Publications by Type: Newspaper Article

2008
Ferguson, Niall. 2008. “Team 'Chimerica'”. Publisher's Version Abstract

Future historians, I suspect, will look back on Saturday's anticlimactic G-20 gathering in Washington less as Bretton Woods 2.0 and more as a rerun of the London Economic Conference of 1933. Back then, representatives of 66 nations completely failed to agree on a concerted international response to the Great Depression. The fault lay mainly with the newly elected U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who vetoed European proposals for currency stabilization.

This time around, it wasn't the newly elected Democrat but the outgoing Republican who wielded the veto. Even before his counterparts reached Washington, President Bush made it clear that recent events had done nothing to diminish his faith in free markets and minimalist regulation. Over the weekend, it was the United States that resisted European calls for a new international regulatory body, opposed significant redefinition of the International Monetary Fund's role and showed no interest in the idea of a global stimulus package.

A real opportunity has been missed. Just as happened in the 1930s, what began as an American banking panic has now escalated into a global economic crisis. And just as happened in the 1930s, a lack of international coordination has the potential to turn a recession into a deep and protracted depression.

The problem that seems scarcely to have been discussed over the weekend is that each national government is currently responding to the crisis with its own monetary and fiscal measures. Some central banks have already slashed official rates to close to zero. Some treasuries have already launched multibillion-dollar bailouts and stimulus packages. The devil lies in the different timing and magnitudes of these measures. The absence of coordination makes it almost inevitable that we will see rising volatility in global foreign exchange and bond markets, as investors react to each fresh national initiative. The results could be nearly as disruptive as the protectionist measures adopted by national governments during the Depression. Now, as then, a policy of "every man for himself" would be lethal.

At the heart of this crisis is the huge imbalance between the United States, with its current account deficit in excess of 1 percent of world gross domestic product, and the surplus countries that finance it: the oil exporters, Japan and emerging Asia. Of these, the relationship between China and America has become the crucial one. More than anything else, it has been China's strategy of dollar reserve accumulation that has financed America's debt habit. Chinese savings were a key reason U.S. long-term interest rates stayed low and the borrowing binge kept going. Now that the age of leverage is over, "Chimerica"— the partnership between the big saver and the big spender—is key.

In essence, we need the Chinese to be supportive of U.S. monetary easing and fiscal stimulus by doing more of the same themselves. There needs to be agreement on a gradual reduction of the Chimerican imbalance via increased U.S. exports and increased Chinese imports. The alternative—a sudden reduction of the imbalance via lower U.S. imports and lower Chinese exports— would be horrible.

There also needs to be an agreement to avoid a rout in the dollar market and the bond market, which is what will happen if the Chinese stop buying U.S. government bonds, the amount of which is now set to increase massively.

The alternative to such a Chimerican deal is for the Chinese to turn inward, devoting their energies to "market socialism in one country," increasing the domestic consumption of Chinese products and turning away from trade as the engine of growth.

Memo to President-elect Barack Obama: Don't wait until April for the next G-20 summit. Call a meeting of the Chimerican G-2 for the day after your inaugural. Don't wait for China to call its own meeting of a new "G-1" in Beijing.

Niall Ferguson is a faculty associate of the Weatherhead Center; Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, Department of History; and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration, Business, Government, and the International Economy Unit, Harvard Business School.

On January 20, when Barack Obama is formally inaugurated as president, the US will have a tryst with destiny. As famously defined by Jawaharlal Nehru, a national tryst with destiny is “a moment...when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance”.

Scholars of nationalism agree that the US was founded upon an ideology, not ethnicity or race. The ideology was contained in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, it said, “that all men are created equal”. Europe, the Old World, was horribly tied up in feudal hierarchies. The New World would have political and social equality at its core. As a corollary, rising from below became the socalled American dream. In reality, however, the US has not fully lived up to this ideal. Indeed, the creed of political equality came entwined with a founding ambiguity. The founders did not abolish slavery, an institution diametrically opposed to equality.

This original ambiguity has haunted the US. The election of Obama as president liberates America from its basic contradiction. It is a shining moment in the historical journey of American nationhood and a landmark moment for world history. No society has yet elected someone from its deepest subaltern trenches to the highest office of the nation. Obama is not a slave’s descendant, but he is African-American. It should be no surprise that an international debate about whether other nations can produce an Obama has begun. The debate in India, too, has been vigorous. Can Mayawati become India’s Obama? Can a Muslim be elected India’s prime minister?

A Muslim PM would, indeed, be a celebratory landmark for Indian secularism, but that is not an exact comparison. No community of India has suffered more than the nation’s Dalits. Muslims have historically had a dualistic structure: a ruling class and an aristocracy on one side and a vast mass of poor on the other side. In significant ways, that dualism continues to this day: the Azim Premjis and Shah Rukh Khans on the one hand, and the teeming millions on the other. In contrast, no film and sports stars or business leaders have come from the Dalit community. Though not enslaved, at least in modern times, Dalits, much like the African-Americans, have been segregated, stamped upon, and treated shabbily. India also has a founding ambiguity. Our Constitution abolished untouchability, but it is still widely practised. A Dalit PM would constitute a true parallel to the election of Obama.

Can India produce an Obama? Three great differences between India and the US make it unlikely. First, party establishments cannot easily be challenged until there are open intra-party elections for the leadership of political parties. American elections start with the primaries, allowing anyone in a political party to stake a claim to leadership. Lacking internal elections, India’s parties today are on the whole family properties. The partial exceptions are the BJP and CPM. But the BJP cannot easily have a leader not approved by the RSS. And the CPM is ruled by an unelected politburo.

The Congress was historically based on internal elections, but with the exception of a feeble attempt in the 1990s, internal elections, suspended by Indira Gandhi in 1973, have not been restored. The institutional decay of India’s political parties means that rank outsiders, like Mayawati, tend to create new political parties, but it is well known that it is much harder to create a new nationwide political organisation than use an existing one. The competition between political parties in India is remarkably vigorous, but competition inside is its exact opposite.

Second, the US has a presidential system, India a parliamentary one. Since a US president is elected by the whole nation, a presidential system creates a national political arena. Every presidential candidate has to think of how to lead the nation. In a parliamentary system, the electorate votes for an MP, but there is no national election for the PM. Only when a parliamentary system has two (or three) nationwide parties, as in the UK, do political leaders tend to compete the way American presidential candidates do. India does not have a two-party system.

Third, to mobilise citizens for vote, one has to speak in a language that the citizens can understand. Political campaigns take place in a linguistic register. Until India becomes more or less fully literate and also bilingual, India’s primary political arenas will be linguistically diverse provincial units. As a result, state-level Obamas will emerge, but national-level Obamas will be extremely hard to come by. Mayawati is at best a provincial Obama, with one major difference. Obama never ran a campaign of bitterness and anger; he subscribed to post-racial politics. In contrast, before the current Brahmin-Dalit brotherhood phase began, Mayawati conflated the politics of dignity with the politics of revenge.

Only movement politics, aimed at putting the various communities together, can tear down India’s institutional constraints. The freedom movement was the last great movement that built unity in India. It produced impressive national political leaders. The JP movement in the 1970s presented an alternative version of national unity, but it could not really take off. The Advani-led rath yatra was also one of the biggest movements of 20th century India. But it did not unite; it only divided. Until such time as India’s political parties become more internally democratic, a national level two-party system emerges, or strong movements of national unity come to the scene, India’s national leaders will continue to come from party establishments, not from the lower reaches of society.

The trial of Saddam Hussein will likely result in his execution. Thus satisfied will be the Greek goddess of justice. Blind, with scales in her hand, she balances evil with justice, dollar for dollar, punishment equaling debts. It was her signature principle—retributive justice—that animated the trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, and trials following war, dictatorship, and genocide in Yugoslavia, East Germany, Greece, Argentina, and Rwanda. Only retribution for the ancient regime, claim the defenders of trials, can establish the rule of law in Iraq under its new Constitution.

But trials have their limitations. Politically they often backfire. Erich Honecker, the deposed premier of communist East Germany, arrived at his trial in the newly unified Germany pumping his fist in the air, decrying victors' justice—and became more popular for it.

Trials rarely succeed in prosecuting more than a fraction of major perpetrators, even when they are lengthy and expensive. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has spent more than $1 billion over eight years to produce 20 convictions—out of 125,000 alleged genocidaires awaiting trial. Political pressures frequently undermine verdicts. Due process, legal procedures, and adversarial incentives often hinder the public revelation of the truth about past injustices. Under pressure for a speedy execution, Saddam's prosecutors may exclude from their case his colossal massacres of Shi'ites and Kurds, thus inhibiting their public exposure.

Most of all, trials will contribute little to the chief US foreign policy goal of a stable, democratic regime. The persistent hindrance is hatred. Historical wounds fester between Sunnis and Shi'ites, Kurds and Arabs, Islamists and secularists, and now Iraqis and Americans, breaking out in continual attack, revenge, and counter-revenge. Steps forward—elections, rebuilt institutions, and a new Constitution—seem constantly checked by steps backward—assassinations, detonations, and proliferating jihadi factions.

Trials are unlikely to assuage these wounds. In fact, news reports indicate that Saddam's trial is already pitting his sympathizers against his avowed enemies—yet another source of division.

What is needed is a dulcet in the din, a strong antidote to communal violence. Where might such medicine be found? One source of hope lies in a truth commission, a body charged by a state to investigate its past. Roughly 30 countries have turned to this solution in dealing with their own troubled histories.

Arising from the rhetoric is an ancient principle found in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures: reconciliation. Connoting the restoration of right relationship, reconciliation provides a blueprint for dealing with the past.

It begins by publicly acknowledging the suffering of thousands of victims of political violence. One of the remarkable themes to emerge from truth commissions in South Africa, Guatemala, El Salvador, and East Timor was victims finding healing through public testimony. Recent interviews with ordinary Iraqis find them welcoming just such an opportunity to speak publicly about the injustices that they and their loved ones have suffered at the hands of the state and to discover the truth about injustices that the state has hidden. The same exposure of deeds can foster accountability for perpetrators and assist trials.

Truth commissions even encourage apology and forgiveness. Following the publication of the final report of Chile's truth commission, President Patricio Aylwin called for nationwide repentance for injustices committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Enjoined by the Koran, apology and forgiveness might also be realized in Iraq.

For entire societies, truth commissions create a public historical record. The report of Argentina's truth commission, Nunca Mas ("Never Again"), became a bestseller on the streets. Perpetrators are thereby denied the lies through which they vindicate and reempower themselves, and new regimes are founded on truth and accountability.

