For the Fulbright, For the Future

I received a Fulbright to study public nutrition in Germany in 2011. That experience allowed me to learn another language, explore another culture, and share my slice of America with another continent. I was one of roughly 1,600 American scholars who receive funding each year.

I know several friends in other countries who hope to receive Fulbright grants to study in the US and join 4,000 students from around the world who aspire to benefit from our universities and develop skills that can support their homelands and enrich the United States as well.

Foreign aid and diplomatic outreach are among the most effective and worthy projects undertaken by our national government. It’s easy to cut a bridge that doesn’t land in a constituent’s back yard, but those bridges are what ennoble America and tie it to the aspirations of people around the world.

If we become a guns and butter country, unwilling to lift people towards their dreams because they weren’t born American, then we will have failed the vision that we hold dear. Our city on a hill will loom, not welcome; fester, not flourish.

We owe it to future generations to support a positive American presence in the world. 8,000 people each year are brighter, wiser, and stronger thanks to the support of the American government and a world’s worth of partners.

The world isn’t ready for our light to go softly behind walls of ignorance and insouciance. In this age of doubt, distrust, and despair, connections made between different peoples are among the beacons of light that keep our world aglow in possibilities for a better tomorrow.

That is something not to cut, but to celebrate.

Secrecy and Trust in Surveilled Times

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, former Secretary of State, Henry Stimson declared "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail," when asked about his decision to close the State Department's code-breaking office in 1929. The US was at peace until 1941, but active intelligence gathering before that December 7th might have thwarted Japan's infamous surprise attack.

Espionage is a preventative measure, seeking to catch those who would do us harm before triggers are pulled and civilians or their nation's interests are hurt. As such, spying should remain secret so as to make it effective. Snowden, whatever his intent, is exposing and wounding the very agencies that seek out threats from those who target our embassies overseas and our public spaces at home.

We live in a Republic governed by a constitution written to preserve essential liberties, such as freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. We are still discovering how that 18th century language applies to 21st century methods and the unprecedented surveillance made possible by modern technology. Our Republic places that exploration in the hands of our elected representatives, the courts, and the bureaucracy of the executive branch.

Abuses of power, corruption, individual or systemic abuses deserve to be exposed, but it should be done in a manner to minimize the damage to legitimate practices—approved by Congress, overseen by courts, and carefully calibrated by cadres of intelligent intelligence lawyers. I don't think Snowden’s leaks meet that standard—for all the good that some of his revelations may do.

We as citizens shouldn’t expect or hope to know all that is done in our name. Some element of trust is involved in governance, and when that trust is violated through illegal behavior it needs to be curtailed and the government must hold itself and its agents accountable. In turn, voters in a functioning republic hold their representatives accountable for impropriety or failure. The United States doesn’t use public referenda and breaking-news popular opinion to run its intelligence agencies—one hopes.

It is clear that the NSA stretched its authority, made errors, and didn’t always appropriately manage the power that it accrued. Questions must be asked: about NSA’s relationship with the FISA court, about the merits and value of metadata collection, about the security clearance system and contractors’ participation in our intelligence bureaucracy, about Director of National Intelligence  James Clapper’s congressional testimony (his general counsel’s perspective illustrates how context matters in considering allegations). The investigations to answer these questions don’t require or excuse the exposure of the methods and sources of our intelligence successes.

We don’t live in a world of gentlemen, and Snowden’s leaks don’t show America at its purest. But his disclosures haven’t revealed the kind of lawbreaking uncovered in Hoover’s FBI; they haven’t matched the illegal executive actions of Iran-Contra; they haven’t threatened President Obama with impeachment or the courts with a constitutional crisis. Unless or until abuses of that caliber emerge from Snowden’s well-stocked laptops, our government should focus on cleaning up intelligence practices to protect against breaches of conduct where they exist and begin restoring secrecy to our nation’s antennae.

Heavily Armed and Adrift

In Drift, Rachel Maddow challenges her readers to an entertaining examination of recent American defense policy. The early chapters, filled with examples of Reagan-era skullduggery and executive overreach, make for easy reading from a liberal's point of view. Tougher chapters for the left cover Clinton's and Obama's tenures in the Oval Office. For example, Maddow tracks the rise in contracted-out conflict to Clinton's engagement in the Balkans, where US military casualties were to be avoided at all costs, and a stew of think tankers, indulged by a Democratic White House, who had interests in defense companies and/or a devotion to private-sector-is-always-better dogma.

