The Putz has decided that he’s competent enough to be “Grading Obama’s Foreign Policy.” He sniffs that the president’s record only looks good if the Iraq war is your standard. Let’s let “gemli” from Boston take it away in the comments: “It takes more than a bit of gall for a conservative to criticize the current president’s foreign policy. I suspect that inheriting two unfunded, misguided, ineptly prosecuted and morally sapping wars might have put the Obama administration in a pretty deep hole right from the start, and one could argue that the effects of the Bush/Cheney fiasco reverberate to this day. Bush turned over a smoking hole where the economy used to be, and then went back to Texas to paint pictures.” In “Condi’s Lesson” MoDo ponders what Rice could have taught the Rutgers students. The Moustache of Wisdom gives us “The Square People, Part 2″ and has a question: From the town square to the virtual square the globe over, what happens after the protest march? Nothing, Tommy, nothing. The MOTU keep on keeping on. Mr. Kristof remembers the “Tears of a Rickshaw Driver” and says the haunting lesson from the bravest people at the student massacre in China 25 years ago still resonates. Mr. Bruni considers “Class, Cost and College” and says a new movie’s troubling questions include whether the best schools encourage social mobility or perpetuate privilege. Here’s the Putz:
Second terms are often a time when presidents, balked by domestic opposition, turn to the world stage to secure their legacy — opening doors to China, closing out the Cold War, chasing Middle Eastern peace.
But the global stage hasn’t been a second-term refuge for President Obama; it’s been an arena of setbacks, crises and defeats. His foreign policy looked modestly successful when he was running for re-election. Now it stinks of failure.
Failure is a relative term, to be sure. His predecessor’s invasion of Iraq still looms as the largest American blunder of the post-Vietnam era. None of Obama’s difficulties have rivaled that debacle. And many of the sweeping conservative critiques of his foreign policy — that Obama has weakened America’s position in the world, that he’s too chary about using military force — lack perspective on how much damage the Iraq war did to American interests, and how many current problems can be traced back to errors made in 2003.
But the absence of an Iraq-scale fiasco is not identical to success, and history shouldn’t grade this president on a curve set by Donald Rumsfeld. Obama is responsible for the initiatives he’s pursued, the strategies he’s blessed and the priorities he’s set. And almost nothing on that list is working out.
Start with Libya, the site of Obama’s own war of choice. The consuming Republican focus on Benghazi has tended to obscure the fact that post-Qaddafi Libya is generally a disaster area — its government nonfunctional, its territory a safe harbor for jihadists, its former ruler’s weaponry and fighters destabilizing sub-Saharan Africa. (Some of those weapons, for instance, appear to be in the hands of Nigeria’s most-wanted kidnappers, Boko Haram.)
Then swing northeast to Syria, where this administration’s stated policy is that Bashar al-Assad has to go, and that there is a “red line” — backed by force, if necessary — around the use of chemical weapons. Well, Assad isn’t going; he’s winning. And the White House’s claims of progress on the chemical weapons front were undermined by Secretary of State John Kerry’s acknowledgment last week that “raw data” suggested a “number of instances” in which Assad’s government recently used chlorine gas.
The picture doesn’t look better when you turn south or east. In the Holy Land, Kerry’s recent push for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations ended in predictable failure, and in Iraq the caldron is boiling and Iranian influence is growing — in part, The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins suggested last month, because the White House’s indecision undercut negotiations that might have left a small but stabilizing U.S. force in place.
Similar status-of-forces negotiations are ongoing in Afghanistan, and the backdrop is even grimmer: The surge of forces ordered by Obama (also amid much indecision) failed to replicate the success of Gen. David Petraeus’s salvage operation in Iraq, and even with an American presence the Taliban are barely being held at bay.
As for the White House’s major diplomatic projects, one — the “reset” with Russia — has ended in the shambles of the Ukraine crisis. A second, the opening to Iran, is still being pursued, with deadlines looming, and it’s the administration’s best remaining hope for a paradigm-altering achievement. But that hope is still a thin one (complicated, for instance, by Iran’s continuing pursuit of ballistic missiles), and it’s just as likely that Obama will have unsettled America’s existing alliances in the region to very little gain.
As for the promised “pivot to Asia,” let me know when it actually happens, and maybe I’ll have something to say about it.
The point of this litany is not to suggest that all of Obama’s decisions have been misguided (I sympathized with the decision to slip free of Iraq entirely, and I’m glad we don’t have 50,000 troops occupying Syria), or that there’s some strategic reboot that would clear all these problems up. In a world that’s necessarily beyond an American president’s control, even the wisest choices can lead to disappointing results.