To realist ears, reconciliation sounds remote from the necessities of sandbags, M-16s, and barbed wire. But to sound the principle is not to expect a utopian reconciliation of all with all. It is rather to urge a set of practices that can begin to heal the social divisions that now endanger a new regime. On this logic, many Iraqis have called for a truth commission, including a broad consensus of Iraqi citizens interviewed for a report of the International Center for Transitional Justice. As history's schisms roil on, their plea emerges not merely as an alternative concept of justice but also as sound foreign policy.

In its response to letters protesting the recent hiring of hard-line neoconservative William Kristol as a weekly Op-Ed columnist, the New York Times described the decision as the result of a "long and thoughtful process" by a paper committed to "vibrant political discourse." Editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal said critics of the move were being "intolerant" and complained about a "weird fear of opposing views."

Hiring Kristol did not bring an "opposing view" to the Times' Op-Ed page, of course, because columnist David Brooks already represents the same worldview that Kristol does. Nor does the Times' roster of liberal pundits provide a full complement of "opposing views." Most liberal commentators share the neocons' belief that it is America's right and responsibility to exercise "global leadership," even when that role involves the aggressive use of American military power and constant interference in other countries' affairs. The Times' Thomas Friedman was an energetic supporter of the Iraq war until it went south, and Nicholas Kristof is a passionate advocate of U.S. intervention in Darfur. Columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have been sharply critical of the neoconservatives' worst follies, but both proceed from the familiar liberal internationalism that has characterized the American foreign policy establishment for many years.

Even now, neoconservatives do not lack other mainstream outlets for their ideas. Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, Fred Hiatt and Jonah Goldberg appear regularly on the editorial pages of the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times, and prominent neocons routinely publish in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times and the New York Sun. Not to be outdone, the supposedly liberal Boston Globe publishes neocon Jeff Jacoby twice a week. The neoconservative outlook is ubiquitous in journals of opinion like the New Republic, Commentary or Kristol's own Weekly Standard and is regularly heard on major radio and TV talk shows. Even National Public Radio and Comedy Central give neoconservatives a platform with surprising frequency.

What's missing in America's mainstream media is the voice of realism. As the label implies, realists think foreign policy should be based on the world as it really is, rather than what we might like it to be. Realists see international politics as an inherently competitive realm where states constantly compete for advantage and where security is often precarious. But realists understand that being overly alarmist and aggressive can get states into just as much trouble as being excessively trusting or complacent. So realists keep a keen eye on the balance of power, but they oppose squandering blood or treasure on needless military buildups, ideological crusades, or foolish foreign wars. Realists cherish America's commitment to democracy and individual liberty, but they know that ideals alone are no basis for conducting foreign policy. They also understand that endless overseas adventures will inevitably provoke a hostile backlash abroad and eventually force us to compromise our freedoms here at home.

Such views are hardly heretical, but there is not a single major columnist, TV commentator or radio pundit who consistently presents a realist perspective on world politics and American foreign policy. In America today, the mainstream media is a realism-free zone.

The exclusion of realism is surprising for three reasons. First, realists enjoyed distinguished positions in the American foreign policy community in the past and remain a respected group today. Prominent statesmen whose views generally reflected a realist approach include the late George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Colin Powell, Richard Haass and Brent Scowcroft, as well as politicians like outgoing Sen. Chuck Hagel and current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. To give a realist regular space on a major Op-Ed page is hardly like hiring a Maoist, a Scientologist or a die-hard World Federalist.

Second, realists are an important constituency in the academic world. Realism is still the dominant paradigm in the academic study of international politics, and the writings of realist scholars like E.H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz have cast a long and lasting shadow over the academic landscape. One would think editors and publishers would be eager to hire someone whose views reflected that distinguished intellectual tradition.

Third, realism's track record as a guide to foreign policy is quite impressive, especially when compared to the neocons' catalog of blunders. Morgenthau, Waltz and Kennan were among the first to recognize that the Vietnam War was a foolish diversion of American power, and Waltz was one of the few foreign policy experts who understood the Soviet Union was a Potemkin colossus with feet of clay. When assorted hawks were sounding frantic alarms about Soviet dominance in the late 1970s, Waltz was writing that the real issue was whether the Soviets could hope to keep up with the far wealthier and more powerful United States. The 1980s proved they couldn't, and that Waltz and his fellow realists had been essentially correct.

Realism has done rather well since. Liberals and neoconservatives greeted the end of the Cold War by proclaiming the "end of history" and imagining a long era of peaceful American hegemony, but realists foresaw that the end of the Cold War would unleash new forms of security competition and produce new tensions within existing alliances. And when both hawks and doves foresaw a difficult and bloody battle in the 1990-91 Gulf War, realist scholars like Barry Posen of MIT and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago wrote articles that correctly predicted America's easy victory.

Most important, realists were among the most visible opponents to America's more recent misadventure in Iraq. In September 2002, for example, 33 international security scholars paid for an ad in the New York Times declaring "War With Iraq Is Not in the U.S. National Interest." About half of the signatories were prominent realists, and several others wrote articles before the war explaining why it was unnecessary and unwise. By contrast, it was the neocons who conceived and promoted the Iraq war, while many prominent liberals endorsed it. Surely Americans deserve to hear from a perspective that has been an accurate guide to recent events, instead of relying on pundits who have been consistently wrong.

A realist would provide readers with insights that have been largely absent from mainstream discussion for a decade or more. Realism emphasizes that states defend their interests vigorously and that successful diplomacy requires give-and-take; that advancing our own interests often requires us to do business with regimes whose values we find objectionable; that nationalism is a powerful force and most societies resist when outsiders try to tell them how to run their own affairs; that global institutions can be useful tools of statecraft but require great power support to work effectively; and that even well-intentioned democracies sometimes do foolish and cruel things. Most important of all, a realist would emphasize that military force is a blunt and costly instrument whose ultimate effects are unpredictable, and that it should be employed only when vital interests are at stake.

In short, a realist would be a valuable antidote to the self-righteous hubris that pervades contemporary U.S. commentary on foreign affairs, an attitude that has encouraged many of the policies that have undermined America's image around the globe. A realist would also cast a skeptical eye on virtually all of the current presidential candidates, whose views on foreign policy do not stray far from the current neoconservative/liberal consensus. Realists aren't infallible and some readers will undoubtedly object to their views, but that's hardly the issue. The point is that Americans would be better informed if they regularly heard what realists had to say, and media institutions that are genuinely interested in presenting a diverse array of views should be signing up a few of them.

Walt, Stephen M, and John Mearsheimer. 2008. “Israel's False Friends”. Publisher's Version Abstract

U.S. presidential candidates aren't doing the Jewish state any favors by offering unconditional support.

Once again, as the presidential campaign season gets underway, the leading candidates are going to enormous lengths to demonstrate their devotion to the state of Israel and their steadfast commitment to its "special relationship" with the United States.

Each of the main contenders emphatically favors giving Israel extraordinary material and diplomatic support—continuing the more than $3 billion in foreign aid each year to a country whose per capita income is now 29th in the world. They also believe that this aid should be given unconditionally. None of them criticizes Israel's conduct, even when its actions threaten U.S. interests, are at odds with American values or even when they are harmful to Israel itself. In short, the candidates believe that the U.S. should support Israel no matter what it does.

Such pandering is hardly surprising, because contenders for high office routinely court special interest groups, and Israel's staunchest supporters—the Israel lobby, as we have termed it—expect it. Politicians do not want to offend Jewish Americans or "Christian Zionists," two groups that are deeply engaged in the political process. Candidates fear, with some justification, that even well-intentioned criticism of Israel's policies may lead these groups to turn against them and back their opponents instead.

If this happened, trouble would arise on many fronts. Israel's friends in the media would take aim at the candidate, and campaign contributions from pro-Israel individuals and political action committees would go elsewhere. Moreover, most Jewish voters live in states with many electoral votes, which increases their weight in close elections (remember Florida in 2000?), and a candidate seen as insufficiently committed to Israel would lose some of their support. And no Republican would want to alienate the pro-Israel subset of the Christian evangelical movement, which is a significant part of the GOP base.

Indeed, even suggesting that the U.S. adopt a more impartial stance toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can get a candidate into serious trouble. When Howard Dean proposed during the 2004 campaign that the United States take a more "evenhanded" role in the peace process, he was severely criticized by prominent Democrats, and a rival for the nomination, Sen. Joe Lieberman, accused him of "selling Israel down the river" and said Dean's comments were "irresponsible."

Word quickly spread in the American Jewish community that Dean was hostile to Israel, even though his campaign co-chair was a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Dean had been strongly pro-Israel throughout his career. The candidates in the 2008 election surely want to avoid Dean's fate, so they are all trying to prove that they are Israel's best friend.

These candidates, however, are no friends of Israel. They are facilitating its pursuit of self-destructive policies that no true friend would favor.

The key issue here is the future of Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel conquered in 1967 and still controls. Israel faces a stark choice regarding these territories, which are home to roughly 3.8 million Palestinians. It can opt for a two-state solution, turning over almost all of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians and allowing them to create a viable state on those lands in return for a comprehensive peace agreement designed to allow Israel to live securely within its pre-1967 borders (with some minor modifications). Or it can retain control of the territories it occupies or surrounds, building more settlements and bypass roads and confining the Palestinians to a handful of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel would control the borders around those enclaves and the air above them, thus severely restricting the Palestinians' freedom of movement.

But if Israel chooses this second option, it will lead to an apartheid state. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said as much when he recently proclaimed that if "the two-state solution collapses," Israel will "face a South African-style struggle." He went so far as to argue that "as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." Similarly, Israel's deputy prime minister, Haim Ramon, said earlier this month that "the occupation is a threat to the existence of the state of Israel." Other Israelis, as well as Jimmy Carter and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have warned that continuing the occupation will turn Israel into an apartheid state. Nevertheless, Israel continues to expand its settlements on the West Bank while the plight of the Palestinians worsens.

Given this grim situation, one would expect the presidential candidates, who claim to care deeply about Israel, to be sounding the alarm and energetically championing a two-state solution. One would expect them to have encouraged President Bush to put significant pressure on both the Israelis and the Palestinians at the recent Annapolis conference and to keep the pressure on when he visits the region this week. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently observed, settling this conflict is also in America's interest, not to mention the Palestinians'.

One would certainly expect Hillary Clinton to be leading the charge here. After all, she wisely and bravely called for establishing a Palestinian state "that is on the same footing as other states" in 1998, when it was still politically incorrect to use the words "Palestinian state" openly. Moreover, her husband not only championed a two-state solution as president but he laid out the famous "Clinton parameters" in December 2000, which outline the only realistic deal for ending the conflict.

