Bend Over America !

A friend and fellow memo reader responds to my comments about my dinner with some liberal friends. He also tells a story of his own.

Comments from another friend regarding Obama and liberals.

Comments from a liberal friend about Obama, Palin and McCain - seems to make my point.

I have always stated Obama is sharp, raised a lot of money, runs an organized campaign and has espoused a lot of clever ideas. I also see Obama believing government is the solution, has a tendency to be radical in his policies and associations, has made personal claims about being more than he really is, accomplishing more than he really has and remains, to my mind, Wilson's "music man." He is inexperienced and has proven that time and again with comments he quickly had to retract. He can become dangerous when he wanders away from the teleprompter.

Should he become president, perhaps he will prove a fast learner because he is going to be challenged quickly from all fronts - domestic and foreign, financial and military etc.. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)

My comments about liberals being humorless when challenged was extreme and too broad brushed, agreed. Ideologues on either side tend to be humorless and defensive when challenged. I often make points by painting with too broad generalities and for this I am at fault.

People come in all varieties don't they?

Aoun draws closer to Iran. Implications are not favorable. (See 2 below.)

No one seems to care about Socialism anymore and the direction that has taken us. In subtle ways, Socialism has brought us to our current state of affairs but few make the connection - government sponsored agencies forcing the private sector to make unworthy loans, a dependent society seeking sustenance from government rather than from self, a decline in rugged individualism, excessive personal and government debt and the list is endless.

We began down this path when Roosevelt came into power because of the Depression. Post WW 2,we did not modify or eliminate many of FDR's policies but rather welded them into our psyche and modus operandi. We now are facing another financial debacle and are resorting to more of the same Socialistic "bail out" policies.

When we eventually recover, and we will, we will have grafted another layer of Socialist "gook" to our nation's fabric, our thinking and it will become an accepted way of life. There is always a price to pay and we will pay it through inefficiency, non-competiveness, more dependency and a decline in morality. Obama's smooth talking populist pap will oil the way so bend over America you are about to receive another Socialist Suppository. (See 3 below.)

Jail 'em! (See 4 below.)

A positive view of GW's actions regarding N. Korea's "delisting" from a liberal academician (See 5 below.)

Can or will America remain a dominant power? Does it matter? (See 6 below.)

Dick

1)the problem with liberal is that they are nice people as long as you agree with them....
Once I thought I was a liberal until I came to this country...

About a year ago in (country name) I was at dinner. The couple across from us (a known columnist and his female companion) heard that we live in the US and asked us what do we think of Jimmy Carter's "book" (quotation marks are mine).
I responded it is nothing short of a second Dreyfus trial for the Jewish people. It turns out that the columnist worked in the White House as a media person for Hillary. To that the columnist (obviously a left of center laborite) said: STOP. I cannot ALLOW you to speak any further!

To which I said that I thought in a civilized society the first principle of liberalism is that one is allowed to express his opinion. He said, of course, but next I will say that Carter is Nazi. To that I responded: First you do not allow me to speak, second you put words in my mouth.

Needless to say fireworks erupted around the table. I held my own.

1a)Re your dinner and conversation with liberal "friends." Try asking them if they would still vote for Obama if he brought the same qualities to the table but was white. Were he white, during the vetting process and the primaries, he would have been deemed an empty suit.

1b)Dick, I don't know what your liberal friends cannot tell you what they like about OBAMA.

First- He is a decent American(McCain defends OBAMA against a BIGOT)

Secondly-He is an extremely well educated individual.

Third-He has come out with some specific plans as to what he plans to do.

Fourth-He has put together the most formidable campaign machine in American history( Well organized and managed).

Fifth- Has raised more funds from more people than any other candidate in a Presidential election.

Sixth-One of the sharpest political minds ( From Republican campaign
managers-Ed Rollins etc.).

