scale. And for the first time they are gathered not under the State Department’s imprimatur but the U.S. military’s.

The Defense Department has been dipping into a mushrooming fund for direct military-to-military partnerships since 2006, when it demanded a proprietary funding channel to fast-track anti-terror and counter-insurgency programs. It was granted under Section 1206 of the Defense Authorization Act - effectively ending the State Department’s authority as Washington’s lead foreign assistance arm. Despite a key condition laid down by Congress for 1206 approval – that the Pentagon submit its programs list to the State Department for “concurrence” – oversight has been lax.

In August 2009, the Senate responded to the Pentagon’s request for additional 1206 funding with a report that $6 million from the program had been given to the government of Chad, which according to a State Department report is “engaging in extra-judicial killing, arbitrary detention and torture.” Other recipients of 1206 money include Algeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, all of which have abysmal human rights records. An April 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office found that “DOD and State have incorporated little monitoring and evaluation into Section 1206 programs…. The agencies have not consistently defined performance measures and results reporting has generally been limited to anecdotal information.”

Last June, Michael Shank, a director for legislative affairs at the Washington-based Friends Committee on National Legislation, warned in an article for U.S. News & World Report that institutional checks on the Pentagon’s growing intercourse in Africa “do not prevent ongoing partnerships with chronically abusive governments.” Implementation of such couplings he wrote, “looks a lot more like short-sighted Cold War policies in Latin America than local empowerment.”

Certainly there has been no reckoning for Nigeria’s army, which remains an ACOTA acolyte despite a raft of reports from human rights organizations that link it with massacres committed in its hostilities with Boko Haram. According to African specialist Lesley Anne Warner, the Pentagon, frustrated with its inability to find Nigerian army units with which it could operate legally, was helping the government establish an Army Special Operations Command that would stand up fresh units. As Warner wrote in a blog post early this year, “Will the newly-created ‘clean’ units be able to avoid the human rights violations that have restricted the space for U.S. military engagement with their non-special forces counterparts?”

As the Defense Department’s ongoing frustration with Nigeria implies, the answer is no, which begs more questions: what, exactly, is the Pentagon doing in Africa? What is the purpose of AFRICOM, rejected by the Clinton administration only to be activated during the twilight of the George W. Bush years, and which was regarded with such suspicion on the continent that no African leader would host it? (The command is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany). Given the dismal results SOUTHCOM, the Pentagon’s Latin American command, has managed prosecuting its war on drugs, is there any reason to believe AFRICOM’s record will be less dispiriting?

For that matter, how does the military rate success in a region where the challenges are overwhelmingly economic in origin? A few days after the Pentagon official was winging about Nigeria in the Senate, China announced it would invest billions of dollars in Africa via a fund managed by the African Development Bank. The “Africa Growing Together Fund” according to the Financial Times, represents the first time Beijing will distribute investment capital multilaterally - “part of a broader effort to recalibrate its relations with Africa in response to criticism about its … cheque book policy of bilateral deals.”

If China does replace the United States as the world’s superpower - an authority it is unlikely to crave and which regional powers would be loathe to respect - it will do so not because of its huge foreign exchange reserves, emerging military might or computer hacking skills but on the strength of its (relatively) abundant common sense.

U.S. Statecraft on the Ropes

Convulsive events worldwide - in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Caucuses - and Washington’s inability to navigate them with authority implies a twilight of U.S. statecraft. The itinerant John Kerry - negotiating in Jerusalem, hectoring in Brussels, speechifying in South Sudan - is received abroad less as America’s top diplomat than as a pauperized, late 19th-century English lord - all rolled Rs and tweed but no inheritance.

This is not for lack of resolve; unlike his ticket-punching predecessor, Kerry wagered his credibility at two high-stakes tables - in Palestine, where his bid for a peace deal was pointedly and publicly thwarted by Israel (and all but ignored by his feckless boss) - and in Iran, which has so far complied with interim agreements to suspend its suspected nuclear weapons programs. This too may fail, but at least he tried.

What ails American statecraft is less personal commitment than the State Department’s structural inability to adjust to the emerging multi-polar world - the “old” normal, as it were, after a quarter-century of abnormal uni-polarity. Faced with the return of minor hegemons like China, Russia, and Iran, the State Department must ditch its ossified nation-state bias in favor of regionalism. For inspiration it need look no farther than its well-endowed cousin just south of the Potomac.

Since the late 1980s, when it divided the world into regional command posts, the Defense Department has become the de facto, if not de jure engineer of U.S. foreign policy. To paraphrase John Quincy Adams, as America goes abroad in search of monsters to destroy she is sustained by a patchwork of combatant commands that divide the globe into six areas of responsibility: the Middle East and Central Asia, East Asia and Oceania, North America, Central and South America, Europe, and Africa. Their four-star field marshals are responsible for making war and keeping peace and they enjoy near-total control over the human, financial, and material resources at their disposal. They are invested with the power of Proconsuls, the military governors who ruled the colonial provinces of ancient Rome, and they are commonly referred to as such.

Needless to say, the power and prestige of these commanders - particular the heads of CENTCOM in the Middle East and PACOM in Asia - eclipses that of their civilian counterparts. While a U.S. ambassador is mired in such parochial concerns as bilateral trade disputes and visa matters, a combatant commander’s writ extends nearly to the heavens. In a 2010 interview, Anthony Zinni, the head of CENTCOM from 1997 to 2000, lamented the asymmetry in authority between Washington’s senior-most military and civilian representatives. The combatant commanders, he told me, “saw the interdependence and interaction in the region because we had that responsibility. So when we spoke we had more clout.”

The first step in restoring equilibrium between America’s civilian and military elites is to create diplomatic viceroys to match their uniformed counterparts and make them responsible only to the Secretary of State. The second is to close the funding gap between the two sides, a divergence that widened dramatically under the despotic Senator Jesse Helms in the mid-1990s. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Helms slashed the budgets of both the State Department and the U.S. Information Agency, Washington’s public-diplomacy channel. By the end of the decade USIA - along with a vastly diminished U.S. Agency for International Development, Washington’s aid-distribution arm - had been shunted under State Department authority where they could be easily pressured by Congress and the White House.

The high price of needless conflict - in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in Libya and Washington’s failed war on drugs - has exposed Americans to the futility of using armed might in response to diplomatic challenges. The need for robust, creative aid and information agencies has never been greater, which is why USAID and USIA should be restored to their pre-Helms independence. At the same time, America’s military and civilian aid programs - indirect subsidies for defense contractors, wheat growers, and a galaxy of consultant-NGOs that create unhealthy dependencies among recipients - should be scrapped and redrawn.

Congress should also allocate funds to the State Department for the foundation of a school of diplomacy, the kind of elite academy common among most developed countries but sadly missing in trigger-happy Washington. The creation of such an institution - it would be a shame not to call it The George C. Marshall School of American Diplomacy - would signal to the global community that America is at long last of the world as well as in it.

Thus reformed, the State Department would be worthy of its most important post-war mission - to dismantle America’s costly and superfluous military commitments. Working in lockstep with their uniformed colleagues, Washington’s regional diplomatic overlords could begin the long-neglected process of shifting the burden of security to its European, Asian and Middle Eastern allies, most of which have grown rich under U.S. vigilance and can now easily afford to look after themselves.

The deep state will agitate in defense of empire. Torch-bearers of the Second Red Scare - they are plentiful and powerful - will cry appeasement. They must be resisted. Even at this late date, Washington could provide no greater service to its people and its allies than to publicly acknowledge the unsustainable cost of militarized, global hegemony at the expense of statecraft.

“Iraq has gone Mad.”

In his profile of Nuri al-Maliki in The New Yorker this week, Dexter Filkins explores the Iraqi Prime Minister’s intimate ties with Dawa, a grass-roots Shia Islamist group. During the Saddam Hussein era, Dawa distinguished itself as the only genuine resistance movement - the secular nationalist, royalist, and Kurdish cadres being content with propaganda offices in London - and it has now emerged as a central power broker and a principal combatant in the country’s sectarian wars.

The Filkins’ piece was corroborated in a conversation I had this month with an old Iraqi friend, Samir Al Jaburi, who passed through Paris this month the way he does each year as a guest of the French government. Samir manages the Ministry of Commerce and Industry’s pavilion at the annual trade exposition in Baghdad and a perk of the job is a week of meetings and day trips in and around town. It’s a good job and Samir, a Sunni Muslim in what is now archly Shia-centric Iraq, must work hard to keep it. He is constantly warding off challenges from the shills of sectarian elites who would, if given the chance, exploit the job for personal gain. The clutch of Dawa apparatchiks, Samir told me, is never far away.

"Dawa controls everything,” he said. “The checkpoints that divide the city, the ministries, the commercial contracts and the universities.”

According to Samir, Dawa is only the most powerful in a cartel of political parties that control vast sectors of the Iraqi economy. It represents a profound, if under-appreciated by-product of Iraq’s unraveling: an inability to regenerate what was once a robust and largely meretricious white-collar class.

Modern Iraq - the one carved out of the desert after World War I by Britain’s Colonial Office - began as a nation of traders in preservation of the country’s long role as Europe’s land bridge to Asia. During the Cold War it became an oil-rich proxy of both global powers before it was appropriated by Saddam Hussein, who in the 1970s converted its petroleum wealth into a booming economy led by world-class engineers, physicians, financiers and even artists whose education and crafts were subsidized by the state. The Iraq-Iran war, Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War it provoked along with more than a decade of U.S.-led sanctions, and finally America’s disastrous war to oust Hussein transformed a regional economic power into a violent wasteland of warring sects and tribes. In the 1990s Iraqi cardiologists and mechanical engineers had become cab drivers and shop-owners. Today, their children are thumb-crushers, pimps and confidence men.