But most presidents do win some clear victories. Not everyone gets to end the Cold War, but there’s usually some diplomatic initiative that leaves a positive legacy (even Jimmy Carter had the Camp David accords), some military or humanitarian intervention (even George W. Bush had his AIDS-in-Africa initiative) that looks like a success.
Yet except for the killing of Osama bin Laden — an “except” that has to be qualified by Islamist terrorism’s resurgence — if Obama’s presidency ended today I have no idea what major foreign policy achievements his defenders could reasonably cite.
There is still time for it to be otherwise — for the administration to brilliantly exploit Vladimir Putin’s possible overreach, or seal a lasting nuclear deal with Iran, or craft a strategy to soothe the nationalisms gathering on the Indian subcontinent and the Pacific Rim.
But recent events do not inspire much confidence. Instead, future defenses of Obama’s foreign policy may boil down to just six words: “At least he didn’t invade Iraq.”
What a waste of pixels and print he is… Here’s MoDo:
There has been much mockery of political correctness run amok on college campuses this spring, with knots of know-it-all students and teachers knifing their commencement speakers.
The Times’s Timothy Egan dubbed the protesters “commencement bigots,” and The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger christened the trend the “Bonfire of the Humanities” — a “ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics.”
The disinvitation list has been burgeoning. Brandeis canceled human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, saying she’d made remarks critical of Islam. After protests about imperialism, Condoleezza Rice pulled out of her speech at Rutgers and Christine Lagarde, chief of the International Monetary Fund, said au revoir to Smith College.
This past week, liberal Haverford College shooed away Robert J. Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, “the big bang of political correctness,” as Henninger dryly noted, because Berkeley police had used “force” against Occupy protesters.
For a militaristic imperialist, Rice caved awfully easily. She should have invaded Rutgers, occupied the podium and said her piece about her failures on peace. And the students shouldn’t have jumped the gun. After all, there was always a chance, a small one, admittedly, but a chance, that Condi Rice would have looked into her soul and told the story of what happens when you succumb to the temptation to sell it.
And that, dear graduates, family and friends, faculty and honored guests, would have been the most amazing and instructive commencement speech of all time.
Rice always seemed to me a particularly sad part of the tragedies of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lovely linchpin of the moral corrosion of W.’s presidency.
“What a falling off was there,” as the ghost of Hamlet’s father said of his compromised queen.
Condi had all the qualities required to dazzle. Smart, attractive, hard-working, personable, chic. She grew up in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s, when segregationists bombed so much that the city became known as “Bombingham.”
Yet she sailed to success at a young age. She could stand toe-to-heel on substance with world leaders. She could speak Russian competently and talk sports expertly and play the piano and ice skate beautifully. She could authoritatively survey the troops in Wiesbaden in black leather knee-high stiletto boots and fashionably dominate a Washington banquet in a long, scarlet Oscar de la Renta gown.
Women everywhere, including my mom, were blown away by her, believing that she could be the first woman and the first black person to be president.
So how could someone named by her mother after the Italian musical notation con dolcezza, meaning “with sweetness,” end up having such a sour effect on American history? Rice was a star, but unfortunately, she cast herself in yet another production of “Faust” on the Potomac, uttering one of the most over-the-top lines of war spin ever: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
She excelled at failing better. As national security adviser for W., she ignored the intelligence report warning that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike inside the U.S. And she only learned about Hamas’s shocking win in the Palestinian elections in 2006 when she was on her elliptical trainer watching the TV news crawl. After verifying it with State, she returned to exercising.
As Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in her trenchant biography of Rice, “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life”: “It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them. Her real ideology was succeeding.”
And so, in order to succeed, she rejected her old mentors, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell, and went along with the preposterous pre-emption plan of the old hawks who had far less respect for her: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
She knew that W. — eager to show he was not a wimp, the word Newsweek had once hung around his father’s neck — was leaning toward kicking some Arabs around. So she ignored the red flags raised publicly by Scowcroft and privately by Powell and made her Faustian deal to sell a fake war.
We’ll never know if she could have stopped W. from ruining his presidency and destroying so many lives when there was no national security stake.
We only know that when you sell your soul, it’s not like a pawnshop. Condi thought she could reclaim it after she was secretary of state and bring W. back to the light of diplomacy and common sense. But, as Russell Baker once noted, she was trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, spinning her wheels in the second term trying to undo the disasters of the first.