When you talk about liberals being humorless, I think you are PAINTING with a broad
brush. When you mentioned LIBERALS don't like to be questioned, I HONESTLY thought you were going to mention S.Palin. While on the subject of Palin, she is not worthy of being on the ticket. PLAIN TALK--SHE IS A LIAR AND A HYPOCRITE. I will Happily back up my charge but I think you know I am right. Any one of the republican candidates who ran against McCain would have been a far SUPERIOR CHOICE. As to the reaction of the market today I would like to share your OPTIMISM but I have my doubts that it will return to the level it was in the next four or five years. REMEMBER, MORE PAIN, VOTE MCCAIN. Cheers,

2)Lebanese Christian strongman's Tehran visit underscores Iran’s grip on Lebanon


It would have been unthinkable for any Middle East Christian leader to pays his respects to the ayatollahs in Tehran before the indecisive Israel-Hizballah war of 2006 and the subsequent collapse of US and Israeli positions. But now, the once pro-West Lebanese Christian strognman, Gen. Michel Aoun, who has become a close ally of the Iranian surrogate Hizballah and Syria, is leading the way.

He drew encouragement from two developments:

1. The Bush administration’s quiet collusion with Iran over the deal which broke a long political deadlock in Beirut and brought Michel Sleiman to the presidency. That deal was part of a broader package of Washington-Tehran understandings that covered cooperation for taming the violence in Iraq and America’s renunciation of its military option against Iran’s nuclear installations.

Aoun decided that to build up his position in Beirut, he too would do well to avail himself of Iran’s support.

2. The political and military inertia paralyzing the Israeli government in the face of the collapse of UN Resolution 1701. That measure, negotiated by the would-be prime minister Tzipi Livni to end the 2006 war, was called a flop even by Israel defense minister Ehud Barak. Iran and Syria have openly flouted the measure month after month by topping up Hizballah’s arsenal with improved weaponry, including rockets capable of reaching almost all of Israeli territory and a highly-advanced anti-air defense system. Israel has not lifted a finger to interfere with these violations.

This led the ambitious Lebanese general to conclude that Iran was on the winning side of current Middle East disputes and therefore the right sponsor for his bid to replace his fellow-Christian, middle-of-the-road Gen. Michel Suleiman, as president.

Aoun flew to Tehran shortly after the visit to Beirut on Oct. 6 of two senior US officials, Assistant Deputy Secretary of State David Hale and Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long. They came in response to an appeal from the Siniora government and president for help against the threatening Syrian troop and tank buildup on Lebanese borders.

Washington issued Damascus with a sharp warning not to invade Lebanon. Damascus responded by pouring more troops into additional border sectors.

3) Why Obama's socialism matters
By Bookworm

For conservatives opposed to an Obama presidency, the last few days have brought the wonder of the smoking gun: Obama really was a socialist. Combine that hidden paper trail with his Ayers affiliation, and it's reasonable to believe that Obama still holds these socialist political views.

Conservatives' excitement at finally having found the real socialist hiding inside that empty suit is tempered by one thing -- outside of conservative circles, nobody really seems to care. The media, of course, is very aggressive about not caring, but the malaise seems to affect ordinary Americans as well.

The only way to explain this disinterest in Obama's past and its relationship to his present is that Americans no longer consider the label "socialist" to be a pejorative. To them, it's just another content-neutral political ideology. In our non-judgmental age, it falls into the same category as Liberal vs. Conservative, or Left vs. Right. To most people, it just means Obama is a more liberal Liberal, or a leftier Lefty, and they already knew that.

In order to stir ordinary Americans to the sense of outrage those of us in the blogosphere feel, we need to remind them that socialism is not simply a more liberal version of ordinary American politics. It is, instead, its own animal, and a very feral, dangerous animal indeed.

It helps to begin by understanding what socialism is not. It isn't Liberalism and it isn't mere Leftism. Frankly, those terms (and their opposites) should be jettisoned entirely, because they have become too antiquated to describe 21st Century politics. The political designations of Left and Right date back to the French Revolution, when Revolutionaries sat on the Left side of the French Parliament, and the anti-Revolutionaries sat on the Right. Terms from the internal geography of the French parliament as the ancient regime crumbled are striking inapposite today.

