Where We Are Now and Where I Hope We're Not Going Next

State of the Union?  Not doin' so good.

The economy, well, people say it's getting better, and can dig up several indicators to prove it, but it still feels like we're in a recession.  Less people may be unemployed, but they might not have a good job either, and there's a sense that even that could be taken away in an instant.  The downside of this glorious global economy we've spent the last half century building is that you can get fired not because of any fault of your own, but because it's cheaper for your boss to pay someone on the other side of the planet to do your job.  Or your investments could take a hit because of what the Chinese or whoever is doing with their currency.  It's a time when it's hard to feel in control of your money.

The president's health care plan didn't work out like it was supposed to.  A lot of people have insurance now who didn't have any before, which is good, but everyone's paying more for their insurance too.  Something about not enough young, healthy folks buying into the system, only older people with big hospital bills.  Or so say the insurance companies.  It's not like they'd use an attempt at reform as an excuse to jack up prices so that either they make more money or public outcry convinces the politicians to repeal the reforms, right?

College is probably too expensive.  Start with a captive audience forced to buy overpriced textbooks, tack on tuition hikes to cover new student centers and sports stadiums, require them to pay for classes that have nothing to do with their major, and the end result is a degree which may or may not be entirely useless in the modern economy.  Though if you had to work a part-time job to support yourself during college, at least you have something to put on your résumé.

It feels like things are unfair, like the country isn't working the way it's supposed to.  It's a time when you'd want your elected officials to do something, to fix things, make things better.

Unfortunately, the government just doesn't function these days.  It's now an accomplishment not to pass a balanced budget, but any budget without some rogue faction shutting down the government over some grievance.  The party that pledged to oppose anything the current president tried to do is now in control of the legislature, and is unable to take action on the immigration crisis or the latest mass shooting because it would go against their conservative values.  Then they flip out when the president tries to do things with executive orders.

It'd be nice to get a better government, maybe elect leaders willing to pull the party plank out of their backsides, but there's three problems with that.  First, our electoral system sucks, it lets politicians stay in office indefinitely so long as their districts are drawn to marginalize the opposition party.  Second, the politicians suck, because again party planks, backsides.  And third, our electorate sucks because it's willing to vote those sucky politicians into office in the first place.  My district keeps reelecting the "pro-life conservative" who talked his wife and girlfriend into getting multiple abortions.

Democracy is the struggle to reconcile the idea that people should be able to rule themselves and control their own government with the creeping realization that people can be kind of stupid.

So take all this dissatisfaction, add the recurring bogeyman of terrorism, throw in concerns that Team America, World Police is losing control of global affairs, and you have a very dangerous situation.  People are scared, they're angry, and the normal means for dealing with these problems are breaking down.  When President Obama addresses gun control by executive action, a lot of people are furious with the abuse of power, but others shrug and say "well, if that's what it takes to actually do something..."  When Candidate Trump talks about banning Muslims from entering the country "until we figure out what's going on" - and it is terrifying to have a serious presidential candidate use those words as a campaign plank - many people are horrified at the betrayal of American values.  But others shrug and say "well, if that's what it takes for us to be safe..."

This is how democracy dies.

America is pretty special because, compared to a lot of presidential democracies, we've been both stable and liberal.  We had a civil war over slavery states' rights, but that was a way to resolve a divisive issue that had been festering since our country's creation.  Even the secessionists wanted to keep a democratic form of government, albeit a weak and ineffective one.  Other than that traumatic episode, there hasn't been a problem that we couldn't solve with our democratic system.  If one set of leaders couldn't handle things to our satisfaction, we voted in some who could.  That's the great strength of democracies, they schedule regular revolutions that allow citizens to change the government without tearing everything down.

But now, things aren't changing.  Our current government is demonstrating that it can't solve the problems facing the country, an election or two after the previous government proved the same thing.  So when the regular methods aren't working, other methods start to look more attractive, like an executive who goes beyond an "imperial presidency" to rule by decree.

And people are afraid.  The "war on terror" (another idiotic concept) has gone on for over a decade, and Americans are still dying in terror attacks, in our own country, even!  The economy is supposedly improving, but people are still afraid for their futures.  And since nothing our current government does seems to remove these sources of anxiety, some people need something to blame, a scapegoat whose removal will make everything better.  And so such people flock to candidates who promise to deport millions of Mexicans and forbid Muslims from entering the country.