I first met Samir in 1999 on my second visit to Iraq as a Middle East correspondent. Back then, visiting reporters were taken straight to the Al Rashid Hotel, where most foreign visitors were concentrated along with a subculture of hangers on – drives, fixers and translators, merchants and prostitutes. A scrum of men surrounded me as I disembarked from the GMC Suburban I’d hired for the 14-hour drive to Baghdad from Amman. I waved them off and they reluctantly parted to reveal Samir in faded khaki pants and a polo shirt. He was standing ram-rod straight as he strolled over and casually extended his hand.

“Welcome to Iraq,” he said. “May I be of assistance during your stay?”

There wasn’t a trace of servility in his voice. I liked him immediately.

“You’re hired,” I said.

For the next several days, we were inseparable. The occasion for my visit was a ratcheting-up of tensions between Iraq and the U.S. and I was to gather anecdote and color as string for my colleagues in Washington. Saddam had responded by mobilizing his “people’s militias” and Samir and I spent a day watching aging, overweight men awkwardly forming ranks at several reporting stations. When word got out that an American correspondent was on hand to capture the glorious event, several of the militiamen sought me out to tell me how fondly they remembered studying for advanced degrees at elite U.S. universities.

In subsequent reporting trips, Samir and I would meet with other refugees of Iraq’s once-globalized economy. There was, for example, the graduate of Britain’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurt, an ex-officer in the Iraqi army’s corps of engineers, who produced rubber engine hoses and gaskets for a living; an electrical engineering specialist with a degree from the University of Wisconsin who repaired kitchen appliances and stereo systems (including eight-track cassettes players); a physician who plied the black market to supplement the meager supplies of drugs and medical equipment that were allowed for purchase under the sanctions regime; and a team of mechanics who worked for Iraqi Airways - which remained intact during the sanctions era despite the dissolution of its fleet - who preserved their skills by stripping and re-assembling the same Pratt & Whitney turbine engine.

By 2007, when Samir and I met in Damascus for a story I was writing about the millions of Iraqis who had fled Iraq’s civil war, most of the country’s skilled professionals had either abandoned the country or were killed in the sectarian killings that Hussein, his many atrocities notwithstanding, had managed to subdue.

Samir, 51, has a wife and four children. His eldest daughter is married to a Kurd and living in relative peace in the northern Kurdish city of Erbil. His eldest son Ahmed is studying law in Baghdad. It can take hours to get from one end of the city to the other because of the patchwork of roadblocks controlled by various political groups. At each chokepoint militiamen demand tribute from motorists the same way policemen insisted on bribes under Hussein. Saddam and the Baath Party, his source of power and patronage, has been neatly replaced by Maliki and Dawa.

Extortion has become a plague, Samir said. Recently, he was approached by a secretary from Ahmed’s law school who complained he was making trouble on campus and risked expulsion unless Samir paid the university an “emolument” of $2,000. Samir said he sent the man on his way, though not all such propositions are so easily deflected. “Young women who work in offices,” he told me, “are often forced to have sex with their employers. Jobs are so scarce these days they can’t say no.”

At the same time, the most exotic and expensive sports cars prowl the streets of Baghdad, the wages of a predatory economy that guarantees the biggest portions for those at the peak of the food chain.

“Iraq,” Samir told me, “has gone mad.”

Before Hussein’s ousting many Iraqis I met - even in the absence of government minders - would praise him as a paternal tribal sheik standing up to American imperium. It was their Big Lie, a fiction they sold themselves to evade responsibility for not rising up against the regime in a society where honor is esteemed above all things but faith in Abraham’s God. Now, not more than a decade after Saddam’s death, this expediency has been replaced by a weary cynicism that hardens with each shake-down, sectarian slaughter and school bombing.

It would be pleasant to believe the future of Iraq belongs to Iraqis like Samir who cling to their integrity like an overburdened life-raft even as they tread water from one day to the next. It would also be as naively self-indulgent as the notion that Saddam Hussein was anything other than a blood-thirsty tyrant who subverted his own vision of a prosperous Iraq. For myself, a pessimist by nature as well as inclination, the sooner Samir can get himself and his family out of Iraq the happier I’ll be.

Is China Ready to Blow?

In fall 2007 I was backstopping Newsweek’s reporters in Beijing as they toiled under the crush of China’s looming summer Olympics. The bureau was in Jianguomen in the center of town and each night on my way home I’d stroll through Ritan Park, an enclave of calm amid Beijing’s relentless clamor. Along the way I’d pass a vacant lot that was used as an open-air movie theater for itinerant workers. They had been recruited from far away - Shenyang province in the northwest perhaps, or central Shaanxi - as shock troops in a hell-for-leather charge to complete the city’s Olympian make-over.

There were scores of them, all men and of all ages. Most appeared to be in their late teens and twenties but there were also boys who, in a true workers’ paradise, would have been in school, as well as slumped elderly men ripe for the mahjong circuit. The sense of wonder in their faces, illuminated by the flickering light from the make-shift screen, revealed the enabling power of China’s economic growth. A generation earlier they would have exhausted their lives in the villages where they were born, having never seen a feature film let alone one in the imperial seat. Now they were part of the biggest cotillion in human history and on the emperor’s generous terms: work, pay, dinner - and a show.

Of course, scenes like these were common long before China entered its Olympic chrysalis. For decades rural laborers migrated to the cities by the busloads on contracts negotiated by provincial and city officials, their local dialects collaborating with the blasts of pneumatic drills in an ear-splitting ode to modernization. Hand-wringing over what might happen when the music stopped was largely ignored, particularly as China’s economy continued to deliver healthy rates of growth.

Today, economists and investors are sounding the alert about China’s billowing housing bubble, and reasonably so. Having multiplied residential property space at Malthusian rates, supply has finally outstripped demand. Largely as a result, debt as a percentage of GDP has risen to some 230 percent, far higher than it was before the global financial crisis. And because housing accounts for a third of China’s investment and 16 percent of GDP, according to the business-news website Quartz“a housing crash will be more devastating for the economy than many realize.”

Like many emerging markets, China’s financial sector is underdeveloped relative to its manufacturing and services industries. As a result, fixed assets like apartments and houses assume an outsized role in credit allocation. Should property prices collapse so too might loans backed by rents and sales in secondary and tertiary markets. At least one default has already rattled China’s bond markets. Late last month, the Financial Times reported that China’s biggest banks last year wrote off bad loans at double the rates they did in 2012 amid fears that a property overhang may deplete growth to its lowest level in nearly twenty-five years.

What of it? Unlike many of the heavily indebted economies that capsized in 2008, most of China’s debt is denominated in its own currency, the renminbi. Not only that, the country maintains a thicket of currency controls that seals it from capital flight. Withdrawals of investment from one sector of the economy have to be invested into another. Also, it is important to remember how much of China’s economic activity is hidden given the prevalence of “under-invoicing” to the state among provincial governments and exporters - a significant factor in China’s high rates of liquidity. This alone, say some economists, will spare China the crash landing that is the inevitable end of most asset bubbles. 

There is nothing more tedious and - up until now, premature -  than heralds of China’s economic denouement. In the early 1990s, even as the West grappled with the magnitude of the country’s export-led growth- “they’re taking our jobs,” cried members of Congress, a sure sign that somewhere in Asia an economy has arrived - commentators were forecasting its demise. China was too big and unruly to cohere within its traditional borders, I was told by diplomats and financial analysts, and would eventually split into three separate countries. (Whether it would fracture laterally or longitudinally depended on who you talked to.) Unless the economy grew at double digits rates, an economist told me in an interview almost breathlessly, it would collapse for lack of jobs. “There will be a thousand people on top of a train going nowhere,” he said. “It's the emperor's worst nightmare.”

As it turned out, China’s economy continued to grow at double digits rates - still at 10 percent over the last three decades despite its gradual slowdown since the 2008 global crash. (The apocalyptic image of all those Chinese on the train stuck with me, however.)

But make no mistake: China is due for a reckoning. The government forecasts the country will maintain a growth rate of about 7 percent over the next year, strong enough to maintain employment levels but still a full thirty percent slower than it was averaging a decade ago. Given how a growing share of investment is being financed on credit - amid projections of slowing property sales - demand has only one place to go: south.

The result will be crisis - painful, disruptive and country-wide, perhaps China’s first national economic upheaval in its modern era. Until recently, a financial meltdown in one province - free-wheeling Fujian, for example, has had several over the decades - would go unnoticed everywhere else. Today, thanks to the growing integration of China’s financial system, the concussion from a bank default in southern Shenzhen will ripple through markets as far as northern Heilongjiang. Even China’s informal, or “shadow” credit systems are deep and extensive enough to go viral should several fail at once.

There will be violence. It will be contained.

China is lucky enough to have sidestepped not one, but two global financial meltdowns that occurred within a decade of each other. It survived the 1997-1998 Asian currency collapse - and famously resisted the urge to devalue the renminbi in response - as well as the 2008 crash. Soon enough the bell will toll for China, and when it does Beijing could learn from a tale of redemption close to home. In 1998, South Korea was digging itself out of the wreckage of the regional currency crisis with a large share of its debt denominated in dollars. With little margin for error, it paid down or wrote off much of its debt, replenished its foreign exchange reserves, reformed its banking sector and established open and transparent credit markets. Thanks to these efforts, it survived the 2008 calamity more or less unscathed.

Unlike South Korea a generation ago, China’s debt is locally raised and its capital markets largely captive. While this served the country well in the past, it is now part of the problem. The coming crisis will make this abundantly clear. Bur China will emerge from it stronger than ever.

Free Marwan Barghouti

Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century Medieval historian, famously developed a theory of social structures called asabiyya, which translates roughly as ‘solidarity.’ It refers to the unifying complex of culture, language and customs that make tribal societies cohere. Ibn Khaldun warned that unless tribal leaders adapt asabiyya to the challenges of urbanism, it will dilute and their societies will atomize.

