The CBS-National Journal Foreign Policy Debate

Just some random thoughts from watching the Republican foreign policy debate:


1) The most intelligent remarks are coming from the bottom-tier candidates such as Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul,  and occasionally Michelle Bachmann.

2) The top level candidates seem to be posturing to the crowd, especially Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

3) Herman Cain denied that waterboarding is not torture but merely an enhanced interrogation technique. What are the odds that within 48 hours he will be claiming that he was just kidding or that he was misunderstood?


4) Rick Perry has used self-deprecating humor to some effect with a couple of references to his debate performance two days previously when he forgot the Dept. of Energy. But in terms of substance he is in the same league with Romney and Cain.


5)  Gingrich is much more articulate than either Cain or Romney, his first-tier competitors.

6) Michelle Bachmann used a question about cost-cutting in the military to grandstand about Obamacare.

7) Cain tries to either sound intelligent or gain time by rephrasing questions. And his fallback default answer is that he will consult the generals.  But he sounds like he obviously prepared for the debate.

8) The debate will probably do very little if anything to change the dynamics of the race. Huntsman, Santorum and Paul will still remain in the bottom tier. Cain's future will be determined by how caucus-goers in Iowa react to the sexual harassment scandal and by whom they tend to believe, and Romney will continue to coast while Gingrich continues to rise until he self destructs.

Alasdair McDonnell New SDLP leader

On Sunday Alasdair McDonnell, the member of parliament for the Social Democratic and Labour Party from South Belfast, was elected the new leader of the party beating out three other candidates including Deputy Leader Patsy McGlone and Environmental Minister Alex Attwood. His tenure got off to a rough start when he decided to give an acceptance speech from a lecturn without notes using a teleprompter (autocue in UK speak) that was badly positioned so that he was blinded by the glare of the lights and couldn't read his speech. Some commentators took this as a bad omen.
 

McDonnell vowed to make the party competitive with Sinn Fein for the first time in years. Because of his impressive vote-winning performances in South Belfast he was chosen leader over his rivals. But the party has a basic problem with policy and strategy. It wants to attract Protestant members, but most members favor keeping the support for a united Ireland as part of its platform. If it does keep this it will find very few Protestants willing to join a Catholic party. And if it abandons this goal, it may lose many supporters to rival Sinn Fein without attracting many Protestants as compensation. Sinn Fein has stolen the SDLP's policies--plagiarized them without citation--and is better organized and sexier. The Shinners can persuade many young voters that it was the IRA's terrorist campaign that won all the concessions in equal status and power sharing that nationalists now enjoy in Northern Ireland. For the SDLP to convince them that the "armed struggle" delayed the delivery of these prizes rather than delivered them is a hard sell to people who did not live through The Troubles.

Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness may have also stirred up trouble for the SDLP as well as for his own party by going South to contest the Irish presidential election and then delivering the prize to Labour Party candidate Michael D. Higgins from unofficial Fianna Fail candidate Sean Gallagher. This might lead FF to enter Northern Ireland and start organizing branches in nationalist areas. This would strip voters from the SDLP in elections as more nationalist non-Sinn Fein voters choose to vote for an all-Ireland party rather than one that is merely committed to a united Ireland. Here is an exploration of that argument.

The SDLP has a choice between temporarily surrendering ministries to the rival Sinn Fein parties by going into opposition, possibly in conjunction with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and Party, or permanently playing second fiddle to Sinn Fein. Here is the argument for the latter course. The fact that the SDLP was unable to cooperate with the UUP when both were the leading parties under the Good Friday Agreement from 1998 to 2001 bodes ill for future cooperation in opposition. Most SDLP voters gave their lower preference votes to the rival Republicans rather than to their unionist allies in the UUP. Likewise UUP voters gave their lower preference votes to the DUP rather than to the SDLP. Sectarianism still runs strong in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has called on the UUP to dissolve itself and form a new party with the Tories. This was probably a deliberate way of forcing the UUP to cut its links to the Conservatives before the 2014 election. This will possibly make the UUP more receptive to a joint opposition strategy with the SDLP and Alliance.