Now, we haven't ever had a real tyrant in charge of America.  George W. Bush may have taken the first steps down the path to becoming a police state as he waged war on a tactic, but his heart was as empty of malice as his head was empty of wisdom.  Obama has been using his executive power in worrisome ways, but only when he can't get results from working with the legislature.  Trump... we'll see.

The point I'm making, and the good news, is that while we've had the components of a proper dictator, they haven't all been present in the same person.  We've had leaders willing to use disgusting methods in the name of security, a leader with a borderline personality cult and a willingness to take executive action when Congress won't respond, and now a candidate appealing to xenophobia by promising that by going after the right minorities everything can be made better.  We haven't had someone in the Oval Office willing to use torture and spy on American citizens, and rule by decree, and persecute a minority population to gain support from the majority.

The reason I'm worried, and the bad news, is that all those things have happened in sequence.  The precedent has been made.  A president can torture detainees, ship suspected terrorists to out-of-country black sites for even worse torture, imprison people without trial, all in the name of security, and as we've seen, that president can win reelection.  A president can try to reform by executive order when he feels Congress isn't doing enough, and as we're seeing, people will support him.  And now we have Trump, who is tapping into some of the worst sentiments in this country to fuel his campaign.

I'm not saying Trump is the next Hitler.  I'm saying that, if he's elected, he'll have all the pieces he needs to become one, if he chooses to assemble them.  So maybe now's the time to think real carefully about who to vote for.

Stimulus, Response

Thanks, ISIS, I really wanted my birthday to be forever associated with an atrocity.

Terrorism is violence with a political agenda, where the actual victims don't matter so long as the attack provokes the desired response.  Klansmen lynch an African-American to cow the rest of a town's black population, the Soviet Union puts on show trials to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia even within the party leadership, al-Qaeda blows up a symbol of America's wealth and global prominence to simultaneously make America look weak and it look strong, and so forth.

But the attacks in France - well, they're only the latest attacks in France, and they're different from the ones that came before.  The attack on Charlie Hebdo, that was retaliation for satire, because when someone mocks your religion the only logical answer is to travel across the planet and kill them.  The attack on a kosher supermarket, you can link that to French support for Israel, and I guess ISIS was hoping that killing Jews would make the French less inclined to protecting the rest.  But the attacks in Paris on Friday, they weren't that specific.  A concert, a football game, even random people enjoying the weekend - this wasn't an attack on a symbolic target, this was more like an attack on the French themselves.

It's still terrorism, of course.  But it's an imprecise, unpredictable terrorism, like a white supremacist who doesn't target "uppity" African-Americans but instead picks a dark-skinned target at random.  You're not safe even if you keep your head down, you're in danger simply for being black.  Or in this case, French.

The other alarming thing is that, as I said, terrorism is meant to bring about a certain response, and the French response may be going according to ISIS' plan.  The French president is talking about being at "war," apparently having learned nothing from the presidency of George W. Bush.  French police are being given expanded powers to defend against terrorist threats, and the idiots at Fox News were positively excited about this, citing the French experience in Algeria aas proof that the country can crack down on malcontents.  No mention of "enhanced interrogation techniques," oddly enough, but like I said - morons.  And France is also launching air strikes in Syria now, because the ones the US have been doing for the past year have accomplished so much.

Or in other words, France has now bought into the ISIS narrative of a war between Islam and the West, even though President Hollande tried to explain that he didn't consider it a war between "civilizations" - I don't think that's going to do him much good when ISIS' PR machine spins his comments.  France will now be cracking down on its Muslim minority population, at a time when many are already feeling alienated as they try to reconcile their beliefs with modern Western society, thus giving them even more incentive to turn to ISIS and similar extremist groups.  And France is now militarily engaged in the Middle East, so ISIS can highlight how it's fighting with those "crusaders" to distract from how often it kills Muslims for not being Arab enough or Arabs for not being Muslim enough.  Just by launching the attacks in Paris, ISIS was able to display its power to potential recruits, and the magnitude of the French retaliation only makes them look like more of a credible threat.

So if France is doing everything wrong, what's the proper response to something like the 11/13 attacks?  You can't not respond, can you?