No doubt Ibn Khaldun, who was as good a pundit as he was an historian, economist and sociologist, would be appalled at what stands for Arab leadership today. Since the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Arab potentates have presumed to lead a people for whom they have had a generally low regard and with whom they had little in common.  The Anglo-French monarchies imposed on the post-partition Middle East were, with the exception of Faisal I of Iraq, aloof and incompetent. The liberal nationalists who followed were effete colonials who lacked the finesse needed to reconcile the region’s tribal and urban constituencies. Their Baath Party successors were ruthless and atavistic enough to rule effectively but they were suckered into forlorn military adventures - Syria’s Hafez Al-Assad against Israel in 1973, Saddam Hussein in Kuwait - that undid them. Political Islam came and went, thanks to the Muslim Brotherhood’s startling inept performance in Egypt during its first and bloodily abbreviated term in office.

Only Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian strongman who galvanized the Arab world a half-century ago, earned a popular mandate to lead on a national, if not transnational scale - and he made a hash of it. Since the Arab revolt against despotic rule erupted three years ago, only Tunisia, with its enlightened blend of liberal, ecumenical governance, has survived the mayhem that now consumes the Middle East.

To be fair, the Arabs were never going to cultivate the leadership they deserved so long as the region’s power broker, the United States, subordinated their interests to those of its ally, Israel. That is the price Egyptians and Jordanians pay for peace with their powerful neighbor. And it is a burden shouldered by the Palestinians with no peace, let alone a state, to show for it. Instead they have labored for the last generation with Marwan Barghouti, one of their sharpest political minds and charismatic leaders, wallowing away in Israel’s Hadarim Prison.

Barghouti, 54, is serving a life sentence for the murders of five civilians, crimes for which he denies involvement. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry struggles to weave a proposed peace agreement that both Israelis and Palestinians might not categorically reject, Barghouti stands as a flesh-and-blood metaphor for Palestinian statehood: a promise ripe for redemption, still interred. Even behind bars, polls show he would win a “national” election hands down against Islamist as well as secular rivals.  According to a 2012 survey, 60% of Palestinians would vote for him for president of the Palestinian Authority if they were given that chance, and he would prevail over both Mahmoud Abbas, the current president of the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Pledges by Israeli leaders to release Barghouti as a goodwill gesture - most prominently Shimon Peres’ promise to do so in 2007 - come and go. “If Israel had wanted an agreement with the Palestinians it would have released him from prison by now,” declared Haaretz, Israel’s most respected daily newspaper and the conscience of what remains of the country’s pro-peace wing, in a 2012 editorial. “Barghouti is the most authentic [Palestinian] leader and he can lead his people to an agreement.”

Once an aide to the late Yasser Arafat and a senior official in Fatah, Arafat’s political movement, Barghouti was a fervent believer in a negotiated peace with Israel but abandoned the process in response to the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. When the Second Intifada erupted in fall 2000, Barghouti emerged as the intellectual and political architect of its operations in the West Bank. He was unapologetically militant and was closely identified with the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade and the Tanzim, Fatah’s armed wing, which stunned his pro-peace friends and supporters in Israel.

Barghouti speaks fluent English and Hebrew, the latter of which he learned during earlier stints in Israeli jails, and before his arrest in 2002 he enjoyed bantering with foreign journalists. During the first few months of the Second Intifada, with Palestine and much of the Middle East simmering around him, he was garrulous, unhurried, and rakish in his trademark leather jacket and well-trimmed moustache.

“The Israelis have revealed themselves to be insincere in their talk of peace,” he told me in early 2001. “They negotiate even as they expand settlements. They leave us no option but to defend ourselves, which is our right.”

There is an indelible image of Barghouti being led into an Israeli courtroom the first day of his trial. He is wearing a brown jumpsuit and his beard has grown out. His hand-cuffed fists are raised over his head and his eyes are defiantly, almost mischievously bright. From that day forward, Barghouti would become the most respected and influential of Palestinian leaders. From his prison cell, where he reads the morning papers in three languages, Barghouti manages to shape Palestinian politics and policy. After breaking with Fatah in 2005, he nearly contested the 2006 vote from jail by forming his own party led by the younger guard of Fatah leaders. Despite polls that showed he would have won an overwhelming share of the popular vote, he backed down at the last minute for the sake of Palestinian unity. The election ended in a victory for Hamas, the Islamist group that refuses to recognize Israel, and Fatah’s bitter rival. The results shocked Israel and the U.S. but came as little surprise to everyone else, and while the election was declared free and fair by monitors, the two allies vowed to isolate and eventually oust Hamas.

In early 2007 I was in the Palestinian territories reporting a story about Mohammad Dahlan, a powerful Arafat protégé who was supported by both the U.S. government and Israel in their covert war against Hamas. After several days of travel through the West Bank and Gaza, it became obvious to me that Barghouti, not Dahlan, represented the future of Palestinian politics. As the Israelis were unlikely to allow me to interview Barghouti himself, I met instead with his wife, Fadwa, a lawyer who serves her husband as counselor, gatekeeper, courier, and spousal confessor. We gathered late one evening over tea in Ramallah, the West Bank’s unofficial capital city. The newspapers that day had led with stories of America’s then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s latest visit to re-ignite a stalled peace process. Though Fadwa dismissed Rice’s efforts – “marketing ploys,” she called them – rumors that the Israelis might consider swapping Barghouti and dozens of other Palestinians jailed in Israel for a kidnapped Israeli soldier leavened the atmosphere.

“Marwan is in high spirits,” she said. “He is not demoralized and he sees a steady stream of people, including senior Israelis who believe a prisoner exchange is a good idea.”

Fadwa is allowed twice-monthly visitations with her husband. “The whole process is humiliating,” she told me. “We get up very early and meet with members of the Red Cross, then we board a bus with other families of prisoners that takes us through Kalandia [a Palestinian refugee camp along the main Jerusalem-Ramallah road]. The process is so chaotic that family members often abuse each other. It is 20 hours of torture, and then you get 45 minutes with your loved one with a plate of glass running in between and a phone that often doesn’t work and by the time you get it fixed your 45 minutes are up.”

Israeli jails are like political finishing schools for much of the Palestinian leadership, particularly its younger generation. Few within its ranks are held in such high regard as Barghouti, however. Having spent much of his career either in Palestine or in exile in Jordan, he is unassociated with the corruption that soiled Arafat and his inner circle after their own return from exile. Barghouti is fiercely secular but modest in his habits, which makes him popular among the Islamists. As a member of the Nationalist-Islamist Coordination Committee, he brokered a hudna, or temporary truce, with Israel in June 2003 that lasted 152 days – something Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas was unable to do. He helped draft and ratify the Prisoners Document of May 11, 2006, a compact signed by secular and Islamist Palestinian leaders that was widely regarded as a foundation for a unity government between Hamas and Fatah. It called for a two-state solution and implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas, which agreed to support Abu Mazen, as Abbas is commonly referred to, in his negotiations with Israel.

“Marwan wanted to give Hamas the chance to come closer to Fatah,” Fadwa told me. “He told them if you’re interested in the democratic process, you must compromise. It so happened that many Hamas leaders were in the prison with him, and they would meet during the two hours of exercise they got out of their cells in the morning and the 90 minutes they had in the afternoon. It took them nearly a month to hammer out the pact and then it was circulated to leaders in other prisons. Mazen saw it as the basis for a referendum and gave it his immediate support. Here you have Hamas giving a Fatah leader a mandate to negotiate with Israel, which is something they never gave Arafat.”

Neither the U.S. nor Israel showed any interest in the Prisoners Document. Within six months, fighting broke out in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah. With the Palestinians on the brink of a civil war, Abbas sent an envoy to seek a truce with then-exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Damascus, but Mashal refused to talk. When Barghouti dispatched Qadura Fares, his long-time ally, to see Mashal, he was welcomed warmly and an agreement was quickly hammered out.

On February 8, 2007, a deal for a Palestinian unity government was struck in Mecca under the imprimatur of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah II. The U.S. and Israel studiously ignored it. In June, fighting resumed in Gaza and Fatah, despite nearly $90 million in U.S. aid to bolster its security forces, was quickly overrun. Dahlan, whom President George W. Bush once described as “our guy” in Gaza, fled. The Gaza strip, needless to say, remains under Hamas’ authority.

Rumors that Barghouti may be freed as a concession by Israel continue to circulate despite Kerry’s flagging efforts for peace. Statesmen from former U.S. secretary of state James Baker to ex-Israeli deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh have pushed for his release, if nothing else as a counterweight to the still-popular Hamas. Such calls have been ignored by political elites in Washington and Israel who refuse to acknowledge an iron law of Middle Eastern conflict: Arab leadership, once spurned by the West, is inevitably replaced by a more hostile and inflexible one.

In the 1950s, the U.S. government managed to chase Western-oriented, Islamist-hating Arab nationalists like Nasser into the arms of the Soviets and got the Baath Socialist Party in return. It then rejected the Baathists which laid the groundwork for an Islamic revival and the ascent of political Islam. It refused to deal with moderate Islamist leaders like ex-Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, who was succeeded by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Its attempt to isolate and destroy Hamas have reaped a similarly bitter fruit: this week, the New York Times reported how Hamas is struggling to prevent a new generation of extremists from provoking Israel into launching another Gazan war. The story quoted an Israeli security expert lamenting how “the balance of power in Gaza is changing, and not to a very optimistic direction …. Israel and Hamas both have no interest in escalation, but there are other parties that are playing in the Gaza Strip, other bad guys.”

It is no wonder the average Arab on the average Arab Street believes the U.S. and Israel prefer war to peace. I was in Jerusalem’s Old City when Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh announced his support for the Mecca accord, and the enthusiasm was electric. Surely Washington could not ignore such a compromise, I was told, particularly one so heavily invested in by King Abdullah, America’s close ally. Not only did Washington do just that, it was well into a plan to turn Fatah loose on Hamas with American weaponry, a gambit every bit as foolish as it was irresponsible.

