Redwood Age: Political Thinking
John McGowan, August 19, 2008
That didn’t last long, did it? Ten years, give or take a few months, between America’s triumph in the first Gulf War and the start of the insurgency in Iraq. Ten years when America stood alone, the supreme power in a post-Communist world.But now China, some kind of capitalist-communist hybrid, challenges American economic supremacy, while Russia is making a comeback as the troublesome giant at Europe’s back door. Bogged down in the Middle East, in wars that deplete its economic and its military resources, the United States doesn’t have many options at the moment. It can bluster, but it can’t do anything to change China’s or Russia’s behavior significantly.No wonder Russia is taking its own sweet time about leaving Georgia. There’s no penalty for its staying. Americans – and American foreign policy – would do well to face the fact that the United States is not alone in the world and is no longer, if it ever really was, in a position to dictate the terms of international conflicts or agreements.
John McGowan, August 10, 2008
To understand the current hostilities in Georgia, you have to go back to the 1999 NATO action in Kosovo. It was NATO, not the United Nations, that intervened in Kosovo to protect the ethnic Albanians there from the Serbians, because Russia blocked any UN action. NATO, in effect, made Kosovo’s bid for independence from Serbia possible in the name of the humanitarian protection of an ethnic group that was in the majority in the particular province but not the ruling group in the whole nation. Russia (as well as China) condemned NATO’s action—and both Russia and China have refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence. Now Russia has played the same game in South Ossetia that NATO played in Kosovo; it has intervened militarily to prevent a central government—in this case, Georgia—from bringing a secessionist province back under control. To revive a term that hasn’t had much play lately, Russia considers Georgia within its “sphere of influence,†just as NATO considered chaos in the Balkans as too close to home to ignore. The larger point is that, in the post 1989 world, the ability of the superpowers to prevent or contain local sectarian, ethnic, or tribal disputes has proved almost nil, but that doesn’t keep them from trying. Meanwhile, the UN is as paralyzed as ever, lacking both the moral legitimacy and the raw power it would need to be effective.
John McGowan, August 4, 2008
I first heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn when I was a sophomore in high school, probably from an article in Time magazine. I got a copy of his novel, First Circle, from the public library and took it that night to a babysitting gig I had in the neighborhood. The father of the seven year old I was minding took one look at the book and said, “You’ll never read all that.†Needless to say, that insured that I finished the six hundred page book. In fact, it wasn’t a hard read, almost a page-turner. I went on to read two more Solzhenitsyn novels while in high school, but it wasn’t until may years later that I read his non-fiction masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago. Of course, left-leaning apologists for the Soviet Union had plenty of reasons—the murder of Trotsky, the Moscow show trials, the non-aggression pact with Hitler, the invasion of Hungary—before Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of the Soviet prison system to abandon all trust or hope in Russia. But there was something about Solzhenitsyn’s first-person testimony and the banked fury of his eight hundred page tome that brooked no argument. After 1975, it really became impossible for anyone to deny that Communist Russia had been a disaster of staggering magnitude for the Russian people. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989 was partly a result of its utter loss of moral legitimacy—and Solzhenitsyn did more than any other single human being to show the Russian Communists’ crimes to the world.
John McGowan, July 27, 2008
We’ve got inflation. How could that news surprise anyone? The mystery is how the government could claim that inflation was practically non-existent over the past 10 years. For those of us actually paying the bills, costs have steadily gone up for years. So why is it only now that the statistics bear out what everyone knows? The big difference is the cost of commodities. It is true that things like scissors, light bulbs, computers, and cars have been remarkably constant in price over the past 10 to 15 years. Food wasn’t quite as stable, but still only climbed moderately. The big increases were in services, everything from college tuitions to getting your leaky faucet fixed. The biggest increases of all were in housing costs—as if the competition for prime housing soaked up all the savings on commodities. Now we have a reversal; the housing market is down just when the cost of oil is driving commodity prices up. And since the government’s way of calculating inflation is heavily reliant on the price of commodities, the government is finally catching up with reality: life just keeps getting more expensive.
John McGowan, July 15, 2008
Today’s question: What ways are open for intervention in the criminal practices of another nation? Since World War II, there have been four favored routes: economic sanctions, multilateral military intervention, multilateral negotiation (with aid serving as the carrot, and military action as the stick), and criminal proceedings such as the Nuremburg trials or the trials of the Libyan plane bombers. The Bush Administration has generally scorned all four of these methods, with the exception of economic sanctions. And the Republicans are adamantly against the US accepting the authority of the International Criminal Court. The actual impact of the court is doubtful. The indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for crimes in Darfur may have the awful effect of making things worse for the victims of al-Bashir’s murderous policies. So the American reluctance to join the court is somewhat understandable. But that same reluctance is also connected to the Americans’ desire to remain a law unto themselves. Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, makes it clear that the current administration has, by every international standard, tortured prisoners. Who will call the Americans to account?
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