It's the dilemma of a kid seeking negative attention - if you respond you give him what he wants, but if you don't discourage him to continue he'll keep causing trouble.  But it's useful to have a sense of perspective about these things.  As tragic and horrible any terrorist attack is, you have to remember that they're rare, especially when compared to the more mundane dangers of modern life.  For instance, between 2001 and 2013, a total of 3,380 Americans died from acts of terror, a statistic which includes the extraordinarily lethal World Trade Center attacks.  In the same period, firearms killed 406,496 people on American soil.  So which is the bigger problem, the global specter of Islamic terror, or the fact that America is a trigger-happy society armed to the teeth?

Terrorism gets our attention because it's intended to get our attention - it's about creating a spectacle, building an atmosphere of fear, proving your might when in reality the fact that a group needs to resort to terrorism in the first place shows that they don't have the power to get what they want through conventional means.  Treating it as something more than violent crime, or heaven forbid casting aside your liberal values and transforming your society to wage "war" on it, is a way of conceding defeat. 

You fight spectacular, fearsome terrorism through inconspicuous, boring methods, the same you would use to deal with any other criminal organization.  And you don't expect to "win" against terrorism at any point, it's a tactic, not an enemy that can be defeated.  You can close your borders, but you'll still be in danger from home-grown extremists.  You can bomb ISIS out of Syria, but some other group will eventually take their place.  You can brutally crack down on potential converts within your borders, and now you have replaced the potential threat of insurgent terror with the more certain danger of state terror.

And you'll still lose more citizens due to traffic accidents, illness, or violent neighbors than to what you devoted so much time and energy to combating.

A Simple Plan

According to a recent poll, 71% of Americans don't think that their president has a "clear plan" about how to handle the disaster in Syria.  And hey, they might be right, and President Obama is just doing things at random, running out the clock until his term ends.  But I find that unlikely.  I think the reason people would even think that there is no Syria Plan is because their logic is as follows: "if someone has a plan to achieve victory, then they would use it to achieve that victory.  Therefore, if someone has not achieved victory, they obviously don't have a plan to win a conflict." 

Now I haven't snuck into the Oval Office lately and don't have the latest copy of Obama's Syria Plan on my desk.  But I have been paying occasional attention to what's going on in and around Syria, and from America's activities I can make a guess at what the president's trying to do.

First, US forces have been performing air strikes to hit ISIS targets.  Lots of air strikes, for more than a year now.  Air strikes are a tempting policy tool for leaders, especially in situations like this, because their results are impressive (boom!) and, against a low-tech foe like ISIS, low-risk as well.  It's not like those fanatics have an air force.

Second, America has been supporting ground forces in both Iraq and Syria to take advantage of the aforementioned air strikes and retake territory lost to ISIS.  This only makes sense - if the Iraqis and Syrians aren't willing to fight for their countries, why should the US put its own soldiers at risk?  Plus the local forces speak the language, know the terrain, don't have to tote supplies halfway around the world, and so forth.

Third, President Obama has been building a regional coalition to combat ISIS.  After all, the Islamic State is a revisionist power that made a big point about scuffing out the old colonial border that divided Iraq and Syria.  It aims to transform the entire region - or rather revert it into its idea of what the medieval Caliphate was - and therefore poses a threat to states beyond Iraq and Syria.

There you have it, Obama's mythical Syria Plan exposed.  But it's not very comforting, is it?  Because despite this plan, we're obviously not winning in the fight against ISIS, to say nothing of the fight to have a non-authoritarian leader in Syria.

The air strikes aren't working because you can't retake ground with planes.  They have a limited amount of fuel to stay in the air, and a limited number of bombs to drop.  They can't go house-to-house, clearing out insurgents, and they can't rebuild towns and comfort refugees.  If no one is able to follow up on an airstrike, the enemy can simply crawl out of hiding and wheel in a new artillery piece to replace the one you blew up.  Plus there's something fundamentally dissatisfying about sending a 150-million-dollar fighter jet to blow up a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the back.