Dennis Ross Resigns

Obama's special advisor on the Middle East, Dennis Ross, announced his resignation from the Obama administration yesterday only months after Middle East envoy George Mitchell, his predecessor, resigned. He resigned in order to spend more time with his family. The Palestinians considered him to be Israel's representative within the administration, and he was considered a hawk on Iran. When he agreed to join the administration it was initially only for two years, and then he agreed to extend for another year. His resignation can be taken as another signal that the peace process is stalled until after the November 2012 election. It may also signal a disagreement within the Obama administration on how to deal with Iran's nuclear efforts that Ross lost. When he joined the administration it was to concentrate on Iran, rather than on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. He also gave advice on how to deal with the Arab Spring.  Dennis Ross was said to often have been at odds with George Mitchell, whose job Ross had previously filled in the Clinton administration. But he took over for Mitchell, once Mitchell had resigned. Here is an Israeli article on the resignation. And here is a more critical look at his tenure from the National Journal.

The Danger of Economic Collapse in Europe

No one in the punditocracy has raised the issue yet, but their are drastic dangers in the collapse of the Eurozone in Europe. The European Union (EU) voted an austerity rescue package for Ireland and Dublin accepted it. It then voted one for Greece, and Athens accepted it, but with the proviso of first holding a referendum on it. Commentators have even come up with an acronym for the danger of a Southern European collapse: PIGS--Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. If any of the three other PIGS defaults then Europe will be plunged into a depression, the Euro will collapse, and the effect will likely be felt across the Atlantic in America. Go here for a timeline of the debt crisis as it developed from late 2009 to the present. Go here for an article on the dangers of Italian default on their debt.

This is then the opposite of the Great Depression of the 1930s when the depression began on Wall St. and very quickly moved across the Atlantic to Europe and South Africa. America was providing the financing for the system of revolving finance in which America loaned money to Germany, which then paid that same money to the Allies as reparations for World War I, and then the Allies repaid American war loans. Once America could no longer provide the funding to Germany the system collapsed.

The best description of the link between politics and economics in the 1930s is The Dark Valley by British historian Piers Brendon. It demonstrates that as the decade began fascism was confined to Italy and Portugal and neither country was doing very well. The Nazi Party was polling under three percent in German elections and France was ruled by the Radicals (a centrist party despite the name). Soon the Nazis began to rise very quickly as most voters abandoned the parties of the center in favor of either the Communists or the Nazis. By the end of January 1933 Hitler was chancellor of Germany; eighteen months later he was a dictator. Fascist paramilitary groups began to dominate the streets of Paris and other French cities until they were finally outlawed following a bloody clash with the police in 1934. The depression led the Japanese army to invade Manchuria in 1931 and then much of the eastern half of China in 1937.  The military took over running the government from the civilians during the 1930s. In Eastern Europe traditional dictatorships gradually gave way to fascist parties, which then established their own more radical dictatorships. Fascism then spread to the Arab world--to Egypt and Palestine and then to Syria.

I think that Western Europe is safe from a return of fascism as democracy is well entrenched there after two generations since its introduction following 1945. But east of the Czech Republic and south of Slovenia it is another story. Fascism was introduced in Yugoslavia by Slobadan Milosevic in the late 1980s. Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and even Montenegro and Croatia remain at danger from an economic collapse.  In Serbia and Croatia democracy remains weak with ultra-nationalist challengers. In Bosnia politics is dominated by Serb, Croat and Bosniak ethnic nationalist parties. The central government is dysfunctional. In Macedonia there is the danger of demands by the Albanian minority and repression by the Slav majority. Nationalism could return to the Balkans in a big way if there were a Euro collapse. The Bosnian war of 1992-95 led to at least 100,000 deaths and a million refugees leaving the country for Western Europe and the United States. Unlike the Albanians in Kosovo, most never returned.

Central Europe north of the Balkans is safer but there are danger zones there as well. Democracy is probably quite safe in the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltic States. But in Slovakia there could be problems as the economy is dependent on heavy industry--military industries were very important in Slovakia. There is a Hungarian minority in Romania; if ill treated by the Romanian majority this could lead to a return of nationalism in Hungary with irredentist claims over Transylvania. Like Dracula in the Hammar films of the 1950s and 1960s, fascism could rise from the dead in Budapest.  