But what is Clinton saying now that she is a candidate? She said hardly anything about pushing the peace process forward at Annapolis, and remained silent when Rice criticized Israel's subsequent announcement that it planned to build more than 300 new housing units in East Jerusalem. More important, both she and GOP aspirant Rudy Giuliani recently proclaimed that Jerusalem must remain undivided, a position that is at odds with the Clinton parameters and virtually guarantees that there will be no Palestinian state.

Sen. Clinton's behavior is hardly unusual among the candidates for president. Barack Obama, who expressed some sympathy for the Palestinians before he set his sights on the White House, now has little to say about their plight, and he too said little about what should have been done at Annapolis to facilitate peace. The other major contenders are ardent in their declarations of support for Israel, and none of them apparently sees a two-state solution as so urgent that they should press both sides to reach an agreement. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security advisor and now a senior advisor to Obama, noted, "The presidential candidates don't see any payoff in addressing the Israel-Palestinian issue." But they do see a significant political payoff in backing Israel to the hilt, even when it is pursuing a policy —colonizing the West Bank—that is morally and strategically bankrupt.

In short, the presidential candidates are no friends of Israel. They are like most U.S. politicians, who reflexively mouth pro-Israel platitudes while continuing to endorse and subsidize policies that are in fact harmful to the Jewish state. A genuine friend would tell Israel that it was acting foolishly, and would do whatever he or she could to get Israel to change its misguided behavior. And that will require challenging the special interest groups whose hard-line views have been obstacles to peace for many years.

As former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami argued in 2006, the American presidents who have made the greatest contribution to peace—Carter and George H.W. Bush—succeeded because they were "ready to confront Israel head-on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America." If the Democratic and Republican contenders were true friends of Israel, they would be warning it about the danger of becoming an apartheid state, just as Carter did.

Moreover, they would be calling for an end to the occupation and the creation of a viable Palestinian state. And they would be calling for the United States to act as an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians so that Washington could pressure both sides to accept a solution based on the Clinton parameters. Implementing a final-status agreement will be difficult and take a number of years, but it is imperative that the two sides formally agree on the solution and then implement it in ways that protect each side.

But Israel's false friends cannot say any of these things, or even discuss the issue honestly. Why? Because they fear that speaking the truth would incur the wrath of the hard-liners who dominate the main organizations in the Israel lobby. So Israel will end up controlling Gaza and the West Bank for the foreseeable future, turning itself into an apartheid state in the process. And all of this will be done with the backing of its so-called friends, including the current presidential candidates. With friends like them, who needs enemies?

Domínguez, Jorge I, and Juan Enriquez. 2008. “What about austerity?”. Publisher's Version Abstract

Within the billions of sentences about the financial bailout there is one word notably absent, austerity. All talk is of payments, supports, subsidies, incurring more debt, stimulus packages. The thesis seems to be: If only we spend more the party can go on. True, only if the financial meltdown is a temporary mismatch and dislocation in housing and credit markets. But suppose there is something fundamentally wrong with the US economy. Then spending more will not fix it. Getting the diagnosis right means getting the treatment right. It may save us a trillion or two.

The subprime collapse is one symptom of years of little regulation, under-taxing, overspending, and massive debt. One way to understand what is happening in the United States is to look at what occurred time and again in Latin America and Asia, hotbeds of financial and banking crises. What we are living through happened time and again in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, as well as Korea and Thailand.

If there is too much debt, people lose confidence in the banks, then credit markets, currency, and government.

For more than a decade, the international financial cop, the International Monetary Fund, forecast a hurricane was heading toward US shores. As did many heads of the treasury and the Fed. It is, to paraphrase a great writer, a chronicle of an agony foretold. There are five basic drivers of these crises, all based on excess: high income concentration, too much debt, too much reliance on foreign money, not enough tax revenue, and reckless government spending. Time after time governments believe they are different. They are bombarded by warnings but ignore, postpone, spend even more, and crash.

Over past decades, most US wages have fared poorly. Despite stagnant wages, consumer spending and debt increased, fueled by cheap credit. Companies also went on a debt binge. Careless deregulation allowed financial cowboys to run the system. Responsible CEOs who kept some cash, maintained moderate debt, invested for the long term, got pink slips. Financial chop shops did leveraged buyouts using a company's own cash and credit. To survive, companies piled on debt.

Many politicians decided reelection depended on cutting taxes and offering more benefits. Increase Medicare, postpone Social Security reform, hire more bureaucrats, and pay for a two-front war. Debt grew to pay for this party. These were not true tax cuts, just postponed debt; now we owe more and the bill has come due with interest.

Complicating this crisis is US economic hegemony. There were few places to park a lot of money. Despite the euro, European policies on debts and deficits are not much to brag about. So foreigners have gorged on US debt. The United States continues importing more than it exports. Middle Easterners and Asians who save and invest bought dollars for decades, but some of this money is now fleeing. The dollar has dropped sharply. Gold and oil have skyrocketed. In financial crises, huge pools of capital cross borders very quickly; a few can make a great deal of money shorting the country's currency.

The United States requires a massive restructuring to address its debt, cutting back on its borrowing, spending, and wars. The bailout package is essential to keep the credit markets open. But absent sentences that include the word austerity all the bailout will accomplish is a temporary postponement. Bailout and stimulus are a stopgap.

A solution requires the country to begin to spend what it earns, reduce its mountainous debt, and address massive liabilities, restructure Social Security, pension deficits, military, and Medicare. No wonder politicians would rather spend more of your money now rather than address these problems. Because we have been spending 5 to 7 percent more each year than we earn, a forced restructuring, triggered by a currency collapse, would have the same effect on wages and purchasing power that the housing collapse had on housing prices. So let's learn from our Latin and Asian friends and act before it is too late.

Juan Enriquez, managing director of Excel Medical Ventures, is author of "The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future." Jorge Dominguez is vice provost for international affairs and a professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics at Harvard University.

It matters what we call things. It took too long for the Bush administration to admit that its intended liberation of Iraq had become an occupation, that US forces faced a home-grown insurgency there, and that a transition to Iraqi democracy might not result in a nation that supports US interests.

Finally, not until 2007 did the Pentagon acknowledge that Iraqi sectarian violence had crossed a threshold to become a civil war.

But policymakers still haven't come to terms with the implications of that fact. If they did, they'd see that a wisely executed withdrawal of US-led forces could well be the surest path to peace. That's because withdrawal is likely to transform the fighting in Iraq into a defensive struggle for power in a nation-state, as opposed to an offensive battle rooted in religion.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the war in Iraq is a religious civil war and that—even putting aside Al Qaeda in Iraq—Islam is at the heart of it for three reasons.

First, Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites themselves see the war in these terms. They identify first and foremost as Shiites and Sunnis. Second, they use religious identity both to target opponents and define threats. Finally, they have appealed beyond the borders of Iraq for aid—fighters, arms, cash—in religious terms.

Islam is not based in a specific territory; it is a transnational faith that unites its community, or umma, in the minds of men.

Further, Islam does not have one leader who can dictate what is right or who is wrong. The absence of an ultimate authority figure means that Shiites—who, unlike Sunnis, believe that religious scholars are needed to help interpret the will of God—often latch on to charismatic imams.

This helps explain why the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has recently committed himself to further religious study in Iran. It also helps to explain why Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will fail to gain acceptance as a leader among the vast majority of Iraq's Shiite population.

Not only does Mr. Maliki not have support in the street—his government's failure to deliver even basic security and life's needs is apparent to most Iraqis—but he has no religious credentials of his own to fall back on.

By contrast, Mr. Sadr's ability to deliver security and services through his Mahdi Army, and his authority as cleric and the son of the martyred Grand Ayatollah Mohammed al-Sadr, has assured him a devoted following.

Sectarian conflict in Iraq was previously limited to fighting between Sunnis and Shiites. But today, the conflict has grown to include Shiites against fellow Shiites. Despite signs that security has improved, the religious civil wars in Iraq may have only just begun.

My research on civil wars from 1940 to 2000 highlights three important facts about such wars, all of which apply to Iraq. First, nearly half of all ongoing civil wars (46 percent) involve religion in some form. Second, Islam has been involved in more than 80 percent of all religious civil wars. Third, religious civil wars are less likely to end in negotiated settlement. Instead, combatants tend to duke it out until one side achieves victory.

In Iraq, a negotiated settlement is going to be very difficult for two reasons. First, the Shiites will want to remain in almost complete control due to two entirely legitimate concerns: (1) fears of Sunni repression as experienced in the past, and (2) a sense of majority-rule justice. Second, the Shiites themselves are divided on how Iraq should be ruled, so it's difficult to know whom to bargain with on the Shiite side, and therefore who can credibly commit to abide by the terms of any settlement.

What then can the United States and its allies do to bring about a negotiated settlement? Ironically, the best way to support a negotiated settlement would be to leave Iraq.

The withdrawal of US forces would allow Iraq's predominantly Arab Shiites and Sunnis to find common interest in opposing their two more classical historical adversaries: Kurds and Persians. The longer the US and Britain stay, the more they facilitate a shift away from the identity that long unified Iraq to the religious identity that is tearing it apart and facilitating its manipulation by Iran.

There are three obvious downsides to this approach.

First, the end of violence in Iraq following a US withdrawal would lead to the emergence of a nonsecular, nondemocratic government in Iraq. It would be more friendly toward Iran (though not Iran's puppet, as currently feared), but less friendly toward Israel, although a democratic Iraq would be no improvement in this regard.

Second, since US withdrawal has been conditioned on a de-escalation of violence in Iraq, the Bush and Brown governments would be left the unenviable task of explaining to their countries that "withdrawal is the best way to create the conditions for, withdrawal."

Third, withdrawal before violence has fully ceased will look like failure to most Americans and Britons.

The idea of victory versus failure is really a false dichotomy, however. The real choice for US and British policymakers is between the more costly failure that will obtain from current policy and the less costly failure that might obtain from a well-thought-out and well-executed withdrawal.

President Bush does not seem to know it yet, but his peace plan for the Middle East is moribund. That is my chief impression from a recent three-month journey through the troubled region. A viable Palestinian state will not exist by the time Bush leaves office. Nor will one exist, probably, in the predictable future—not least because of the failures of US policy.

Cynicism prevails among Palestinians, and Israelis also. Azmi Bishara, a prominent Palestinian intellectual, decries what he calls “the Palestine settlement industry—that inexhaustible source of quasi-initiatives [and] pseudo-dialogues” that after 41 years of harsh Israeli occupation have led nowhere. To virtually every Palestinian I talked to, Bush's peace process has become a black comedy.

To them, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become a forlorn figure, frequently flying to Jerusalem to entreat the Israelis to remove roadblocks and cease building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and then the Israelis blithely do the opposite. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in his grandfatherly way has become a nearly pathetic figure—regarded by his own people as an American stooge, dependent on the United States to pay his huge bureaucracy, and constantly disappointed by Bush's refusal to pressure Israel.