Likewise, the terms Liberal and Conservative date back to Victorian England, when Liberals were pushing vast social reforms, such as the end of child labor, while Conservatives were all for maintaining a deeply hierarchical status quo. Considering that modern "liberals" are seeking a return to 20th Century socialism, those phrases too scarcely seem like apt descriptors.

If it were up to me to attach labels to modern political ideologies, I would choose the terms "Individualism" and "Statism." "Individualism" would reflect the Founder's ideology, which sought to repose as much power as possible in individual citizens, with as little power as possible in the State, especially the federal state. The Founder's had emerged from a long traditional of monarchal and parliamentary statism, and they concluded that, whenever power is concentrated in the government, the individual suffers.

And what of Statism? Well, there's already a name for that ideology, and it's a name that should now be firmly attached to Sen. Obama: Socialism.

Although one can trace socialist ideas back to the French Revolution (and even before), socialism's true naissance is the 19th Century, when various utopian dreamers envisioned a class-free society in which everyone shared equally in what the socialist utopians firmly believed was a finite economic pie. That is, they did not conceive of the possibility of economic growth. Instead, they believed that, forever and ever, there would only be so many riches and resources to go around.

The original utopians did not yet look to the state for help establishing a world of perfect equality. Instead, they relied on each enlightened individual's moral sense, and they set up myriad high-minded communes to achieve this end. All of them failed. (For many of us, the most famous would be the Transcendentalist experiment in Concord, Massachusetts, which almost saw poor Louisa May Alcott starve to death as a child.)

It took Marx and Engels to carry socialism to the next level, in which they envisioned the complete overthrow of all governments, with the workers of the world uniting so that all contributed to a single socialist government, which in turn would give back to them on an as needed basis. Assuming that you're not big on individualism and exceptionalism, this might be an attractive doctrine as a way to destroy want and exploitation, except for one thing: It does not take into account the fact that the state has no conscience.

Once you vest all power in the state, history demonstrates that the state, although technically composed of individuals, in fact takes on a life of its own, with the operating bureaucracy driving it to ever greater extremes of control. Additionally, history demonstrates that, if the wrong person becomes all-powerful in the state, the absence of individualism means that the state becomes a juggernaut, completely in thrall to a psychopath's ideas. Herewith some examples:

My favorite example is always Nazi Germany because so many people forget that it was a socialist dictatorship. Or perhaps they're ignorant of the fact that the Nazi's official and frequently forgotten name was the National Socialist German Worker's Party. In other words, while most people consider the Nazi party to be a totalitarian ideology arising from the right, it was, in fact, a totalitarian party arising from the left.

Practically within minutes of the Nazi takeover of the German government, individuals were subordinated to the state. Even industries that remained privately owned (and there were many, as opponents of the Nazis = socialist theory like to point out), were allowed to do so only if their owners bent their efforts to the benefit of the state. Show a hint of individualism, and an unwillingness to cooperate, and you'd swiftly find yourself in Dachau, with a government operative sitting in that executive chair you once owned.

We all know what life was like in this Nazi socialist state. Citizens immediately lost the right to bear arms; thought crimes were punished with imprisonment and death; children were indoctrinated into giving their allegiance to the state, not the family; the government dictated the way in which people could live their day-to-day lives; and people who appeared to be outliers to the harmony of the conscienceless government entity (gays, mentally ill-people, physically handicapped people, Jews, gypsies) were dehumanized and eventually slaughtered.