These are things that Angela Merkel, the Germans, the Greeks, and the Italians should all think about very hard.

American Jews and the 2012 Election

Next to blacks, Jews have been the most consistently loyal ethnic constituency of the Democratic Party. And considering that until 1965 blacks could not vote in the South, and that many in the North do not vote, Jews have been a more electorally important one. Jews are concentrated demographically in the states with the largest electoral votes: New York, Illinois, California, Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Texas (in roughly that order). Jews are only between two and two and a half percent of the American population, but because they vote in much higher numbers they are about three or four percent of the electorate on election day.  Jews have voted consistently Democratic since the Progressive Era when they voted for Woodrow Wilson.

About eighty-five percent of the affiliated Jewish community--Jews that participate in Jewish communal life through membership and attendance at synagogues or through other Jewish organizations--is made up of either secular Jews or Jews of non-Orthodox denominations that aren't officially recognized in Israel (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist).  The fifteen percent of Jews who are Orthodox, either ultra-Orthodox or Modern Orthodox, tend to vote Republican because their religious views are more in line with Republicans on matters of personal morality than with Democrats. For secular and Reform Jews so-called Jewish values (tolerance, aid to the poor, equal rights) have replaced Orthodox ritual as the expression of their spiritual values. Most of these Jews consider themselves moderates or liberals/ Progressives politically and vote Democratic. About an additional ten percent of non-Orthodox Jews, roughly equal in number to Orthodox Jewish voters, vote for Republicans. This has been the situation for the past century, but with exceptions in individual presidential elections. Eisenhower and Reagan received about double the normal Republican  percentage of the Jewish vote. Eisenhower probably in gratitude and recognition for his role in defeating Hitler and Reagan in 1980 because Jimmy Carter was so disliked for attacking Menahem Begin over settlements. This previous analysis is based on several of the essays collected in Arthur Hertzberg's Jewish Polemics, a 1992 collection of his essays published over the previous decade. Hertzberg is a professor of religion who specialized in Judaism and the intellectual history of Zionism.  The present incumbent seems to attract the same disdain, contempt, and outright hatred among Jews that Carter did. But even Carter won 60 percent of the Jewish vote!


Obama is hated by those American Jews who are either already Republicans or who are Democrats but who identify with the Likud Party in Israel. Typical of this group is Martin Peretz, the publisher and former senior editor of The New Republic.  Peretz supported Obama in 2008, but then felt betrayed after Obama made overtures to the Arabs in 2009 and pushed for a settlement freeze in Israel. These Jews tend to put Israel at the top of their considerations when considering for whom to vote in presidential elections. Most American Jews, like other Americans, tend to vote on domestic issues and although Israel is important to them it is important as a homeland from which they can derive pride just as Irish-Americans identify in a vague way with Ireland, Italian-Americans with Italy, and Polish-Americans with Poland. These Israel-first voters might be compared to the Cuban exile community in Miami, where opposing Castro has traditionally been the only issue on which it votes.

The Republican Party now sees the 2012 election as an historic opportunity to part Jews from the Democratic Party in record numbers by casting the vote in terms of loyalty to Israel. Ironically, the insinuation that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the U.S. was seen as an anti-semitic aspersion. Now some Jewish Republicans are making the charge that those who vote for Barack Hussein Obama are disloyal to Israel. I predict that this will backfire and that Jews will vote for Obama in their traditional percentages, if for no other reason than that they find the Evangelical Right supporters of the Republican Party to be more of a threat to their interests than they find Obama. This will be especially true if the GOP nominates a candidate other than Mitt Romney such as Rick Perry, Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. And if that weren't enough there is always this Likud rally of Rick Perry to persuade all those J-Street supporters. And even Mitt, after flipping on all major social and economic issues from when he was governor of Massachusetts in order to win the nomination, will then be hard pressed to credibly flop back in order to win the general election.