The Israeli government is split between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the stronger of the two. Olmert fears for the future of Israel as a Jewish state under Palestinian demographic pressure and favors some sort of peace deal, but he will soon resign from office on accusations of corruption. Barak is leisurely in cracking down on settlements and wants to delay a final deal indefinitely.

Israeli peace advocates complain that the army in effect has a veto over Olmert and slows down or sabotages civilian orders to remove roadblocks and settlement outposts. Even if an accord is achieved before Bush leaves office, it will probably be no more than a cloudy declaration of goals that would take many years to implement. Olmert has admitted that no agreement on the division of Jerusalem can be reached this year.

Bush has done little to satisfy the Palestinians who entrusted their fate to November's Annapolis declaration, which promised “every effort” to conclude an agreement on a two-state solution before the end of 2008. At the White House in April, Abbas told Bush that when the Palestinian negotiators saw the latest Israeli proposals, they laughed. According to the eminent Israeli analyst Akiva Eldar, Olmert and his foreign minister Tzipi Livni demanded all of East Jerusalem except the Temple Mount, much of the Jordan Valley except for a walled enclave around Jericho, and the retention of all settlement clusters, such as Ariel in the heart of the West Bank.

The territory reserved for the Palestinians would be a patchwork of Bantustans cut off from Jerusalem with no continuity, no sovereignty, and subject still to incursions by the Israeli Army. A referendum containing such limitations would inevitably be rejected by the Palestinian population.

A struggle resumes?
When the peace process collapses, as seems so likely, the broad Palestinian struggle will probably resume. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, the dynamic physician who heads the Palestinian National Initiative, told me in Ramallah that he hopes the struggle will be Gandhian and peaceful. But Nasser al-Qudawi, Yasser Arafat's nephew, thinks not.

“The resistance will resume,” Qudawi told me, “but it will bring more splintering of Palestinian society, more extremism, and more blood.” In the West Bank, Hamas and Islamic Jihad may flourish. Will Hamas fire rockets at Israel from the West Bank?

Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants have launched thousands of primitive Qassam rockets from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel since 2000, killing 17 Israeli civilians, wounding scores, and destroying much property. Yet more than 2,000 Palestinian civilians, many of them children, have been killed by Israeli retaliatory attacks, and it is heart-rending to tour tiny Gaza and witness the devastation.

In the north of the Gaza Strip sits a lake of human waste. It exudes the stench of excrement and is threatening to burst because the Israelis have rationed the importation of cement. The waste seeps into the ground of Gaza and pollutes the aquifers, causing rampant diarrhea and infestations that afflict children most.

At Khan Younis near the sea, buildings chopped in half by Israeli bombs are still inhabited, and laundry hangs from the ruins. A man named Ahmed, who has lost a leg, invites me upstairs into his flat to meet his wife and 10 children. The ceiling sags. “Aren't you afraid it will collapse?” I ask. “We have nowhere else to go," he answers.

Since Hamas chased Abbas's secular government out of Gaza in June 2007, it has governed the Strip untainted by the Fatah faction's corruption and with modest benefits to the population of 1.5 million. Women feel compelled to wear the veil, the sexes are rigidly separated, and the judiciary can be severe. Sharia law has not been officially introduced, but the trend is toward more Islamization.

The Internet is monitored for pornography, but Hamas has cracked down on more radical Islamist groups that have attacked Internet café's. The police seem everywhere, but they have generally imposed order. Hamas's rivalry with Fatah remains savage. Despite recent efforts at reconciliation, blood continues to be shed between them.

The role of Hamas
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the mystical quadriplegic who founded Hamas, said that the fate of Israel must be left to the will of God and future generations of Palestinians. But in June 2006 Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh declared Hamas's willingness to sign a document jointly with all Palestinian factions that it accepts Israel's existence. Hamas will not formally recognize Israel, preferring to offer only a hudna, a truce of 10 or even 30 years. But Hamas would accept a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that produces an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders.

Israel and the United States have shunned Hamas until it explicitly recognizes Israel, and they have discouraged Abbas from negotiating with it. Bush regards Hamas not as a government but as purely a terrorist organization, as if any peace could be achieved by excluding more than a third of the Palestinian people. Barak believes that in good time and by brute force he can emasculate Hamas and crush its governance of Gaza.

Yet in mid-June, Israel accepted a cease-fire of six months in Gaza mediated by the Egyptians. The agreement won Israel a reprieve from Qassam rockets, and Hamas a suspension of Israel's military attacks and an easing of its economic blockade of Gaza. The deal was acclaimed in the Arab world, and deplored in Israel, as a victory for Hamas.

Hamas did not surrender in Gaza; its crude rockets forced Israel to sue for calm. To Palestinians, Hamas proved its creed that Israel understands only the language of force. Not only have Israel and the United States failed to topple the Hamas government, but Hamas has forced Israel to deal with it—even as President Abbas has achieved so little in his negotiations with Israel.

The Israelis fear that Hamas will use the calm to regroup its militia of perhaps 15,000 men and import more arms, and they may be right. The asymmetrical warfare between Israel and Hamas may continue in cycles, periods of quiet interspersed with periods of great violence and attrition, for many years. The Palestinians of Gaza have proved their capacity to absorb suffering. Though the West Bank is more bourgeois, it may come to do likewise under the banner of resistance.

Many secular Palestinian intellectuals have despaired of a two-state solution and have resumed their old dream of a unitary, democratic state for Jews and Arabs in all of historical Palestine. But there might still be a meager chance of achieving a two-state solution, depending on the will of the next US president.

Will he exert effective pressure not only on the Palestinians to end all violence, but on Israel to evacuate the settlements and retreat substantially to the borders of 1967? Should he do so, he will need also to create a formula to include Hamas in the solution if he truly wants peace. Paradoxically, the key to peace may be held by Hamas.

Edward R.F. Sheehan is a former fellow of Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Unlike China, India doesn't have a clear vision for its role in the world.

For three decades, India has craved a nuclear energy deal that would bring prestige and advanced technology. Yet when the coalition government declared this week that it would move ahead with one, it triggered a crisis and a no-confidence motion in Parliament, which it had to scramble to survive.

Watching this drama unfold, the international community may be forgiven for feeling a little baffled. After all, the landmark Indo-US nuclear deal is immensely advantageous for India. It allows India to buy nuclear technology from the US in exchange for abiding by International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. It would give India's growing economy much-needed energy without endangering its strategic capabilities or influencing its sovereignty in foreign policy.

To understand the political anguish and hand-wringing in India over a nuclear deal with the US, one needs to understand a very simple fact. Unlike China, its rival rising power, India lacks a grand strategy or concept of its role in the world. India thinks it should be a great power but has no clear vision of its path. In contrast, China thinks it is a great power and expends a great deal of time and energy outlining its "peaceful rise" to itself and the world.

China's rise on the world stage is constantly discussed by Chinese academics, journalists, policy experts, political leaders, and the elite. This discourse emphasizes that despite China's growing power and the need for resources and markets, it will not pursue militarization and hegemony as Germany and Japan did before and during World War II.

Rather, it intends to rise peacefully and harmoniously. Simultaneously, this idea draws on the concept of tianxia ("all under heaven") which, simply put, promotes order over chaos and has been key to understanding governance in China for the past 2,000 years. With defined ideas of the world and their role in the world, China acts like a confident great power and pursues its international goals with single-minded zeal.

The last time India had a defined concept of its international role, Jawaharlal Nehru was the prime minister. Nehru made some notable foreign policy mistakes, particularly his disastrous Forward Policy that resulted in the 1962 war and bitter defeat at the hands of China.

But there is no doubt the man was a visionary. Designed by Nehru, the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) was a domestic and international triumph for India. It was poor, struggling to develop economically and militarily, but there was a sense of purpose and national pride that it had, at least, cornered the moral market in international relations and assumed the leadership of the developing nations.

Post Nehru and post cold war, India failed to adapt or abandon NAM, even when it had little significance. Nor, unlike China after Mao, did any Indian leader articulate an alternate ideology of the world and India's role in it.

It is, therefore, not surprising that such bitter ideological divisions now exist in India. What is the way forward for India as a would-be great power? Does signing a nuclear deal with the US make its old antagonist its new BFF? Does it mean that even paying lip service to the long-obsolete idea of NAM is no longer possible? Or does great power mean, as the communists suggest, proudly rejecting the nuclear deal and thereby showing the international community who's boss?

Even as the nuclear deal steams ahead, unless India articulates a vision for itself and gains the confidence of a great power, such splits will continue to plague its international relationships and negotiations.

Manjari Chatterjee Miller is a post-doctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and an affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She is working on a book about Indian and Chinese foreign policy.

The enlargement of NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine could become the most dangerous spoiler in relations between Russia and the west next year. It would also set the new US president off to a bad start. If NATO’s foreign ministers were to decide in December that the two former Soviet republics were ready for the membership action plan and if Russia retaliated by freezing its relations with the alliance, that would create a lose-lose situation for everybody—for NATO, for Russia and, ultimately, also for Kiev and Tbilisi.

An already nationalistic Russia would fall prey to its fear of being encircled again and it would dangerously isolate itself from the west. The alliance, in turn, would revert to its 20th-century raison d’être—containing an increasingly hostile Russia—instead of focusing on more crucial tasks, including its adaptation to the new security challenges. This would further exacerbate the rifts within the European Union over its Russia policy.

But in a different scenario, could Georgia’s and Ukraine’s legitimate aspiration to join the alliance turn a potential spoiler into a win-win situation for both NATO and Russia?

Yes, it could, but only if both sides show political courage. Contrary to today’s received wisdom, Georgia’s and Ukraine’s wish to join the alliance could provide the right conditions for two positive developments: NATO could at last shake off its legacy as a cold war and anti-Russian alliance; and a new mindset could take hold in Russia, involving a vision of security based on co-operation, not on competition or on spheres of influence.

How can this be achieved? A strategy based on three elements could work. First, the US, NATO, Russia, the EU and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe should forge a new compact jointly to manage security threats in their common neighbourhood, which stretches from Ukraine, through the Caucasus to Central Asia (an area whose geostrategic importance has grown as a result of the conflict in Afghanistan). The group of these organizations would share responsibility for combating common threats in the area, ranging from terrorism to Islamic fundamentalism, to drug-trafficking and organized crime. They would also commit themselves to finally resolving the frozen conflicts in Transnistria, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russia has been resentful of the west since the end of the cold war, claiming that it is unfairly treated as a junior partner and demanding formal recognition as an equal. A new security compact would grant Russia that status: the sharing of power between Russia, the EU, NATO, the US and the OSCE would go hand in hand with shared responsibility for “securing security”. The new compact should complement these institutions, not replace them.