The ground forces we're supporting in Iraq and Syria aren't accomplishing much because they suck.  The Iraqi Army in particular should be replacing the WWII French Army when it comes to military insults, and has shown itself capable of retreating despite outnumbering threatening forces ten-to-one.  $818 billion well spent, there.  There is no unified Syrian resistance, just a bunch of rebel groups that aren't aligned with Assad or ISIS, and of course our attempt to train a mythical "moderate" Syrian rebel army fell so disappointingly short that the Obama Administration has put the program on hold.  The exception to this bad news would be the Kurdish Peshmerga, which has shown itself capable of both holding the line and taking back territory.

The regional coalition we're building also sucks.  Sure, countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia have pitched in when it comes to air strikes, but they all have their own agendas to look after as well.  The Saudis are distracted by the civil war in Yemen and have to prop up the government there against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.  Turkey has been a major avenue for foreign fighters to pass through as they join ISIS, famously sat and watched the border town of Kobani get pounded by ISIS because it was being defended by Kurds, and even as it finally mobilizes against ISIS is also deploying against Kurdish forces fighting the same group.  And of course, nobody's sending in ground forces, and see my above point about airstrikes.

The only nation that seems eager to get involved in Syria is Russia, and Putin's fighting on behalf of its dictator.

In short, the American public is not so much upset that their president doesn't have a Syria Plan as they are upset because the Syria Plan isn't working.  Obviously Obama needs to change his plan, but there's a problem - part four of that plan, Do Not Get Involved In Another Ground War in the Middle East.  After inheriting miserable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq from his woefully inept predecessor, President Obama has made it clear that he's eager to get Americans out of those countries as quickly as possible.  He actually succeeded in withdrawing from Iraq, only for the country to all but immediately collapse in the face of ISIS' assault, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan has been delayed because the Taliban is causing the same problems there.

And because our attempts to build stable democracies in those countries have gone so badly - hell, we'd settle for a illiberal but stable country capable of defending itself at this point - you can understand why the president is in no hurry to start another military adventure in the reason.  Because what would sending ground troops to Syria lead to?  The evidence suggests more years of US soldiers getting picked off during patrols, more years of tribal or religious violence, more years of bundles of dollars disappearing into the desert, and the result is a corrupt and ineffective government that collapses the minute someone pokes it with a stick.  It sure would be nice to think that this country has learned something after over a decade of occupation and nation-building, but since at least some of us are eager to try it again, I'm not that optimistic.

And yet, committing American ground forces seems to be the only thing that could turn this conflict around.  And there's the dilemma facing the president, and if they thought about it, the American public.  Either we stay our hand, refuse to put boots on the ground, and "lose" to ISIS, or we go all in yet again and probably end accomplishing very little at great cost over the next decade.

There's no clear route to victory, and that, I think, is what the disapproval about the Syria Plan is really about.  Americans don't like to lose, we like to think that we have the power and know-how to fix any problem.  But occasionally a situation comes along that humbles us, and it looks like Syria is one of them.

Structural the Same, Emotionally Drained

Once upon a time, the world was multipolar.  The great powers of Europe all competed to see who would dominate, but employed a shifting alliance system to balance out anyone who seemed to be getting too powerful.  When new players joined the game this system fossilized, leading to World War I and as a consequence World War II.  After that, the world was dominated by two superpowers with opposing ideologies, who led coalitions of like-minded governments to see whether communism or democracy would triumph.  The winner turned out to be democracy, and so with the Soviet Union's collapse, the United States became the world's sole superpower, a country with unrivaled military strength able to deploy anywhere on the globe.

Back in 1989, Fukuyama talked about the "End of History," since after all the great political debate seemed to be over, liberalism was ascendant, and the former Warsaw Pact countries were kicking out their communist regimes and clamoring for democracy.  Others looked forward to a Pax Americana, in which the United States would use its preponderance of power to protect the international system as a mostly benign overlord.  The original Gulf War seemed to vindicate this idea, and saw the US enforce a United Nations resolution to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.  Everything seemed to be going well, and the future looked bright.

We are not living in that world anymore.  Global freedom has been in decline for nine years running.  The former Soviet satellite states are under threat by a resurgent, authoritarian Russia that's undermining their autonomy through means just short of outright war.  The United States went back to Iraq, defying the United Nations in doing so, spent nearly a decade there, and now tries to keep the dysfunctional "democracy" it created from being toppled by an Islamic State even worse than Saddam Hussein's despotism.  Everything seems to be getting worse, and there's little hope in sight.