And here's something important for you to realize as you think about what happened in that socialist state. While a core group of people, Hitler included, undoubtedly envisioned these extremes as their initial goals, most didn't. They just thought that, after the utter chaos of the 1920s (especially the economic chaos), the socialists would calm the economy (which they did), and simply remove from people the painful obligation of having to make their way in the world. It was only incrementally that the average German bought into the ever-more-extreme demands of the state - and those who didn't buy in were coerced because of the state's unfettered willingness to use its vast, brute power to subordinate individuals to its demand.

Here's another example: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In my liberal days in the 1970s and 1980s, it was very popular to downplay what was going on in the USSR and, instead, chalk up fear of the Soviets to the foul remnants of McCarthyism. This was extreme intellectual dishonesty on our part. The fact is that life in the USSR was always horrible.

From its inception, the Soviet state brutalized people, whether it was the upper echelon party purges or the mass slaughter of the kulaks -- all in the name of collectivism and the protection of the state envisioned by Lenin and Stalin. Most estimates are that, in the years leading up to WWII, the Soviet socialist state killed between 30 and 60 million of its own citizens. Not all of the victims died, or at least they didn't die instantly. Those who didn't receive a swift bullet to the head might starve to death on collective farms or join the millions who ended up as slave laborers in the gulags, with most of the latter incarcerated for thought crimes against the state.

I've got another example for you: the People's Republic of China, another socialist state. One sees the same pattern as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia: individuals were instantly subordinated to the needs of the state and, as the state's needs became ever more grandiose, more and more people had to die. Current estimates are that Mao's "visionary" Great Leap Forward resulted in the deaths of up to 100 million people. The people died from starvation, or were tortured to death, or just outright murdered because of thought crimes. The same pattern, of course, daily plays out on a smaller scale in socialist North Korea.

Those are examples of hard socialism. Soft socialism is better, but it certainly isn't the American ideal. Britain springs to mind as the perfect example of soft socialism. Britain's socialist medicine is a disaster, with practically daily stories about people being denied treatment or receiving minimal treatment. Invariably, the denials arise because the State's needs trump the individual's: Either the treatment is generally deemed too costly (and there are no market forces at work) or the patients are deemed unworthy of care, especially if they're old.

British socialism has other problems, aside from the dead left behind in her hospital wards. As did Germany, Russia, and China (and as would Obama), socialist Britain took guns away (at least in London), with the evitable result that violent crime against innocent people skyrocketed.

The British socialist bureaucracy also controls people's lives at a level currently incomprehensible to Americans, who can't appreciate a state that is constantly looking out for its own good. In Britain, government protects thieves right's against property owner's, has it's public utilities urge children to report their parents for "green" crimes; tries to criminalize people taking pictures of their own children in public places; destroys perfectly good food that does not meet obsessive compulsive bureaucratic standards; and increasingly stifles free speech. (Impressively, all of the preceding examples are from just the last six months in England.)

Both history and current events demonstrate that the socialist reality is always bad for the individual, and this is true whether one is looking at the painfully brutal socialism of the Nazis or the Soviets or the Chinese, with its wholesale slaughters, or at the soft socialism of England, in which people's lives are ever more tightly circumscribed, and the state incrementally destroys individual freedom. And that is why Obama's socialism matters.

Regardless of Obama’s presumed good intentions, socialism always brings a society to a bad ending. I don’t want to believe that Americans who live in a free society that allows people to think what they will, do what they want, and succeed if they can, will willingly hand themselves over to the socialist ideology. They must therefore be reminded, again and again and again, that socialism isn’t just another political party; it’s the death knell to freedom. So remember, while McCain wants to change DC, Obama wants to change America.

4) Jail for Iranian Journalists
By Arash Sigarchi


Arash Sigarchi, former editor of Gilan-e Emrooz, was the subject of the Middle East Quarterly's Dissident Watch in the fall 2005 issue. He recently received asylum in the United States. This article is adapted from a speech he gave at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., on February 4, 2008. — The Editors.

