Global Networks and State Power

In previous posts, I’ve considered the economic and political decentering of the nation-state, the unraveling of free-market orthodoxy in the face of the economic crisis of 2008, and my opinion that our political disarray of recent years emerged from these two factors.

You might fairly ask how I can talk about the decentering of the nation-state after a massive financial bailout and stimulus package, and in the face of major health care legislation. Not to mention the assertive international policy of the Bush years.

I’ll begin my answer by considering a characteristic that all of these phenomena share: That is, they all involve responses to the increasing ability of networked groups of non-state actors to cause disruption on a global scale.

We well understand how 9/11 depended on the ability of a non-state actor to take advantage of networking opportunities provided by new communications and transportation technologies. The neoconservative response, rightly or wrongly (and I still hold, rightly) constituted a serious response to this new reality: the reorganization of hostile societies, they argued, served as a means of policing wayward elements that the US could not control from a distance. Iraqi social patterns would benefit us if they enhanced the relative authority of the moderate, and hopefully growing, middle class: The neoconservative project ultimately depended on a very socially-oriented view of national defense. (Some, obviously, will disagree with the premise that we can alter foreign societies socially. Nonetheless, one would have difficulty disagreeing with the idea that the social constitution of foreign societies bears increasing relevance in an age of weapons of mass destruction, improved communications and transportation, etc.)

The financial crisis of 2008 bears strikingly similar traits to the “terrorism crisis of 2001” in that the networking of housing-purchase decisions across the country created a heretofore unknown interconnection between national housing values. Here again, enhanced communications technologies played a central role: Namely, they allowed financiers to organize nation-wide housing derivatives into unified products and allowed massive pools of capital, from international sources, to overwhelm traditional patterns of home financing. In finance, as in the case of international terrorism, the state confronts a vast web of transactions that it cannot successfully monitor or police. In the case of TARP, as in that of Iraq, middle class wealth and habits reveal themselves as the ballast of a volatile political economy: Specifically in the US case, the middle-class funded bailout of high-stakes financiers, after a crisis created by those same financiers as well as by uneducated homebuyers, suggests that ultimate financial stability does not derive from New York but from the well-being, and education, of the mass of American society.

The US government acted aggressively in Iraq and with regard to the financial crisis. In each case, however, the logic of the events precipitating these actions indicates that state power faces a lasting, and growing, challenge from the power of networks unattended until the moment of crisis. The nature of such networks should fascinate us even more than the loud words and deeds of a superpower.

Why Bush and Obama are Not as Different as You Think

Bush ignored the supposed inviolability of nation-states with his invasion of Iraq. Obama believes that we should “spread the wealth around” and is attempting to do so through health care reform, agitating to no end those who believe in the sacredness of individual property. How could these two phenomena be connected?

The nation-state system and the ideology of individualism are codependent in many ways. The illusion of the atomized individual sustained itself as long as global politics forced individualistic societies to bind together in the confrontation of collectivist and/or repressive regimes.

Bush correctly discerned that the system of international law not protect the country in an age of easy travel and transportable, highly destructive technology, and committed non-nation state actors. He undermined the preexisting global order in the face of a real security need.

Obama correctly discerns that, in the wake of the general acceptance of the economic power of individualism and in the absence of a viable ideological alternative (whether, as you would have it, due to Bush’s attack on radical Islam or due to its inherent nihilism), he must confront the social malaise that individualism sometimes creates. Struggle with communism, for instance, can no longer provide an individualistic halo for the reform of education, infrastructure, or social insurance.

The post-national world, emerging slowly for now, presents a new matrix for security decisions and new social challenges to individualistic democracies. Naturally, national governments are a crude tool for managing their own (again, perhaps very gradual) retreat into obsolescence. Nonetheless, it is inevitable, and at times, useful, that they attempt to do so. It is no surprise that confusion reigns in the meantime.

Emerging Independent Judiciary in Iraq

Briefly:

Here’s a story you don’t see very often. Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

Read more.

Conservatives and Liberals, Culture and Politics, US and Iraq

An excerpt from a note I recently wrote to Dr. Jonathan Haidt, author of "What Makes People Vote Republican?":

Your article on on "What Makes People Vote Republican?" should be read at every dinner party here on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I quoted you extensively on my blog and, in conjunction with the Palin selection, much discussion was stimulated.

An interesting connection might be drawn between (simply put), on the one hand, the liberal focus on politics and conservative focus on culture and, on the other hand, the neoconservative (at least) focus on reforming Iraqi political arrangements and the liberal tendency to focus on, so to speak, "the long, careful evolution of culture that prepares the ground for democracy." I would argue that conservative sensitivity to cultural development leads to the supposition that cultural arrangements are the crowning achievement of political development, and that the inverted (no connotation intended here) liberal relationship to culture and politics, leads to the opposite conclusion.

The Invasion of Iraq: A Response to Sir David

I supported the invasion of Iraq and am aware of the resolutions that preceded it. Still, I would argue that the US has accepted an international cost in executing a war of choice that was not supported by the public opinion of the democratic world.

The effectiveness of the US to act as an international policeman is necessarily supported by the good opinion of fellow liberal democracies.

IRAQ AND GEORGIA

What do these invasions teach us about the state of our geopolitical system?