Has the global distribution of power changed over the past quarter century?  I would say no, not substantially.  The world isn't multipolar, there's no "great game" being played on the global stage by a handful of major powers.  The United States is still supremely powerful, despite the exhaustion from decade-long deployments in two countries.  Russia is resurgent - that is, aggressive, it's still an economic time bomb and its army hasn't recovered from the USSR's collapse - but it still can't match the United States.  As I've said before, this isn't Cold War II, Russia has no ideological appeal.  At best Putin can try to start an "absolute power" club with the rulers of Iran and Syria, but nobody else is looking at Russia as a model government.

No, the world still seems to be unipolar.  What's changed is our understanding of what that means.  In Afghanistan and Iraq, we've seen that just because you have a state-of-the-art army capable of pulverizing any adversary doesn't mean that you'll be able to build something in the resulting ruins.  We've seen the international community picking and choosing when and where to live up to its ideals, intervening in Kosovo but watching the Rwandan genocide.  And we've seen a supposed bastion of freedom imprison people without trials, torture them as suspected terrorists, and turn into a surveillance state that spies on both its own citizens and its allies.

But rather than describing the world in terms of how power is distributed in the international system, an alternative is to name an era after something more intangible.  There were the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, an era popularly perceived as one of ignorance and barbarism.  There was the Renaissance, when the Western world rediscovered the good parts of Greek civilization while skipping the pederasty.  There was the Enlightenment, in which liberalism blossomed and transformed political thought, laying the foundation for modern democracy.

And now?  I call the current era the Disillusionment.

The big difference between now and the end of the Cold War is not in the distribution of power, or the emergence of some rival to the liberal international order.  What's changed is us - we've seen the limitations and shortcomings of these things, but don't have a viable alternative to them.

We thought freedom and democracy would fill the vacuum left by communism, and while Eastern Europe was able to pick up the habit of letting people vote, in the rest of the world, that didn't happen.  China's one-party government has gotten so good at quashing dissent and controlling information that most of its subjects don't know anything happened in Tienanmen Square.  In Russia, when President Yeltsin's opponents objected to his power-grabbing, he had the army shell Moscow's White House; his successor Putin never leaves power, and when a rival politician is gunned down just outside the Kremlin, Russian state media is quick to decry the murder as an attempt to discredit their beloved leader.  In the Middle East, the Arab Spring saw the region rise up against its repressive and incompetent regimes, but only Tunisia can be said to be better off for its revolution; the others either failed or resulted in regimes that are at best as bad as the ones replaced.

And what of the democracies that won the Cold War?  America’s political system is increasingly partisan, its conservative faction is increasingly radical, and the national legislature is so dysfunctional that it is now an accomplishment to pass an unbalanced budget without the GOP's lunatic fringe shutting down the federal government.  The national debt is skyrocketing and neither party is willing to risk votes by properly fixing it, the country’s infrastructure is decaying, and attempts to reform America’s health care system - well short of the sort of comprehensive government health care seen in the Nordic countries - have been viewed as a socialist takeover and led to the aforementioned government shutdowns.  Voters aren't happy, Congress' approval rating is in the toilet, and yet the public keeps voting for politicians who exacerbate these problems.

It's rather telling that we set up parliamentary systems in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of the brand of federalism America currently fails to function under.

Across the pond, the socialist democracies of Europe have been peaceful since World War II and have come together in an unprecedented European Union, but this is showing signs of strain.  It’s easy to support a lot of social programs when America has effectively paid for your national defense, but with the current global economic downturn it’s getting harder to find the funding - plus Putin’s antics make defense spending more relevant than it’s been in decades.  The EU is struggling to deal with the economic malaises of its least successful members, leading countries like Great Britain to talk about dropping out.  And now there’s a flood of refugees from a war no one did anything about that is putting Europe’s welcoming, open-minded reputation to the test.

Global governance, the liberal international order, the same system that punished Saddam for invading his neighbor?  Helpless to do anything about Syria because Russia has its Security Council veto.  Capitalism, the free market system that maximizes wealth while minimizing government interference?  The gap between the rich and everyone else keeps growing wider, a global economy means you can lose your job simply because it’s cheaper to have a foreigner do it on the other side of the world, and the people ostensibly in control of the economy are willing to wreck it in pursuit of short-term profits.


