Winter 2012

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

R. KELLY AND POSTMODERN IRONY

INTERVIEW: GETTING OVER BOWLES- DAVID AXELROD ON RE-ELECTING SIMPSON THE PRESIDENT

VOLUME XXXIX NO. 4, WINTER 2012 HPRONLINE.ORG

IS AMERICA SAFE? CHINA, CYBERWAR, AL-QAEDA IN AFRICA, AND PEACETIME IN AMERICA

IS AMERICA SAFE?

6 Rethinking China Rachel Wong

11 Hacking Homeland Tom Silver

9 Is Africa al-Qaeda’s New Home?

Omar Bongo

13 Peacetime in America Jordan Feri

FUNNY PAGES

WORLD

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25 Drug Prohibition: the International Alternatives Peter Kaplan

The Reëlection Headlines Sarah Siskind

CAMPUS 18 The Stewart-Colbert Factor Daniel Lynch

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Why Wall Street Beats Public Service and How to Change That Jenny Choi

UNITED STATES 15 Is It Time to Get Over Bowles-Simpson?

Daniel Backman 32 Moscow and Beijing: the Uneasy Partnership Tom Lemberg

21 The New Israel Lobby

Colin Diersing

23 The Harvard College Model David Freed

INTERVIEWS 41 David Maraniss Jenny Choi & Matt Shuham

34 Ugly Truths: The Casual Vacancy Valentina Perez

42 David Axelrod Daniel Backman

28 A Mirage in the Sahara: the Fragility of Azawad Matthew Disler 30 From Riga to Athens: Can the Baltic Model Be Applied Elsewhere?

Krister Koskelo

BOOKS & ARTS 36 Irony and its Discontents: the Saga of R. Kelly Graham Moyer 39 Voicing Discontent: #YoSoy132 and its Art Alexandra Méndez

ENDPAPER 44 Navigating America and the Republican Party Forward Alexander Chen

Email: editor@hpronline.org. ISSN 0090-1030. Copyright 2012 Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image Credits: U.S. Federal Government: Cover-U.S. Navy; 2-U.S. Army; 13-U.S. Army. Flickr: 8-World Economic Forum; 9-Magharebia; 10-US Army Africa; 11-Magharebia, AfghanistanMatters; 26-Jeffrey Beall; 28-Magharebia; 30-Sergey Vladimiorv; 42-World Economic Forum. Wikimedia: 24-Daderot; 34-J.K. Rowling.

WINTER 2012 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW A Nonpartisan Journal of Politics Established 1969—Vol. XXXIX, No. 4

EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Jonathan Yip PUBLISHER: Andrew Seo MANAGING EDITOR: Neil Patel ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR: Alex Chen ONLINE EDITOR: Paul Schied COVERS EDITOR: Beatrice Walton CAMPUS EDITOR: Tom Gaudett CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Medha Gargeya INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Alpkaan Celik U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Caroline Cox U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Frank Mace U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Daniel Backman WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Josh Lipson WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Arjun Mody WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Gram Slattery B&A SENIOR EDITOR: Eli Kozminsky B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Holly Flynn B&A ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Wendy Chen HUMOR EDITOR: Sarah Siskind STAFF DIRECTOR: Zeenia Framroze BUSINESS MANAGER: Olivia Zhu ASSISTANT BUSINESS MANAGER: Naji Filali CIRCULATION MANAGER: Ross Svenson DESIGN EDITOR: Sam Finegold GRAPHICS EDITOR: Gina Kim MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Eric Hendey WEBMASTER: Corinne Curcie WEBMASTER: Ben Shryock

SENIOR WRITERS Lena Bae, Christine Ann Hurd, Kathy Lee, Raul Quintana, Henry Shull, Simon Thompson, Jimmy Wu

STAFF Jay Alver, Oreoluwa Babarinsa, Humza Syed Bokhari, Alex Boota, Ashley Chen, Samuel Coffin, Tyler Cusick, Matthew Disler, Jacob Drucker, Mikhaila Fogel, Harleen Gambhir, Nick Gavin, Aditi Ghai, Barbara Halla, Raphael Haro, Kaiyang Huang, Nur Ibrahim, Elsa Kania, Brooke Kantor, Adam Kern, John Kocsis, Sandra Korn, Krister Koskelo, Ha Le, Tom Lemberg, Ethan Loewi, Zak Lutz, Daniel Lynch, Ken Mai, Jimmy Meixiong, Jacob Morello, Chris Oppermann, Lily Ostrer, Caitlin Pendleton, Sylvia Percovich, Valentina Perez, Heather Pickerell, Cory Pletan, John Prince, Ivel Posada, Gabriel Rosen, Matt Shuham, Tom Silver, Alexander Smith, Martin Steinbauer, Alastair Su, Danielle Suh, Lucas Swisher, Rajiv Tarigopula, Selina Wang, Danny Wilson, Teresa Yan, Jenny Ye, Benjamin Zhou

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr. Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

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FROM THE EDITOR High Stakes Dear Readers, This November has been a month of momentous change. The world’s two largest economies chose their newest leaders. At home, 131 million people went to the polls and cast ballots, an event unique only in its ordinariness. For the 1.3 billion Chinese citizens, such an occurrence is unfathomable. Instead, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party anointed a predictable slate of leaders, headed by President Xi Jinping.

These elections are striking in just how different they were, and the advantages of American democracy would seem as obvious as the benefits of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms over Great Leap Forwardcommunism. Yet, praise of China’s regime persists.

Thomas Friedman has written that China’s one party autocracy led by its “reasonably enlightened group” of leaders can have “great advantages” in imposing “politically difficult but critically important policies.” Kishore Mahbubani, former Singaporean diplomat, wrote in the Financial Times that the CCP has created a succession model that is “strong and durable,” resulting in leaders that could prove to be “a talented group of reformers.”

Such acclaim might make you pine for China as well, especially when combined with the pervasive feeling that our democracy fosters pettiness, untruth, and incoherent policy. Kennedy School Professor Dani Rodrik likened the 2012 presidential race to “third-world politics” and a “failed African state” in its distortions and failure to address “the signature issue of our time,” climate change.

President Obama often tells us not to bet against America, and I would take Friedman’s odds any day. China’s problems remain bigger than ours and its leaders increasingly ill-equipped for them. In the past year, the corruption at the highest levels of the CCP has become stunningly clear. Even as former prime minister Wen Jiabao called for reduced inequality, his family amassed a fortune of $2.7 billion

through government patronage. The downfall of rising star Bo Xiliai for bribery and perhaps even murder is astounding.

And even when China’s leaders are clean—unlikely as it may seem—they are mediocre. Promotion in China veers far from meritocratic Confucian ideals.

Instead, rising through the CCP depends on connections and vanity projects. The party is dominated by “princelings,” the children of old revolutionary leaders. And it is no coincidence that nearly member of the new Politburo Standing Committee was an ally of former leader Jiang Zemin.

Finally, one of the new leaders is a North Korean-trained economist. How about that bet?

In this winter of anxiety about the fiscal cliff, there are at least charted paths and plausible solutions. China faces turmoil at every level as its economic growth slows.

Corruption is rife, dissent at the grassroots level is no longer possible to suppress, and the middle class fears contaminated food and growing income inequality. Even former premier Wen has called China’s growth “unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” That a crisis of legitimacy for the CCP is on the horizon is not implausible.

In America’s greatest moments of crisis and instability, our electoral system bestowed on us leaders who more than met the moment: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt. History will judge Bush and Obama, but I suspect they will fare better than Hu Jintao. For the sake of the Chinese people, I hope Xi Jinping proves to be the man who changes China, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.

And there was one more election this November. We elected the 45th Editorial Board of the Harvard Political Review. I’d bet on them.

Jonathan Yip Editor-in-Chief

THE FUNNY PAGES THE REËLECTION HEADLINES Washington Post:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS ON THE OATH OF OFFICE: “I TOTALLY GOT IT THIS TIME” The Harvard Crimson:

“WELL DANG,” BOTH HARVARD REPUBLICANS The Denver Post:

FIRST EVER SECOND BLACK PRESIDENT! Like, whooa.

Miami Herald:

Why is your grandson so happy?

Pg. 4 for details.

Minority Times:

THANKS FOR ALL THE GIFTS! Salt Lake City Tribune:

Romney to be Given 3 Extra Planets Huffington Post:

WHAT IS KOURTNEY KARDASHIAN DOING TODAY? WINTER 2012 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 3

CAMPUS

WHY WALL STREET BEATS PUBLIC SERVICE

and how to change that Jenny Choi Recently, elite colleges have begun taking a special interest in their students’ career choices in promoting the spirit of public service. The inspiration behind such efforts is expressed by former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, who stated “Excellence alone without humanity is worthless.”

Yet, at elite universities around the country, jobs in public service are among the most unpopular post-graduation employment options. According to an annual post-graduation survey run by Harvard’s Office of Career Services, about 22 percent of the Class of 2012 entered jobs in finance or consulting. Meanwhile, only around five to 10 percent of Harvard graduates enter the non-profit and public sectors each year.

Therefore, to compete with Wall Street and consulting firm models that dominate college graduate hiring, the public and non-profit sectors must reform their recruitment strategies and establish legitimacy for their organizations. Additionally, these organizations, along with universities, need to increase the financial viability of and access to public service employment opportunities.

By bringing down these barriers and establishing competitive models, these sectors can create a more favorable incentive structure. Today, programs like Teach for America and the Peace Corps are already providing viable, popular opportunities. If applied more broadly, they could shift graduates towards greater participation in public interest careers.

THE RECRUITMENT PROBLEM One major reason behind the relative unpopularity of public interest careers is the absence of early and active recruitment from the public sector. Gene Corbin, Harvard’s Dean of Public

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Service, described this problem to the HPR: “When Goldman Sachs and McKinsey come to campus early in senior year with a very structured recruitment and application process, I think students know and see a very structure path.”

Trey Grayson, Director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, mentioned the widespread cultural effect that the corporate recruiting process has on campus, saying, “Because it’s a public process and they all go on at the same time, people talk about it in the dining halls.”

Travis Lovett, Director of Harvard’s Center for Public Interest Careers (CPIC), adds, “It’s going to take a great amount of energy to transform this kind of culture.” The absence of a mechanism through which the public sector can reach out effectively leaves many students interested in and passionate about public service stranded.

LEGITIMACY AND ACCESSIBILITY Furthermore, Maria Dominguez Gray, Executive Director of the Philips Brooks House Association, a Harvard non-profit public service organization, said that establishing the “legitimacy” of public service jobs should be a primary concern, since “pressure…comes from wanting to be successful.” The legitimacy of an employment option comes into perspective when students take into account that they are Harvard graduates. Grayson suggested that parents can especially increase the pressure on students when they continuously ask their elite college children, “What’s next?”

Meanwhile, what often drives the legitimacy of an employment option is financial reward. Employment in public service is simply not an option for those seeking a lucrative career path to

CAMPUS

An anxious trader looks on at the NYSE’s trade floor screens.

support families or pay off debt. Gray emphasized that especially for post-graduates, “We need to have a healthy number of opportunities…that can provide a living wage.”

Additionally, summer internships in the financial and consulting sectors often lead to full-time employment offers. But, students receiving financial aid from Harvard must contribute $1,500 annually to their education, which Gray believes poses “a legitimate barrier” for low-income students seeking to engage with public service during their summers.

Finally, volunteer work and public interest opportunities are often characterized by their openness and non-selectivity.

However, 33 percent of respondents to a CPIC survey said that “the competition of other Harvard applicants” was a “key barrier for… participating in summer public internships.” Access at Harvard is especially a challenge considering that last year various institutions were only able to grant full-time Harvard affiliated summer service opportunities to 45 percent of applicants.

MODELS TO FOLLOW Despite the structural challenges that make public service careers difficult to pursue, Teach for America (TFA) and the Peace Corps are rare success stories among post-graduate and full-time public service opportunities. Indeed, TFA and the Peace Corps are among the most sought-after opportunities for recent college graduates, and their selectiveness and prestige have established the aforementioned “legitimacy” that most other public service opportunities are missing.