Irish Presidential Election Analysis

Last Thursday, October 27, Ireland held a presidential election and the results were officially published on Saturday. According to the Irish Times the results were a follows for the three leading candidates: Michael D. Higgins (Irish Labour Party) 39.6%, Sean Gallagher (Independent but unofficial Fianna Fail candidate) 28.5%, and Martin McGuinness (Sinn Fein) 13.7%. The remaining four candidates together received 18.2% with none of them reaching seven percent. 

Martin McGuinness proved to be the kingmaker by accusing Gallagher on Monday night during a candidates' forum of taking a Fianna Fail contribution from a rich donor at an event a few years before. The accusation caught Gallagher off guard and he seemed to obfuscate in front of the cameras. He immediately went from being the frontrunner at 40 percent in the polls to the leading challenger. But by doing so McGuinness probably embittered a core Fianna Fail electorate, which will not forgive him nor Sinn Fein in the future. Sinn Fein slightly improved its standing over last year's general election, but received much less than the 14-18 percent that Mary Lou McDonald was predicting in the final week or the 20 percent that McGuinness polled at the start of the race. In comparison, Fianna Fail's unofficial candidate attracted a significant improvement in those constituencies that both FF and Sinn Fein contested last year.


The electorate seemed to demonstrate that it considered McGuinness to be more a paramilitary (Irish speak for terrorist) than a peacemaker and to be a foreigner as well. This confirmed trends demonstrated by other Northerners who have attempted political careers in the South, usually with Fine Gael. Northerners can be elected and have a career, but they won't be party leaders or presidents--except in Sinn Fein, which is predominantly a Northern party.

Fine Gael's Gaye Mitchell turned in an embarrassing performance for the party, but he was probably a poor choice. There was a reputation of less than honesty about him, which is reminiscent of Brian Lenihan Sr., the Fianna Fail candidate against Mary Robinson in 1990. The result did not hurt FF in subsequent general elections and the same will probably be true for Fine Gael, which is now Ireland's leading party after more than three-quarters of a century as the second largest party.

The result is also unlikely to affect McGuinness's stature in Northern Ireland where he returns to his role as Deputy First Minister after three weeks leave. In the North most unionists regard him as both former terrorist and peacemaker. McGuinness was reportedly reluctant to make the challenge for the presidency, but gave in to his party's draft.

For an analysis of the results of the election by the Irish Times see this article.  Or to avoid the archive charges go to the Ireland section of the website and look for the article entitled "Return of core Fianna Fail vote."

Does trauma inhibit Netanyahu?

During apartheid South Africa's real period of siege from 1974 to 1994 there were three white rulers: John Vorster (1966-1978), Pieter Willem Botha (1978-1989), and Frederick Willem de Klerk (1989-1994). South African political scientist Dan O'Meara, who chronicled the apartheid years of the ruling National Party in Forty Lost Years: The National Party in Power 19448-1994, wrote about John Vorster that division within the party during the first half of his rule inhibited him from making necessary reforms during the second half. From 1966 to 1970 the party was torn by an ideological division between conservatives--verkrampte--literally cramped--and moderates--verligte--literally enlightened. This led to the split in the party with a small portion of the verkrampte forming the Herstigte Nasionale Party--Reconstituted National Party--under the leadership of Albert Hertzog. Hertzog was the minister of mines and, ironically, the son of the first leader of the National Party who had ended his career in ignominy rejected by Afrikaner nationalists during World War II. Except for appointing a pair of commissions late in his period of rule Vorster made no attempts at domestic reforms. O'Meara contends that this was in order to avoid the trauma of another ideological battle and another possible split. The HNP did not elect a single MP until 1985 in a by-election and then this MP lost his seat in the next general election in 1987. By calling a snap election in 1970, Vorster largely destroyed the HNP as an election threat to the National Party.

Vorster in his final four years in office concentrated on foreign policy. In October 1974 he initiated a peace effort with Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda aimed at mediating a peaceful solution within Rhodesia. This was before the guerrillas were a serious threat to white rule there. Vorster pressured Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith to release political detainees and to attend talks on a bridge overlooking Victoria Falls in August 1975. The talks got nowhere due to intransigence on both sides. Next Vorster teamed up with Henry Kissinger to pressure Smith into publicly conceding majority rule in September 1976. But when the nationalist leaders and their Frontline State backers rejected the concessions that Kissinger made to Smith, the initiative soon floundered. Both sides then headed to a constitutional conference presided over by a British diplomat at Geneva. The conference went nowhere as Smith refused to deviate from the Kissinger plan and the nationalists refused to accept that plan.