I was a newspaper journalist in the Islamic Republic, but censorship forced me to blog. My blogging led to my arrest and eventual departure from my homeland. To comprehend how pervasive censorship is in Iran today and how difficult it is for Iranians to access a wide range of accurate information about everyday news, it is essential to understand how the Iranian government censors journalists. Iranian censorship is enforced by six major entities.
Instruments of Censorship

First, the Supreme National Security Council, charged with defending the country from external enemies, has become omnipresent not only in domestic matters but also in journalism. On a weekly basis, upon direct orders from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme National Security Council informs journalists and newspaper editors of new themes of censorship. Ahead of the March 3, 2008 U.N. Security Council decision to sanction the Islamic Republic for its uranium enrichment program,[1] the Supreme National Security Council sent a letter to newspaper editors and instructed them to respond with articles describing nuclear energy as an Iranian right.[2]

The second group, the Iranian judiciary, acts upon the direct orders of the supreme leader. If the supreme leader questions one item, this might lead to the closure of twenty to thirty newspapers. The judiciary might order only temporary closures but, in practice, their long duration makes the shutdowns permanent. In addition, security forces have killed two journalists and imprisoned another seventy. The Intelligence Ministry has imprisoned several hundred people for interrogations.

Arash Sigarchi (R) greets Iranian president Mohammad Khatami at the Iranian Press Festival, 2001.
Security agencies are a third group that exerts pressure on journalists and newspapers. As a journalist in the Islamic Republic for twelve years, I was never able to criticize the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). To do so is simply forbidden. Toward the end of Mohammad Khatami's term (1997-2005) and the beginning of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration (2005-present), the Ministry of Information and Security—Iran's intelligence ministry—began to summon all newspaper journalists to ask them to cooperate with the system. Their message was clear: Those who cooperate can work; those who do not will go to prison. Those who cooperated with the regime received economic privileges. Some of my former colleagues chose to accept the regime offers and today hold positions of power.

The Office of the Friday Prayer Leaders is a fourth mechanism of censorship. The Friday prayer leaders exist to provide the supreme leader a representative in every major town and city. They are, in effect, mini-Khameneis. As Khamenei censors at the national level, so do the various Friday prayer leaders enforce censorship in the provinces. For example, in November 2003, Ayatollah Zeinolabedin Ghorbani, the Friday prayer leader of my hometown of Rasht, spoke about a house that cost $200,000. During the following Friday prayer session, he criticized the system in which workers cannot afford decent housing. I published a response suggesting that it would be more productive if the system actually helped workers get decent housing rather than simply talking about the situation. The same day the article appeared, seven people attacked and beat me, and the judiciary fined me $1,000, a significant amount in Iran, for insulting the sacred matters of Islam.

The fifth group consists of the so-called "pressure groups," which many Iranians refer to as Hezbollahi groups. They are similar to Germany's pre-World War II Brown Shirts, who roughed up anyone deemed an enemy or insufficiently loyal to the regime. These groups, who attack journalists because of political opinions and writings, are attached to the Basij resistance force, to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and to the various security agencies. After I criticized Ghorbani, I also experienced this firsthand. Vigilantes attacked me and my staff in our newspaper office.

Sixth, beyond external censorship, there are internal pressures that also constrain Iranian journalism. Economic actors constrain journalism. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has extensive economic interests.[3] Their companies maintain advertising relationships with newspapers. For example, if an IRGC-owned factory wishes to hire workers, they will place a notice with the local newspaper. When a newspaper is critical of the regime, however, the IRGC will ban any company in which it has an interest from advertising in that newspaper, severely curtailing the revenue that paper can expect. For this reason, most newspapers practice self-censorship.