Elissa Kim, the Executive Vice President for recruitment at Teach for America, tells the HPR, “We know we need to actively convince top students to choose us given the pressures they face to take more ‘traditional’ paths of law, medicine, consulting, and so on. So we do what is required to win talented people; we actively recruit on campuses and get the word out so people can make fully informed choices about what to do when they graduate.”

Such strategizing also applies to the Peace Corps, which has regional recruitment offices and actively hosts recruitment events. Both organizations are testaments that replicating the models of consulting firms and banks that do heavy college

campus recruiting helps mitigate the aforementioned barriers to public service.

THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES Universities can also play an important role promoting public interest careers. For instance, as Dean Corbin suggested, “Nonprofit and governmental organizations don’t have the resources to come to campus and recruit.” Harvard and other elite institutions can play a central role streamlining the recruitment process for various public sector employers. Gray suggested that Harvard should “make sure that [they’re] focusing more on the culture of legitimacy.” Universities should also increase interest for public service programs beyond TFA and the Peace Corps that provide competitive career paths.

Another challenge for universities to tackle is ensuring access when programs become more competitive over time. Universities might consider establishing mentoring programs for students who are seriously interested in pursuing public interest careers.

Finally, institutions must develop a solution to the question of the financial viability of the public service career pathway.

According to Gray, a healthy first step for Harvard would be “forgiveness of the summer contribution” for students participating in public service over their vacation. Lovett told the HPR that “our model should be that we support anyone who cares about service.”

With CPIC’s establishment in 2001 and the hiring of a Dean of Public Service, Harvard has been taking steps toward making public service more accessible and attractive for its students and graduates. Meanwhile, there are many more solutions that can be actively pursued by elite institutions. A reformation of the recruitment process to emulate the models set by TFA and the Peace Corps may have a domino effect, knocking down traditional barriers to public service. Furthermore, America’s elite universities can use their immense resources to deal with students’ financial limitations. Public service organizations and elite universities need to change the incentive structure so the best students choose the public interest over the lucre of Wall Street and consulting.

WINTER 2012 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 5

NATIONAL SECURITY

RETHINKING CHINA

Why the history of China’s rise matters.

Rachel Wong On July 9, 1971, a team of American officials stopped for a short rest in a Himalayan hill station. What followed, as then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recalls, was the most dramatic event of the Nixon presidency. It was the first diplomatic visit between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, and it happened in complete secrecy. Kissinger and his team were whisked away on a forty-eight hour visit to Beijing, where they met with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in a series of preliminary negotiations and paved the way for a reopening of relations between the two great powers.

At the time, China sought to resume its diplomatic ties with the United States not because of ideology, policy, or the economy, but because of military necessity. As Kissinger notes in his recent book, On China, Chairman Mao Zedong’s doctor had this conversation with the Chairman in 1969: “Mao presented me with a riddle. ‘Think about this,’ he said to me one day. ‘We have the Soviet Union to the north and the west, India to the south, and Japan to the east. If all our enemies were to unite, attacking us from the north, south, east, and west, what do you think we should do?’ When Mao’s interlocutor responded with perplexity, the Chairman continued: ‘Think again. ... Beyond Japan is the United States. Didn’t our ancestors counsel negotiating with faraway countries while fighting those that are near?’” What blossomed out of these first encounters during the Nixon years was willingness on both sides to set aside ideological misgivings,

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and work towards a more cooperative future.

Forty years, ten presidencies, and an almost two hundred percent increase in Chinese GDP later, we seem to be losing sight of this vision. The recent rhetoric of American media and politicians, especially leading up to and during the presidential elections this past November, suggests that China and the U.S. may inevitably end up as competitors for world hegemony. The rise of China’s economy appears to be a direct threat to American influence worldwide, a threat that may translate into conflict. But popular rhetoric in the United States may only be making the situation worse: by gearing up for a potential clash with China, on both economic and military fronts, Americans are fuelling a sense of Chinese nationalism that benefits neither side.

At a time when neither politically-shaky China nor militarilyoverextended America can really afford a showdown, we should be cautious about the way we approach hot-button, nationalistic issues like Tibet and Taiwan. To effect peaceful change without forceful confrontation, a strong and coherent China is essential.

The traditional Chinese approach to foreign policy is a considerably more peaceful and less invasive one than the European model and China’s framing of world hegemony is starkly different to that of the West. The Chinese view of a 21st century world order is, to a large extent, shaped by American attitudes and actions. If the United States continues to view China’s rise as part of a zero-sum game, then so will the Chinese.

NATIONAL SECURITY

In a country with a domestic situation as precarious as China’s, an aggressive American foreign policy could very well tip the scales.

WHY HISTORY MATTERS

IS CHINA’S RISE IS ANYTHING SPECIAL?

It would be a gross oversimplification to assume that all countries determine their policy based on the same rational calculations. Cultural norms, dictated by history, are just as important as geography, economics, and military factors. And when dealing with a country with as long a history as China, historical context becomes essential to understanding China’s priorities.

In 1492, a little-known Genoese explorer sighted land in the Bahamas, an island inhabited by a small population of indigenous Arawak. Almost a century earlier, a Chinese admiral had already navigated a sizeable fleet to Brunei, Thailand and the Horn of Africa, bestowing lavish gifts upon the kingdoms he encountered, and bringing back ostriches, giraffes, and ivory as tribute to the Yongle Emperor. Yet around the world, people remember and celebrate the life of Christopher Columbus, not Zheng He. Both were naval explorers, both received sponsorship from their monarchs to extend the reach of their respective empires, both struck land and made meaningful contact with local inhabitants.

Columbus’s voyages began a new era of European conquest, while his Chinese counterpart did the opposite. After Zheng He’s death, Chinese naval exploration came to a sudden halt. For reasons historians still debate, the Emperor decided to dismantle the royal fleet and destroy the records of Zheng He’s voyages.

“China’s naval history was thus a hinge that failed to swing,” observes former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “technically capable of dominance, China retired voluntarily from the field of naval exploration just as Western interest was beginning to take hold.” Some scholars suggest that Zheng’s travels ran contrary to the Confucian priority of domestic harmony and stability. Others argue that for the Ming rulers, they offered no practical benefits. While “God, gold, and glory” drove Columbus to the shores of the Bahamas, the lure of trade and colonization did little to motivate the self-sufficient Ming Chinese. This example from history is particularly relevant today because it illustrates a larger difference in European and Chinese world views.

For almost all of recorded history, China has accounted for approximately thirty percent of the world population and forty percent of world GDP. For a civilization that has never needed to contend with economically aggressive neighbors, the majority of financial innovation has focused on increasing domestic efficiency and productivity, rather than on honing China’s competitive advantage. This is not to say that China’s economy stagnated throughout the past half millennium. In fact, scholars in the 1950s argued that China would have developed a fully industrial and capitalist economy had the country not been ravaged by foreign imperialists during the Opium Wars. But the overall trend of Chinese economic development has prioritized internal stability over international expansion. Regardless of whether this trend is a product of geographic location or of contingent factors like European imperialism, the fact remains that China’s enthusiasm for economic stability has formed the foundation of its political culture, both past and present.

The ruling style of the late imperial era reflects China’s economic appetite for self-sufficient stability. Despite Zheng He’s wide-ranging travels, he never displayed any territorial ambition, for the simple reason that there was no need for China to expand abroad. According to American sociologist Charles Tilly, many of the trademark innovations of the West, including secure property rights, banks and the rule of law, are really the byproducts of war. The pressure-cooker that was modern Europe led not only to aggression among neighboring states and imperial expansion abroad, but also to adversarial systems of government within each nation, which pitted one interest group against another in an elaborate system of checks and balances.

China, on the other hand, strove to create a unified and coherent state under a single moral authority. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a famous epic from the fourteenth century, opens with this line: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” Whether the nation is ruled by the Kangxi Emperor, Mao Zedong, or today’s Hu Jintao, China’s political history can be viewed as a continuous

WINTER 2012 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 7

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Kissinger, author of On China, speaking at the World Economic Forum. thread, with successive regimes sandwiched between temporary periods of inner turmoil.

WHY WE MATTER The rise of China to the world stage can be viewed as another link in the long chain of Chinese history. As international relations expert Alastair Johnston argues in his book, Strategic Culture, “ahistorical or ‘objective’ variables such as technology, capabilities, levels of threat, and organizational structures are all of secondary importance: it is the interpretative lens of strategic culture that gives meaning to these variables.” In other words, how China sees itself as a long-standing culture is just as important to Sino-American relations as any number of trade agreements, presidential visits, or military tactics that we may pursue with our Pacific neighbor.

This idea is illustrated in the thawing of China’s relations with Taiwan. Since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, Taiwan has remained a contentious issue. The very existence of this island, not much bigger than the state of Maryland, and with somewhat limited strategic importance, reminds the Communist Party of its inability to eradicate its historical foes. The fact that the Nationalist Party took China’s imperial treasures with it when it fled in 1949, including over 650,000 artifacts covering every time period from the Neolithic to the present, continues to rankle with the Chinese sense of national pride. In 2007, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Susan Shirk warned that if an outbreak of Chinese nationalism were to occur over the Taiwan issue, the Communist Party may be forced to go to war. “We don’t want to become mired in rhetorical polemics with China,” Shirk told the HPR. “Name calling would force politicians to want to show how tough they are in maintaining national strength.” In a country with a domestic situation as precarious as China’s, an aggressive American foreign policy could very well tip the scales.

Over the past four years, however, the danger of war with Taiwan has receded significantly. Leadership on both sides of the Strait has pursued a cautious and largely successful rap-

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prochement. In a 2008 phone call to President George Bush, CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao conceded for the first time that although “both sides recognize there is only one China, [they would] agree to differ on its definition.” Both mainland China and Taiwan have agreed to establishing “three links” of communication, transportation, and commerce, which had been cut off since 1949. William Kirby, T.M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard, is optimistic about the implications for the United States, “The normalization of relations across the Taiwan Strait has removed a potential area of military strife,” he told the HPR. “For all the rhetoric, we forget that enormous progress has been made in the last five years on the issue that was the most dangerous for US-China relations.” This is thanks, in large part, to the active role that Obama administration has pursued in the area. “President Obama’s policies are quite consistent in finding a basis for cooperation with China,” Susan Shirk stated. “I don’t foresee any major change in the substance of American foreign policy over the next four years. Now is the time to maintain a cautious and consistent stance with China.”

MOVING FORWARD BY LOOKING BACK The normalization of cross-Strait relations is an example of how the United States can maintain a non-confrontational presence in Asia without stepping on the toes of Chinese nationalism. “China is an ancient civilization,” Kirby reminds us, “but as a country, it was founded about a hundred years ago.” In order to maintain a stable and sustainable relationship into the future, it is crucial that we view China through both lenses. As an ancient civilization, China is heir to an unparalleled legacy of economic prosperity, internal stability, and peaceful world hegemony.

As a young state, it must live up to these goals, while grappling with a unique national identity that calls for a return to its past glory. The United States’ peaceful involvement in the Taiwan issue presents us with a feasible model for future relations with China. Productive coexistence with China will depend on an understanding of the historical context in which China has been shaped.

NATIONAL SECURITY

IS AFRICA AL-QAEDA’S NEW HOME?

Omar Bongo

Extremist groups like Al-Qaeda are no strangers to the African continent with operations in Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia, most notably through the militant group Al-Shabaab. Their growing prowess, especially in Northern Africa, was illustrated by Al-Qaeda’s recent involvement in the Malian coup d’état. AlQaeda’s naturalization in Africa has been perceived as a threat to not only regional security, but also global security. Stabilizing the region and containing the influence of extremist groups will depend on the international community’s ability to work with regional partners.