Drift leaps over many of the well-covered 2nd Bush administration's aggressive defense policies, and the book is better for it. By then, Maddow has already indicted the extreme wing of presidential-prerogative philosophy in her chapters on Reagan and the 1st Bush administration. She turns instead to the still relatively undisturbed and yet highly disturbing acceleration of unmanned war in the age of Obama. Maddow rightly questions  the scope and constitutionality of our ongoing drone strikes, carried out by secretive commands with little debate and insufficient oversight, often in territories that aren't technically at war with us.

Maddow takes particular aim at the authorities under which such strikes are executed. She doesn't particularly focus on the arguments that might be made to justify a capacity to destroy targets of opportunity (such as Osama bin Laden). Drift centers on the question of congressional responsibility for oversight, and reminds her readers, if not explicitly, that the tolerated actions of a preferred President often turn into the outrageous abuses of a chief executive from an opposing party--see conservatives' denunciation of Obama in Libya and their past support for the far-less-justified assault on Grenada under Reagan (which was denounced at the time by every other member of the UN Security Council, not just Russia and China).

Maddow's arguments don't stop at war's edge. David Petreaus's Counterinsurgency Doctrine catches flack as over-ambitious and quixotic. For all the heat that "COIN" is taking these days, it's still difficult to find an alternative short of ending an engagement as happened in Vietnam. Wisely, Maddow doesn't spend time suggesting alternative strategies, but she also doesn't confront the consequences to innocents in a world without American-led intervention--Libya doesn't make the book, possibly Drift had already gone to print.

At it's core, Drift argues that any war worth fighting should be fought with the approval of Congress, concurrent funding through bonds or taxes, and the legitimate investment of the American people--not just the one percent who have served in the armed forces in recent decades and their families. These are all worthy goals, but few Presidents will take accept their costs voluntarily if less strenuous, however dubious, alternatives are available.

Drift isn't dry, far from it. A host of compelling and often entertaining quotes and historical anecdotes carry Maddow's argument farther than a straight-up polemic ever could. A prime example is a letter from John Wayne, which accused Reagan of either “misinforming people” or being “damned obtuse when it comes to reading the English language," as Reagan harangued audiences about the betrayal entailed in returning the Panama Canal to Panama.

From citing well-founded fears of the founding fathers to a devastating critique of America's nuclear arsenal and black-box campaigns, Rachel Maddow offers every American good reasons to request a return to a reigned in armed forces and a strictly supervised Commander in Chief. “America’s structural disinclination to declare war is not a sign that something’s gone wrong,” she writes. “It’s not a bug in the system. It is the system.” It's up to us to ask how that system can be repaired and elect the men and women who are willing to do so.

Coming Together

David Brooks’ Friday column attempts to discredit the belief that our world has grown closer thanks to technology, trade, and international institutions. He cites as evidence: the polarization of American politics, reports that 95% of Americans’ news is domestically produced, and the statistic that only 2% of Europeans have left their homelands to live in another country on the continent. In addition these numbers, Brooks offers survey data that reveals differing emphases placed upon work and family life among various EU nations. He deploys all this data to suggest that the European project is an unpopular failure.

Al Smith under the Pope's influence

Political polarization makes a worthy target, but growing divides between parties differ greatly from what has taken place between peoples. Ideas matter far more than identities in our modern political discourse. There are, to be sure, numerous news stories about political candidates’ ethnic and religious identities, but we are nowhere near the uproar that greeted the first Catholic to run for the Oval Office on a major party platform, Al Smith. Today the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, belongs to a church that represents only .019% of Americans, but it is his ideas, not his faith that inspire most of his critics. President Obama, meanwhile, belongs to the 12.6% African American community, but his ideas and identity extend far beyond his own race. Despite the occasional shrill cry from fringe figures, the vast majority of Americans respect the humanity of minorities in ways that were foreign just half a century ago. Prejudices and biases remain, to be sure, but they have less to do with ethnic or racial origins than with the economic and cultural characteristics that sometimes accompany traits such as skin color and ethnicity, which once provided sufficient justification in themselves for exclusion.