Under Arafat, Israel was often justified for complaining there was no one on the Palestinian side willing to negotiate a lasting peace. Today, as the gymnastic equivocations and cynical demands of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamen Netanyahu make clear, the reverse is true. Matti Steinberg, an adviser to three Shin Bet security service chiefs and a leading authority on the Palestinian national movement, put it well: “When people claim [the Palestinians] are not a partner … this is meant to hide the fact that we are not a partner.”

Free Marwan Barghouti.

The Upside to Putin’s Outrage

You’ve got to hand it to Vladimir Putin: He knows his neighborhood.

Like a junkyard dog with the run of a sprawling and unruly domain, Putin cocks a leg, marks his territory as he sees fit and jealously defends it. He knows he is the strongest mutt in the yard and he understands his rivals are too isolated to expect help from beyond the perimeter. He can strike more or less with impunity so long as he confines his bullying to the Caucasus and Black Sea regions, one of the few parts of the world America is not obliged to defendeither by treaty (Japan, South Korea, Europe), economic interests (the Persian Gulf), or domestic politics (Israel).

By occupying Crimea this week Putin again demonstrated that spheres of influence, a Cold War-era term of dubious repute, did not dissolve along with the Soviet Union. On the contrary, a world dominated by a handful of regional powers - China, of course, but also India and perhaps one day Germany and Iran - is a far more natural and enduring state of affairs than a unipolar order, as the unraveling of American imperium makes clear.

Putin understands this. So did George Kennan, the esteemed American Sovietologist and one of his country’s last clear-eyed statesmen. (More on him in a moment.) So too, at least intuitively, does the increasingly hapless Barack Obama. Even the U.S. Congress, for decades an enclave of oafish militarism, has been generally mute in the wake of the Crimea crisis. In part, that’s because the last time Putin invaded a neighbor was in August 2008 - under President George W. Bush - when he sent tanks to “liberate” the secessionist South Ossetia in its war with the pro-West Georgia. The trigger-happy Bush proved as unwilling to confront Moscow then as the comparably hyper-cautious Obama is now.

Not long ago it was unfashionable in Washington to acknowledge spheres of influence still existed. Doing so implied there were pockets of the world that lurked outside America’s imperial writ, which hardliners in Washington refused to concede. (“No Beach out of Reach!”, etc.) It also allowed for the awkward fact that Washington throughout the nineteenth century administered its own sphere of influence in Latin America - and in a manner not unlike the way Putin treats his “near abroad” today. Largely as a result, spheres of influence are associated with Victorian-age brutality and Cold War proxism.

Behold, for example, Putin: thug, liar, and gross poseur possessed of no imagination beyond what is needed to cantilever his Ozymandian ego. Rather than marshal the abundant human and natural resources at his command, he created the worst kind of kleptocracy. Contemporary Russia is feared for Putin’s police state and muscle-bound army, not respected as it was under Catherine the Great for its enlightened reforms and diplomatic cunning. Had Putin invested his energies in building a diversified economy, competent governance and a rule of law, his Russia would be a legitimate regional hegemon rather than a petulant spoiler. Its closest ally and trading partner might well be Ukraine.

Putin’s Crimean adventure may exact a stiff toll in the form of Western-imposed sanctions on Russia’s already troubled economy. It is by no means clear, however, if Europe is prepared to estrange itself from one of its most important energy sources. A U.S.-led military reprisal, meanwhile, is all but inconceivable.

As one analyst told the Financial Times this week: “We can’t send a strong military show. Nobody is willing to go to war over Crimea.”

This is progress. Remember how, in 1999, then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright dragged America into a war to rescue Kosovo from Serbian aggression by promoting intervention as a sine qua non of NATO credibility. Though successful, the operation nearly provoked a war with Russia. Today, the Republic of Kosovo is recognized by little more than half of United Nations member states. It is host to some 7,000 NATO peace-keepers, a haven for money laundering and is routinely characterized as a narco-state.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel unveiled a defense budget that would defer outlays on costly new weaponry like the F-35 fighter jet andreduce America’s troop strength to its lowest level since 1940 - a draw-down that would all but demand a winnowing of U.S. security commitments worldwide, particularly in Europe. Last month, a chorus of senior German security officials, beginning with new Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, called for the country to match its economic and diplomatic clout with an enhanced role in European strategic affairs. Historians may regard such remarks as a tentative first step towards the evolution of Europe into a German sphere of influence, perhaps in a pas de deux with France, assuming Paris can ever get its act together, or Poland.

Which brings us to George Kennan.

Writing in the International New York Times this week, the editor of “The Kennan Diaries” argued that the author of the Cold War doctrine of containment would have welcomed the diminution of American empire in favor of spheres-of-influence diplomacy. “Mr. Kennan wanted the United States to abandon its exhausting efforts at playing world policeman,” argued Frank Costigliola, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. “Mr. Kennan’s strategic vision entailed containing adversaries, curtailing our foreign ventures, and conserving our moral and material assets …. Policing the globe exacerbates resentment abroad while neglecting the decaying infrastructure at home.”

However reckless and destabilizing, Putin’s march on Crimea may be remembered as the clarifying event that forced Washington to accept the futility of empire and the inexorable logic of a multipolar world.

The Bible Scam

When I covered South Korea in the 1990s, the standards of accounting were so low that independent auditors, reviewing  the annual results of the nation’s top conglomerates, issued disclaimers on them. In much the same way  the Defense Department’s own inspector general every year declares the Pentagon’s murky financial statements to be incoherent, void of credibility.

It is time to apply a similar health warning to the bible. From the start, the Revealed Word exposes itself to be of specious authority and of a sloppy multiplicity of authorship. In Genesis, we are told the world was created in six days even though the sun did not appear until the third day, making the whole process of indeterminate length. We read  that Adam will die the day he eats the fruit of the forbidden tree, only to learn a few chapters later that he and Eve live long, if somewhat hardscrabble lives after the Fall. To punish Cain, the eldest son of Adam and Eve, in perpetuity after he murders his brother Abel, God imposes a mark on the killer “to prevent anyone who finds him from slaying him.” It is an oddly gratuitous gesture given how, with Abel dead, Cain and his parents are the only ones left on Earth.

There is the account of the flood, clearly poached from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which predates the biblical version by generations, and the so-called Battle of Jericho as rendered in Joshua, when the Israelites on God’s command blared the city walls into rubble with their horns. This, despite overwhelming archeological evidence that not only did the walls not collapse under such conditions, there was never much in the way of walls to begin with.

Even the synoptic gospels of the New Testament betray profound differences in their interpretations of Christ’s ministry, death and ascension. There is reason to believe that all but a handful of the Pauline epistles were written, not by the apostle Paul himself, but by franchisees years after his death. In 1 Timothy, for example, Paul is to have instructed women to “learn in silence with full submission,” adding, “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man.” How to reconcile this with a sixth-century cave rendering in central Turkey depicting Paul celebrating mass alongside a woman, in this case St. Thecla? As biblical scholars John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed remarked in a 2004 book on early Christianity, “Pauline equality was negated by post-Pauline inequality.”

A recent book by Bart Ehrman further advances the theory of the bible as a politicized palimpsest. In his 2005 book “Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why,” Ehrman laid out forensic proof that much of the gospels were doctored by supplicants of an increasingly intolerant church. Now, in “Forgery and Counter-forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics,” he argues that a good share of the entire New Testament was retroactively distorted through selective edits and elaboration. In its journey from papyrus scrolls to Gutenberg’s printing press, it seems, the bible was transformed from a bundle of Bronze-age folkloric myths into a doctrinal canon enforced by an authoritarian and militantly sexist priesthood.

Here thoughtful readers may reasonably ask: What of it? Do not all religions embellish their narratives so as to more efficiently awe and manipulate their flock? What is Abraham’s god, after all,  but a new species of deity objectified by religious elites in their image for the purpose of cultural hegemony?

The answer, as Diarmaid MacCulloch writes in a recent review of Ehrman’s book, is that “Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a ‘Religion of the Book’.” Or, put another way, they are particularly presumptuous scriptures of record. Unlike the more elastic sensibilities of Hinduism and Buddhism, the Hebrew god delights in his jealousy - so much so that his laws and man’s would inevitably collide. Thus the pledge to Abraham - “to your descendents I give this land [of Israel]” - however fabulist, becomes the seedbed for decades of ruinous war and dispossession. The jihadi slaughter that punctuate Joshua, Judges and I Samuel are claimed as precedent for the sectarian wars that devastate the Middle East today. For bible literalists in both East and West, Old Testament violence is not so much a tragedy as an obligation. (Think of American Christian Zionists who urge their sons to “fight for Israel” in preparation for the Second Coming.)

Earlier this month, Time magazine featured a story about two Israeli archeologists who determined that Abraham could not have employed a camel as the biblical accounts have it because domesticated dromedaries did not arrive in Mesopotamia until centuries after he lived. Having listed a host of similar biblical inaccuracies, the story concluded happily that the book’s hazy history was part of its charm. “We needn’t understand these accounts as literally true,” the story quotes one biblical scholar, “but they are very rich in meaning and interpretive power.”

Fair enough, but if the bible is a fable let’s call it one, the better to preempt those who would embrace parochial folklore and mythology as reference points for policy-making.

Anatomy of Empire

You can tell a lot about a country by the way it accounts for its imperial past.

Following World War II, for example, Germany endured a scouring public appraisal of its atrocities while Japan - with U.S. complicity - convinced itself that the worst thing it did during the war was to lose it. Great Britain, which as India’s ex-overlord claims paternity for its railroads, postal service and invention of khaki, refuses to apologize for its brutal crackdown on the Sepoy mutiny of 1857, to say nothing of the 1919 killing of hundreds of civilians in the Punjab city of Amritsar. The United States, meanwhile, prefers to finesse its Victorian-era invasion and occupation of Latin American and Pacific states not as imperialism but destiny - or put another way: lebensraum.

And then there is France.