What a wonderful lesson she could have taught those graduates about the perils of succeeding at any cost, about how moral shortcuts never lead to the right place.
She should have said she was sorry about everything — except becoming one of the first two women permitted to join Augusta National.
That will happen when pigs fly and I’m the Czarina of all the Russias. Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
In a famous 1995 interview about her dysfunctional marriage and the infidelity of Prince Charles, Princess Diana noted that “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” I find myself thinking of that quote lately to describe the new politics and geopolitics that have been produced by “The Square People” — all those newly connected and aspiring middle classes who have gathered in the squares from Cairo to Kiev, Istanbul to Tehran, and Tunis to Moscow to demand a greater voice in their future and better governance. A lot of leaders are discovering that these Square People are like a spontaneous third party that has emerged between themselves and their tame traditional opposition and, as a result, their politics is getting a bit crowded — and a lot more interesting.
Indeed, “The Square” — as the place for these newly networked political forces to gather, collaborate and pressure for change — is truly disrupting both traditional politics and geopolitics. But the big thing to watch going forward is which Square People can go from disruption to construction — can take the energy and inchoate aspirations of their Square followers and turn them into parties, elections and better governance. Surely, the most interesting of these dramas today involves The Square People of Ukraine versus Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
Putin was minding his own corrupt business, living in a two-party relationship with his neighbor Ukraine, which was being led by the even more corrupt, pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych. Suddenly, spontaneously from below, an emergent, connected, aspiring middle class of Ukrainians — fed up both with regime corruption and how far they’d fallen behind their neighbors in the European Union — demanded that Yanukovych forge closer cooperation and trade ties with the European Union. They also demanded something now common to every square: the right to be treated as “citizens” with rights and responsibilities, not as the playthings of oligarchs or outside powers.
Yanukovych opted instead for a closer economic relationship with Russia, so The Square People in Kiev toppled him, challenging every aspect of Putin’s K.G.B.-shaped worldview. Putin does not believe any political protest can ever be spontaneous. If a large body of Ukrainians gathered in the square of Kiev to demand an end to corruption and closer ties with the E.U., it could only be because the C.I.A., NATO or the E.U. inspired or paid them to do so. Putin’s whole mind-set is top-down, and the notion that the combination of globalization and the I.T. revolution might have given the “people” both the ability to see things they could never see before — and the tools to collaborate and act on them from the bottom up — is totally alien to him.
Putin is looking backward, trying to restore Russia’s czarist empire, using its natural resources, while the Kiev Square People are looking forward, trying to associate with the E.U., so they can develop their human resources. They believe that integrating their economy with Europe would produce from beyond the judicial reform, transparency and regulations that they could not generate from below and that their leaders would never enact from above. For the Square People of Kiev, an E.U.-Ukraine association is a vital lever for domestic renewal, but for Putin it is a direct threat to his “sphere of influence.”
Ditto in Turkey. A spontaneous movement emerged to resist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s attempt to install a mall in the only green space near Istanbul’s central Taksim Square, but it quickly mushroomed into protests against his autocratic rule. Erdogan went berserk. He had created a two-party universe that included only himself and the official Turkish opposition parties and TV stations, which he had totally cowed, tamed and neutered. So Turkey’s Square People created a new opposition, and, through Twitter and YouTube, their own TV network.
But Erdogan has managed to outmaneuver his Square People with repeated election victories. How? A report from Turkey in Forbes.com Friday gives one answer. Most of Erdogan’s largely rural voting base is not on YouTube or Twitter. They “are tech-illiterate; they get their news from television,” which he controls. “Television news channels show only the damage and virulence of protest, a selection of images that ultimately give the impression of anarchy loosed upon the country by rabid troublemakers.” Putin has used the same propaganda in Moscow and Ukraine.
This failure to translate their aspirations into parties that could contest elections and then govern is the Achilles’ heel of The Square People — from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street.
Or as Moises Naim, the author of a very smart book on this subject, “The End of Power,” recently observed in The Atlantic: Today “an appeal to protest via Twitter, Facebook, or text message is sure to attract a crowd, especially if it is to demonstrate against something — anything, really — that outrages us. The problem is what happens after the march. … Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters’ demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government. This is the important point made by Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, who writes that ‘Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.’”
Daniel Brumberg, a democracy expert at Georgetown University and the United States Institute of Peace, points out that the most successful Square People in the Arab world, who forged a whole new constitution, are in Tunisia, which is the Arab country that had “the most robust civil society institutions — especially a powerful labor union federation, as well as business, human rights and lawyers associations — that could arbitrate between the secular and religious factions,” who had come together in the square to oust Tunisia’s dictator. Tunisia also benefited from an army that stayed out of politics and the fact that the secular and Islamist forces had a balance of power, requiring them to be inclusive of one another.