All the systems and principles the West fought the Cold War for just don't seem to be living up to their potential.  And since the Cold War is over, there's no viable alternatives to them.  Communism was a failure, it was simultaneously naive and ruthlessly brutal.  The medieval society the Islamic State is trying to construct in the ruins of the Middle East lacks appeal to anyone but sufficiently sociopathic Muslims.  Nobody wants to live under an authoritarian regime like in Russia or China, and people outside of them would take democracy on its worst day over a dictatorship on its best, but it's going to be hard for a Russian or Chinese to get galvanized to stand against the system when they see the US government shutting down over Obamacare or Europe threatening to kick out Greece if it doesn't get its economy together, especially if those authoritarian regimes can deliver a similar standard of living.

So disillusionment, pessimism.  Recent events have done for politics and economics what World War I did for science, so I suppose you could say we've been living in one long Age of Disillusionment for a century now.

As gloomy as this situation is, there's a straightforward way out - if the system is broken, and we don't have an alternative, fix what we have.  Of course, "straightforward" isn't the same as "easy."  Can the American electorate support candidates who vow to bridge the partisan divide and solve their nation's problems, instead of politicians who stick to their principles and refuse to compromise?  Can Europe hold itself together and maintain its standards in the face of an uncertain economy, Russian aggression, and an influx of refugees?  Can we reform the international system so that disasters like Syria aren't allowed to happen, and have free markets that benefit more than the richest participants?

The Western world getting its act together is an important first step, but that in itself won't bring us back to the good old days of 1991.  Saddam's gone, but there's plenty of people like him out there.  But if we can't solve the problems at home, how can we expect to fix what's wrong with the rest of the world?

A Pound of Prevention or an Ounce of Cure?

They call it the "international community," as if all the nations of the world are homes in a village somewhere.  That'd be one messed-up looking town.

You'd have the sprawling, lavish mansion of the USA (purchased on credit, serious issues with the plumbing and foundation) on the same street as Latin America, whose homes have holes in the roof and bullet holes around the door.  The Koreas share a duplex, one of which is well-lit and prosperous, the other dark and boarded-up - and the owner occasionally takes potshots at the mailman.  Well-to-do and quiet Europe Street is just around the corner from the Middle East Road, which is currently on fire.

There are fire trucks and such in an enclosed parking lot that can only be unlocked when the right five households agree to do so.  The understanding is that if your home is burning down, it's only a matter of real concern if some sparks land on a neighbor's yard.  And if you happen to hear the sound of women and children screaming from a neighbor's house, mixed with muffled gunshots and the thump of something heavy hitting the floor, well... it's not really your business, or your problem.

Not a model community, in other words.

It does have its good points, however - if someone's home is ablaze, sometimes its neighbors will provide shelter for the residents until the fires go out and they can rebuild.  But other times, a neighbor will force a fleeing family to stand out in the yard without water or shelter, because they aren't wanted.  And then we have a crisis of people without adequate supplies, struggling to find a place of safety when what they thought was home became a roaring conflagration.

And it begs the question - maybe it would've been easier to douse the flames when they were first sparked.  Sure, it'd be hard work, and expensive, and you might even lose people.  You'd probably expend more resources and cause more grief preventing the crisis than you would by watching it happen but letting some refugees camp out on your property.  But while your individual share in the effort would be greater, the overall level of misery would be much lessened.  You'd be doing something good for your community.

But it's not a real international "community," is it?  Just a bunch of self-interested actors who happen to live next to each other.  And so we'll watch a disaster like Syria unfold, consider taking action, but decide it's not really worth the trouble.  It's not really our problem. 

At least until those refugees show up on our borders, asking why we aren't doing anything to help.

Bread and Circuses

I have a concern about the upcoming Iran nuke deal that doesn't actually have anything to do about Iran's nuclear capability.

During a trip to the gym, I had the radio on, not really to listen to but to provide some non-engine background noise.  The program had a story on Iran and its people's reaction to the potential for lifted sanctions, and mentioned that the country's rulers hoped that improved economic conditions would make the population less unruly.  And I suddenly had second thoughts.