When the US invaded Iraq, it certainly contravened international legal norms that provided for aggression only when an enemy presented an immediate threat. This is a norm that the US helped to enshrine in the post-World War II legal order. We have witnessed, since the fall of the Soviet Union, a strengthening of the social and economic order promulgated by, and beneficial to, the US: democracy and free markets. The process of the US invasion of Iraq and its aftermath involves a negation of the legal order of the era of Pax Americana but an affirmation of the era’s social and economic order. In short, the US undermined the international legal system while strengthening the international social system.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia, however, represents a challenge both to the international legal order and to the socioeconomic order of US-led globalization. In Iraq, we ultimately seem to be witnessing the triumph of the liberal economic and political order. The ability, or inability, of that socioeconomic order to prevail in Georgia is of great symbolic significance over the next few years.

The US invasion of Iraq was, if you will, a wager in which the socioeconomic order of international democracy was chosen over the international norm of national sovereignty. It is not surprising that US disregard for the latter is costing us right now. Still, we would be foolish to be entranced by that fact and to overlook the greater stakes that underpinned the initial wager. The pace of the march of political and economic freedom around the world is at stake.

THE MEANING OF THE INFORMATION AGE

This is my most extensive political theory work to date. It may be a bit rough around the edges but I hope that you will find it interesting. I am hoping that it will impress but even more so, that you will be inspired to offer me criticism and guidance.

THE SADR MILITIA ANNOUNCES THAT IT WILL DISARM

From Pete Wehner:

What we are witnessing unfold in Iraq will one day be written about in history books, and not just military history books. To have taken a situation critics said was a mistake of historic proportions–the worst foreign policy debacle since the founding of the Republic–and to transform it into a victory, which is what is well under way, is among the more dramatic and important moments in American history. These have been exhausting years for our nation, ones during which tremendous errors in judgment were made. But they have been memorable and proud ones as well. And now, we can say with increasing confidence, they have been successful ones.

I supported the war and was hesitant and nervous about the surge. I respect the position of war opponents. Still, are there any such opponents out there who will celebrate these salutary developments in Iraq?

OBAMA ON TERROR

From today's Washington Post:

Mr. Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves.

What's going on here? Obama's stances are based on electoral politicas and are delimited by the moral stances of the left regarding the initial justice of the two respective wars. The left is generally uninterested in a geopoltical analysis of the current security needs of Afghanistan or Iraq. The justice, or injustice of the inception of each war is enough to guide the general strategic thinking from certain quarters.

I respect the moral judgments of many who proclaim the legitimacy of the Afghanistan war over the Iraq wars. There are many sounds reasons uppon which to base such an argument. Such judgments do not an indefinite policy make. I am reminded of a favorite Max Weber quotation that states, regarding political action, "it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant."

QUICK POSTS:

+ Krauthammer on the good news from Iraq, with specific evidence.

+ Brooks on Obama, reform, and education. Brooks analyzes Obama's stance on education to try to see if Obama has the substance to follow up his reform rhetoric.

MORE GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ

A Wall Street Journal article to make you feel good (I hope ;) about Iraq:

"[As of February 2008,] Three main challenges to security and political progress remained: clearing al Qaeda out of Mosul; bringing Basra under the Iraqi government's control; and eliminating the Special Groups safe havens in Sadr City. It seemed then that these tasks would require enormous effort, entail great loss of life, and take the rest of the year or more. Instead, the Iraqi government accomplished them within a few months."

GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ

Read from this Washington Post selection about a signal event in the progress of Iraqi security:

"Iraqi soldiers moved unhindered through Baghdad's vast Sadr City district on Wednesday as Shiite militiamen who have long controlled the area faded from view and schools and businesses began to reopen after weeks of strife.

The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is pursuing an increasingly successful effort to contain the militias of his Shiite rivals and to exercise authority over areas where Iraqi forces were once unwelcome. The strategy has won Maliki admiration from Sunni politicians and from U.S. and British officials, who credit him with exerting some of the political will necessary to achieve reconciliation."

Peace in Iraq

David Brooks broadens our understanding of this topic in today's New York Times. Here are the first several paragraphs:

The U.S. brought no shortage of misconceptions into Iraq, but surely the longest lasting has been what you might call: Founding Fatherism. This is the belief that peace will come to the country when the nation’s political elites gather at a convention hall and make a series of grand compromises involving power-sharing and a new constitution.

The Bush administration has been pushing the Iraqis to make this sort of grand compromise for years — to little effect. The Democrats happily declare that there has been no political progress in Iraq because this grand compromise is the only kind of political progress they can conceive of.

As Philip Carl Salzman argues in “Culture and Conflict in the Middle East” (brilliantly reviewed by Stanley Kurtz in The Weekly Standard), many Middle Eastern societies are tribal. The most salient structure is the local lineage group. National leaders do not make giant sacrifices on behalf of the nation because their higher loyalty is to the sect or clan. Order is achieved not by the top-down imposition of abstract law. Instead, order is achieved through fluid balance of power agreements between local groups.

In a society like this, political progress takes different forms. It’s not top down. It’s bottom up. And this is exactly the sort of progress we are seeing in Iraq. While the Green Zone politicians have taken advantage of the surge by trying to entrench their own power, things are happening at the grass-roots.

IRAQ

I have to admit that the information coming out of Iraq, regarding the fighting with al-Sadr, has been ambiguous. We'll have to stay tuned.

I will note, on the plus side, however, that Sunnis had been waiting for some time for this al-Maliki to confront the Shiite militias.