Second, within this new co-operative security framework Russia would shelve its opposition to Georgia and Ukraine accessing the membership access plan. In fact, if NATO becomes part of a larger, co-operative security framework in which Russia is an equal partner, Moscow should have nothing to fear from Georgian or Ukrainian membership. Indeed, Moscow would benefit from the fact that NATO membership would encourage its two neighbors to become more responsible regional players. Russia would thus boost its legitimacy in the eyes of the “new” Europe, which still mistrusts it and sees it as a sovereign democracy bent on denying sovereignty to others.

Finally, in return for Russia shelving its opposition to the membership access plan, both Georgia and Ukraine would commit to negotiating new bilateral pacts of friendship and co-operation with Russia to consolidate trust.

Implementing such a strategy depends on both the west and Russia showing the political will to do so. In just over a year we will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the end of the cold war. What better way could there be to dispel the tensions between Russia and the west than to work together in addressing the common challenges of the 21th century? A US-Russia-NATO-EU-OSCE summit and the signing of a new Eurasian security charter could help to consign this hangover from the past to the archives and allow us to start afresh. It is high time that happened. A reformulation of the terms of security co-operation between the west and Russia in their common neighbourhood would also bode well for future co-operation in other hot areas, with Iran and Afghanistan heading the list.

Will the food crisis that is menacing the lives of millions ease up—or grow worse over time? The answer may be both. The recent rise in food prices has largely been caused by temporary problems like drought in Australia, Ukraine and elsewhere. Though the need for huge rescue operations is urgent, the present acute crisis will eventually end. But underlying it is a basic problem that will only intensify unless we recognize it and try to remedy it.

It is a tale of two peoples. In one version of the story, a country with a lot of poor people suddenly experiences fast economic expansion, but only half of the people share in the new prosperity. The favored ones spend a lot of their new income on food, and unless supply expands very quickly, prices shoot up. The rest of the poor now face higher food prices but no greater income, and begin to starve. Tragedies like this happen repeatedly in the world.

A stark example is the Bengal famine of 1943, during the last days of the British rule in India. The poor who lived in cities experienced rapidly rising incomes, especially in Calcutta, where huge expenditures for the war against Japan caused a boom that quadrupled food prices. The rural poor faced these skyrocketing prices with little increase in income.

Misdirected government policy worsened the division. The British rulers were determined to prevent urban discontent during the war, so the government bought food in the villages and sold it, heavily subsidized, in the cities, a move that increased rural food prices even further. Low earners in the villages starved. Two million to three million people died in that famine and its aftermath.

Much discussion is rightly devoted to the division between haves and have-nots in the global economy, but the world’s poor are themselves divided between those who are experiencing high growth and those who are not. The rapid economic expansion in countries like China, India and Vietnam tends to sharply increase the demand for food. This is, of course, an excellent thing in itself, and if these countries could manage to reduce their unequal internal sharing of growth, even those left behind there would eat much better.

But the same growth also puts pressure on global food markets—sometimes through increased imports, but also through restrictions or bans on exports to moderate the rise in food prices at home, as has happened recently in countries like India, China, Vietnam and Argentina. Those hit particularly hard have been the poor, especially in Africa.

There is also a high-tech version of the tale of two peoples. Agricultural crops like corn and soybeans can be used for making ethanol for motor fuel. So the stomachs of the hungry must also compete with fuel tanks.

Misdirected government policy plays a part here, too. In 2005, the United States Congress began to require widespread use of ethanol in motor fuels. This law combined with a subsidy for this use has created a flourishing corn market in the United States, but has also diverted agricultural resources from food to fuel. This makes it even harder for the hungry stomachs to compete.

Ethanol use does little to prevent global warming and environmental deterioration, and clear-headed policy reforms could be urgently carried out, if American politics would permit it. Ethanol use could be curtailed, rather than being subsidized and enforced.

The global food problem is not being caused by a falling trend in world production, or for that matter in food output per person (this is often asserted without much evidence). It is the result of accelerating demand. However, a demand-induced problem also calls for rapid expansion in food production, which can be done through more global cooperation.

While population growth accounts for only a modest part of the growing demand for food, it can contribute to global warming, and long-term climate change can threaten agriculture. Happily, population growth is already slowing and there is overwhelming evidence that women’s empowerment (including expansion of schooling for girls) can rapidly reduce it even further.

What is most challenging is to find effective policies to deal with the consequences of extremely asymmetric expansion of the global economy. Domestic economic reforms are badly needed in many slow-growth countries, but there is also a big need for more global cooperation and assistance. The first task is to understand the nature of the problem.

Amartya Sen, is the Chair, Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics, a Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate, and Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, Department of Economics, Harvard University.

Amartya Sen received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998.

IN A SPEECH this week, Iran's supreme leader found himself in rare agreement with President Bush. Echoing Bush's judgment that nuclear terrorism is "the single most serious threat to American national security," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned that, "sooner or later, international terrorists will get their hands on nuclear weapons and bring the security of the world…to an end."

Bush has insisted that "for the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." Unfortunately, however, as a result of the failure of the Bush administration's strategy toward Iran, today Tehran stands seven years further down its path to nuclear weapons than it did on Jan. 20, 2001. Specifically, when Bush entered office, Iran had no operational uranium enrichment facilities. Today, as last month's International Atomic Energy Agency report documents, Iran is operating 3,492 centrifuges in a cascade that has produced 500 pounds of low-enriched uranium. This is one-third of what is required for Iran's first nuclear bomb.

The Bush administration's strategy to prevent Iran's mastering technology for enriching uranium and producing nuclear weapons has been characterized as a "diplomatic slow squeeze." The administration has hoped that UN Security Council resolutions isolating Iran, enforced by sanctions, would persuade Tehran to suspend enrichment activity. Ironically, the IAEA chose Memorial Day to inform its member governments that for the third time, Iran has stiffed the demands of the Security Council resolution.

In baseball, it's three strikes and you're out. After the undeniable failure of the third Security Council resolution imposing sanctions to slow Iran's nuclear program, Bush's Iran strategists should recognize that they have struck out.

Hoping to divert attention from this record, the Bush administration has further confused the issue with exaggerated rhetorical attacks on those who advocate an alternative strategy of direct diplomacy including negotiations. Speaking to the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's creation, Bush accused proponents of negotiations with unfriendly regimes of "appeasement." More diplomatically, but equally pointedly, in addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for another dose of the same medicine the administration has been prescribing, and sought to shift the blame to Iran, asserting that "The real question is: Why won't Tehran talk to us?"

Facts are only obliquely relevant to political debate. But for the record, the charge of appeasement leveled against British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain focused not on his willingness to talk, but on his unwillingness to act. In the run-up to World War II, negotiation was not the issue. The question was whether Britain and France would act when Adolf Hitler violated Germany's Versailles Treaty commitments.

Winston Churchill criticized the governments for capitulating when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, arguing that if they had responded, "There is no doubt that Hitler would have been compelled by his own General Staff to withdraw.…They had only to act to win." Instead, a confident Hitler went on to absorb Austria, and after Munich, Czechoslovakia.

If Bush recognized the fact that his diplomatic squeeze has failed, and asked what he could do in his final eight months to advance US interests in relations with Iran, he would not have to look beyond his own Cabinet.

In a 2004 report titled "Iran: Now is the Time for a New Approach," Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged that "the United States deal with the current regime rather than wait for it to fall." When asked about this recommendation during recent testimony on the Hill, Gates noted that he had been "in a happier place" then.

But it is clear that Gates remains convinced that direct negotiations are imperative for solving the nuclear standoff. As he told the Academy of American Diplomacy last month, "We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage…and then sit down and talk with them."

Negotiations are never certain to yield results. The alternative, a world of nuclear anarchy, is of great concern to both nations. Having seen the results of seven years of nonengagement, Bush could do his successor—whether Democrat or Republican—a great favor by proposing to negotiate with Iran now.

Graham Allison is a Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate; Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

International prices of rice, wheat and corn have risen sharply, setting off violent urban protests in roughly a dozen countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But is this a "world food crisis?"

It is certainly a troubling instance of price instability in international commodity markets, leading to social unrest among urban food-buyers. But we must be careful not to equate high crop prices with hunger around the world. Most of the world's hungry people do not use international food markets, and most of those who use these markets are not hungry. International food markets, like international markets for everything else, are used primarily by the prosperous and secure, not the poor and vulnerable. In world corn markets, the biggest importer by far is Japan. Next comes the European Union. Next comes South Korea. Citizens in these countries are not underfed.

In the poor countries of Asia, rice is the most important staple, yet most Asian countries import very little rice. As recently as March, India was keeping imported rice out of the country by imposing a 70 percent duty.

Data on the actual incidence of malnutrition reveal that the regions of the world where people are most hungry, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, are those that depend least on imports from the world market. Hunger is caused in these countries not by high international food prices, but by local conditions, especially rural poverty linked to low productivity in farming.

When international prices are go up, the disposable income of some import-dependent urban dwellers is squeezed. But most of the actual hunger takes place in the villages and in the countryside, and it persists even when international prices are low.

When hunger is measured as a balanced index of calorie deficiency, prevalence of underweight children and mortality rates for children under five, we find that South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in 2007 had hunger levels two times as high as in the developing countries of East Asia, four times as high as in Latin America, North Africa or the Middle East, and five times as high as in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The poor in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are hungry even though their connections to high-priced international food markets are quite weak.

In the poorest developing countries of Asia, where nearly 400 million people are hungry, international grain prices are hardly a factor, since imports supply only 4 percent of total consumption—even when world prices are low.

Similarly in sub-Saharan Africa, only about 16 percent of grain supplies have recently been imported, going mostly into the more prosperous cities rather than the impoverished countryside, with part arriving in the form of donated food aid rather than commercial purchases at world prices. The region in Africa that depends on world markets most heavily is North Africa, where 50 percent of grain supplies are imported. Yet food consumption in North Africa is so high (average per capita energy consumption there is about 3,000 calories per day, comparable to most rich countries) that increased import prices may cause economic stress for urban consumers (and perhaps even street demonstrations) but little real hunger.

Import dependence is also high in Latin America (50 percent for some countries) but again high world prices will not mean large numbers of hungry people, because per capita GDP in this region is five times higher than in sub-Saharan Africa. There is a severe food crisis among the poor in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but it does not come from high world prices. Even in 2005 in sub-Saharan Africa, a year of low international crop prices, 23 out of 37 countries in the region consumed less than their nutritional requirements.

Africa's food crisis grows primarily out of the low productivity, year in and year out, of the 60 percent of all Africans who plant crops and graze animals for a living. The average African smallholder farmer is a woman who has no improved seeds, no nitrogen fertilizers, no irrigation and no veterinary medicine for her animals. Her crop yields are only one third as high as in the developing countries of Asia, and her average income is only $1 a day.