In the Islamic Republic, newspaper editors do not have the freedom or independence to determine their own publications' content. The regime approves the newspaper executives who oversee the editors and enforce censorship. In addition, self-censorship is rife. Many of my colleagues resisted becoming mercenary pens in the hands of others, but they censor themselves to avoid arrest. Often, the sentences for journalists are severe. But, if they show contrition in prison, they win early release. If they return to reporting the truth, the state quickly returns them to prison. Many journalists, after receiving a taste of incarceration, are far more mindful of what and how they write.
Information Gap

The lack of real journalism hurts the Iranian public by promoting a false sense of international diplomacy. Ahmadinejad, for example, has said that Iranian discussions with the entire world with regard to Iran's nuclear issues are over, but he still negotiates with Westerners. The entire world has sanctioned us economically, but few Iranians inside the Islamic Republic understand the full nuance or effect.

Another example: In 2007, Ahmadinejad visited Gilan to inaugurate a sports stadium. This year, it was announced that the stadium had opened. What the newspapers could not report, however, was that the stadium had been slated to open fifteen years ago. Nor could the Iranian papers ever report that a day after Ahmadinejad inaugurated the stadium, it shut because it had not yet been completed.

The press also misleads with regard to the economy. After the supreme leader said that the Islamic Republic needed to be self-sufficient with regard to cereals, for example, Ahmadinejad reported that under his government, Iran had, indeed, become self-sufficient. Soon after, my wife and I traveled from province to province. In southern Iran—provinces such as Hormozgan, Bushehr, and Khuzestan—I took pictures of foreign ships importing cereals into Iran. Clearly, neither the politicians nor the newspapers reported the true situation. As a result, politicians could not implement the proper policies to enable the agricultural sector to meet real rather than fictional goals.

You might ask if Iranian journalists are asleep. No, we are awake, but in prison. So how can Iranian reporters pursue the who's, what's, where's, and why's that underpin basic journalism? Many—myself included—started blogging. Everything that I could not publish in my newspaper, I wrote on my blog. When I started in 2001, the Iranian government was not too aware of the Internet, and so I got away with straight reporting. But they soon caught on. I was arrested briefly on August 29, 2004, and, again, the next day. On January 17, 2005, the Revolutionary Court sentenced me to ten years imprisonment for cooperating with the U.S. government, two years for insulting the Iranian leadership, and two years for conducting propaganda against the Islamic Republic. Despite the crackdown of which I was one victim and Ahmadinejad's efforts to shut down blogging, the phenomenon has taken off. When I was arrested, Persian was already the fourth most popular language for blogging.[4] Today, two million people write blogs in Iran. I firmly believe that the only group that can counter the demagoguery of the Ahmadinejad government are the bloggers. With the help of their efforts, censorship in Iran will be crushed.

Arash Sigarchi is an Iranian journalist, living in Washington, D.C. He is the recipient of the 2007 Hellman/Hammett award for writers who have suffered political persecution. He blogs at www.asigarchi.blogspot.com.

[1] UNSCR 1803 (2008).
[2] Agahsazi (Tehran), Mar. 3, 2008.
[3] Ali Alfoneh, "How Intertwined Are the Revolutionary Guards in Iran's Economy?" Middle Eastern Outlook, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., Oct. 2007.
[4] The Guardian (London), Dec. 20, 2004.

5) Delisting North Korea
By Victor Cha

Many will criticize the Bush administration's decision to remove North Korea from the terrorism blacklist last weekend, over the objections of close U.S. ally Japan, as a Hail Mary pass by an administration desperate for good news. Did President Bush, reeling from the U.S. financial meltdown and still struggling to achieve success in Iraq, finally relent to North Korean saber rattling and prematurely "delist" a country he once deemed part of the "axis of evil"? Perhaps so. But other factors may have been at play in this controversial decision. In any case, a McCain or Obama administration is likely to reap the benefits of this move.