Like most European powers, France celebrated the end of centuries of continental slaughter by subjugating diversely colored people in resource-rich pockets of the world. What began as a global grab for commodities - from sea-otter pelts to pulp and precious metals - was for propaganda’s sake beautified as a mission to redeem foreign unfortunates. Just as Britain had its “White Man’s Burden” so do too did France have its mission civilisatrice, though unlike its more cynical cross-Channel rival France was just arrogant enough to take it seriously. (In this, the French and the Americans have a shared sense of exceptionalism, the lynchpin of their mutual mistrust.)

Last month I visited an exposition of France’s colonial experience in Indochina at the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. Indochine: Des Territoires et des Hommes, 1856-1956, was a fascinating look at how a nation chooses to memorialize its share of an imperial age that helped make the twentieth century the most violent in human history. The exhibit, which closed January 25, began as an overview of the territory itself, curated as a cluster of ancient civilizations exposed to foreign predations by its own civil wars, ethnic rivalries, and warlordism. Earlier settlements by French Jesuits - traditionally the vanguard of worse things to come - were followed by the arrival of French anthropologists, geologists, agronomists and later soldiers and civil servants. The motivation behind Paris’ imperial reach into the region was made clear in the antechamber to the main exhibit hall: to challenge London’s near-monopoly - via the Raj, a land bridge from the Mediterranean to Asia - on the lucrative markets of China.

The objects of war on display revealed the order of battle’s stark asymmetry.  The primitive muskets wielded by Vietnamese militias were no match for the aggressor’s highly accurate breech-loading rifles - the Armalites of their era - purchased from American and German arms makers. Sleek, French-made gunships shelled ancient pagodas at will. The closely tailored wool uniforms and pith helmets of French forces, erected ghost-like along with the floridly embroidered gowns of their Vietnamese counterparts, underscored how far European armies had evolved during the Napoleonic wars as Asia dosed under the silken parapet of Chinese vassalage.

The exhibit subtly tempted the visitor onward. Its case against the human costs of empire was all the more profound for its restraint. Post-cards of Japanese prostitutes - “les femmes horizontales” - who worked Saigon’s humid streets in the 1920s and 1930s hung appallingly alongside photos of executed Vietnamese insurrectionists. Newsreels of the 1954 rout of French forces at Dien Bien Phu by Vietnamese communist-nationalist rebels, followed by the failure of the Geneva Conference to pacify the region, hinted at the Americanization of the conflict. Wars of national liberation were by then raging worldwide, a multi-generational process that continues today.

Just ask the French. As curious Parisians and tourists alike filled Indochine‘s exhibit halls France was embroiled militarily in two of its ex-colonies in Africa -  Mali and the Central African Republic - and was poised to lead a bombing campaign against Syria, a former French stronghold in the Middle East, before its preemption by Washington. These operations, characterized by President François Hollande as humanitarian missions in conflict-punished states, were authorized with little debate in parliament and accepted with weary resignation by a people who have been in a near-permanent state of war for the last twelve hundred years.

Today, few French believe they have a civilizing mission to play. The once-obscure extreme right, ascendant after decades of unresponsive governance and high unemployment, is bigoted and isolationist while the left busies itself fighting yesterday’s collectivist battles. If there is support for an expansionist foreign policy it is solely as a means to destroy undesirables in their liars rather than fight them on French shores. The Parisian banlieues, suburbs of often shabby public housing, are meanwhile populated with emigrés from the same countries that French troops weredeployed decades ago to subdue. They inhabit an imperial twilight, estranged from Paris as citizens no less then they were as subjects under its hegemony.

Mention the war!

“Don’t mention the war!” bellows Basil Faulty, the half-mad hotelier, to his wife after a German foursome checks into his English country inn. It is an iconic scene from the classic 1970’s sit-com “Faulty Towers,” an inspired send-up of the European reflex to avoid references to German war guilt for the sake of post-war comity.

Judging by recent remarks from Asian leaders, such sensitivity is a thing of the past. Once verboten in diplomatic circles, equating geopolitical rivals with  warmongering German dictators is now de rigueur. Last week, Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III lamented to the The New York Times how the free world was not standing up to what he described as Chinese maritime aggression in Southeast Asia. “At what point do you say ‘enough is enough,’?” he asked. “Well, the world has to say it - remember that the Sudetenland was given in an attempt to appease Hitler to prevent World War II.”

Whoa! Someone should remind Aquino about the protocols of diplomacy in this, the smoldering ashes of the unipolar world. Traditionally, imperial America demands at least a morsel of diplomacy before it tears into its next quagmire. (Even George W. Bush, on the eve of his 2003 invasion of Iraq, appealed to the United Nations for its imprimatur, however unsuccessfully.) Aquino, it seems, would just as soon skip the appetizer and head straight to the main course. After all, what better way to war-cloud prospects for peace than to liken Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Adolf Hitler?

Aquino’s interview, which provoked  a strong rebuke from Beijing, was not an isolated attempt to tar China with a peculiarly Teutonic adventurism. Throughout Southeast Asia, anti-China protests have compared Beijing to Berlin under the Nazis; in Davos, Switzerland last month, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe implied that Edwardian-era Germany - then an emerging power not unlike China today - plunged Europe into conflict with its imperial ambition. (Not to be outdone, North Korea - China’s plucky, if thoroughly deranged ally - responded by calling Abe an “Asian Hitler.”)

Needless to say, bickering over Asia’s maritime borders is reduced to a geopolitical hemorrhoid when measured against the prevailing perils of 1914 and 1939. Comparing the Chinese regime or any other government, however authoritarian, to the Nazis is absurdly disproportionate and morally offensive, trivializing as it does the victims of Wilhelmine and Hitlerian aggression. It is a pity the U.S. government, which rightly sanctions regimes that traffic in Holocaust denial - and which until recently claimed neutrality in Asia’s territorial disputes - does not also denounce those who debase the magnitude of Nazi evil with such cavalier associations.

Of course, there is more at work here than tasteless metaphor. For a century,  America’s allies have employed demagogic cant to lure Washington into fighting their battles, often with great success.

In 1918, after Russian communists toppled the tsar, enemies of Vladimir Lenin set up offices in Washington to promote their cause. With the help of a trove of “secret” documents, they managed to convince U.S. President Woodrow Wilson that the Bolsheviks were stooges of imperial Germany. The archive was later revealed to be counterfeit, but not before Wilson deployed thousands of American troops to Russia’s northern coast, part of a punitive expedition that remains one of the most disastrous campaigns in U.S. military history.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called “China Lobby,” a cabal of conservative politicians, pundits and publishers, promoted China’s right-wing  Nationalist Party and its struggle against China’s communist revolutionaries and a Sino-Soviet “bloc” that never existed. Their red-baiting tactics helped maneuver the U.S. into a war with China on the Korean peninsula and proxy guerrilla conflict in Indochina, delaying Sino-American rapprochement by nearly two decades.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992, eastern Europeans governments allied with U.S. defense contractors to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Russia’s doorstep. The ostensible motivation behind the policy - to keep then-impoverished and toothless Moscow at bay - has freighted U.S.-Russian relations ever since and nearly ensnared Washington in a 2008 war between Georgia on one side and Russia and its proxy South Ossetia on the other.

With Beijing responding in kind to the U.S.-led arms buildup in Asia and with competing claims on strategic waterways escalating in pitch, it is no wonder China’s neighbors are dealing the Nazi card. With Communism all but dead and buried, how else to adequately caricature the aggressor in their appeals for American intervention? It is instructive, however, to consider what cards they aren‘t playing.

Asia has played host to no shortage of western hegemons having their way with the region. Consider, for example, “French” Indonesia, “British” Malay, and the “Dutch” Indies. For that matter, if Aquino really wanted to bring home the danger of “appeasing” aggression he could have cited the U.S. invasion of his own country in 1899 followed by three years of war that led to nearly a quarter-million Filipino casualties. He could also have raised Japan’s military dominance of Asia - beginning with victory in its war with Russia in 1905, which allowed it a springboard in Manchuria and Korea from which to terrorize the entire region for the next four decades. It wasn’t until the late 1930s, when Japan began horning in on western concessions in China that the U.S., with help from fellow imperial powers Britain and the Netherlands, stood up to Tokyo.

Of course it would never do to offend the world’s greatest Pacific power and its most important regional ally when pandering for their support. Thus Aquino’s course conflation of Beijing as 1930s Berlin. Get used to such nonsense, as it appears to be working. As the Financial Times reported yesterday, senior Obama administration officials have recently “placed the blame for tensions in [Asia] solely on China and warned that the U.S. could move more forces to the western Pacific” should China refuse to back down. As the impetus behind Washington’s hardened line the article cited “several Asian governments” who have “complained privately” that America is insufficiently attentive to their concerns.

Allies uber alles!

Deconstructing Arik

Prime Minister Sharon was a complex man.” - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden eulogizing Ariel Sharon in Israel this week.

Complex? How long did Biden and his staff deliberate over the legacy of Ariel Sharon before coming up with such a pallid verdict? Sharon was many things - chronically insubordinate, bigoted charmer, handmaiden to sectarian slaughter - but complex? On the contrary, anyone who understood Old Testament justice could easily comprehend Ariel Sharon. What’s so complicated about a human howitzer?

Certainly the man I interviewed fourteen years ago was hell and gone from complexity. It was October 12, 2000, two weeks into the second Palestinian Intifada. A few days earlier a Sharon functionary had told me to expect a call at 3 p.m. for what was budgeted as a twenty-minute phone interview - a narrow slot with much to talk about. Among other things, Sharon had been accused of provoking the Intifada by barreling through sacred Muslim sites on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a phalanx of security agents in tow, in late September.

The day of the interview arrived, and what a day it was. In the West Bank town of Ramallah, two Israeli army reservists had been set upon and brutally murdered by a crowd of Palestinians. As my driver and I headed back to Jerusalem from Nazareth, where I had spent the morning with a prominent Arab-Israeli lawmaker, I received a call from an editor in Brussels: a U.S. Navy destroyer, the Cole, had been ripped open by suicide bombers off the coast of Yemen.The Intifada appeared to be going viral. The Middle East, it seemed, was closer to regional conflict than at any time since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

Just then my other phone rang. It was Arik calling.