FROM TOURÉ TO TRAORÉ The March coup d’état in Mali spurred the resignation of president Amadou Toumani Touré a month before the scheduled presidential election in which he vowed not to participate. The coup was largely led by the disgruntled Mali army, which was critical of Touré’s handling of the Islamist-lead insurgency in the northern parts of the country. Touré was forced to resign and hand over the presidency to the army captain and leader of the National Committee for Recovering Democracy and Restoring the State, Amadou Sanogo. After stringent economic and political sanctions from the United States, the African Union, and the Economic Community of West African States, Sanogo ultimately allowed the democratic process to take its course, leaving Dion-

counda Traoré, the president of Mali’s national assembly, to act as the interim president.

The insurgency in Northern Mali, which ultimately led to the political coup, was precipitated by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and by Ansar Dine, a suspected Al-Qaeda affiliate. The main objective of the two groups is to achieve independence for the northern region of Azawad. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad is a secularist group lead by the Tuareg people, an indigenous and nomadic ethnic group with a population in Mali exceeding 400,000. Ansar Dine, on the other hand, is a jihadist group that intends to implement sharia law in Mali.

In the midst of the instability created by the coup, another group, the Islamic Maghreb, has created a stronghold in the region and intends to spread a stringent version of sharia law throughout the country. The group has seized power in three major cities in the north, Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu. The group is also accused of committing serious human rights violations, of propagating terror amongst the local population, and of desecrating important cultural monuments.

The President Emeritus of the World Peace Foundation, Robert Roberg, stressed in an interview with the HPR that the international community “cannot let the people of northern Mali cut off hands and stone adulterers for much longer,” without suffering great consequences. Likewise, advocacy groups, foreign

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Malian soldiers train with U.S. special forces.

governments, and even the United Nations have expressed concern over the growing humanitarian crisis in Mali.

FRANCE LEADS THE CHARGE In response to the Islamic Maghreb’s threats to execute six French hostages it currently has under its control, French President François Hollande is emerging as a leading force encouraging military action in the region. Although this initiative is encouraging, recent comments by Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s defense minister point to a slight change of tone from France, with a stronger emphasis on prudence and caution. Mali’s long collaborative history with France, a legacy of its former status as a French colony, explain France’s responsive attitude with regards to the Islamic Maghreb’s rapid ascent to regional dominance.

The UN Security Council’s decision to grant Mali and the Economic Community of West African States, its principal continental ally, forty-five days to present a credible and detailed military plan to reclaim the northern Mali exemplifies a bilateral effort designed to grant more authority to the African leadership.

However, doubts still remain about the intervention. Algeria, the predominant military force in the region, favors a diplomatic solution to a military one, as evidenced by a reported meeting with Ansar Dine on Algerian soil. The prospect of a military intervention without Algeria’s support seems unlikely. Additionally, the fragile political situation in the Ivory Coast and the internal conflict created by Boko Horan, another jihadist organization, in Nigeria further weakens the coalition. The logistical and material limitations of Mali’s military limit Mali’s ability to act on its own.

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AMERICA’S ROLE As a global leader advocating peace and democratic stability, the U.S. would do well to mark the current situation in Northern Mali as a top foreign policy priority. Rotberg emphasized that “any destabilization of even a remote part of Africa is of concern to the United States’ program to encourage peace and stability everywhere.” Before the recent instability, Mali’s democratic governance was seen as a model of development in the region.

Particularly concerning to the United States, Mali is a member of the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, a program led by the United States to fight terrorism in Northern Africa. While the American public has generally devoted most of its attention to terrorist groups in the Middle East, failing to diversify its efforts to prevent the next wave of extremist movements could be a grave mistake. Strong logistical and intelligence support in Africa could symbolize a lasting statement of U.S. support on a continent whose development and security could be put at risk

by Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.

With a rapidly growing population that boasts a median age of roughly twenty years old, the continent’s human resource wealth should not be underestimated. In addition, the continent’s remarkable economic growth, as evidenced by the presence of African countries such as Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana amongst the fastest-growing economies in the world, highlights the continent’s economic importance. However, such development is not possible without a stable political atmosphere, an area that the United States must focus on. Collaborating with the continent’s leaders and supporting regional antiterrorism efforts exemplifies a course of action that could guarantee multilateral success.

NATIONAL SECURITY

HAC KIN G HOM LAN E D HOW DO WE PREVENT A CYBER PEARL HARBOR?

A

s we check email, listen to music online, and log onto our favorite social networks, we never see nationstates exchanging blows or even the remnants of their combat. Military officials and cybersecurity, however, experts agree that the Internet is an active battleground. Some say it has the characteristics of a jungle, with militant hackers taking on the role of guerillas as they launch attacks from hiding. Others see the Internet as a more conventional terrain, open for strikes between superpowers in the form of viruses aimed at national infrastructure. In either case, cyberwarfare, the expanding form of warfare in which nation-states use computer code to attack enemy networks, has emerged from the pages of science fiction thrillers to make its mark in the public sphere.

In June, The New York Times revealed that the United States built and deployed Stuxnet, a virus targeting the computers that run centrifuges in Iranian nuclear facilities. Since then, three other prolific viruses with suspected state-backing have been discovered. Officials from the United States, Iran, and China have become increasingly open about efforts to enhance their cyberwar chests. Given the nature of cyberwarfare, the wide gaps in cybersecurity legislation, and the numerous areas of vulnerability to malicious hackers, it remains clear that the American network is at great risk.

Tom Silver

THE NATURE OF CYBERWARFARE After World War II, the United States and the USSR rushed to recruit German aerospace engineers to help advance their rocket technologies. John Arquilla, Chair of the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School, sees that situation as analogous to the current high demand for skilled hackers. He told the HPR that several countries around the world are recruiting “master hackers” as part of their attempts to get ahead of the technological curve. Many have characterized the international scramble for hackers as a new arms race. While historically arms races involved stockpiling weapons such as naval warships or nuclear bombs, in the cyber realm, the military with the largest budget does not necessarily have a clear advantage. In fact, Arquilla describes America’s spending on cybersecurity as ineffectual, “Sadly, the more you spend, the less security you may get.

[The United States is] not getting very much security for [its] dollar.” The intangible nature of cyberwarfare has disadvantaged the United States, which has traditionally thrived in military conflicts that are more directly dependent on economics.

Because technological superiority is necessary for success in a cyber conflict, non-state terrorist groups are also at a disadvantage. Without knowledge of or access to sophisticated attack

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functions, insurgents would likely be forced to recruit experts to levy a serious attack. Arquilla reasons that they would be reluctant to do so because “if the person they recruit is actually working for us, we could undermine the whole group.”

The organizations poised to benefit from the nature of cyberwarfare include countries like Iran, which would suffer severely in a total war with the United States, but could inflict serious damage through covert cyber attacks. Although Iran has not taken responsibility for any acts of cyberwarfare, experts widely believe that Tehran has at least provided funding and support for anti-American hacker groups. On August 15, Saudi Arabia’s largest oil company, Aramco, was the target of an unusually malicious attack in which three quarters of their corporate computers were wiped clean. On the blank PCs, the hackers left one image: a burning American flag. After analyzing the virus, cybersecurity experts noted similarities to a virus called Flame that was first used by the United States and Israel to spy on computers of the Iranian government casting suspicion on a potential retaliatory attack.

The ability of hackers to remain anonymous leaves the United States in an awkward position. With little concrete evidence that Iran or other adversaries are responsible for attacks, American officials must choose between ignoring the attacks, escalating the cyberwar, or initiating a more conventional war. The nature of cyberwarfare debases the traditional advantages the United States has enjoyed in traditional conflicts.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT IS OFFLINE The pervasiveness of the Internet makes it difficult not only to secure, but also to legislate. Current cybersecurity law is vague and lacking in technical details, while judicial precedents on the subject remain limited. Cybersecurity expert and Columbia Professor of Computer Science Salvatore Stolfo has grown frustrated with the government’s stagnation on issues of the Internet. He tells the HPR that while “time and technology and capability marches on, the government is ignoring it.” The United States is certainly at risk from a technical perspective, but he sees it “more as a political and legislative problem than a technical one.”

Besides the sheer complexity of the field, there are two primary factors preventing the government from taking effective steps towards cybersecurity. The first is that the Internet has become taboo in the halls of Congress following public outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act that was introduced early this year.

This bill, with the intention of preventing piracy, sought to give the government the power to regulate the World Wide Web. After Wikipedia, Reddit, and thousands of other sites led protests against SOPA, the House of Representatives announced it would postpone drafting the bill. Since this incident, both the Republican and Democrat Parties have officially supported net neutrality.

Though the Internet has subsequently been left alone by Congress, Stolfo asserts that net neutrality and cybersecurity are two different issues, insisting that “now is the time, when we’re not under stress, to... design policies and laws that defend the network and defend our civil liberties. They can coexist with each

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other if thoughtful people actually took interest in ... deliberating over it.”

The second obstacle to comprehensive cybersecurity legislation is jurisdiction. Because the Internet is diffuse entity, there is no one government agency responsible for its security. The two major organizations with jurisdiction over the web are the Department of Homeland Security, which has established a National Cyber Security Division, and the Department of Defense, which has formed the United States Cyber Command. While the two have begun to collaborate, Stolfo says that legislators and bureaucrats remain “confused” in the realm of cybersecurity. He fears that only a major cyberattack on American infrastructure would be impetus enough for the government to make significant advances on cyber policy.

HOLES IN THE NETWORK During this summer’s Aspen Security Forum, General Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency and Commander of the United States Cyber Command, offered his assessment of the country’s cybersecurity. On a scale from one to ten, he gave it a three. Arquilla agrees with this analysis, describing the United States as “vulnerable at every level” in terms of cyber attacks. However, some experts, such as Executive Director of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security and Duke Law Professor Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., are more optimistic about American cybersecurity. Dunlap told the HPR, “Fortunately, we have not suffered a cyber Pearl Harbor that everyone fears. I believe that if it was easy to do, it would’ve already happened because there are enough actors out there on the world scene with enough hatred for the U.S. to then try to harm us in any way. The fact that it hasn’t happened does say something.” With this in mind, Dunlap acknowledges that “the U.S. needs to be prepared to conduct both defensive and offensive cyber operations.” Arquilla identifies three different levels of vulnerability that the United States needs to address: infrastructure, commerce, and individuals. The DHS found that between October 2011 and February 2012, there were 86 reported attacks on computer systems that control critical U.S. infrastructure, compared with only eleven in the same period the year prior. Though none have been disastrous thus far, dams, energy grids, and others are on increasingly high alert. In the area of commerce, authorities are growing concerned not only about the exposure of the digital stock market, but also about the vulnerabilities of companies that rely on proprietary information. In the case where such information is stolen by hackers, Stolfo notes that “the law is completely confused and silent.”

The United States so far remains largely unscathed in the battleground of the Internet. However, as nation-states turn towards cyberwarfare, the vulnerabilities in the American network must be addressed. A cyber Pearl Harbor may never happen, but legislators must realize that a devastating cyber attack on American infrastructure, commerce, and even individuals is a very real possibility. Whether or not politicians support net neutrality, they must not remain neutral as the nation’s net comes under attack.

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PEACETIME IN AMERICA Jordan Feri

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ost college students can hardly remember a time when America was not at war. To many of us, it may seem unfathomable, if the words of President Obama hold true, that the final withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in 2014 will conclude the first chapter of the War on Terror.

Even if potential conflicts with Iran or China remain on the distant horizon, and minor conflicts such as those in Libya and potentially Syria continue to demand United States military involvement, it is safe to say that America will not be engaging in a full-scale “war” any time soon. Peacetime may be on the horizon.

Nevertheless, reduced military engagement is unlikely to impact the United States as strongly as the end of previous conflicts in the past have. In 1945, defense spending represented a full 42 percent of national GDP, yet by 1952 it had dwindled to ten percent. Today’s defense spending represents only a mere four and half percent of GDP and participation in the military has dropped to less than half a percent of the U.S. population, down from nine percent at the height of WWII. A peacetime America does pose several transitional challenges. The federal government will be forced to deal with the fiscal implications of a peace dividend, or lack thereof. Thousands of Americans will return from war with physical and mental

burdens and finding ways to foot the bill for their treatment will test lawmakers. Most importantly, the military may face spending cuts, the transition or “pivot” to Asia, and ultimately, the rise of a new and profoundly different reliance on national defense, rather than warfare.