One third of these poor African farmers are malnourished. In part because of the added burden of climate change, the number of undernourished people in Africa is now expected to triple by 2080, whatever the level of prices on the world market.

The long-term solution to such problems is not lower international prices or more food aid, but larger investments in the productivity of farmers in Africa.

African governments essentially stopped making these investments 25 years ago, when the international donor community pulled back from supporting agricultural modernization in the developing world.

Over the past two decades the U.S. Agency for International Development has cut its support for agricultural science in Africa by 75 percent.

World Bank lending for agriculture has dropped from 30 percent of bank lending in 1978 to just 8 percent. In 2005, the World Bank president at the time, Paul Wolfowitz, told a business forum: "My institution has largely gotten out of the business of agriculture."

This may be changing, and if high world food prices help speed the change, so much the better.

In a recent interview, the new World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, said he planned to raise agricultural lending to Africa next year from $450 million to $800 million. Since 2006, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also begun to focus more of its grant-making on the needs of poor smallholder farmers in Africa through an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) chaired by Kofi Annan.

These are encouraging initiatives, because the productivity of farms in Africa—not food prices on the world market—should be the long-term focus.

Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley College, is the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa.

The March 31, 2008 decision of Turkey’s Constitutional Court to hear a case that could bring down the governing Justice and Development Party (also known in Turkey as AKP) has provoked a constitutional crisis. The Court must decide if their allegedly anti-secular activities warrant shutting down the AKP and/or banning Prime Minister Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul and sixty-nine members of the party from politics for five years.

The Court has banned other parties and politicians from politics in the past, including the previous two Islamist parties. This case, however, represents an increased threat to the democratic process and a thwarting of the popular will. The moderate Islamist AKP received 47 percent of the popular vote in the elections of July 2007, giving it a parliamentary majority and entitling it to run the government.

Shutting down the party and banning its leaders from politics could set off political and economic turmoil in Turkey. Anticipated reactions range from potentially violent popular protests that could invite intervention by the Turkish military to a set back for Turkey’s economic recovery and further cause for the Europeans to block Turkey’s accession to the European Union.

The Court is also considering a ban on the Kurdish political party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP). If both the DTP and AKP (which garnered a large number of Kurdish votes) are kept out of politics, this could increase support amongst Turkey’s Kurds for the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Turkey desperately needs to address the Kurdish issue in its southeast and the PKK terrorism emanating from northern Iraq. This constitutional crisis diverts the governmental efforts needed to address those issues.

Political chaos in Turkey could also upset U.S. foreign policy objectives in Iraq and the greater Middle East. The administration has only recently begun to repair the relations with the republic that were ruptured over the Iraq war. Washington has shared intelligence over PKK havens in northern Iraq and permitted limited military intervention to root them out. The United States needs a stable Turkey that can cooperate with respect to the war in Iraq, Iranian nuclear proliferation and other issues affecting Gulf security.

This crisis has its roots in the very foundation of the Turkish Republic. Its founding father, Kemal Ataturk, promoted the principle of secularization in order to further the goal of modernizing the new Turkish state. The Turkish military considers itself the guardian of this Kemalist concept of a secular state. It has not hesitated to take action against what it views as the increasing Islamization of Turkish politics under the majority rule of the AKP.

The AKP first achieved majority rule in 2002. Even though it won only 34 percent of the popular vote, AKP gained a parliamentary majority because of the peculiarities of the Turkish electoral system. Among those who voted for the Justice and Development Party were people who were not necessarily Islamist but were seeking an alternative to the allegedly more corrupt, ineffective and splintered secular political parties.

The AKP subsequently sought to consolidate its position of power by electing then Foreign Minister Gul as President of Turkey. The Turkish military opposed this move and attempted an “electronic coup” by issuing an online statement warning against Gul’s election. This backfired. In a showdown with the military, Prime Minister Erdogan won the elections in July 2007 and secured Gul’s election as President of the Republic.

What spurred the public prosecutor to bring the case to the court was his belief that the AKP was using its parliamentary majority to aggressively promote an Islamist agenda. The AKP-led parliament has passed legislation allowing women to wear headscarves in universities. It has also unsuccessfully attempted to allow students who attend secondary religious schools (Imam Hatip schools) to more easily enter the general university system. Other actions by AKP-dominated municipalities include the banning of alcohol and the separation of men and women in parks and at festivities. The prosecutor is concerned that the AKP will be able to amend the constitution to allow the accelerated Islamization of Turkish politics.

Ironically, by bringing the case, the prosecutor put the Constitutional Court in an untenable position. The Court has the power to impose the harsh remedy of shutting the AKP and its politicians out of the political process. It could also impose a lesser remedy of limiting state funding for the party. If it orders the ban, the Court will be viewed as interfering with the will of the people and the deepening of Turkish democracy. If it orders a lesser remedy, it will be viewed as approving the AKP’s actions. Whatever the Court’s ruling, AKP politicians may gain even greater popular support as happened when the military challenged it in 2007.

The immediate solution to this lose-lose situation is for the Court to fashion a compromise remedy that will restrain what the prosecutor believes is the AKP’s aggressive pursuit of an Islamization agenda, while at the same time permitting it to participate in the Turkish political arena.

The real answer to Turkey’s crisis is to be found in its political system. A compromise judicial outcome would enable a longer-term win-win solution. The constitutional crisis should sound a wake-up call to the opposition political parties in Turkey; they need to reform themselves and Turkey’s political system. Party leaders are autocrats who make all financial decisions and choose the candidates who run for office. The main opposition party, the Republican Peoples Party, in particular, needs to reform its leadership if it seeks to regain its credibility in the Turkish polity. Turkey’s opposition parties need to overcome their divisive politics and structure a coalition that has both the platform and the grassroots organization that can challenge what many see as the Islamization of Turkish politics, by democratic contest in the political arena and not by judicial or military intervention.

Data suggest buyers willing to pay more to humane producers.

A majority of consumers want to do the right thing. That is, in numerous studies, consumers say that they are willing to pay more for products produced under good working conditions, rather than those that come from sweatshops.

But what consumers say and what they actually do when they pull out their wallets at the cash register is not as clear.

Michael J. Hiscox, professor of government, has been developing models to test actual consumer behavior when shoppers are confronted with a choice to buy a higher-priced item certified as produced under good conditions and cheaper items that are not so designated.

Preliminary results suggest that, indeed, consumers are willing to pay a premium if they believe that a product is made under good working conditions, Hiscox said during a Feb. 28 seminar sponsored by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

More research is needed, but “if this holds up, it’s pretty compelling evidence,” Hiscox told his audience during his talk on “Consumer Demand for Labor Standards: Experiments with Ethical Labeling of Imported Products.”

Hiscox, author of the Riker Prize-winning book “International Trade and Political Conflict” (2002), draws his conclusions from innovative study methods he and graduate students have devised over the past three years.

One such study was conducted in a major home goods retail store in New York City in 2005 with two products: candles and towels. Hiscox created special labels that indicated that an item was “made under fair labor conditions, in a safe and healthy working environment which is free of discrimination, and where management has committed to respecting the rights and dignity of workers.” These labels were posted on one set of candles and one set of towels—when, in reality, all the candles and towels in the displays were produced under good conditions. The labeled towels and candles were priced higher than unlabeled items, and the prices changed over time. Hiscox’s crew also switched labels at key points to the previously unlabeled products.

The result: “Sales rose for items labeled as being made under good labor standards, and demand for the labeled product actually rose with the price increases of 10 to 20 percent above pretest (unlabeled) levels,” according to Hiscox’s paper on his work.

Moreover, a higher price on a labeled towel seemed to actually stimulate demand. The higher price might be telling shoppers it’s a better product,” Hiscox said. They think, “Aha! The label is credible because I have to pay more for the goods.”

Still, the study was done in a high-end shop in a company with a known commitment to fair practice. The items may have had “snob appeal” to wealthy consumers already predisposed to buy ethical items. What about consumers really looking for a bargain?

So Hiscox turned to one of the biggest bargain-hunting markets in the world: eBay.

Hiscox’s team devised auctions around two items, gourmet coffee and polo shirts. All were produced under good conditions and all were extremely similar in presentation. (“It’s very good coffee,” Hiscox added.) But one set of coffee beans was labeled as “fair trade” and the other as “premium.” One set of shirts was described as “ethically made” while the other had no designation.

And again, “eBay shoppers were willing to pay a substantial premium for goods certified by label” as produced under fair standards,” Hiscox said. The results were, however, more dramatic for coffee than for the shirts.

Perhaps, suggested moderator F.M. Scherer, professor of public policy and corporate management emeritus, eBay shoppers are more “world-oriented,” a possibility that Hiscox conceded.

What, asked Jack Waxman, a master’s student in public policy, would happen to fair-trade markets in an economic downturn? “Yes, that’s a fear,” Hiscox said.

Jennifer Kurz, also a master’s student in public policy, wondered if products produced under good conditions would really—in the long run—cost more. “Maybe certification doesn’t increase prices,” she said.

It’s a possibility, Hiscox said. Perhaps healthy workers operating under safe conditions are actually more efficient, thus increasing productivity and lowering prices, he said. “It’s a really inherently open question.”

Hiscox cautioned against basing any business decisions on these initial results. More studies are needed, he said.

“At the moment there’s a prior question: Is there even a market for this that would support the expansion of these [socially accountable] systems? We don’t know that,” he said. “Before you start championing, “‘This is the answer,’ you have to know whether or not it’s feasible.”

HAIM RAMON, a vice prime minister of Israel, recently stated that Israel hoped to reach agreement with its Palestinian negotiating partners by the end of 2008 on a "declaration of principles" for peace, but not on a detailed peace treaty. At this time of escalating violence and diminishing hope, the call for such a declaration offers an opportunity for revitalizing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

To represent a dramatic breakthrough, a declaration would have to go beyond a vague, general commitment to a two-state solution, and lay out the fundamental principles on which such a solution must be based if it is to be perceived as fair and just by the two populations and offer them a positive vision of their future relationship. The statement must address the key final-status issues - notably borders, Jerusalem, settlements, and refugees - that a viable two-state agreement would have to resolve. In essence, the statement would frame the envisaged final agreement as a principled peace, based on a historic compromise that meets the fundamental needs of both peoples, validates their national identities, and declares an end to the conflict and to the occupation consistent with the requirements of fairness and attainable justice.

To concretize the components of a statement of basic principles for framing a negotiated agreement, I offer the following hypothetical draft of what such a statement, issued by the two leaderships, might contain, in the hope that it might stimulate thought.