One statistic cited by Brooks belies his claim that nationalities haven’t found greater common ground in the past half-century. Brooks calls Angela Merkel, “[t]he most popular major European politician,” and goes on, “[s]he has 80 percent approval in Germany, 66 percent approval in Britain and 76 percent approval in France.” Can anyone imagine, much less recall, a German politician who was broadly popular in Britain and France before 1945? Prior to the late 20th century, successful foreign leaders were to be feared as potential conquerors, not admired as talented statesmen. Brooks misses the forest for the trees when he cites the 25% greater preference for work amongst the French as compared to the Danes and neglects to remind readers that the countries share a currency, have no visa requirements, and lack frontier posts, let alone armies, on any of the borders between them.

Integration, peace, and cooperation do not require cultural uniformity. Diverse social preferences and national characters were never the intended victims of internationalism. Rather, political solidarity and shared prosperity helped exorcise the old European poltergeist of nationalism. Rivalries once tested in blood are now tried on the football pitch, the European Athletics  Championships, and even the Eurovision Song Contest. Despite the recent advances of far-right parties during hard economic times, national hatreds remain buried beneath half a century’s progress away from the bloodshed of centuries past. Far more important and relevant to this discussion is the reality of a Europe that stands committed to commonly held principles of human rights, shared security, open borders, and cultural exchange.

The “unification of mankind” that Brooks discounts is not equally distributed throughout the world. Many borders remain hostile, many cultures alien, many peoples jingoistic. Apart from these hotspots, though, the past sixty years are characterized by the greatest expansion of international trade and intercultural communication in human history. Although most Americans may watch the local news rather than Al Jazeera Arabic, millions of Arabs enjoy Hollywood films. Never have more works of literature, art, and music been translated, shared, and embraced by people around the world. Surely this global flowering cannot wholly be the “illusions” of liberal humanists.

Our ever-thickening web of connective technologies make communication and shared experience the norm rather than the exception. Witnessing the struggles of citizens in Cairo, Moscow, and Wukan, China, is no longer the sole preserve of foreign correspondents and international aid workers. Today, civilians around the world can tune in and reach out, through the phones and cameras of local activists, to the human rights movements of our age.

European unification has come a long way since the Third Reich.

Brooks is wrong to say that, “Europe continues to suffer from the same problem that has plagued it for the past half-millennium. There are too many nations in too small a space. There are no historical trends or technocratic schemes that are altering that basic flaw.” To be sure, Europe has problems that are complicated by its dense fabric of different nationalities, but Brooks’ problem has changed dramatically since the early 20th century. There are no dictatorships in modern Europe, no pogroms, no wars. When violence or authoritarianism most recently broke out, in Milosevic's Serbia, the rest of the continent joined to extinguish it and to preserve the peace that emerged.

The Social Animal, Brooks’ 2011 bestseller, belies his column’s narrow focus on pessimistic statistics. Before he condemns European unity to the dustbin of history, he should return to his own assessment of what he labeled, "the urge to merge." Europe faces immense challenges to its political and economic institutions in the months and years to come. But Brooks is wrong to associate these challenges with half a century’s growing “segmentation.” In doing so he ignores the immense convergence in democratic and economic institutions that took place in the past half century. Going forward, leaders would do well to scrutinize apparent similarities, but beneath these differences they can take comfort in the common foundations that have been built since the end of the last World War.

Speaking Freely About China

The New York Times has produced a couple of excellent recent articles about the ongoing and multi-front battle between free expression and pervasive censorship. China will only continue to grow in international significance, but these articles examine a crucial stumbling block to China's success: its suffocating control over political and personal expression within its Great Firewall.

First, Brook Larmer profiles two internet renegades, one an animator who slips through the government's nets with clever cartoons, the other a journalist who races the censors on micro-blogs. It may take a few minutes, but you'll come away with a sense of how millions of Chinese citizens attempt to make themselves heard.

The second piece, written by Edward Wong, looks at one author's attempt to overcome the censorship mindset that cuts his works to pieces even before they even leave his mind. Both pieces really struck me for the courage displayed by individuals who don't know the rules of the game they're playing and have to compete with a team that can change and break those rules on a whim.

I've known several Chinese students in my time, and none of them wished to be protected and "harmonized" to preserve the stony facade of the People's Republic. I only hope that Beijing recognizes this desire before resentment boils over in its hot, crowded pot.