THE NATIONAL DEFENSE Most evidence suggests that the U.S. military has been preparing to reduce the number of troops currently deployed in combat. The Department of Defense has already undertaken systematic cuts, and the Obama Administration has proposed a further eight percent cut by 2020. To meet its tightening budget, the Pentagon has announced major troop reductions, including the severance of 20,000 Marines and 3,900 active-duty Air Force servicemen. The Army has been downsizing as well, with many servicemen being offered early retirement packages. As Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and Belfer Center fellow Troy Endicott told the HPR, these changes, when bolstered by fewer troop rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan, will be part of America’s peacetime opportunity to “prepare for defense, rather than war.”

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The federal government will be forced to deal with the fiscal implications of a peace dividend, or lack thereof.

These changes are also a part of America’s larger policy shift or “pivot” towards Asia. In a recent address to the Australian parliament, President Obama sent a thinly veiled message to the People’s Republic of China, noting publicly that “prosperity without freedom is another form of poverty.” Obama’s rhetoric suggests that the United States is unwilling to accept the perceived totalitarian and oppressive nature of the Chinese government despite China’s growing influence on the international stage.

Considering that the United States is not prepared to get involved in another conflict, Colonel and Weatherhead Center Fellow David Krumm tells the HPR that the U.S is best served by a strategy of defensive deterrence, “Maintaining a military that can win any conflict overwhelmingly is no longer feasible.” The real goal, he says, will be to establish influence in major portions of Asia. He also suggested that as China’s economic growth slows due to unfavorable demographic shifts, the United States may simply be expecting China’s military buildup to shrink on its own.

A focus on deterrence, which aligns well with Asia’s vast island-centric geography, will lead the military to lessen its focus on ground troops and concentrate its resources instead on naval and air capacity. Under the Obama administration, this shift is evidenced by the military’s increased use of remotely piloted aircraft.

THE PHANTOM PEACE DIVIDEND Some of the criticisms of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have focused on the financial burdens and the contribution of these costs to the current recession. According to the Congressional Budget Office, however, the wars have cost the United States an estimated $1.3 trillion, only 4.4 percent of the nation’s defense spending over the last eleven years. Nevertheless, President Obama has repeatedly flaunted the end of wartime fiscal commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq as an opportunity to “free

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up some resources, to, for example, put Americans back to work, especially our veterans, rebuilding our roads, our bridges.” Many believe that the end of these wars will allow for the reallocation of defense spending to domestic causes as part of what they call a “peace dividend.”

It is not clear where the “peace dividend” will be found.

Associated Press “Fact Check” noted that there is no direct peace dividend from ending the wars “because the government borrowed to pay for them” and military spending, overall, is likely to remain high even after the wars are over. Nevertheless, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that if military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq decrease from an average of about 180,000 in 2011 to 45,000 by 2015, outlays for defense will amount to only $716 billion in 2021, down to three percent of GDP, the lowest level since the beginning of World War II.

THE WOUNDED WARRIOR The lasting legacy of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq will be the physical and psychological tolls on veterans. According to the Cost of War Project, an initiative at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, over two million service members have seen active service in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Among these returnees, the report notes a threefold increase in the likelihood of child abuse, and a 177 percent rise in partner abuse rates since 2003. Equally concerning are the psychological burdens veterans face. A study by the Pew Research Center reports that 37 percent of all post-9/11 veterans say they have suffered from post-traumatic stress, including a full 49 percent of veterans who served in a combat zone. Additionally, 46,000 veterans have been wounded over the course of the wars.

The Cost of War project estimates that the government will be obligated to pay $600 to $950 billion to treat veterans returning from the two wars. While a peacetime America may help scale down America’s conflicts abroad, great challenges, both human and financial, will need to be dealt with at home.

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IS IT TIME TO GET OVER BOWLESSIMPSON? Daniel Backman

“H

e created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”

In many ways, this quote from Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention encapsulates deficit reduction efforts over the past two years. Ryan was criticizing President Obama for failing to pursue the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan commission the president established. Named the Bowles-Simpson report after commission co-chairs Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson, it was projected to reduce the deficit by nearly $4 trillion over eight years and balance the budget by 2035.

Had the plan garnered 14 votes among the 18 commission members in December 2010, it would have been automatically submitted to Congress. Ultimately only 11 members voted “yes.”

Paul Ryan voted “no.”

The story of fiscal reform is truly one of lip service, finger pointing, and inaction. Both presidential campaigns pointed to Bowles-Simpson as a model for fiscal reform, yet neither fully embraced the plan. President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 budget claimed to incorporate elements of Bowles-Simpson, and Congress soundly rejected it. Several bipartisan plans similar to Bowles-Simpson have also sprung up since December 2010.

None have gained sufficient congressional support.

Nonetheless, Bowles-Simpson remains a synonym for fiscal

responsibility and serious compromise for many in Washington and the media. But after two years, the commission’s recommendations are far from becoming law: the plan is clearly does not offer a political solution to the United States’ deficit problem.

Many of the plan’s provisions have come under fire from both the right and the left, and economists are as starkly divided as politicians.

The task of reducing the deficit is inextricably tied to broader debates over the role of government. Alternative plans since proposed depict fundamentally different conceptions of this role.

Some emphasize pro-growth tax reform and spending reductions, while others promote redistributive policies to address rising income inequality. No bipartisan plan has reached the floor of either house of Congress, because while most legislators agree on the need for deficit reduction, the consensus stops there.

Until Congress, along with the Obama administration, achieves greater clarity on other issues: tax efficiency, tax fairness, and the size of entitlement programs, nothing short of a debt crisis will make comprehensive deficit reduction a reality.

Nor should it. Bowles-Simpson does not transcend these issues, but is rather one potential solution among many.

SIMPLIFYING THE TAX CODE At the center of the Bowles-Simpson report is an ambitious plan to reform the federal individual income and corporate tax codes. Bowles-Simpson eliminates most tax expenditures,

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“broadening the base,” and uses the extra revenue to both lower rates and reduce the deficit. For individuals, the plan cuts the number of brackets from six to three and lowers the top marginal tax rate from 35 percent (under the Bush tax cuts) to 28 percent. Similarly, corporate tax rates would decrease from 35 to 28 percent. The plan would reduce the deficit by $785 billion over eight years and increase the progressivity of the tax code.

This structure draws heavily upon the Tax Reform Act of 1986, passed with bipartisan support under President Reagan, which also limited tax expenditures and significantly lowered rates.

Indeed, base broadening, as a general principle, continues to hold fairly widespread support among economists and policy makers. As Seth Giertz, economics professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told the HPR, “A broader base is a good thing because it tends to treat different activities more equally.” Tax expenditures, by taxing certain types of saving, investment, and income differently, distort the market by “favoring the activities you’re allowing to be deducted and penalizing the ones you’re not.”

Economist James Galbraith mentions the mortgage interest deduction as one such distortion. As part of the compromise behind the 1986 law, the mortgage interest deduction remained in the tax code even though other forms of interest deductibility were cut. By making the mortgages effectively cheaper than all other loans, Galbraith told the HPR, the law created a “strong incentive to acquire a house that had some notional equity [the owner] could borrow against.” Galbraith argues this contributed to the housing bubble that burst in 2007.

According to many economists, including Giertz, removing these distortions while lowering marginal tax rates using the increased revenue from a broader base would bolster economic growth. Galbraith disagrees, pointing to the recession of the late 1980s as evidence that broadening the base and lowering rates is not a “magic formula” for increasing growth.

Many experts also recognize the political and social justifications for certain tax deductions. Giertz cites the deduction for charitable donations as a particularly desirable social policy tool. In addition, as economist Daniel Feenberg, co-author with Harvard professor and former Reagan economic advisor Martin Feldstein, told the HPR, “People have planned their lives around the existence of these tax expenditures.” Feenberg and Feldstein thus propose a cap on deductions that could gradually decrease over time, eventually phasing out most to all expenditures while giving Americans time to adjust their economic plans.

Ultimately, he calls this “a fairness argument, not an efficiency argument.”

This divide among economists on the merits of base broadening and lowering tax rates, and how to go about it, helps explain the multitude of competing tax proposals in Congress and the lack of consensus. Bowles-Simpson, while bipartisan, garners neither complete political nor economic support for its tax approach precisely because it reflects merely only one of these options.

including the wealthiest Americans, when income inequality in America is climbing. Although the plan ultimately makes the tax code slightly more progressive by eliminating tax expenditures, which tend to benefit primarily high earners, many liberals feel the wealthy should contribute even more toward paying down the debt. President Obama and Senate Democrats won this year’s election partly on that premise, and they show little sign of backing down.

Leading the charge against lowering top marginal tax rates is Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who in a recent speech rejected using the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as a model for today’s deficit reduction plan because, for one thing, its goal was not to reduce the deficit. It was revenue neutral, and could lower marginal tax rates without imposing a tax increase on the middle class. He also derides Bowles-Simpson for potentially raising net tax liability on the middle class, arguing that income inequality means the rich must contribute more.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, agrees with Schumer in prioritizing the tax code’s progressivity. “It doesn’t matter what the rate is and which loopholes and deductions are limited,” Reich told the HPR, “as long as the result is far more progressive than it is today.” He recommends capping the mortgage interest, health-care, and charitable donation deductions to raise revenues from the wealthy while protecting the middle class. By using these caps and taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income, Reich claims, “we might be able to achieve the same result Schumer wants without dramatically increasing the top marginal income tax rate.”

As vindication of these proposals, the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a highly regarded, non-partisan source for policy evidence on Capitol Hill, examined the effects of cuts on the top marginal tax rate on economic growth over the past 65 years in 18 advanced economies and found no correlation between the two. It did find, however, that top tax rates were negatively correlated with income inequality. Senate Republicans immediately rejected this analysis and called on the CRS to remove the report from publication. Although the authors of the study defended their findings, the Service complied.

Clearly, approaching tax reform in the context of deficit reduction depends on confronting the issue of inequality. As long as Democrats and Republicans emphasize inequality to different degrees, no plan or evidence will likely bring them closer together.

REVENUES AND INEQUALITY

Medicaid

The Bowles-Simpson tax plan has also come under fire from Democrats for proposing to cut marginal tax rates for all,

Bowles-Simpson’s Medicaid proposals consist of cutting administrative costs and making some structural changes, reduc-

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ENTITLEMENT REFORM Another major component of the Bowles-Simpson report is entitlement reform. The plan seeks to reduce Medicare spending largely by expanding on some aspects of Obamacare reforms, and while Medicare reform received much attention during the presidential campaign, Medicaid and Social Security reforms rarely came up. Nevertheless, policy disagreement pervades these issues.

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President Obama meets with National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. ing the deficit by about $58 billion. The report calls for further reforms if growth in total federal health care spending, including Medicaid and Medicare, exceeds GDP growth plus one percent per year over a five-year period. Joseph Newhouse, professor of health policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, told the HPR that these administrative cost reductions were “one-time kind of savings,” saying they “won’t really deal with the growth of cost problems” in the Medicaid program.

Republicans have proposed turning state-federal Medicaid cost sharing into a block-grant, meaning the federal government would give each state a pre-determined sum of money to fund its Medicaid program. This proposal seeks to reduce spending by encouraging states to innovate to best make use of their grants.

While Newhouse agrees that such a plan could reduce costs for the federal government, he claimed that “block grants in and of themselves don’t bend the cost curve” for Medicaid spending as a whole, because they merely shift costs onto the states.

Still, Newhouse points to improvements in care coordination, or medical management, that states are already making to reduce costs. For example, Newhouse suggests that shifting disabled patients and some elderly patients into the program, which Bowles-Simpson encourages, can improve efficiency in health care spending by centralizing patient care within Medicaid and thus reducing waste among the various programs.