Israeli-Palestinian joint statement of principles

The parties agree that the land that has been in dispute between the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples - the land that includes the State of Israel and the occupied territories (the West Bank and Gaza) - belongs to both peoples: both have historic roots in it, both are deeply attached to it, and both claim it as their national homeland. We are convinced that there is no military solution to the conflict resulting from these competing claims.

The attempt to impose a solution by violence has caused pain and suffering to both peoples for generations, which we deeply regret. The conflict threatens to destroy the future of both peoples and of the land itself. We are therefore committed to ending the conflict by negotiating a principled peace, based on a historic compromise in the form of a two-state solution. We agree to share the land in a way that allows each people to exercise its right to national self-determination, express its national identity, and fulfill its national aspirations in its own independent, viable state within the shared land.

The details of a peace agreement that concretizes this historic compromise have to be negotiated, but we are committed to certain basic principles, dictated by the logic of the historic compromise, that must be followed in resolving the key issues in the negotiations. Specifically:

The borders between the two states will follow the 1967 armistice lines, with minor, mutually agreed-upon adjustments, based on an exchange of West Bank territories that contain most of the Israeli settlements for Israeli territories of equal size and value, and with a secure link between the West Bank and Gaza. These borders are necessary in order to enable the Palestinian state to meet the criteria of true independence, viability, governability, and contiguity within the West Bank. Palestinians can accept the fairness of these borders because they conform with international legitimacy, as expressed in appropriate United Nations resolutions.

Jerusalem will be shared by the two states and contain the national capital of each state, in recognition of the central importance of the city to the national identities of both peoples. Jerusalem's Jewish neighborhoods will be under Israeli sovereignty and its Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty, with jointly administrated arrangements for security, freedom of movement, and municipal services for the entire city and for governance of the Old City. A plan of shared or joint sovereignty will be negotiated for the holy sites, allowing each side control over its own sites and assuring free access to them from both parts of the city.

Israeli settlements with extraterritorial rights and status (including separate roads and protection by Israeli troops) will be removed from the Palestinian state in order to ensure the state's independence, viability, governability, and contiguity. The right of individual settlers to stay in place as Palestinian citizens or as resident aliens, subject to Palestinian law, will be negotiated.

In negotiating solutions to the problem of Palestinian refugees, Israel recognizes that the refugee problem and the right of return are central to the Palestinian national identity and national narrative, and acknowledges its share of responsibility for the plight of the refugees. Concretely, the refugee problem will be addressed in all its dimensions, with comprehensive plans for financial compensation, regularization of the status of refugees in host countries, and resettlement when needed or desired. Refugees will be granted citizenship in and the right of return to the Palestinian state. Only a limited number, however, will return to Israel proper, in order to allow Israel to maintain its character as a Jewish-majority state.

The final negotiated agreement, based on a historic compromise as reflected in the above principles, is designed to yield a principled peace, characterized by the following conditions:

Mutual recognition of the national identity of the other people and of each people's right to express this identity in an independent state within the shared land.

A sense that the agreement is not merely a product of the balance of power, but is consistent with the principle of attainable justice and with international law and the international consensus.

Integration of both states in the region and the international community.

As we commit ourselves to negotiating a final agreement based on the concept of a historic compromise and meeting the conditions of a principled peace, we are enabled to develop and to communicate to our publics a positive vision of a common future for the two peoples in the land they are agreeing to share. Our vision contemplates:

A secure and prosperous existence for each society.

Mutually beneficial cooperation between the two states and societies in various fields, including economic relations, public health, environmental protection, telecommunications, cultural and educational programs, and tourism.

Regional development.

Stable peace with ultimate reconciliation.

Our positive vision extends not only to the future of the two peoples in their independent states within the land they are agreeing to share, but to the future of the shared land itself: a land to which both peoples are attached, even though each agrees to claim only part of it for its independent state.

In this spirit, our vision of a common future includes freedom of movement across state borders, as well as a range of cooperative activities that treat the shared land as a unit and are designed to benefit it in its entirety.

A joint statement of principles along the lines proposed above would reassure the two publics about the intentions of the other side and help to reestablish trust in the availability of a negotiating partner. By advocating a principled peace that acknowledges each side's national identity and national narrative, that conforms to the dictates of attainable justice, that provides a rationale for the concessions each side is expected to make, and that offers a positive vision of the future, it has the potential for energizing the two publics and eliciting their full support for the negotiated agreement on a two-state solution.

Given the apparent readiness of the two leaderships to formulate a declaration of principles, the challenge now is to utilize this moment as an opportunity to create a visionary document that will reassure and energize the two publics and elicit their enthusiastic support for negotiating a historic compromise.

Civil society efforts, in the form of unofficial Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, can be instrumental in generating ideas for such a document and conveying them to the political leadership. The US government and other third parties can contribute significantly by encouraging the parties to formulate a statement of basic principles and identifying the issues that it must address, keeping in mind that, in the end, the document must be crafted by the parties themselves in order to reflect their concerns and engender their commitment.

Finally, to be maximally effective, movement toward and beyond the proposed joint statement of basic principles must be accompanied by significant changes in the conditions on the ground, designed to improve the security, economic well-being, quality of life, and personal dignity of the two populations.

Herbert C. Kelman is a professor social ethics emeritus and cochairman of the Middle East Seminar at Harvard.
Paarlberg, Robert L. 2008. “Africa's organic farms”. Publisher's Version Abstract

Approach any serious-looking college student in the Boston area, where I teach, and ask them what kind of food and farming system they would like to see. Most will say they don't want food from factory farms with a large carbon footprint. They want foods locally grown on small family farms. They don't want crops grown using synthetic chemical fertilizers or pesticides; they want crops grown "organically." They want farm animals to be able to range freely. They want "slow" food rather than fast food. And they don't want "Frankenfoods"—crops developed through genetic engineering.

What might such an idealized food system actually look like? Take a trip to Africa. The small farmers who populate the continent's impoverished countryside are living out something close to this post-materialist fantasy. Two-thirds of all Africans depend on farming or animal grazing for their food and income, and nearly all of their operations are small-scale.

Eighty percent of the labor on these farms is done by women and children, in part because it provides so little income for working-age men. There is no power machinery (only two tractors for every thousand agricultural workers) and only 4 percent of crops are irrigated. More than two thirds of all cropland is still planted with traditional crop varieties rather than with scientifically improved varieties. The animals—mostly cattle and goats—for age for their own food.

Agribusiness firms are nowhere to be seen, and chemical fertilizer applications per hectare are less than one-tenth the industrial world average. Insecticides and herbicides are not affordable, so crops suffer pest damage, and the weeding is done by children who would be better off in school. Nobody grows genetically engineered crops because governments in Africa—following Europe's lead—have not approved such crops for use.

Nearly all of Africa's farms are thus de facto "organic." Poor and non-productive, but organic.

Africa's traditional rural food systems are definitely "slow." To serve maize meal (called nsima) to her family, an African woman must first spend a season planting, weeding, harvesting and storing her corn, then she must strip it, winnow it, soak it, lay it out to dry, carry it to a grinder or pound it by hand, dry it again, and finally—after walking to gather enough fuel wood—cook it over a fire.

Cereal crop yields in Africa are only one-third as high as in developing Asia, and only one-tenth as high as the United States. Average income from this kind of farming amounts to only a dollar a day, which is why nearly 80 percent of all those officially classified as poor in Africa are farmers, and why one third of all farmers are chronically malnourished.

Without modern agricultural science, food production in Africa has fallen ominously behind population growth. Total agricultural production per capita today has fallen 19 percent below the level of 1970. Increasingly, Africans must depend on imported food aid.

Africa's urgent need for agricultural modernization is being rudely ignored. When elite urbanites in rich countries began turning away from science-based farming in the 1980s, external assistance for agriculture in poor countries was cut sharply. As late as 1980 the U.S. Agency for International Development was still devoting 25 percent of its official development assistance to the modernization of farming, but today it is just 1 percent. Nearly 30 percent of World Bank lending once went to agricultural modernization, but now it is just 8 percent.

In Europe, meanwhile, some official donors and nongovernmental agencies are working to block farm modernization in Africa. Despite Africa's worsening soil nutrient deficits, European donors like to promote costly organic farming techniques as the alternative to chemical fertilizer use. This is not how European farmers escaped poverty. Only 4 percent of cropland in Europe is currently being farmed organically (and less than 1 percent in America), but European NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace tell Africa's poor this is the path they should follow.

European governments and NGOs also promote regulatory systems that block the use of genetically engineered crops, including crops capable of resisting insects without pesticide sprays. Europe's own science academies have found no new risks to human health or the environment from any of the genetically engineered crops placed on the market so far, but since overfed Europe can do without this technology, underfed Africa is told to do the same.

In this fashion, and perhaps without realizing it, wealthy countries are imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people. The rich are, in effect, telling Africa's farmers they should just as well remain poor.

Robert Paarlberg is a professor of political science at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the author of "Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa" (Harvard University Press, March 2008).

In the mushrooming procedural debate about Democratic superdelegates and the uncontested Florida and Michigan primaries, more is at stake than the identity of the presidential nominee or even the Democrats' chances of victory in November. Primaries and caucuses coast to coast in the last two months have evinced the sharpest increase in civic engagement among American youth in at least a half-century, portending a remarkable revitalization of American democracy. But that rebirth of American civic life would be aborted if the decision rendered by millions of ordinary Americans could be overturned by a backroom deal among political insiders. The issue is not public jurisprudence or obscure party regulations or the alleged "wisdom" of party elders, but simple playground notions of fairness.

Throughout the last four decades of the 20th century, young people's engagement in American civic life declined year after year with depressing regularity. In fall 1966, well before the full flowering of Vietnam War protests, a UCLA poll of college freshmen nationwide found that "keeping up with politics" was a "very important" goal in their lives for fully 60 percent.

Thirty-four years later that figure had plummeted to 28 percent. In 1972, when the vote was first extended to 18-year-olds, turnout in the presidential election among 18- to 24-year-olds was a disappointing 52 percent. But even beginning at that modest level, rates of voting in presidential elections by young people steadily fell throughout the '70s, '80s, and '90s, reaching barely 36 percent in 2000. National commissions bemoaned the seemingly inexorable increase in youthful apathy and incivism. The National Commission on Civic Renewal said, "When we assess our country's civic and moral condition, we are deeply troubled... We are in danger of becoming a nation of spectators."

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a national tragedy, but also a vivid reminder that we are all in this together. Civic seismometers across the land showed a sharp spike in virtually every measure of community-mindedness. It was, I wrote at the time, not only a tragedy, but also the sort of opportunity for civic revival that comes along once or twice a century. Just as Pearl Harbor had spawned the civic-minded "Greatest Generation," so too Sept. 11 might turn out to produce a more civically engaged generation of young people.