The optics are terrible: The delisting comes after two weeks of North Korean missile tests and good doses of fiery rhetoric. Pyongyang has ejected international inspectors from previously locked-down nuclear facilities. Agreeing to anything right now with North Korea's almost certainly stroke-stricken leader looks like surrender. In this regard, chief U.S. negotiator Christopher Hill's last-ditch attempt to break the logjam reflects a fundamental dilemma the United States faces in implementing agreements reached during talks with North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia.
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Continually, the United States confronts the issue of "relative reasonableness." Every agreement in the six-party process is negotiated with painstaking care; parties hammer out specific quid pro quos, timelines and the synchronization of steps, with concomitant rewards and penalties. Yet sooner or later, Pyongyang demands more than it was promised or does less than it should. While everyone accepts that North Korea is being unreasonable, they also realize that a failure of the agreement could mean the failure of the talks and the precipitation of another crisis.

At the core of the current impasse, for example, was the North's spurious claim that its June nuclear declaration was sufficient for it to be taken off the blacklist and that verification of the declaration was not part of the deal. As former deputy negotiator for the U.S. delegation to the six-party talks, I can attest that the North Koreans fully understood our need for verification as far back as the September 2005 joint statement (the road-map agreement) and the February 2007 "first phase" and October 2007 "second phase" implementation agreements, as did the other participants. Yet while all express outrage at Pyongyang's petulance when it reneges on agreements, the parties end up pressing the United States -- knowing full well that the North is at fault and is traversing the bounds of fairness and good faith but certain that the only chance of progress lies in American reasonableness. That almost certainly was a factor here. The result is that any additional American flexibility is widely perceived in the region as evidence of American leadership (except, perhaps, in Tokyo) but is viewed in Washington as some combination of desperation and weakness.

In return for being taken off the blacklist, the North has apparently agreed to immediately resume disablement of its bomb-making facilities. That is hardly enough. It has also agreed to allow inspection of its declared nuclear sites and to allow some "scientific procedures" (i.e., sampling of materials) to be done by experts from the other five parties, including Japan and South Korea. Provisions apparently exist for interviewing scientists and reviewing documentation. Inspections, sampling, interviews and documentation are the four key elements of any decent verification scheme.

There are still some rather big loopholes in this agreement. Access to undeclared sites is possible only with mutual consent. And Pyongyang's uranium-based nuclear activities and its proliferation connections with Syria are said to be covered by the scope of the agreement, though ambiguities remain. Moreover, none of this is set in stone until the six parties codify the understandings reached in Pyongyang -- and even then, who is to say the North won't renege again in the future?

Nonetheless, with this agreement, Bush is likely to leave his successor the remnants of a workable nuclear disablement process rather than a full-blown crisis. The North was plummeting down a path of missile and nuclear tests. The arresting of this process is hardly consolation to those who believe we should end the charade of trying to negotiate away North Korean weapons and instead resort to financially strangling the regime, especially as its leader is in poor health. But undermining the regime is costly, and a Libya-type wholesale disarmament is not a viable option as Bush's time in office winds down.

In the meantime, if North Korea keeps its word, John McCain or Barack Obama should inherit a situation in which U.S. and international nuclear experts are on the ground in North Korea learning more about Kim Jong Il's nuclear secrets while slowly disabling and degrading his nuclear capabilities. In this regard, Bush's decision was not a Hail Mary -- it was another yard gained in a slow ground game.

The author is director of Asian studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Pacific Council. He was deputy head of the U.S. delegation for the six-party talks and director of Asian affairs on the National Security Council from 2004 to 2007.

6) Chinese Largesse
By Reihan Salam


The financial crisis is raising serious questions about the future of American power. Can the United States sustain the burdens of global leadership while we dust ourselves off from what looks like a near-knockout blow to our economy?

As Zachary Karabell has argued, we are now seeing a globalization of finance that parallels the globalization of manufacturing that began in earnest in the 1970s. Wall Street is no longer the center of the financial world as wealth flows from our shores to the Gulf and Asia's rising states. The sharp increase in the quantity and quality of consumption, which we owe to a combination of Wal-Mart (i.e., China), cheap credit, and historically low fuel prices, has bought the United States social peace in an era of stagnant wages and rising inequality.