When asked whether the Medicaid program needs reform, Newhouse responded, “a bit, but not radically.” Many conservatives, seeking to reduce spending on the program, disagree.

Social Security Bowles-Simpson also contains a plan to reduce costs and increase revenues in the Social Security Fund, not as a deficit reduction measure but as a means of preserving the program.

The plan increases benefits for the poor, decreases benefits for the wealthy, and increases the payroll tax cap to raise more revenues. It also proposes raising the retirement age from 67 to 69 years by the year 2075 and reducing the growth in benefits by calculating inflation differently.

According to economist Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, increasing the retirement age and reducing benefits as Bowles-Simpson suggests “misses what has happened in the economy over the last three decades.” Because the financial crisis ate away at private retirement accounts, the typical middle-income retiree is often “entirely dependent on Social Security” for his or her livelihood. Given this reality, he claims the reforms are merely proof of “how un-seriously [the commission] took their job.”

Baker argues, “Nothing needs to be done now” on Social Security, saying the program can pay its promised benefits for another two decades. Beyond that, he says, “It would not be difficult to determine a path that maintains full funding.” He blames the public perception of crisis in the Fund on a “wellfinanced campaign to undermine confidence in the program.”

The Mandate With the fiscal cliff looming, this lame-duck session will be occupied by attempts at a Grand Bargain to stave it off. Do not get your hopes up. Following the election, House Republicans along with Senate Democrats and President Obama all claimed an electoral mandate. While the risk of recession following the fiscal cliff seems like a good incentive to compel compromise, the chance that Democrats and Republicans will effectively come to consensus on the core principles behind deficit reduction is unlikely.

But even if they reach a deal, most likely following the spirit of Bowles-Simpson, it may not be good. Just scratching the surface of the commission report, one can begin to see the controversial assumptions and proposals lying beneath its bipartisan allure.

The disagreements are varied and complex. Congress and the president should take longer than the lame-duck session to carefully consider the trade-offs, and certainly, the debate should not stop with a report written by 18 people two years ago.

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THE STEWARTCOLBERT FACTOR Where do you draw the line between comedy and news?

Daniel Lynch 18 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW WINTER 2012

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illions of Americans watch them. They have been compared to Murrow and Cronkite, Shakespearian fools, and even Socrates. Their guests have included world leaders, celebrities, leading scientists, and everything in between. But just who and what are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert: 21st century journalists or, as they claim, mere comedians? The answer is not entirely clear-cut, as the line between comedy and journalism has blurred. Nonetheless, their position has given them a unique ability to raise issues and call out politicians in ways that mainstream journalists will not. They should embrace this power and the responsibility that comes with it.

“Fools… speak wisely what wise men do foolishly” (As You Like It 1.2) Stewart defines himself as “a comedian” and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as “fake news.” In an interview on Meet the Press, Colbert described his character on The Colbert Report as “an active idiot.” However, some have argued that the StewartColbert brand of “fake news” can actually be substantive and impactful. Their shows frequently highlight and raise awareness of serious issues, including some that may not receive sufficient attention from politicians and the mainstream media.

For instance, while many politicians decline to talk seriously about climate change, Colbert and Stewart have invited leading scientists to discuss the issue. Indeed, the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that, in 2007, The Daily Show “devoted a greater percentage of its news to science/technology and environmental stories than did the mainstream news media.”

Shortly after Colbert invited astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson on the show to criticize proposed cuts to NASA’s manned space program, President Obama, coincidentally or not, backtracked on the proposed cuts.

Similarly, Stewart repeatedly lambasted Congress for holding up benefits for 9/11 First Responders (the “Zadroga Act”), increasing coverage of the issue and arguably shaming Congress into eventually passing the bill. Meanwhile, by creating his own Super PAC, Colbert called attention to the issue of campaign finance and what he calls the “politico-industrial complex,” winning a Peabody Award for his efforts.

The substantive content of these shows has not been lost on viewers. While Stewart and Colbert insist that they are not newsmen, some, especially younger viewers, view the shows as legitimate news sources. A 2004 Pew study found that shows like The Daily Show rivaled traditional broadcast news as sources of campaign information for young adults. Meanwhile, an Indiana University study found that The Daily Show’s coverage of the 2004 campaign was as substantive as network news.

Furthermore, a 2007 Pew survey found that regular viewers of Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows were much better informed than the national average and were even better informed than those who rely on traditional news outlets.

The appeal of Stewart and Colbert may be largely driven by deep frustration with current political reality. Timothy McCarthy, Director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a cultural historian, told the HPR that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have become “place[s] where people would go to get their news because our politics ha[s] become so absurd and so…superficial and really all about a series

of performances” that are themselves much like entertainment.

Indeed, when asked if the shows ever push the envelope and become offensive, Stewart himself told Maureen Dowd, “I don’t understand how anyone can consider jokes about this stuff worse than the reality of it.”

“There’s no slander in an allowed fool” (Twelfth Night 1.5) Arguably, an advantage Stewart and Colbert have over mainstream journalists is that, like the jesters and Shakespearian fools of old, they occupy a position outside the societal, or in this case, journalistic, mainstream from which they can tear into politicians and mainstream journalists without fear of pushback or accusations of bias. According to Paul Cantor, a culture critic and visiting professor of government at Harvard, they “share with a venerable satirical tradition,” a willingness and license to “speak truth to power.” Cantor told the HPR that he has been “struck by how many times particularly Stewart has brought up an issue that the mainstream media refused to deal with.”

Clearly, Stewart takes on powerful people and weighty issues, perhaps surprising for a self-described comedian. According to McCarthy, however, “we are in a political and cultural moment where the distinction between entertainment and political journalism is being blurred.” He traces this blurring of the line between journalism and entertainment to the 1996 emergence of Fox News and MSNBC, which offer a mix of news coverage, “explicitly partisan” commentary and entertainment segments like Chris Matthews’ “Hardball Sideshow” and Bill O’Reilly’s “Dumbest Things of the Week.” McCarthy believes that the emergence of Stewart and Colbert “even further complicates and blurs those lines of distinction” between journalism and entertainment.

At times, Stewart and Colbert have even flirted with activism, though with mixed results. Their joint “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” received less-than-glowing reviews. McCarthy says that he attended the rally but left early, finding it to be “politically bankrupt” and a tremendous missed opportunity to “cross over into a serious political space while bringing all the humor and absurdity.” Meanwhile, Colbert acknowledged on Meet the Press that “everyone was critical of” his testimony before a Congressional subcommittee, which was intended to shine a light on the plight of immigrant farm workers.

This suggests a possible limit to their influence. Ultimately, McCarthy concludes, Stewart and Colbert are quite able to “generate political energy and rile people up,” but they generally do not “determine political outcomes.” Similarly, Cantor argues that, in terms of elections, “their effect is marginal.” To be clear, Colbert and Stewart have emphasized that they are not attempting to influence political outcomes or, as Stewart told Maureen Dowd, be “warriors in anyone’s army.” Their real power lies in their capacity to question authority and show, in Cantor’s words, “that the emperor has no clothes.”

“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” – Jonathan Swift Some would argue that with their present influence, whatever its extent, come certain ethical obligations. The Daily Show may claim to be “unburdened by objectivity, journalistic

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Stewart and Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear drew an estimated 215,000 people.

integrity or even accuracy,” but media experts Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini write that even “fake news” shows should be held to some journalistic standards. Williams and Carpini complain that “The Daily Show does a much better job shining a light on the foibles of others than it does taking responsibility…for its own truth claims.”

It is difficult, though, to say exactly what sort of standards Stewart and Colbert should observe. Jeffrey Seglin, Director of the Communications Program at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, told the HPR that their “ethical standard is driven by the genre they’re working in.”

Since that genre is satire, they should be afforded some “license to exaggerate and…embellish the news.” Seglin adds that the viewers, themselves, “have some responsibility to be more informed.” For example, a study published in The International Journal of Press/Politics suggested that at least some conservatives watch Colbert and fail to get the joke: they believe that he is a genuine conservative, rather than a satirist parodying conservative talk-show hosts. Seglin considers this “a problem with the viewers,” not Colbert, adding, “I don’t think there needs to be a disclaimer that says ‘this is fake news’” for a show on Comedy Central.

McCarthy broadly agrees: “I’m not sure that Stewart and Colbert should be held to the same kinds of standards as, say, New York Times journalists.” He notes that “we’re not holding the political pundits on MSNBC or Fox News, or CNN for that matter” to the traditional standards of “objectivity and ethics” either. McCarthy views this as further indication that, “the definition of what is journalism and what is entertainment [has] shifted” over the past 20 years.

Indeed, freedom from strict journalistic standards is central to the ability of Stewart and Colbert to do what they do best.

Perhaps a more apt criticism is that they tend to use their comedic license as a shield as well as a sword. McCarthy notes that

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they, and especially Stewart, have a worrisome tendency, “when they get really sharply criticized,” to “pull back and say ‘I’m just a comedian.’” McCarthy calls this an “abdication of a certain kind of political responsibility” and argues that it is difficult for them to dodge criticism in this manner and still “be taken seriously as a political force.” Stewart and Colbert may benefit from the breakdown of distinctions between politics, journalism and entertainment, but that breakdown can be a double-edged sword: as McCarthy puts it, “it’s hard…to reestablish those lines of distinction once you’ve blurred them.”

“Satire is parody with a point” – Stephen Colbert Heirs to a long tradition of political satire, Stewart and Colbert enjoy special license to expose the folly of society’s leaders.

That said, they are also very much products of their times. Their prominence, not only as comedians but also as news sources, stands as a testament to widespread popular dissatisfaction with current politics and the mainstream journalists who cover it. They epitomize the breakdown of old distinctions between entertainment and political journalism. Even if they cannot shape political outcomes, they have considerable power to inform voters, expose and shame politicians, and increase political engagement.

With this power comes a responsibility: not a responsibility to adopt the strict and confining “balanced reporting” standards of mainstream journalists, but a duty to embrace their unique capacity to enhance political discourse without retreating, as Stewart sometimes does, behind the “I’m just a comedian” shield. Just a comedian? When Comedy Central rivals mainstream network shows as a source of substantive news, perhaps Stewart would be better advised to shed the modesty and take a leaf from the in-character Colbert’s book. “I AM a comedian (and so can you!).”

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THE NEW ISRAEL LOBBY How the conventional wisdom of U.S.-Israeli relations is being turned on its head Colin Diersing

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ollowing election night 2012, most political news stories about American-Israel relations focused on the seeming failure of Sheldon Adelson to use massive political donations to change Jewish voting patterns. Meanwhile, a very different voice for the Jewish community was celebrating an incredible success story. J Street, a progressive Jewish organization focused on pushing for U.S. involvement in a two-state solution, proudly announced that 70 of its 72 candidates had won their races this year, including several closely fought ones.

The relatively young but fast-growing group is going where no advocacy group has gone before: challenging the conventional wisdom of U.S. politics and Israel.

PRO-ISRAEL HEGEMONY: AIPAC AND THE ISRAEL LOBBY The so-called Israel lobby has an almost mythic status. A survey of Capitol Hill aides places it as the second most powerful lobbying group, topped only by the enormously influential AARP. Support for Israel, although commonly disputed, is an assumed prerequisite for any successful Presidential campaign and almost any Congressional candidacy. No President since Eisenhower has actively expressed much but admiration for the country and its relationship with the United States.

How support for the Jewish state became a reflexive position for American politicians is hotly contested though. Stephen Walt, Harvard Professor and author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy told the HPR that it is attributed to the success of “a loose coalition that works actively and openly to strengthen the so-called special relationship and maintain unconditional support for Israel,” a group he deems the Israel Lobby. The centerpiece of what Walt describes as a large and highly effective, although not centrally coordinated, political group is AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, which organizes an-

nual conferences and engages in aggressive lobbying in support of a close U.S.-Israel relationship.