See, one of the big theories I studied in grad school was the democratic peace theory, oftentimes called the "Kantian peace" after early proponent Immanuel Kant.  The short version is that democracies are very unlikely to go to war with each other, so it'd be great if every nation in the world let people vote for their leaders.  A book I read about it focused on three elements to this theory: democracy itself, economic interdependence, and shared involvement in international organizations, as mutually-reinforcing principles that could bring about this type of peace.

It's a nice theory, and sounds appealing.  So in Iran's case, its leadership being willing to negotiate with world leaders over its nuclear program could lead to it cooperating more with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the like.  These organizations have their own rules and protocols, and by participating in them, Iran would theoretically learn more about how to run a democratic government.  At the same time, eased economic sanctions and increased foreign trade would create financial ties between Iran and other nations, or in other words a disincentive to threatening those ties through behavior that might convince countries to impose sanctions again.  And I suppose copies of the Declaration of Independence are being smuggled in along with that increased trade, as another nudge towards democracy.

The book I read - Triangulating Peace by Russett and Oneal, if you're interested - used a lot of statistics and regressions and all that numeric stuff to prove their point, and I'm not the one to examine that sort of thing, I much prefer a concrete example.  And we can look at history and see the inverse of the theory playing out, when post-WWI Germany had an economic crisis and rejected international governance as it discarded democracy in favor of authoritarianism.  The problem is that when I examine the world right now, I don't see a strong positive example.

Consider China.  The country prefers to be an exception to rules rather than conforming with the international community's expectations regarding things like water boundaries, but it's certainly abandoned communism and become one of America's most important trade partners, which helps to take the edge off the crises caused by the aforementioned disputed water boundaries.  But is this trade helping the country become more democratic?

Not to my knowledge.  The events in Tienanmen Square in 1989 have been so heavily suppressed that most Chinese don't know those pro-democracy rallies and subsequent crackdowns even happened.  Dissidents issue Charter 08 and get detained by the authorities, websites discussing it get shut down, and of course the media isn't allowed to mention the thing.  Hong Kong held protests against voting restrictions just last year, but it's a Special Administrative Region with a history of democracy.  There's been no "Chinese Spring," no mass demonstrations against corrupt and authoritarian leaders.  China's government still sucks, and its people aren't taking much action to change this.

Here's my concern - back in the days of the Cold War, we had two systems of government competing to see which could create the best society.  And towards the end, when things loosened up a bit, one of the contributing factors to the fall of the USSR was its citizens could see that communism had created a country that couldn't even feed itself, while the capitalist pig-dogs in America had Coca-Cola, denim jeans and awesome music.  This created outrage that was usefully destructive.

But today, thanks to global trade, every nation can get the material benefits of a First World, democratic society.  American fast food chains span the globe, our Apple gadgets are being built in China, and Hollywood churns out Michael Bay movies to liquefy audiences' brains through excessive explosions and incomprehensible cinematography.  So even if you live in a repressive regime like China, you've got lots of ways to take the edge off it.  You may not be able to vote or browse the internet freely, but you can catch the latest Transformers garbage on your phone-puter.  And isn't that easier than taking to the streets to protest the latest round of arrests?

We're exporting bread and circuses to non-democratic regimes, in other words.  They can enjoy the fruits of a free and open society, and their subjects have less incentive to make their own countries the same way.

So back to Iran.  If all goes well and the country begins to behave less like a rogue state and reaps the economic benefits of doing so, is it likely to cast off its theocratic regime and become a peace-loving, human rights-respecting democracy?  I hope so.  The major difference between Iran and China is that the former was a functioning democracy until we Americans screwed it up, while China went from an imperial system to an illiberal "republic" to Mao's deranged attempt at communism.  Even today Iran is sort of democratic, it just has a religious government making sure the Iranian electorate don't vote for the wrong people.  Meanwhile in China, the only places with a democratic heritage are the former foreign holdings of Hong Kong and Macau.

Iran knows better than China what a democracy should look like, so they should have an easier time bringing one about - which is not to say that convincing all those security forces and religious militias to bow to the will to the people will necessarily be easy.  It'd be great if the increased prosperity from lifted sanctions allowed Iran's middle class to expand and grow strong enough to challenge its priest-tyrants.  But that would take a lot of effort, and it's so much easier to sit back and watch a movie on your smartphone...