Where to begin? Ramallah or the Temple Mount? Sharon chose Camp David, where several months earlier a high-wire peace summit between Israelis and Palestinians had collapsed. It was not Sharon’s march on the Dome of the Rock that set the stage for the Intifada, swore his apologists, but the failure of Yasser Arafat to accept a landmark deal from the Israelis.

“Arafat is trying to get through violence what he couldn’t manage to get by negotiation,” Sharon declared. Ehud Barak, Israel’s then prime minister, “made a mistake when he put all his concessions on the table and thought Arafat would kiss him immediately and that this would be the end of the conflict. Instead the Palestinians revolted. All of this was pre-planned and orchestrated by Arafat.”

The interview was interrupted several times by failed connections, prompting my driver to criss-cross parts of northern Israel in search of proper coverage. (We eventually found a patch somewhere in the Tiberian desert.) Sharon, who had patiently redialed after each dropped signal, responded to my apologies with avuncular dismissals. “I am an old man,” he said. “I have nothing to do but work on my farm. But if I were prime minister the situation would be much better. The Palestinians would know what they may have and what they may not have. They would know that ‘no’ would never become ‘yes.’”

If there was a shred of empathy, reappraisal or self-examination - the constituent parts of complexity - on the other end of the line I detected no sign of it. The interview lasted a good forty minutes, after which Sharon invited me to continue the conversation on his farm. Given the circumstances, he could not have been more gracious.

A few days later I was having lunch in Jerusalem with veteran BBC correspondent John Simpson when Sharon’s name came up. I mentioned my interview and noted somewhat sheepishly how disarmed I was by a man intimately associated with some of the Middle East’s worst atrocities, from the attack on the Palestinian village of Qibya in 1953 to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon two decades later and the subsequent massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila.

“It’s unnerving,” I said, “to find yourself charmed by an … um …,” I searched clumsily for a diplomatic way to explain myself.

“By an evil man,” interjected Simpson, who had witnessed some of Sharon’s handiwork first-hand, in Lebanon.

I nodded.

In February 2001 Sharon was elected prime minister. That April an international commission tasked with identifying the roots of the Intifada concluded that Sharon’s blunt Temple Mount tour helped trigger a revolt that “was foreseen by those who urged that the visit be prohibited.” The report found no evidence that the ensuing violence was planned, either by Arafat or anyone else. Four months later, the New York Review of Books published an account of the Camp David talks that would conclusively discredit the argument that Arafat had rejected an unprecedentedly generous offer of statehood. Instead, it faulted Barak for frog-marching the Palestinians prematurely to the negotiating table - with assistance from the Clinton White House - to garner popular support ahead of the very election he would lose to Sharon.

That Sharon was a liar - even Ben-Gurion noted his “habit of not telling the truth” - and committed war crimes is beyond dispute within the reality-based community. Obscured by his more grisly exploits, however, is his record as Minister of Agriculture, where he became a leader of the settler movement in occupied Palestine. Like the biblical traveler in Judges who dismembers his concubine, Sharon did as much as anyone to slash the West Bank into proliferating Jewish colonies that have rendered Palestinian statehood all but impossible. As prime minister, by unilaterally evacuating settlers from Gaza, he created a power vacuum that Hamas would fill two years later, providing Israel with the excuse to incarcerate the Gaza strip and fuel one humanitarian crisis after another.

However sympathetic I am to Simpson’s characterization of Sharon I am also aware that concepts of evil are often labored and meaningless. When competing narratives are so irreconcilable as to become mirror images, evil in one becomes good in the other. To call Sharon complex, however, is to imply a conscience and a texture that was never there. Sharon was sure of himself even as he massacred innocents in Israel’s name. If that does not betray evil it certainly suggests a studied venality. Thoughtful readers may wonder if there is a measurable difference between the two.

Save the Rooster

Are the knives out for Le Coq? A broadside of news reports about French malaise has provoked a counter-blast from Paris. “Not a week passes,” wailed Le Monde this week, “without the Anglo-Saxon press mobilizing its analyses … on the failures and the excesses of the policies pursued by François Hollande,” France’s embattled socialist president.

The left-of-center daily was responding specifically to a Newsweek column, headlined “The Fall of France,” about how the country’s high taxes and rigid labor laws are chasing away its college graduates, entrepreneurs, and white-collar professionals to seek opportunities abroad. Despite a smattering of factual errors, even Le Monde acknowledged the story was “not illegitimate” given how its premise is shared by French supply-siders.

Over the last year or so, public laments and red flags over Franco-sclerosis have become as commonplace as brie. In November, the rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded France’s sovereign debt to AA status, citing the country’s ten-percent unemployment rate and mammoth public debt. The European Commission has also piled on. Last April, its Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs warned the Hollande government of mushrooming trade and budget deficits, weakened competitiveness, reduced exports and productivity, spiraling debt, dwindling corporate profits, and muscle-bound labor unions.

As if that weren’t enough, an American academic guest lecturing in Paris published a sobering cri de cœur last week against institutionalized as well as street-level ethnic discrimination in France. “The right to live one’s life as a first-class citizen,” Justin E. H. Smith wrote for The New York Times, “depends in part on the conduct of a state and in part on the behavior of its people. Whether or not the right of immigrants to first-class citizenship is set up in conflict with the right of earlier inhabitants … has very much to do with both state policy and with popular opinion.” By this measure, Smith implied, both the state and its people have failed.

The problems confronting France are indeed severe. But are they unique? Absolute comparisons between the French republic and its cross-pond counterpart suggest they are not. American indebtedness is slightly larger than  that of France and its politics are at least as dysfunctional. Washington is also no less derelict when it comes to immigration, having failed to pass related legislation thanks to nativist ringers in the Republican Party. The list of shared Franco-U.S. pathologies goes on, from America’s Christian-Zionist anti-Semites and France’s own, less exotic varietal, to exceptionalist fantasies that have led both nation’s into misbegotten military adventures - sequentially in fact, in Indochina. Of course, America is exceptional in one crucial regard: because the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, Washington may rely on low borrowing costs both in good times and bad while France’s euro trades at the mercy of arbitragers as well as economic fundamentals.

There is, however, at least one Gallic faiblesse of which America is admirably free, and it was something I came across recently while reporting a story about France’s nuclear power industry: the intrinsically inbred quality of its political, corporate, and technocratic elites.

France is second only to the U.S. as the largest producer of nuclear energy. Following the 1973 oil shock Paris identified energy independence as a strategic objective and today nuclear plants account for three-quarters of the country’s electricity output. The sector is woefully inefficient, however. A pell-mell expansion plan has saddled it with huge overcapacity and it is brimming with  stockpiles of spent fuel waiting to be reprocessed. The industry is failing to attract enough young engineers to replace its aging expertise - with potentially devastating consequences. Last year, an inspector general’s report concluded that efforts to repopulate the country’s nuclear-power maintenance skills “appear to be insufficient” even as it noted a “perceptible increase” in the number of “significant events” - a trade euphemism for industrial accidents.

While campaigning for president in 2011, Hollande - largely in response to public concerns following the 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant - vowed to consolidate France’s fleet of nuclear reactors and to promote renewable sources of energy. Since then not a single reactor has been shuttered and talk of energy reform has been shelved. In contrast, Germany has turned its back on nuclear power altogether and is pioneering such energy innovations as “micro grids” that harness solar and wind power. In the U.S., meanwhile, nuclear power has been obscured by a shale gas awakening that is turning the country into a net exporter of hydrocarbon fuel.

France’s preoccupation with nuclear energy, say some experts, is less about meeting the country’s fuel needs than indulging elites heavily invested in atomic power. When it comes to energy policy, French lawmakers have been conspicuously under-represented; the country’s National Assembly did not discuss energy issues until 1989, for example, and the decision to develop a costly new nuclear plant, the so-called European Pressured Reactor, was taken before parliament debated the matter. Small wonder, critics argue, that a significant ratio of the France’s 58 reactors is furloughed at any one time due to demand shortfalls and that the ERP has been plagued with costly design flaws.

The capture of France’s energy sector by a cadre of policy planners and industrialists, as energy consultant Mycle Schneider puts it, “has made it possible to push through long-term policy orientations entirely outside election concerns. The mechanism constitutes … a significant disadvantage for democratic decision-making and it is a serious handicap for any significant policy adaptation or reorientation.”

Georges Vendryes, a godfather of French nuclear power, described the unchecked authority of France’s energy priesthood in a 1989 interview: “Since forty years the big decisions concerning the development of the French nuclear program are taken by a very restricted group of personalities that occupy key positions in the government or in the top administration of … the few companies involved in the program. The approach remains unchanged in spite of the change of ministers thanks to the permanence of these personalities that occupy the same position generally for some ten years.”

One could argue that Paris - unlike Washington, capital of the world’s second-largest polluter - at least has an energy policy. France, however, is grievously compromised by an education system that fosters a permanent upper class of parochial elites. As the Newsweek story pointed out, Hollande himself is a product of the Grandes Ecoles, academies of incestuous political relations that graduated all but a few former prime ministers over the last half-century.

However they may abuse the entitlements of dollar dominance, Americans have distinguished themselves by regularly turfing out failed political establishments in favor of new ones. (That’s one reason the dollar has remained a fiat currency for as long as it has.) At the same time, it has preserved its most compelling attraction for so many of the world’s entrepreneurs and businessmen: in America it is okay to fail and the pedigrees of success begin not with a diploma but a smart idea.

At the core of France’s existential crisis is not excessive debt nor even ethnic discrimination, neither of which are uniquely French. It is a political hierarchy that, for all its illiberal inbreeding and risk aversion may as well be Japanese.

Sephardic Ghosts

This weekend in Paris I toured the Musée Nissim de Camondo, an exhibit of eighteenth-century French art in a Belle Époque mansion overlooking Park Monceau. It features a stunning collection of Louis XVI furniture, paintings, Porcelain sets, and Japanese lacquerware. Even more compelling, however, is the story of the family behind the collection.