I’m encouraged by the many government-monitoring civil society groups that have emerged in Ukraine to make sure that the will of its Square People will not be stolen. Whether Ukraine’s Square People can also develop the inclusive politics — to respect the views of the more pro-Russia population in the East — remains to be seen. Without Square People, no change is possible in these countries, but without civil society institutions and inclusive politics, no change is sustainable.
And now here’s Mr. Kristof:
As long as I live, I’ll never forget the rickshaw driver, tears streaming down his cheeks, rushing a gravely injured student to hospital — and away from the soldiers who had just gunned him down.
That rickshaw driver was a brave man, a better man than I, and he taught me an indelible lesson.
We were on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing, beside Tiananmen Square, on the night of June 3, 1989, and the Chinese army was crushing the student democracy movement that convulsed China that spring 25 years ago.
Millions of protesters filled the streets in hundreds of cities around China from mid-April through early June that year, demanding free speech, democracy and an end to corruption. I was living in China then as the Beijing bureau chief for The Times, and it was an unforgettable — and, initially, inspiring — tapestry of valor and yearning.
Protesters acknowledged that their lives were improving dramatically, but they said that it was not enough. They insisted that they wanted not just rice, but also rights.
To this day, it is the most polite protest movement I’ve ever covered. After shoving their way through police lines, student marchers would pause, turn around, and chant, “Thank you, police!” Some students were assigned to pick up any shoes lost in the commotion and return them to the students or police officers who had lost them.
The student protesters took over central Beijing for weeks. Then, on the night of June 3, the army invaded Beijing from several directions as if it were a foreign army, shooting at everything that moved. Miles from Tiananmen Square, the teenage brother of a friend was shot dead by soldiers as he simply bicycled to work.
As the invasion began, I jumped on my bike and raced to Tiananmen Square, where throngs of citizens had come out on the streets to try to protect the student protesters. They were shot.
The most heroic people on that terrible night and into the morning of June 4 were the rickshaw drivers, driving three-wheel bicycle carts used to haul goods around the city. With each pause in the shooting, these rickshaw drivers would pedal out toward the troops and pick up the bodies of the students who had been killed or injured.
The soldiers were unforgiving, shooting even at ambulances trying to pick up bodies. But those rickshaw men were undeterred.
Their bravery particularly resonated because I had heard so often that spring, from foreigners and Chinese officials alike, that China was unready for democracy, that its people weren’t sufficiently educated or sophisticated. And it’s true that democracy tends to find firmer root in educated, middle-class societies.
Yet I vividly remember that one rickshaw driver, a burly man in a T-shirt who perhaps had never graduated from high school. Yet what courage! I found myself holding my breath, wondering if he would be shot, as he drove out to pick up a body. He placed the young man on his cart and pedaled for his life back toward us. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.
He saw me, the foreigner, and swerved to drive slowly by me so that I could bear witness to what the government had done. It was a terrifying night, and I can’t remember just what his words were, but it was something to the effect that I should tell the world what was happening.
Sure, he couldn’t have offered a robust definition of democracy. But he was risking his life for it.
A quarter-century has passed. The bullet holes in the buildings along the Avenue of Eternal Peace have been patched, and history similarly sanitized. I was staggered when a Chinese university student looked puzzled when I mentioned the June 4 Massacre; it turned out that she had never heard of it.
It’s also true that China has progressed enormously. Incomes have soared, housing has improved and the latest figures (which should be taken with a grain of salt) suggest that the rate of death from pregnancy and childbirth is lower in China than in the United States.
That rickshaw driver may not have the vote, but his children may well attend university. The progress is unarguable. Yet human dignity demands not just rice, but also rights.
The great Chinese writer Lu Xun once wrote, about an earlier massacre: “Lies written in ink cannot disguise facts written in blood.”
As China prospers and builds an educated middle class, demands for participation will grow. I’ve covered democracy movements around the world, from Poland to South Korea, and I’m confident that someday, at Tiananmen Square, I’ll be able to pay my respects at a memorial to those men and women killed that night. I’m hoping the memorial will take the form of a statue of a rickshaw driver.
Last but not least, here’s Mr. Bruni:
The word “crisis” pops up frequently in “Ivory Tower,” a compelling new documentary about the state of higher education in America.