Now, however, that grand bargain has come to a spectacular end, and it's easy to imagine Americans turning away from the world to focus exclusively on our domestic troubles.

Yet we simply can't afford to look inward. Our prosperity is so deeply enmeshed in that of the rest of the world--and particularly with the prosperity of China, which has become our economic Siamese Twin--that turning away is all but unthinkable. Just as importantly, there is no plausible successor to America as global hegemon. You might say that we are the hegemon by default. The real question isn't whether America will still be called upon to lead.

Rather, the question is: Where exactly do we intend to go? When it comes to foreign policy, conservatives have focused almost exclusively on fighting terrorists and rolling back rogue states and spreading political democracy. As a result, conservatives have tended to neglect the economic dimension of foreign policy. But we've now seen how global economic imbalances shape the strategic picture.

Consider the following nightmare scenario: Just as the next president begins a renewed push to bring peace to Afghanistan and to consolidate security gains in Iraq, he discovers that the Iranian nuclear program has advanced far further than he had hoped. Because of the Bush administration's malign neglect, which ostensibly sought to "preserve the options" of the next president, President ObaMcCain is left with only one option: to launch a ferocious military attack on the world's most fearsome rogue state.

Imagine what such an attack would do to global energy markets, and thus to the global economy. Who believes that China and Russia would be eager to lend the United States a helping hand in the wake of such an attack given that both states have eagerly worked with hydrocarbon exporters, including Iran, to restrain American power?

When Paul Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the bestselling 1987 polemic that famously predicted the United States would follow the Roman and British and Soviet Empires into irreversible decline, he saw Japan as the world's ascendant power, a state that, like Venice and Britain before it, would use its trading might to make up for its modest size. This prediction was made shortly before Japan's so-called "Lost Decade," during which economic growth almost slowed to a half and unemployment inched steadily upwards. And of course America was on the verge of an extraordinary innovation boom, which made talk of American decline seem faintly ridiculous.

In fairness to Kennedy, he maintained that the unraveling of an empire often takes a very long time, and that there will always be false dawns. Kennedy's essential argument was that massive deficit spending was a serious sign of weakness, particularly when dedicated to a military buildup. Does this sound familiar?

The fight against Al-Qaeda has led to a vast expansion of our military budget just as the boomers retire and as years of neglect have left us with crumbling infrastructure. Tax cuts haven't been matched by spending cuts, and we've essentially been relying on Chinese largesse to stay afloat. It is a rather awkward position for a hegemon to find itself in.

So how do we get out of this mess? It's not enough to encourage a more democratic world. We also need to encourage a more middle-class world. Sherle Schwenninger and Afshin Molavi have been arguing for an economic strategy that fosters full employment and ample demand in the developing world--a kind of Keynesianism for the BRIC economies. Both Schwenninger and Molavi are on the center-left, yet the project of building a middle-class world ought to appeal to conservatives most of all, particularly social conservatives interested in encouraging stable families and fighting poverty. Unbalanced growth in the developing world has made states more unstable and bellicose--and it's also put severe pressure on family life.

Right now, China suffers from severe interregional inequalities that threaten to spiral out of control. Robust economic growth in rural regions in the 1980s has been followed by an economic policy that taxes the countryside to benefit the export-oriented big cities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to a mass breakup of rural families as fathers and mothers leave home to send money back to struggling children.

By reversing this pro-urban policy, and by investing more in education and infrastructure in the interior, China would enjoy more balanced growth. A similar approach could be embraced in India, Russia, Mexico and other emerging economies. This would tackle several interrelated problems, ranging from the persistence of poverty in the developing world to the global savings glut that helped create the current financial crisis to the global labor glut that has put pressure on American workers. Americans would export more and import less while the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians would do the opposite. The end result would be a more prosperous and balanced global economy, and, as an added bonus, more bourgeois societies are likely to be less violent and more inclined to embrace liberal democracy.

And which country would be better suited to leading this bourgeois world than a reinvigorated United States?