Moïse de Camondo, the manor’s last owner before he bequeathed it to the French state, was born in Istanbul in 1860 to a powerful family of Jewish financiers during a time of great change. The Ottoman sultanate, awakened to the challenges posed by a modernizing Europe, enlisted the Camondo elders to reform its banking sector and to rebuild Istanbul’s urban grid. Having outgrown Istanbul, the Camondos then moved to Paris, where their banking empire grew along with their art collection. By the eve of World War I, Moïse became the patriarch of a clan poised on the abyss; his aviator son, Nissim, was shot down and killed over northeastern France in 1917. Moïse himself passed away in 1935 and the rest of the family perished at Auschwitz.

The Camondos were products of the once-vast Sephardim, Jews with roots in North Africa and the Middle East. For centuries they thrived under the Arab and Ottoman empires, not only as bankers but also as scientists, artists, musicians and administrators. The twelfth-century rabbinical scholar Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides, was revered as astrologer, physician and philosopher to the caliphal court in Cairo. The Farhi dynasty in Damascus served as treasurers to the Ottomans and in their chateau was stored the gold that backed the imperial coin. Sassoon Eskell, a prominent member of Mesopotamia’s legendary Sassoon clan, was a financier, statesman and architect of modern Iraq.

Sassoon died in 1932 and for his character and achievements was eulogized throughout the Arab world.

The Sephardim, however, would not survive the Franco-British partition of the Levant. It lingered on until the mid-twentieth century, when the creation of Israel and the wars that followed forced their remnant communities to flee. Just as the rise of fascism scattered the European Diaspora before its terrible denouement, so too - however indirectly - did Zionist demands for a Jewish state all but chase Sephardic Jewry into oblivion.

The cost of this perverse and destructive exchange - Sephardim exile for an Ashkenazi-dominated ghetto in Palestine - is worth considering now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to scupper Mideast peace talks with yet another red line of his own. By insisting Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, Netanyahu - well known for his opposition to Palestinian statehood despite wan recitation to the contrary - would have them prejudice Israel’s already marginalized 1.6 million Arab citizens as well as millions of refugees who yearn for the right to return. Such a demand would be, and should be, rejected.

As a recent story in The New York Times skillfully implies, Netanyahu’s obstructionism also exposes some inconvenient facts about Israeli democracy, the spirit, if not the letter of which generally eludes its Arab inhabitants. (Israeli-Arabs lags its Jewish counterparts in income levels and leads them in rates of unemployment, illiteracy and infant mortality; they account for twenty percent of the total population but control ten percent of parliament and less than ten percent of the nation’s wealth.) As the Times article posits, “What is the appropriate balance between being a Jewish state and a democracy with citizens of other faiths and backgrounds? With a largely secular population, who interprets Jewish law and custom for public institutions and public spaces? Is Judaism a religion, an ethnicity or both?”

Some distinctions cannot be finessed. As it struggles to reconcile its religious identity with pretensions to genuine democracy, Israel has more in common with Iran, Pakistan and Bahrain than its patron, the United States. Israel defines itself by one of the three Abrahamic faiths and its claim on Palestinian land - a primary source of the region’s instability - is based on the conceit that its people are “treasured” by the Hebrew God. The country has no constitution; its Basic Law stands as an uneasy compromise between the secular emigres who founded the country and demands from a powerful orthodox community that sacred religious texts serve as the basis for jurisprudence. Serious attempts to resolve such an existential dispute could ignite the kind of violent civil strife that now convulses Egypt.

The U.S., in contrast, does have a constitution. Its first amendment precludes a national religion and makes no reference to a higher power of any kind. America’s founding manifesto declares that “all men are created equal” and its only concession to a supreme being is the elegantly ecumenical “Nature’s God.” It is, to say the least, more Diderot and Voltaire than Leviticus and Jeremiah.

And so in their way were Jews like Moïse Camondo and Eskell Sassoon, informed as they were by the Enlightenment rather than the Babylonian Captivity. Ardent internationalists a century before Davos Man, they were less Syrians, Turks, or Iraqis - or even Jews, Christians and Muslims - than they were Damascenes, Constantinoplines, and Baghdadis. Unlike their European counterparts, they refused to distract themselves with vulgar notions of national or religious identity, nation-states and borders. This is why the global economy revolved around the Muslim empires for as long as it did. It is also what makes Israel, which fetishizes borders and barriers, more a creature of Europe than of the Mediterranean, and it is why the early Arab-Israeli wars were less about religion than hegemonism.

Otherwise, how could it be that Jewish power and influence in the Arab world was so much more profound before Israel’s creation than it is today?

Japan’s imperial demons are back thanks to U.S. indulgence.

Years ago, as a correspondent based in Japan, I journeyed to the headquarters of a cosmetics company for a profile I was writing about local firms that were making products in the U.S. and importing them back home. (It was a counter-factual trend and therefore worth a story.) The plant was about an hour’s train ride from Tokyo and after interviewing the company’s directors - a stiff, gray lot if memory serves - I was offered a lift back to the  station by a staff functionary.

Midway through the ride our conversation drifted to politics. I asked my escort how he and his friends felt about the U.S.-Japan security alliance.

“It is very useful,” he said. “It allows us to concentrate on business.”

This was in 1998. Japan was nearly a decade into a severe economic recession that would last another fifteen years. Over time, as Japan slid deeper into economic decay and regional insignificance, I reconsidered the  leavening effects of America’s security guarantees. If Washington’s militarized empire was good for growth, as Pentagon officials often asserted, what explained Japan’s  prolonged degradation?

American hegemony is purchased through a simple transaction: In exchange for a security commitment and sweeteners such as military training and arms deals, the partner nation offers Washington unconditional access to its sovereign space - its ports as depots for American arms and its sea and air corridors through which U.S. troops and material may transit. In this way, the Pentagon can deploy lethal force as promptly and efficiently as Amazon can deliver an Xbox.

For the many hosts of American empire, it is as irresistible a deal as it is perverse and corrupting. There is, after all, no more crucial civic obligation than national defense. For a state to transfer that burden to a third party is to deny itself the responsibility of setting national priorities, a cornerstone of prudent governance. There is also the inconvenient fact that bartered security is by definition temporary. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, he who gives up a little sovereignty for a little security may end up forfeiting both. He is, simply put, a chump.

In addition, the resources American clients would have otherwise invested in homeland defense are inveterately misallocated. In the late 1980s, Washington’s Asian allies manically produced cheap goods for export, creating a credit shortage that led to a foreign currency crisis a decade later. (In South Korea, for example, the country’s fourth-largest conglomerate invested billions of dollars to corner the global semiconductor market - even as the U.S. provided the financial and human backbone of Seoul’s deterrent against its northern adversary - only to go bankrupt a few years later.) A generation after the end of the Cold War, Pentagon beneficiaries in Europe - among the world’s richest countries - have yet to agree on a common defense policy to match their commercial and monetary union. In the Persian Gulf, corrupt emirs spend lavishly on U.S.-made weaponry when they should foster private enterprise as an alternative source of employment to their exhausted public sectors.

For all the waste created by America’s alliance system, however, there is something especially insidious about its relations with Japan. After seven decades of peace,  the consequences of Washington’s overindulgence of its close Asian ally - this geopolitical welfare state - are beginning to assert themselves in the form of a militant, nationalist leadership over which it has increasingly little control.

The history of Japan is one of alternating abundance and deprivation. Its thin crust of serenity - the rock gardens, the tea ceremonies and origami swans - obscures molten human rage and contradiction. The Japanese are among the most self-repressed people on earth, informed by an acute and not unwarranted sense of isolation and vulnerability. Not for nothing is The Great Wave of Kanagawa, Hokusai’s early-nineteenth century masterpiece, so authentically Japanese for its fateful collision of raw might and fragility. Nor, for that matter, is Godzilla.

Few developed countries have transitioned so swiftly and violently from self-imposed isolation to global engagement as Japan. Feudal and prosperous during the seventeenth-century, the country was forced in 1853 to trade with the world under a thicket of unequal treaties signed in the shadow of U.S. gunboats at Yokohama. Liberal reforms followed. By the end of the century Japan had became a regional power, its military modernization and constitution modeled on Bismarckian Germany’s. When, in 1905,  Japan emerged victorious in its brief war with Russia, Tokyo was allowed a seat alongside the western imperial powers then carving up the world into rival  fiefdoms. China, Taiwan and Korea were subject to an arriviste, and therefore particularly savage, Japanese imperium.

Japan’s decision to attack U.S., British and Dutch enclaves in Hawaii and Southeast Asia in 1941 was the consequence of a western oil embargo for  the slaughters it committed in China. The great Pacific War that followed represented a triumph for Showa-dynasty militarism over the short-lived but inspiring Taisho era of liberal, if leftist democratic politics. The country’s devastating defeat  four years later swept away its empire but not, ironically, its militants.

Well known throughout Asia but rarely remarked upon in Tokyo or Washington is how the U.S., under the authority of Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur,  protected Japanese war criminals from prosecution. While Nazi leaders were tried and executed in occupied Germany, MacArthur’s senior  aides protected some of Japan’s most notorious militants for their help in the looming U.S. war with the Soviet puppet-master. After the communist victory in China, Japan was to be, according to the Pentagon, a staging area “from which to project our military power to the Asiatic mainland and to U.S.S.R. islands adjacent thereto.” MacArthur successfully resisted handing post-war authority to Japanese civilians, as had been done in the Western zones of Germany, as such action would give “greater impetus to the Communist drive to bring all of Asia under its control.”