It pops up in regard to the mountains of student debt. It pops up in regard to the steep drop in government funding for public universities, which have been forced to charge higher and higher tuition in response. That price increase is also a “crisis” in the estimation of one of many alarmed educators and experts on camera.
And “crisis” isn’t even their direst appellation. Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor of American studies who functions as the movie’s conscience, notes an “apocalyptic dimension” to today’s discussion of college’s failings. The movie is set on verdant campuses. It’s rife with lecterns, books and graduation gowns. And yet it’s a kind of horror story.
Scheduled for theatrical release next month, “Ivory Tower” does an astonishingly thorough tour of the university landscape in a brisk 90 minutes, touching on the major changes and challenges, each of which could sustain its own documentary.
But as I watched it, one theme in particular kept capturing my attention. One set of questions kept coming to mind. How does our current system of higher education square with our concerns about social mobility? What place do the nation’s universities have in our intensifying debate about income inequality? What promise do they hold for lessening it?
The answers in “Ivory Tower” and beyond it aren’t reassuring. Indeed, the greatest crisis may be that while college supposedly represents one of the surest ladders to, and up through, the middle class, it’s not functioning that way, at least not very well.
I followed up with a few of the people in the movie, including Delbanco, who is the author of a 2012 book titled “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.” I asked him how well colleges were abetting social mobility.
“They are falling down,” he said, adding that in the days of the G.I. Bill, they did a much better job of it.
Anthony Carnevale, another contributor to “Ivory Tower,” gave me a similar assessment.
“The good news is that more and more kids are going to college,” said Carnevale, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “The bad news is that higher education is becoming more and more stratified.”
In 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, roughly 75 percent of the students at the 200 most highly rated colleges came from families in the top quartile of income, he said. Only 5 percent came from families in the bottom quartile, and while that’s up from 3 percent in 1994, it’s no huge advance or cause to rejoice.
Carnevale told me that since 1994, 80 percent of the white young men and women in this country who have headed off to college have gone to schools ranked in the top 500 by Barron’s. But 75 percent of the black and Latino young men and women who have entered college over the same period have gone to two-year or open-admissions schools outside the top 500.
“We’re sorting students by class,” he said. The most prestigious colleges are crowded with the richest kids.
There are poor kids around, too. “Ivory Tower” showcases one, David Boone, a young black man from Cleveland who is attending Harvard with the kind of robust financial aid that it and similarly well-endowed universities — Columbia, Stanford, Yale — can use to diversify their student bodies.
But those student bodies aren’t all that diverse. Harvard’s main student newspaper did a survey of the freshman class this academic year and found that 29 percent of respondents reported family incomes of at least $250,000, while only 20 percent reported family incomes of under $65,000.
It’s wealthier kids who more easily stud their résumés with the extracurricular baubles that catch an admissions officer’s eye. It’s wealthier kids who are more likely to get extensive test preparation. Delbanco noted that superior SAT results correlate closely with high family incomes, so when colleges decide to care and crow about the altitude of their student body’s median SAT score, they’re privileging economically advantaged young people over disadvantaged ones.
And more than half of the poor kids who score in the top 10 percent on the SAT or the ACT don’t apply to the most selective colleges, said David Coleman, the president of the College Board, which administers the SAT. He and the College Board have joined a growing push to make sure those students have the necessary information and encouragement to do so. “We as a country must do everything we can to make sure these hard-working, high-achieving students claim their futures,” he said.
Harvard and its ilk are just a small part of the story, though. Many more young people turn to public universities, where tuitions have gone up much faster than Americans’ incomes have.
Those schools have simultaneously become more invested in admitting students from affluent families. In a 2011 survey of college admissions officers, more than half of those at public research universities said that they had recently ratcheted up their efforts to recruit students who could pay full freight.
A story by Paul Tough in The Times Magazine this Sunday illuminates another troubling way in which college favors the rich. “Whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make,” Tough writes, adding, “About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.”
We need to address that disparity. Andrew Rossi, the producer and director of “Ivory Tower,” says we also need to pump more public money back into higher education to keep tuition down and college affordable. He additionally advocates caps on tuition at public schools.
Watching “Ivory Tower,” which visits Harvard and Columbia and Wesleyan, I was reminded anew of the greatness of America’s universities, which remain the envy of the world.
But as the movie looked at the climbing walls and other gleaming perks that today’s hypercompetitive schools make sure to have, and as it mentioned the stratospheric salaries of university presidents who keep the donations rolling in, I was also reminded of a luxury product. The top colleges, shinier than ever, are Porsches. They can take you far and fast, but it’s a lucky few who get behind the wheel.