Most of its supporters insist that AIPAC does not represent a particular ideology. Alan Dershowitz, an active supporter of the organization and author of The Case for Israel, argues AIPAC “makes the 80 percent case for Israel,” focusing on issues on which most pro-Israel Americans agree.

Others, however, see AIPAC as drifting to the right and away from support of a two-state solution. Walt sees three reasons for this. The first is that AIPAC has traditionally supported positions mirroring the national Israeli government, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party has recently dominated Israeli domestic politics. The second, a theme echoed by dissatisfied Jewish-Americans in other interviews with the HPR, is that political influence within AIPAC has flowed to more rightwing factions because they have donated more actively. The result, progressive organizations assert, is an American political conversation dominated by those who support a belligerent foreign policy and oppose a two-state solution to the conflict.

PRO-ISRAEL, PRO-PEACE J-STREET AND A JEWISH LEFT A Second Voice for Pro-Israel The most notable response to AIPAC’s supposed rightward shift has been the rise of an organized and independent proIsrael left. Commonly referring to themselves as pro-Israel, pro-peace groups, these organizations focus on supporting U.S. advocacy in the Middle East both for Israel’s existence and an eventual agreement on a two-state solution to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. The most notable of these groups, both in terms of media focus and fundraising prowess, is the young but

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Vice President Biden signs Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s official guestbook.

growing J Street.

Founded four years ago, J Street proclaims itself “the home for pro-Israel, pro-Peace Americans.” Representatives from the organization argue that they are not staking out a new position but are rather representing the American Jewish community mainstream. “If you look at where we are in terms of the Jewish community, we’re already representing the majority,” J Street Government Affairs Director Dylan Williams told the HPR. Pointing to polling indicating that the vast majority of American Jews support a two-state solution, J Street staff argued that they are quickly growing and changing the politics of U.S.-Israel relations.

Building to Compete In just four years, J-Street has built an impressive political operation, complete with a lobbying presence, grassroots, and fundraising PAC, an almost entirely unique organization. Williams explains that, “previous groups worked almost exclusively on the grassroots… having popular support is not enough… you have to show people there’s nothing to fear from making the right decision.”

Williams argues that eliminating this fear involves providing financial support to candidates. The fundraising PAC, which J Street claims is the largest pro-Israel PAC, distributed more than $1.5 million to candidates for the last two election cycles.

However, although nominally nonpartisan, the organization only endorsed Democrats this cycle. The goal, according to Director of Political Affairs Dan Kalik, is to undermine the “false narrative that people who don’t follow hawkish positions will lose… financial support from the Jewish community.” If Kalik is correct, then J Street’s growth should encourage more politicians to publicly support the two-state solution.

When asked about their ability to match AIPAC’s scope however, J Street is quick to highlight their relative youth, and Kalik says, “We’re still a pretty new organization.” Still, Williams argues J Street does not need to rival AIPAC in size. “We have assets they don’t have,” Williams asserts, “like the majority of the

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community,” and by simply offering an alternative voice to politicians J Street has begun to shatter ceilings. Williams continues, “Some [Congressmen] had always assumed Jewish donors were right-wing on Israel,” and are shocked to find out that many donors were supportive for reasons unrelated to Israel.

Critics Fire Back J Street’s rise, however, has not come without significant criticism, even from liberal advocates. Dershowitz, a longtime Democrat, says that the organization is “misleading the public by calling itself pro-Israel.” Dershowitz, like many supporters of AIPAC and other traditional pro-Israel organizations, is angered

by J-Street’s aggressive attitude in opposing certain pro-Israel factions.

Dershowitz also echoes common concerns that J Street has gone too far in opposing aggressive policies towards Iran, saying, “they’ve undercut [the Obama administration’s position] on Iran,” and undercut Israel’s security. J Street counters, “Alan Dershowitz seems to be championing loose talk of war,” something they quickly underscore President Obama has explicitly opposed.

Dershowitz’s criticisms occasionally trend toward the personal, revealing both long-standing connections being challenged by J Street’s rise and the sense of betrayal among supporters of other organizations. Dershowitz states that he offered to build a left-wing, pro-Israel organization under AIPAC with J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Amin, but alleges “[Ben-Amin] wanted to build his own organization.”

This tone underscores the tense and frequently aggressive tone of leaders in the pro-Israel movement. AIPAC and its allies remain the clear frontrunner in terms of organization and power, but the defensiveness among Dershowitz and others suggests that the impressive growth of J Street’s political and fundraising operations is game changing. The ultimate policy direction is unclear, but we have entered a ferocious battle that will determine what ‘pro-Israel’ means, and this could change a longstanding cornerstone of American politics.

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THE HARVARD COLLEGE MODEL The Future of Affirmative Action?

David Freed

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isher v. Texas, a recent Supreme Court case, has brought the topic of affirmative action once again to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. Plaintiff Abigail Fisher sued the University of Texas-Austin in 2008, claiming that racial preferences in the admissions process led to her rejection.

As a leading actor on the issue, Harvard College has been continuously entangled with the politics of affirmative action.

In the first university affirmative action Supreme Court case, Regents of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell opined that other universities should attempt to follow the Harvard College model in weighing race as one among many factors. In the 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reaffirmed that admissions processes may favor “underrepresented minority groups” but could not use explicit quota systems as struck down in Gratz v. Bollinger. Yet, with affirmative action hanging in the balance, the new ‘Harvard College model’ remains a progressive leader in the field, creating comprehensive socioeconomic and racial diversity in the classroom and offering a pathway for future affirmative action.

A LONG HISTORY IN THE COURTS The 1996 Hopwood v. Texas case marked the first major victory for affirmative action opponents. With eerily similar facts to the Fisher case, a group of four white University of Texas School of Law applicants sued the university after being rejected despite having better test scores than many admitted minority students. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe unsuccessfully argued the case pro-bono in the Fifth Circuit for UT Austin. At the time, University President Robert Berdahl called the decision “the virtual re-segregation of higher education.”

The state of Texas quickly made legislative amends with the enactment of the “top 10 percent” policy. The law now requires public state universities to accept all applicants in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. Although recently revised down to the eight percent mark, the policy uses the de-facto segregation

of Texas society to ensure racial diversity in higher education.

A UT Austin professor who requested anonymity told the HPR, “it was a remedy for a situation in which we had been forbidden to consider race in admissions. In private schools like Harvard, they are not barred from doing that but our hands were tied by the Fifth Circuit. The main virtue of it was in that a situation where we were forbidden to consider race, the law allowed us to have a very diverse campus.”

After the Court handed down the Grutter decision in 2003, the university began to consider race in its evaluation of non-top 10 percent applicants. Although top 10 percent applicants made up 81 percent of admitted students in 2008, the year Fisher was rejected, UT Austin admissions director Kendra Ishop reiterated the need to use a holistic process of admissions.

“Race and cultural background has a part in the process of character review,” Ishop told the HPR. “Automatic admissions rules have been in place since Grutter, but it’s only a tool in the toolbox, not the entire toolbox.”

REPARATIVE OR EDUCATIONAL? Ishop argues that “all diversity has a role in racial education” and says in the applicant pool, “students represent a variety of diverse situations, and we want all of those to be represented at our school.” She defends the policy on the more conventional basis of promoting racial diversity in the classroom. Ever since the Supreme Court upgraded the standard of scrutiny for affirmative action, forcing defendants to give a “compelling state interest” for justifying their policy instead of just a “rational basis,” a legally crucial distinction, arguments defending the policy have shifted from repairing past wrongs to its benefits for campus diversity.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior member at the Century Foundation, a non-profit think tank, told the HPR that he thinks “most universities view affirmative action as a way of promoting a more racially and ethnically diverse student body, which trans-

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Agassiz House is home to Harvard’s Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid Office.

lates into a better learning environment for students.” However, Kahlenberg acknowledged that the idea of the college application process as anything less than a full meritocracy bothered Americans who feel discriminated against by the policy, particularly poor whites who are seen as undesirable applicants by universities.

“I think the American public sees institutions of higher education as a gateway to the American dream and therefore would put a big premium on [an] admission system that they see as fair and genuinely meritocratic,” Kahlenberg said. Kahlenberg, who advocates reform of the system to produce both greater socioeconomic and racial equality, says that “the complete focus on racial and ethnic diversity has allowed selective colleges and universities to avoid large issues of class and equality.”

Kahlenberg cites a recent book by UCLA law professor Richard Sander, Mismatch, which details the harmful consequences of affirmative action. The book argues that through race-based affirmative action, blacks from lower-income brackets are more likely to enter college than their white socioeconomic counterparts, but are far more likely to earn lower grades, “rank towards the bottom of their class, and drop out.” Kahlenberg says that when students are mismatched with an institution because of affirmative action, “studies show that they are more likely to steer away from math and science and fail the bar exam.”

Kahlenberg is not alone in his desire for substantial reform.

Nine states have already struck down affirmative action through voter initiative or action by state legislatures, and a January Rasmussen poll reported that 55 percent of Americans oppose the policy.

MOVING TO THE FUTURE The Century Foundation recently released a paper titled “A Better Affirmative Action: State Universities That Created Alternatives to Racial Preferences.” The paper, co-written by Kahlenberg, argues against the need for racial consideration in admissions decisions and in favor of holistic socioeconomic models. The approach is similar to those taken by Sander and other intellectuals in the field, who support alternative policies that incorporate other measures of diversity.

Kahlenberg, himself a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, thinks that the contemporary Harvard

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College model of admissions offers a blueprint for the future of affirmative action. He says, “Under the leadership of Larry Summers and Bill Fitzsimmons in the admission office, Harvard has made a concerted effort to bring in low-income students of all races [along with] students of color, and in my mind that’s a big step forward in making affirmative action more inclusive of socioeconomic status.”

Kahlenberg adds that Harvard and Amherst are the only two universities that have done this for admissions, stating, “universities normally do not care about socioeconomic diversity for its own sake.” He views the UT situation with Hopwood as a perfect example of what must happen to bring change: a legal impetus that forces universities to consider other options. “The only way to get universities interested is to ban the use of race,” Kahlenberg said. “It’s only once you ban the use of race for universities that they push for using socioeconomic affirmative action as a way of indirectly achieving racial diversity.”

Recent history supports Kahlenberg’s thesis, with Florida and California both adopting similar policies after voter initiatives banning affirmative action were passed. The Century Foundation report also details how socioeconomic diversity promotes a larger variety of individuals in the classroom.

A similar study by Georgetown University professors Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose argues that a merit-based system that considers socioeconomic disadvantages would boost the percentage of students from the bottom socioeconomic half without lowering graduation rates. Both reports cite polls that demonstrate while public support for traditional affirmative action is waning, support for the socioeconomic admissions model is increasing.

“If the value of diversity from an education standpoint is based in large measure on the different life experiences that students bring to the classroom, then a white student growing up in a trailer home, a black student growing up in the ghetto, or a Latino studen[t] growing up in a barrio is likely to bring as much diversity as the son of a doctor or lawyer, no matter his race,” the report says.

Regardless of what happens in the high court, affirmative action appears to be taking a different turn. While not every school has the ability to provide the financial aid required for a policy like the one Kahlenberg advocates, modern policy trends towards Kahlenberg’s vision. Once again, Harvard College is trailblazing a path for other universities to follow.

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DRUG PROHIBITION: THE INTERNATIONAL ALTERNATIVES Peter Kaplan

Presently, the War on Drugs faces crisis. The United States has thrown more money at restricting drug flows than any other nation, and yet continues to suffer high drug use rates. Despite the Obama administration’s rhetorical efforts to adjust the U.S. approach on drugs, our primary focus remains on interdiction and law enforcement. These strategies have been disastrous, leading to excessive violence and wasteful spending, while doing little to combat drug use.

Upon reflection, the solutions cannot be found in good oldfashioned American stubbornness and commitment to values because the problem is strategic, not tactical. America’s failure stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of appropriate policy. The U.S. needs to import other nations’ ideas for its drug program instead of expending money and weapons for more law enforcement.