For most Americans the half-life of the civic boomlet after the attacks was barely six months. Within a year measures of civic engagement had returned to the previous levels, from which they have barely budged since. Except among young people.

Among the cohort of Americans caught by 9/11 in their formative years, the effects of the attacks on their civic consciousness were more enduring. The annual UCLA chart of interest in politics jumped upward in 2001 for the first time in decades and has kept rising every year since.

Last month the UCLA researchers reported that "For today's freshmen, discussing politics is more prevalent now than at any point in the past 41 years." This and other evidence led us and other observers to speak hopefully of a 9/11 generation, perhaps even a "new Greatest Generation." In the 2004 and 2006 elections, turnout among young people began at last to climb after decades of decline, reaching the highest point in 20 years in 2006. As we approached the presidential season of 2008, young Americans were, in effect, coiled for civic action, not because of their stage of life, but because of the lingering effects of the unifying national crisis they had experienced in their formative years.

The exceptionally lively presidential nominating contests of this year—and, it must be said, the extraordinary candidacy of Barack Obama—have sparked into white hot flame a pile of youthful kindling that had been stacked and ready to flare for more than six years. The 18-year-olds first eligible to vote in 2008 were in sixth grade when the twin towers fell, and their older sisters and brothers who were college seniors in September 2001 are now 28 or 29. It is precisely this group, above all others in America, that has pushed participation rates in this spring's caucuses and primaries to record levels. Turnout in this spring's electoral contests so far has generally been higher than in previous presidential nominating contests, but for twenty-somethings the rise has been truly phenomenal—turnout often three or four times greater than ever before measured.

The 2008 elections are thus the coming-out party of this new Greatest Generation. Their grandparents of the original Greatest Generation were the civic pillars of American democracy for more than a half-century, and at long last, just as that generation is leaving the scene, reinforcements are arriving. Americans of every political persuasion should rejoice at this epochal swing of the generational pendulum, for it portends precisely the sort of civic renaissance for which Jeremiahs have been calling for many years.

This, then, is what is at stake in the otherwise inside-baseball controversies about superdelegates and pledged delegates and the uncontested Florida and Michigan primaries—controversies now roiling Democratic party leaders. If the results of the caucuses and primaries are, despite record-breaking rates of popular participation, overturned by unelected (though officially legitimate) superdelegates or by delegates from states that all candidates had previously agreed not to contest, the lesson for the young civic stalwarts would be unmistakable—democratic politics is a sham. Politics is actually controlled by party bosses behind the scenes. Civic engagement is for suckers.

From Little League to student council races, we all learn to accept defeats we have lost fair and square. But losing in a contest in which the rules can be rigged teaches that the game is not worth the candle. Who can honestly doubt that if the Democratic presidential candidate preferred by a majority of the delegates elected in this spring's competitive contests (and by the overwhelming majority of young voters) were to be rejected solely by the power of unelected delegates (or those "elected" without any serious competition), the unmistakable civics lesson would be catastrophic for this incipient cadre of super citizens?

So as the superdelegates, the two campaigns, and Democratic Party leaders contemplate how to resolve the procedural issues before them - what to do about Michigan and Florida, and how superdelegates should vote—let's hope that they weigh the consequences not merely for their own candidates this year, and not merely for the Democratic prospects in the fall, but for the future vitality of American democracy.

Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and Better Together: Restoring the American Community.

Presdent Pervez Musharraf's stunning defeat in Monday's elections in Pakistan represents a decisive rejection of what his opponents called his policies of "subservience" to the United States. An American press that has been virtually unanimous in opposing Musharraf will now predictably call for his resignation in favor of "genuine democracy." Since this outcome is a possibility, it is essential to ask where a government that accurately reflects the views of Pakistani citizens would stand on issues that matter most to America.

Would such a government follow Musharraf's lead as a grudging shot-gun ally? Recall that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as Musharraf tells the story, the United States gave him the choice of becoming an ally or being "bombed back to the Stone Age."

How vigorously would a new democratic government support the US-led war on terrorism in which Pakistan's army is now fighting Al Qaeda and its affiliates headquartered in Pakistan's ungoverned Northwest Territories? Would such a government be more likely to cooperate with the United States and NATO in the ongoing but faltering war against the Taliban in Afghanistan? Recall again that the rise of the Taliban took place during the term of Musharraf's civilian predecessors, including Nawaz Sharif, the leader of one of the parties that won in Monday's election.

The answer to each of these questions is as unambiguous as it is uncomfortable. A Pakistani government whose actions align with its citizens' views on these issues would be at loggerheads with the United States. Over the past year, polls have highlighted the sharp decline in Musharraf's popularity, with his approval ratings dropping to 15 percent in December. Several recent polls, including ones from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, the International Republican Institute, and Terror Free Tomorrow echo those sentiments, with one showing that 70 percent of Pakistanis "want Musharraf to immediately resign."

But what most American commentators have missed is that however much Pakistanis dislike Musharraf, they are more hostile toward the United States. When asked to name the "single greatest threat" to their country, 64 percent of Pakistanis named the United States. Historic archrival India, with whom Pakistan has fought five bloody wars, was second, well behind America.

Eighty-nine percent of Pakistanis said they disapprove of the US war on terrorism. Eight in 10 Pakistanis oppose allowing the United States to pursue Al Qaeda terrorists in their country. A similar percentage rejects US pursuit of Taliban forces into Pakistan. In opposing Musharraf, opposition parties called him "Busharraf" and accused him of being a "lackey" of the United States in the "so-called war on terrorism," which they say is a US-led war on Islam.

The US military presence in Afghanistan, where earlier Pakistani governments were the primary sponsors of the Taliban, is opposed by 83 percent of Pakistanis. Critics of Musharraf's limited cooperation with the US-NATO campaign should recognize that a government that more closely followed the wishes of its people would be less cooperative in combating the Taliban.

The United States has two vital national interests in Pakistan: first, to prevent any of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and bomb-making materials from being stolen, sold or transferred to terrorists; second, to destroy Al Qaeda's leadership, sanctuary, and training camps. Neither interest will be advanced by a transition from the devil we know to the new democratic Pakistani government.

Fortunately, Pakistan's nuclear weapons are secured by its army, the country's most effective national institution. Unless the army were destabilized or became substantially disaffected because of extended political instability, it will fulfill its custodial responsibilities. In contrast, a government that truly reflects the current views of the Pakistani people is more likely to be an unspoken opponent than an ambiguous ally in the US war against Al Qaeda and other terrorists in the region.Hard as it is to believe, Osama bin Laden is four times as popular among Pakistanis as President Bush, whose approval rating is 7.7 percent.

That leading US opinion pages generally critical of Bush's democracy crusade in Iraq should now so uncritically promote democratic shock-therapy as a panacea for Pakistan's problems is puzzling. The inconvenient, painful truth is that a truly democratic Pakistan would be, at least in the foreseeable future, less inclined to act in ways that advance urgent American interests.

Advocates of instant democracy should be careful what they wish for.

Graham Allison
Faculty Associate; Douglas Dillon Professor of Government and Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

The recent presidential election in Kenya has declined into a bloodbath with the deaths of more than 300 people, jeopardizing the nation and the stability and democracy in East Africa as a whole. Both the government and the opposition must authorize and support an independently directed recount of votes and begin a process of national reconciliation.

The election, the most competitive in the country's history, began peacefully on Dec. 27. The Commonwealth Observer Group commended the Election Commission of Kenya for its professionalism. Early returns on Dec. 29 gave opposition leader Raila Odinga a lead of nearly a million votes. Vote counting was stopped by the election commission that day with 189 of 210 constituencies reporting. On Dec. 30, the election commission announced that in a mysterious overnight switch incumbent Mwai Kibaki had won by 231,728 votes.

European Union observers have condemned the delay in releasing the final presidential result. In addition they have noted that there were irregularities in ballot numbers, and that the presidential election results are not credible. Further, at least four election commissioners have since come forth and asked for a full investigation into vote tampering. There is credible evidence that the elections were rigged.

The current electoral violence in Kenya has historical roots. Kibaki was elected on a multiparty, multiethnic democratic ticket in 2002 promising to “sweep away” corruption and one-party rule. He presided over a renewal of the once moribund economy: Kenya grew 6.1 percent in 2006. Under Kibaki, the press became freer, and civil society flourished. Bill Clinton praised Kibaki for introducing free primary education throughout the country.

Yet, Kibaki reneged early in his administration on a memorandum of understanding with the Liberal Democratic Party regarding governmental power sharing. Although the Kenyan economy grew at a rapid pace, so did economic inequality, resulting in a concentration of wealth in a small oligarchical elite, while most Kenyans earn less than $1 a day.

Senior members of Kibaki's government resigned under a cloud of corruption and his anticorruption czar went into exile in fear for his life. In a sharp turnaround from his 2002 entry as a democratic reformer, Kibaki has behaved like an autocrat in the days after the election, muzzling live broadcasts by the private media, banning opposition protests, and allowing the police to fire live ammunition upon unarmed civilians.

For the sake of the nation and the region, Kenya must move forward to a peaceful democratic transition. Kibaki should immediately unmuzzle the press, and allow the opposition to assemble peacefully in public. Church leaders, civil society, and international observers must urge the police to stop firing on innocent civilians. As urged by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, an independent recount of contested ballots is required. The African Union, the United Nations, and the Commonwealth Group should rapidly assist in convening an independent body of Kenyans from all backgrounds to conduct the recount.

African figures with unassailable democratic credentials, such as Desmond Tutu of South Africa and John Kufuor of Ghana should work with all Kenyan political parties to form an interim unity government that can rule in a transition period. Crucially, Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka, and other Kenyan leaders must help lower temperatures by tempering inflammatory rhetoric, participating in good faith in negotiations, and urging those who claim to be supporters of Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement to halt politically motivated violence. Finally, credible new elections for the position of president must be scheduled in the next six months.

The violence we are seeing in Kenya is not ethnic or tribal; it is political and has deep roots in social and economic inequities that have deepened continuously since independence. For hundreds of years, 42 ethnic and linguistic groups have lived peacefully together in Kenya, with high rates of intermarriage, trade, and in-migration. This violence obscures deep social inequities in economic distribution that cross ethnic lines among all groups.

For 40 years, Kenya has been as a haven for refugees and a broker for peace settlements, avoiding the type of wrenching violence that has torn neighbors Sudan, Rwanda, and Somalia apart while earning a reputation as the most democratic nation in the region. Without immediate efforts toward national reconciliation, and a recount of disputed ballots, Kenya risks descent into autocracy and civil war.

Warigia Bowman is graduate student associate at the Weatherhead Center and a doctoral candidate at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

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