Peace Talks

So Syria's government has recently stated that it's ready for peace talks, though given today's air strikes against a rebel city, apparently al-Assad's regime is also ready for more war.  Or maybe Syria's dictator and his cronies are aware that it probably isn't time to negotiate.

Now it's been a while since my Conflict Resolution class, but here's what I remember about a key concept without having to dig up my old notes.  "Ripeness" is the notion that there's a certain time over the course of a conflict that the belligerents will be open to a negotiated solution to it.  Despite what it sounds like, it has nothing to do with whether the bodies are being properly disposed of.

At the start of a civil war, everybody's all pumped for fighting.  They're sick of each other, they think violence is their only option, and they think they can win a conflict - otherwise they wouldn't be fighting it in the first place.  Trying to intervene and get everyone to try a diplomatic solution is most likely going to be a wasted effort.  It's only after the sides have fought for a while, seen the real cost of war, gotten a feel for their opponent's capabilities, and run into some setbacks, that they might change their mind.  If one side is clearly winning a civil conflict, then they'll see no reason to negotiate with the losing side, and probably go on to win it.  But if the sides are stalemated and they realize that they can't get all - or even most - of what they want through force of arms alone, then they may be willing to come to the negotiating table.  In short, a conflict has to "ripen" for a bit before there's a good chance of peacefully resolving it.

Now, the Syrian civil war has been going on since 2011, it's killed 200,000 people, displaced over 10 million people, and has spilled over into neighboring countries.  But is it "ripe" for a peaceful resolution?

Since Thursday's statement from the al-Assad regime doesn't seem to be going anywhere or been taken seriously, the answer is probably "no."  This seems to be either an attempt at good PR by a dictatorial government willing to bomb hospitals, or an admission that the war isn't going well for al-Assad and that these theoretical peace talks would be the only way for him to keep his head and stay in power.  A sign of desperation in other words.

Even if al-Assad is willing to use words for once, there's little indication the other sides share this interest in negotiations.  ISIS has said, if I recall correctly, that the powers arranged against them would have to treat with them eventually, but this was presumably bravado and an attempt by ISIS to gain legitimacy.  As for the other rebels - well, let's not make the mistake of assuming that the rebels are a unified faction.  There's those legendary "moderate" Syrians resistance fighters that are backed by the US, and who may have little reason to give up with such a powerful ally on their side.  Then there are others who apparently are willing to listen to Iranian delegates and hold a truce, though since I can't find a follow-up on that story I'm not sure how well it went.

More importantly, for negotiations to be successful there has to be common ground, and all of these three factions have mutually-exclusive goals.  Bashar al-Assad wants to stay alive and his cronies want him to stay in power.  The rebels want him gone and someone new in charge.  And ISIS rejects the notion of modern Syria in favor of a religious state under their control.  I suppose the best you could offer would be to divide Syria up among the three of them, except, well, we don't like doing that in a post-colonial country like Syria.  People in the rest of the Middle East might start getting the wrong idea.  Much better to pretend that the lines in the sand mean something.

All this to say, al-Assad's words of peace sound hollow, and the fighting in Syria is probably going to continue.  Because from what else I remember from my conflict studies courses, this civil war in Syria has all the signs of a nasty, protracted conflict.  We've got easily-captured natural resources (oil) that can be used to fund the fighting.  We've got an array of outside actors backing the factions within the civil war - Iran and Russia are propping up al-Assad, the United States and some of its regional allies are (officially) backing the Syrian resistance, and then there are fundamentalist Muslims all over the world lending financial or material support to ISIS.  And we've got goals that are more profound than disputes over representation in government or resource allocation, but a conflict over what type of government is acceptable.

But just because the sides in the civil war may not be interested in a peaceful resolution doesn't mean that the fighting has to go on forever.  The United States is supposedly going to step up its support of the Syrian rebels, and Turkey has recently gotten off its duff to contribute, even if they seem more interested in fighting Kurds than ISIS.  Hopefully with this support, the "good guys" - or at least the guys who aren't loyal to a dictator or a religious fanatics - will be able to tip the balance and resolve the conflict the hard way.  

If they do it fast enough, there may be enough of Syria left to salvage when they're finished.