EUROPEAN LEADERSHIP A leading innovator of progressive drug policy is the Netherlands. The precedent for the Netherlands’ drug policy is the Opium Act of 1919, which criminalized the possession, cultivation, trafficking, import and export of drugs, including marijuana. In 1976 an amendment was passed in response to the Hulsmann and Baan commissions, whose purposes were to “clarify the factors associated with the use of drugs.”

The amendment reorganized drugs into two schedules for

the Netherlands. Schedule 1 is composed of drugs deemed unacceptable in terms of the risk they impose on society, including heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. Schedule 2 includes soft drugs, chiefly among them marijuana.

The schedule system was designed so that drugs are criminalized only when their use poses a threat to society. Given that marijuana use is distinct from hard drug use in its perceived addictive and socially destructive properties, the Dutch legal framework called for its decriminalization. Moreover, the commissions believed that any connection between marijuana and hard drugs could be severed by creating clear distinctions in the drug market through decriminalization.

Portugal followed the Netherlands in 2001 when it eliminated jail sentences for all drugs. This decision included hard drugs, a step significantly further than the Netherlands had gone.

This ultra-progressive policy resulted from a study undertaken by the Commission for a National Anti-Drug Strategy. It decriminalized all drug use, but maintained penalties for production and trafficking. Fees and treatments for drug use were decided by three member panels, which included law and medical experts. Portugal prioritized reducing societal harm in its national drug policy and realized that minimizing drug abuse and death especially entailed eliminating barriers to treatment.

By effectively decriminalizing all drugs, they eliminated disincentives to seeking treatment, emphasizing rehabilitation.

Brendan Hughes, a legal expert at the European

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A medical marijuana dispensary in Denver, Colorado.

Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, says that the concept of decriminalization is a “red herring.” He explains that other European nations have implemented forms of decriminalization, which include eliminating prison sentences and greater rehabilitation. But Portugal’s innovation is that drug use does not fall under the jurisdiction of law enforcement. Instead, the Ministry of Health administers all drug policy, as rather drug use is treated exclusively as a health problem.

The Portuguese experiment’s results have been generally positive. Examining basic statistics for cannabis, cocaine, and opiates, Portugal and the Netherlands have significantly lower usage rates than the U.S. and are below the European average. Drug-related HIV cases remain elevated, but have steadily declined in recent years, and the evidence shows that society has improved since the new policy. The key take away is that while decriminalization and putting drug policy under the purview of medical professionals are not panaceas for Portugal’s drug problems, they have not opened the floodgates to uncontrolled outbreaks of drug abuse.

The national policies of both Portugal and the Netherlands reflect progressive global thinking on drug policy. But even their decriminalization strategies pale when compared with Uruguay’s new proposal. Uruguay already has decriminalized use and possession for all drugs, but to respond to the heavy

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toll that the drug war has taken on Latin America, Uruguay is considering full marijuana legalization. The government would control the growth, sale, and transport of marijuana, with every citizen being allotted a 40 joint limit per month.

Uruguay’s marijuana usage contributes somewhere between 35 and 75 million dollars into the illegal drug trade every month. Removing that money would cause more damage to drug lords than continued attempts at interdiction. The government hopes that by providing a safer, more reliable legal product, it will also rupture the connection between marijuana and hard drug users. There have also been strong calls for national conversations about drug legalization in both Guatemala and Costa Rica, and Argentina and Brazil are seriously considering decriminalizing all drugs.

Meanwhile, incarceration for drug use is declining across Europe, as courts prescribe rehabilitative measures.

This evolution is guided by an EU wide, integrated, multidisciplinary, and balanced approach that disposes of existing moral baggage and embraces scientific decisionmaking. The EU supports a harm reduction approach to drug control, representing an ideological shift away from criminal prosecution that is spreading globally. The common thread linking the South American and EU countries is recognition that aggressive interdiction policies and harsh criminal penalties for drug use have not been effective.

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The U.S. needs to import other nations’ ideas for its drug program instead of expending money and weapons for more law enforcement.

AMERICAN DRUG POLICY The United States remains an exception to this trend.

Despite the Obama administration’s efforts to increase federal funding for drug treatment, federal expenditures for 2012 totaled $15.1 billion towards interdiction and $10.1 billion for rehabilitation. While rehabilitation efforts are increasing, the essence of U.S. drug philosophy is still defined by stiff prison sentences. Marijuana is considered a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act, and the federal government has maintained that it belongs there. Therefore, the law demands that users, distributors, and growers be prosecuted.

This law stands even though many experts maintain that marijuana poses little threat of abuse, addiction, overdose, or progression towards harder drugs. One must note that the American debate concerning practical approaches to drug use has taken a sharply different track from other western nations.

Generally, there are three main international alternate approaches. The Netherlands and most European countries have largely decreased the severity of punishments associated with drug use. Meanwhile, in Portugal, drug policy has been completely removed from the criminal system and is now exclusively a medical issue. Finally, Uruguay, disenchanted by years of drug violence and crime, is trying to extricate itself

altogether from the drug market.

These approaches vary in practicality for the U.S. The Uruguayan model is unrealistic, because the United States still has a dedicated interest in reducing drug use and its associated health risks. Also, members of the United Nations must adhere to the UN 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which prohibits the production and supply of narcotic drugs. This effectively eliminates the possibility of U.S. national legalization. While some states like Washington and Colorado passed laws to legalize marijuana, possession of cannabis on American soil violates federal law.

The fact that so many countries have moved toward reducing punishments for drug use indicates a vastly different understanding of the drug problem. Criminal prosecution should be limited to actions which harm society, and many who try drugs, especially cannabis, do not become addicted.

Those who do become addicted are suffering from a disease, becoming physically dependent on drugs.

The development of black markets, violence over distribution, and aversion to treatment due to the threat of punishment harms society. Portugal, the Netherlands, and other EU nations have listened to science and pursued rational policies to protect their citizens. They abandoned classical disapproval of drug use when evidence showed such disapproval unfounded; the U.S. must do the same.

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A MIRAGE IN THE SAHARA: THE FRAGILITY OF AZAWAD Matthew Disler

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t is not every day that half a country secedes, but that is exactly what happened in Mali earlier this year. On April 6, after months of fighting, a representative of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) formally declared independence for Azawad, a region in north Mali. The rebel group drove the Malian army out, plunging the region into chaos.

The MNLA, comprised of Tuaregs, a group of pastoralist Saharan Berbers, soon found itself in conflict with a number of Islamist groups, namely Ansar Dine, the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA), and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

The MNLA and the Islamists have markedly different goals: while the former supports the establishment of a more secular, independent state, the latter is much more concerned with the enforcement of sharia law. Even within the Islamist insurgency, however, tension is brewing.

So far, the Islamists have gained the upper hand over the Tuareg rebels. Cities formerly occupied by the MNLA, including Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu, have fallen into the hands of Ansar Dine and its allies. In Timbuktu, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, members of Ansar Dine destroyed shrines of 15th century Muslim saints, claiming that the worship of such figures violated sharia law. Although the MNLA contends that it still retains power, it is becoming increasingly clear that Islamists wield real authority. The Islamist rise and failure of the south Malian democratic regime are troubling to many neighbors

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who are facing similar problems with separatism and religious fundamentalism.

Many also wonder how the MNLA could defeat the government but fall to the Islamist groups. However, the Tuareg rebellion’s success is attributed to the weakness of the Malian state rather than organizational or material superiority: though the rebels had not increased their strength since their last rebellion in 2009 they were still able to defeat the frail government, while their own enduring weaknesses left them vulnerable to Islamists.

Ultimately, for many weak West African states, Azawad is a destabilizing factor, and if these governments hope to maintain order, they must cooperate. But, regardless of the geopolitical arrangements that unfold in the coming months, the Azawad will remain shrouded in violence for the foreseeable future.

THE BLUE MAN GROUP Known as the “blue people” for their distinctive clothing color, the Tuareg have long been in conflict with the Malian government. Previous insurgencies amounted to little in terms of territorial gain. However, this rebellion is unique because it was supported by fighters who were trained under Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. After Gaddafi fell, these soldiers returned to north Mali, bringing with them the weapons they had used abroad.

Yet, as University of Ghent professor Baz Lecocq told the HPR, the presence of new heavy weaponry is “overplayed in

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most media.” Rather, the crucial differences between this rebellion and its predecessors were threefold. First, much of the fighting this time around has resulted in the capture of major cities, and second, the current rebellion consists of many more independent groups with different goals.

Most importantly, explains Lecocq, “the main reason [for the rebels’ success] is that their adversary,” the Malian government and army, has “collapsed.” During the fighting early this year, government forces were continually losing ground. Disillusioned with the leadership of President Amadou Toumani Touré in response to the Tuareg rebellion, army forces staged a coup d’état. The new leaders hoped that the putsch would improve the army’s capacity to fight the rebels. However, the disorder in the capital only strengthened the relative power of the MNLA and the other groups operating in Azawad. Northern Mali fell into the hands of a new, markedly weak authority, meaning that the fledgling state of Azawad was vulnerable to takeover by stronger Islamist groups.

SHARIA IN THE SAHARA To determine what made the Islamist groups in Mali relatively strong against the MNLA, one must examine their origins. Michael Lambert, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, tells the HPR, “This brand of Islam that is being imposed in northern Mali is very foreign to that part of West Africa.”

AQIM, the oldest of the three organizations, originated from a guerrilla Islamist movement, the Armed Islamist Group (GIA), which fought against the secular Algerian military government in the 1990s. Many GIA fighters were trained in Afghanistan as mujahedeen during that country’s insurgency against the Soviet Union. There they absorbed the doctrines of Salafism, a brand of Islamic fundamentalism, and learned the principles of anti-secular combat, which they brought back to the Maghreb.

AQIM eventually split from the GIA and aligned itself with the larger al-Qaeda movement. MUJWA broke off from AQIM in late 2011 with the express goal of expanding Islamism further into Africa.

Ansar Dine though is indigenous, and the goals of its leader, Iyad ag Ghaly, are somewhat unclear. Ag Ghaly began operating as a Tuareg rebel, and eventually helped negotiate a peace deal with the Malian national government. Later, as a government employee, he traveled to Saudi Arabia, and came into contact with extremist groups abroad. Gradually, he evolved from a womanizer and notoriously heavy drinker to a devout Islamist. At a meeting with other Tuareg leaders in October 2011, he offered to lead the MNLA; however, his desire to impose sharia law in Azawad led to his rejection. The question, then, is whether he is fighting for religious or personal political reasons.

The various Islamist groups are also linked with each other and with foreign groups. MUJWA has ties to Boko Haram, another fundamentalist group operating in northern Nigeria.

AQIM is connected to the larger al-Qaeda network, and the leaders of AQIM and Ansar Dine are relatives. However, Lambert says, “These are real groups. They’re very different, and just because Ansar Dine has an Islamist agenda doesn’t mean that they’re al-Qaeda.” Crucially, the three groups are capable of operating in tandem in northern Mali, even if their goals are not the same.

In contrast, the MNLA is avowedly secular, and has few alliances with other groups. Thus, the Tuareg find themselves battling a network of militias, each capable of waging separate guerrilla wars, meaning the MNLA faces an extraordinarily difficult task in reasserting control over Azawad.

ECOWAS TO THE RESCUE? The international community has been growing increasingly concerned about the situation in Mali, hoping that it avoids the fate of Afghanistan and Somalia in becoming another chaotic multinational battleground against Islamism. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) recently approved the deployment of 3,300 troops to Azawad, and plans will be submitted to both the African Union and United Nations Security Council.

The two international players with the largest stake in Mali appear to be France and ECOWAS, though Algeria, which has long attempted to increase leadership in the region, may also exert significant influence. “For France, part of [its interest] is concern for a former colony. You can’t completely erase that,” explains Lecocq. “The other is that al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is a direct threat to French interests, not so much in Mali as in Niger.” French businesses operating in Niger have fallen prey to AQIM attacks. In 2010, seven workers for the French nuclear energy company Areva were kidnapped in Niger and transported to Mali. Though three have been released, an additional pair of French nationals was taken hostage later, and France has recently sent military surveillance drones over Azawad.