P.W. Botha came to power on the back of a corruption scandal--Infogate, which forced Vorster to resign as prime minister and to take up the then ceremonial position of state president. Botha spent the first half of his decade in power implementing several reforms to apartheid. First, he allowed certain black urban residents to have legal citizenship within South Africa, something which had previously been abolished under apartheid. Grand apartheid created bantustans or homelands, similar to Indian reservations in North America, and all Africans inside South African were assigned to one of them based on ethnicity. Next he legalized black trade unions and allowed them to collectively bargain over work conditions and wages. Then he implemented a major constitutional reform that created two new chambers of parliament for mixed-race "colored" South Africans, most of whom lived in the Cape Province, and for Indians, most of whom lived in Natal Province. But whites retained an overall majority in parliament and in the president's council that was created to replace the senate as the upper chamber. The president's council would reconcile disputes among the three houses over what were "general affairs" and what were "own affairs."  Seeing the powerlessness of these chambers, the vast majority--some 80-85 percent--of both communities boycotted the first elections for the new parliament in August 1984. The elections also led to protests that quickly turned into riots and an internal insurrection by blacks. The reform also changed South Africa from a parliamentary system to a presidential system.

Botha then spent the second half of his time in office repressing internal unrest, silencing domestic critics, and using South Africa's military to intimidate the surrounding countries that might pose a threat. From a triumphal tour of Western Europe in the summer of 1984, Botha was soon faced with trade sanctions from the U.S. and European Economic Community in 1986. 

So far there have been four Likud leaders in power as prime ministers: Menahem Begin (1977-1983), Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-1992), Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-1999, 2009-present), and Ariel Sharon (2001-2006). Begin and Shamir were mainly responsible for the mass settlement of the West Bank and Gaza. That effort continued on subsequent Israeli governments. Begin had the solid backing of the American Jewish community and of the Reagan administration until he invaded Lebanon in June 1982. 

From 1982 onwards Likud governments--except that of Sharon--faced some hostility from Washington over their settlement policies. Netanyahu opposed the Oslo agreements in his first term as prime minister but agreed to withdraw from territory on the West Bank under American pressure from Clinton in October 1998. As a result his coalition soon collapsed. Sharon had very good relations with George Bush as a result of American antipathy towards Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat after October 2000. Clinton blamed Arafat--rightfully in my opinion--for the collapse of the Oslo process in late 2000. Bush came into office determined to avoid Middle East mediation and to support Israel. His conservative Republican backers demanded no less and this squared with Bush's own personal preferences. Sharon, like Botha from 1984 to 1988, spent his first several years battling the Al-Aksa Intifada by reinvading the West Bank in 2002 and assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders.  He then unexpectedly withdrew from Gaza in 2005, defying his previous political support base of settlers and forcing the Gaza settlers to evacuate. Many Israeli conservatives now regard Sharon as the ultimate traitor.

Netanyahu has proven to be more like Vorster. He has consolidated his position within his own party following the exit of Sharon and his supporters in November 2005 to form the Kadima party. Now he has spent his second term in power balancing the various parties of the Right off against one another as Vorster did with the factions in the National Party. He implemented a temporary settlement freeze in 2010, but refused to renew despite the offer of considerable bribes from Washington. With Obama preoccupied with the economic crisis in the U.S. and with the support of American conservatives, Netanyahu can easily evade any serious pressure from Washington until at least well into 2013. By then there will be new elections in Israel. Netanyahu hopes that Mahmoud Abbas will disappear as a serious political force by then, leaving only Hamas to deal with on the Palestinian side. 

If a Republican president replaces Obama in 2013 the gamble will have paid off. Or if Obama is too weak in his second term to put pressure on Israel, it will also have worked. But in either case Netanyahu resembles Vorster in his political strategy.