Though Germany was encouraged to process its war guilt through a very public ventilation, Washington demanded no such exorcism from Japan. Washington’s post-war strategy for Europe would be different for Asia. There was no Chinese de Gaulle, no Japanese Adenauer to broker rapprochement between the region’s two largest powers and the Americans conspicuously did not cultivate any. Nor was Japan encouraged to play an active role in Asian diplomacy, the way post-war German leaders traveled throughout Europe, to engender trust and goodwill. Instead, foreign ministers waffled through state visits with vague references to  their wartime atrocities without taking responsibility for them, a studied equivocation that only hardened the postwar reputation of Japanese leaders as unfeeling, shifty, and irredeemable.

Tokyo had only to rebuild its economy and remain a steadfast American ally. And it did. Over the years the Pentagon would coax Japan military to enhance the reach and capability of its military, but not so much as to make itself redundant. Demand for Japanese goods soared during America’s wars in Korea and Vietnam, which fueled the country’s decades-long economic boom. Yet, objectified by Washington as little more than “an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” as Pentagon planners often called it, Japan failed to develop a unique post-war identity or bold executive leadership. Unlike Germany, its political institutions remained weak and corrupt, capable of building roads to nowhere but not a fresh vision for the future. The dominant Democratic Party of Japan, more a patronage system than a political movement, ran the country along with huge conglomerates and a hidebound bureaucracy - an iron, unholy trinity - consecrated by the United States government.

By the early 1990s, after the bursting of Japan’s enormous property bubble, the country had become politically, economically and culturally inert. Once a high-tech powerhouse, its industry was stale and aimless. A revolving rotisserie of risk-averse prime ministers had spawned a national nihilism, particularly among the country’s youth; teenage boys - known as “Otakus,” or house dwellers - retreated into Manga or computer-animated virtual worlds while schoolgirls, some barely in their teens, traded sex with adult men for designer handbags. During my last year in Tokyo, the package of stories my bureau chief  submitted for awards consideration was bundled around a theme of sclerosis - the slow degradation of Japan’s civil society. (It ended up winning an Overseas Press Club award.)

Nearly a quarter century later - the “lost two decades,” as some call it - Japan is shaking off the rust of stagnation. Its prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has invigorated the economy with an easy-money policy. The country will be hosting the Summer Olympics in 2020. Last week, Japan delivered a humanoid robot to the International Space Station, the first country to ever to do so. Kirobo, as the robot is called, is capable of making spontaneous conversation and may ultimately replace human labor in everything from nursing to chauffeuring cars.

If Kirobo is the new Walkman, the electronic device that defined Japan’s high-tech dominance in the 1980s, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe represents an altogether unique species of Japanese leadership. He displays none of the discomfort shared by his postwar predecessors about Japan’s imperial past. Indeed, he has paid homage to the remains of war criminals interred at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, provoking outrage among Japanese neighbors and a simpering demarche from Washington. He has spoken dismissively of claims that Korean women were coerced into working as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers and he has said that Class A war criminals “are not criminals under Japan’s domestic law.”

A day before Tokyo announced its triumphant delivery of Kirobo, the Abe government declared it would significantly increase military spending and readiness in response to what it describes as China’s aggrandizing claims on tiny islands Japan regards as its own. As the Financial Times put it in an opinion column last week, “Mr. Abe is working to transform the Japanese premier from a legislative manager into a commander-in-chief, perched atop a more robust defense establishment.” An arms race between Asia’s two great powers, which this space has argued was triggered by the United States a decade ago, is well underway.

Abe himself is the grandson of a right-wing politician and wartime industry minister who was arrested by the Allied Occupation forces under suspicion of committing war crimes. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was a senior official in Japan’s colonial Manchurian administration who served wartime Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo. Kishi became prime minister in 1957 and, according to The Japan Times, was derided by the political left as a ghost of Japan’s past militarism and prewar political system.”
Is Abe, with resources at his disposal far greater than those available to his ancestors, himself the spectral return of Showa-era revanchism? Is Asia’s isosceles troika of great powers, with the U.S. and Japan allied on one end and a solitary China on the other, doomed to make war?

Certainly Washington would prefer to avoid squandering its military resources in a clash with its largest creditor over a ringlet of uninhabited rocks. It has, however, developed a fetish for far-flung military deployments that fuels a  destructive logic and power of its own. If Japan’s future belongs to Shinzo Abe and a generation of Japanese who know little of the atrocities committed decades ago in their name, America’s security establishment has only itself to blame. Having bombed Japan’s great cities into rubble in 1945, Washington could have rebuilt the country into a genuinely sovereign state held to account for its sins through rigorous self-examination. Instead, it satisfied itself with an impenetrable aircraft carrier, its hauls filled with sleeping demons ready to awaken themselves to the martial drumbeat of a resurgent China.

Between Us Primates: What Chuck Hagel Could Learn from Pope Francis

In February, as Likudnik-optioned Senators were mobilized to derail Chuck Hagel’s appointment as Secretary of Defense, I lamented in a blog post how the hearings ignored the Pentagon’s corrupt accounting and alliance systems. A month later, after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was ordained as Pope Francis, I was similarly dismissive of his ability to save a Catholic Church staggering under the burden of murky finances, misogyny, homophobia, and industrialized buggery.

Since then, the career trajectories of the two men have diverged dramatically. Francis - who this week was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year - is gamely trying to shunt the Vatican into the post-Inquisition age. Hagel meanwhile, has not only failed to prepare the Pentagon for its reduced stature in the emerging multipolar world, he is leading it by the nose into another generation of endless conflict.

It may seem odd to compare the Catholic Church with the U.S. Department of Defense. (Unless you’re from the Philippines, which had the misfortune of being run by both for all but a fraction of the last half-millennium.) In fact, the two institutions have much in common. They are equally masculine and hierarchical, with a host of tribes and secret societies who duel furtively for power. Both presume divinely inspired missions to evangelize - one for souls, the other for basing rights. Their respective charters rest on the conceit that men are intrinsically sinful, if not evil outright, and on occasion must be destroyed.

Finally, both the Pentagon and the Holy See are hidebound and impervious to change - or so it seemed until recently. This week, the Financial Times published a superb investigative piece into the Institute of Religious Works, the Vatican’s bank, which for its shady deals had become a €5 billion, ecclesiastical slush fund. Prosecutors allege that the bank was used “to move money for businessmen based in the Naples region, widely regarded in Italy as a haven of organized crime.” It imposed “surprisingly few checks and balances on cash flow,” skimped on documentation, and its staff, a mere 112 people, with cardinals acting as supervisors, “seemed unversed in customer due diligence.

The story documents how regulators effectively shamed banks like Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan into withdrawing as the Vatican’s partner for overseas transactions. The biggest asset in the investigation, however, was the pontiff himself. In speeches, Pope Francis publicly condemned the “idolatry of money” and tax evasion while quietly issuing papal decrees that helped speed inspections and enabled reform within the clergy’s senior ranks.

For centuries church elites have employed endless deliberation to obstruct reform efforts both from within and without. Yet here is the outsider Francis, an Argentine ascetic, exposing one of the Vatican’s most sinister fiefdoms in less than a year of his papacy. And he hasn’t stopped there. Last week he launched a task force, comprised of both lay and clerical members, to investigate the rape and intimidation of children by priests and to recommend reforms for preventing further abuse. Though he has yet to challenge the Medieval orthodoxies that estrange gays, women and divorced persons from church rituals, he has signaled rhetorically that he may one day do battle on their behalf.

If only Chuck Hagel, the primate of America’s national security priesthood, was so dauntless. His first year as Secretary of Defense reveals an embrace of the status quo that is as disappointing as it is unsustainable. Last month, the Reuters news agency revealed a slag heap of fraud so vast it reduces the Vatican bank into a back-ally shell game. Each year the Department of Defense submits its expenditures to a team of independent accountants and each year its inspector-general issues a report that cites numerous “material weaknesses” - i.e. unsupported outlays - in the value of hundreds of billions of dollars. Among Washington’s many extra-terrestrial outrages, this is perhaps the most egregious.

“The Pentagon,” according to the Reuters investigation, “is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years.”

Since 1996, all federal agencies have been legally obliged to annually audit their accounts. The Defense Department, by the sheer weight of its size and dysfunction, has been relieved of this obligation. That means, as the Reuters report points out, that the $8.5 trillion in Pentagon budget outlays allocated over the last seventeen years - an amount that exceeds the value of China’s economic output last year - has never been accounted for. (Remember that the next time senior Pentagon officials charge, as they so often do, that China’s military spending is inadequately transparent.)

Hagel, a Vietnam veteran and former U.S. Senator, declined to be interviewed for the Reuters story, a tacit admission that he has no plans to address the Pentagon’s corrupt accounting regime. He has, however, found time to reaffirm Washington’s commitment to defend Japanese territory, including a chain of islets it ceded to Tokyo in 1971 despite counterclaims by Beijing on the same nano-archipelago. In doing so, he has done as much as anyone to hasten a Sino-American war. (As I write this, wire agencies are reporting that U.S. and Chinese warships have narrowly avoided collision in the disputed area.)

While touring the Middle East last week, Hagel delivered a similarly hawkish message.  Speaking at a security forum in Bahrain, he assured an assembly of despots, strongmen, and unelected emirs of an “enduring” American commitment to their defense. As proof, he cited forward deployments of U.S. troops armed with the world’s deadliest weaponry, as well as a $580 million investment to expand the Fifth Fleet’s headquarter in Bahrain and a new combined air operations center in Qatar.

Separately, veteran Washington Post correspondent Walter Pincus reported that Hagel’s Pentagon is building huge depots in the Arab world and Israel to warehouse weaponry and equipment at an estimated cost of up to $110 million. The largest depots are in Israel, he writes, where some $1.2 billion in surplus U.S. military equipment and weaponry are stored for use by the United States or Israel. Presumably, these stockpiles have accumulated for an anticipated war with Iran.

There are good reasons why the Pentagon’s scandalously opaque accounts defy reform. Global hegemony is expensive - so much so that if its true costs were revealed Americans would insist on its dissolution. Therein lies the difference between Pope Francis, who apparently toils for the sake of his congregation, and Hagel, who labors for empire.