Most of the military burden though will probably fall to ECOWAS. Many member nations have faced similar legitimacy problems of their own over the past few decades, and ECOWAS forces have been instrumental in ending conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Furthermore, the links between the Islamist groups in Mali and insurgent activities in neighboring states threaten to destabilize the entire region. Leaders have been urging Alassane Ouattara, the President of Cote d’Ivoire and current chairman of ECOWAS, to develop military plans.

However, the international community has disagreed over what military involvement should look like. Assistant Professor at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies Dr. Benjamin Nickels tells the HPR, “The easy way to characterize these various differences of views is… [some] feel that something must be done as soon as possible to reduce AQIM and other Islamist violent extremist groups operating in the North, and [others] are not ready to act without further preparations.

What constitutes success is an important part of this debate.”

Rebuilding the Malian state requires a different approach than simply kicking out the Islamists, and the dissension between international advocates of each approach will play an important role in determining Mali’s fate.

Overall, the conflict in Azawad will continue and consume many lives, and before 2012 ends, it will likely have involved a wide swath of the global community. However, foreign players should recognize that they will not end the problems of northern Mali simply by ousting Ansar Dine, MUJWA, and AQIM. Azawad is a warning to ECOWAS, reminding them just how important the capacity and legitimacy of each member state is to regional security.

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From Riga to Athens: Can the Baltic Model Be Applied Elsewhere?

Krister Koskelo Latvia is usually quite unremarkable: in the words of The Economist, “Even Latvians’ fans rarely call them exciting.” Yet the obscure Baltic nation has recently drawn attention, along with its neighbors Estonia and Lithuania, for its quick recovery from the financial crisis through strict austerity and internal devaluation. Indeed, Christine Lagarde, IMF Managing Director, has held Latvia up as a model for other crisis-ridden countries like Greece.

There are certainly many factors that separate Latvia and the Baltics from Greece and the struggling countries of southern Europe. Among these are the differing origins of the crisis, divergent economic structures, and opposing political and social climates. Despite these differences however, the Latvian recovery and so-called “Baltic model” hold valuable lessons for the troubled Eurozone periphery, and Greece in particular.

ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS It is difficult to understand the crisis and its subsequent management without examining at the pre-meltdown economic situation. In Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the 1990s and 2000s were marked by huge strides in economic growth. All three countries profited greatly from the introduction of marketoriented policies after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Jeffrey Anderson, director for European Affairs at the Institute for International Finance, points out that Latvia gained from Russia’s strong recovery after the Russian devaluation of 1998, and from a reorientation of exports towards Western Europe.

During the previous decade, large inflows of credit and foreign domestic investment led to easy borrowing conditions and a spending boom by consumers, especially in real estate. Current account deficits mushroomed, growing from an already significant 6.6 percent of GDP in 2003 to 22.5 percent by 2007.

Toms Silins, ex-CFO of the Latvian arm of Swedish bank giant Swedbank, told the HPR that although some overheating was visible in the form of relatively high inflation, both the banking sector and Latvian policymakers were “overly optimistic on how to solve the issue.” In general, according to Silins, everyone expected that a convergence of living standards to Western European norms and the timely joining into the Eurozone would iron out any difficulties.

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Night falls upon an empty town square in Riga, Latvia.

In Greece by comparison, there was a similar boom and optimistic expectations. However, unlike in Latvia, investors’ expectations for tangible benefits were realized very quickly.

Because Greece joined the Eurozone starting in 2001, investors perceived minimal risk with Greek assets, and its borrowing costs were almost as low as Germany’s. Government and consumers alike took advantage of low interest rates to go on a spending spree, running budget deficits averaging 5.7 percent of GDP between 2001 and 2007, while Latvia’s deficits only averaged 1.2 percent.

THE CRISIS HITS LATVIA In the Baltics, the crisis started in late 2007 when foreign banks started pulling back the easy credit. It was then exacerbated exponentially by Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy in September 2008. Latvia was hit hardest. Its government was forced to nationalize the largest domestic bank, Parex Bank, to prevent the collapse of the financial system. This in turn caused Latvia’s budget deficit to balloon and forced the nation to seek a bailout loan from the IMF and European Commission in February 2009.

Latvia refused to follow the IMF’s advice to devalue the Latvian currency (the lat) relative to the Euro, choosing internal devaluation and austerity instead. Anders Åslund, an expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the HPR that a “small economy [like Latvia] can’t safeguard itself with a floating exchange rate” because of volatility concerns.

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Hence, a currency peg is necessary. Had Latvia followed the recommendation to devalue its currency, he argues, the fall in the lat’s value would have been devastating, leading to “mass bankruptcies of banks” and a large risk of hyperinflation. Silins, who was working closely with the Latvian Central Bank at the time, notes that though a sharp devaluation could have led to a “quick adjustment,” it would have only masked the economy’s structural problems temporarily. Åslund and Silins concur that the only way for Latvia to address its structural problems was through internal devaluation, which necessitated real structural reforms. Wages were drastically cut, often by 50 percent, controlling labor costs, which had been “shooting through the roof.” Government expenditures were significantly reduced and substantial tax and judicial reforms were pushed through. The sharp and frontloaded austerity led to a whopping 17.7 percent decline in real GDP in 2009, and unemployment rose to 21 percent.

These drastic measures would have been impossible without significant political and social support. On the political front, Mark Griffiths, head of Latvia’s IMF program, noted in a recent interview with the IMF Survey Online that the Latvian government took “strong political ownership of the program” from the very beginning and, despite the hardships, was “determined to show us [the IMF] and the world that their program would succeed.”

On the social front, Silins tells the HPR that Latvians have “got[ten] used to some pain.” Silins notes that “people remembered how things were before,” and Latvian policymakers did a good job of explaining that the boom of the 2000s was unsustainable. The efforts of policymakers, combined with the IMF’s discussions during the crisis with stakeholders like trade unions and pensioner groups, allowed for the creation of what Anderson calls a “broad-based social consensus” for austerity and structural reform.

Citizens recognized that these measures were necessary, allowing Latvia to avoid large-scale social unrest. Thanks to this broad support, Latvians even twice re-elected the main implementer of austerity, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis. Latvia remains the only country in Europe enforcing austerity to have done so.

While unemployment still remains extremely high, 15.8 percent as of June 2012, Åslund notes that it is largely a specific problem relating to the way wages are taxed, and does not negate the fact that overall, austerity has put Latvia’s economy on a more sustainable path, with a return to strong positive growth. Griffiths argues that Latvia’s economy is much less vulnerable, and that the “banking system is more stable.” Indeed, “Latvia today,” Åslund asserts, “is very competitive.”

CONTRASTS WITH THE SOUTH Latvia’s “success story,” as outlined above, contrasts quite markedly with Greece’s economic descent. Anderson argues that Greece’s crisis did not really start until the second half of 2009, partly because of its reliance on tourism, but more importantly because the Greek crisis was triggered by the revelation that the deficit and debt numbers previously reported had been falsified.

The revelations widened Greek and German yield spreads from approximately zero to over nine percentage points, as investors belatedly realized that a substantial risk premium did exist. As

soon as Greek bond yields increased, the Greek government had no more “margin of error,” as Anderson tells the HPR, because their debt burden was an already substantial 110 percent of GDP, compared with Latvia’s pre-crisis level of 19.8 percent.

Prohibitive yields drove the government to seek bailouts from the EU and IMF. Being a member of the Eurozone, Greece obviously had no way to initiate currency devaluation, and hence had to adopt internal devaluation and austerity. Åslund notes that Greece’s initial progress in reforms was slow: in the first year, the already bloated Greek public sector actually increased by 5,000 workers.

Whereas Latvia carried out its austerity through a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases, Greek austerity has been overwhelmingly dominated by tax increases, leaving public spending at 50 percent of GDP compared to 38 percent in Latvia.

Anderson argues that the flexibility of labor markets and the degree of openness of the economies represent the two key differences. Latvia’s flexibility allowed both the price and quantity of labor to adjust. Greece’s markets, however, do not allow for wage cuts because of union resistance and various other structural factors; thus, Greece can only adjust its labor quantity, causing unemployment to rise substantially higher and dimming the prospects for recovery. Furthermore, whereas Latvia capitalized on the global recovery due to its heavy reliance on exports that comprise 60 percent of GDP, Greece is heavily reliant on its small domestic market, with exports accounting only for 25 percent of GDP. Politically and socially, Greeks had become habituated to unsustainably high levels of debt-financed public services.

Furthermore, throughout the early 2000s, Greece’s vested interests retained costly privileges. Hence, Anderson notes that although Greece has so far carried out more fiscal consolidation than Latvia, it is nearly impossible to sustain any political support for reforms that affect powerful interest groups. Politicians have also done a poor job of explaining the need for austerity and creating consensus. It is unsurprising then that there has been much social opposition and unrest in Greece against austerity.

Yet overall, the differences between the two cases serve largely to highlight what must be changed in Greece, rather than constituting an argument for why the Latvian model cannot be applied. For example, nearly all economists agree that open economies are preferable, and that the more flexible the labor market, the better the economy functions. Thus, Greece and the other southern European nations need to implement structural reforms and make their labor markets look more like Latvia’s.

Government debt must be manageable to maintain investor confidence; hence, Åslund also argues that structural reforms in Greece should have been tied to debt restructuring.

For Åslund, the difference between Latvia and Greece boils down to willingness to carry out bold ideas. He lauds the frontloading of Latvia’s painful measures, which allowed Latvia to start recovering quickly and regain investor confidence. Åslund maintains that Greece only initially required a fiscal consolidation of similar magnitude, around 20 percent of GDP, but because it was not carried out decisively, Greece was stuck in a quagmire of “too little, too slow, with no structural reforms.”

Even if one does not argue, as Åslund does, that Latvia provides a model for “exactly what should be done” in such a crisis, Greece is the counterexample of “how to do everything wrong.”

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MOSCOW AND BEIJING: THE UNEASY PARTNERSHIP

Tom Lemberg

In June, shortly before his official visit to Shanghai, Russian president Vladimir Putin published a lengthy article promoting Sino-Russian cooperation on economics, energy and international security. Such a partnership is perceived as a nightmarish prospect for Western geopolitical interests. Indeed, the two countries have made a recent point of obstructing Western initiatives in international organizations: Russia and China have thrice exercised the rare double veto on sanctions against Syria, and China’s refusal to follow Iranian sanctions has rendered them largely ineffective. Additionally, Western interests might potentially suffer if the rapidly expanding Chinese economy guzzles Russian oil, creating greater contention in the global political arena.

Nonetheless, while it seems poetic that history’s most famous socialist powers would ally against the West, the alliance itself might not be fundamentally strong. Although both countries are governed by shrewd leaders, they share little ideological common ground. Richard Rousseau, chairman of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Khazar University, tells the HPR, “Russia and China’s cultures differ greatly, their interests in Central Asia will sooner or later clash, East Siberia is potentially a flash point, and China’s military buildup is frightening Moscow.” Moreover, China gives little indication that it will consider Russian interests when determining its oth-

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erwise pragmatic, economically-driven and nationalistic foreign policy, especially given that Chinese leaders are frequently offended by the conduct of Russian political elites.

Overall, though an ideological union between Russia and China against the West seems far-fetched, the geopolitical stakes of Sino-Russian cooperation are strong enough to merit some demystification and exploration of how relations between these two giants could cause headaches for the West.

ENERGY POLITICS In Russia, fossil fuels and political power are inextricably connected phenomena, both domestically and abroad. Over a third of government revenue is collected from Russia’s stateowned oil and gas companies, and in the foreign policy domain, Russia derives bargaining power from its overwhelming dominance in European oil and gas markets: 90 percent of European natural gas and over half of European oil flows through Russian pipelines. Furthermore, in January 2009, a dispute with Ukraine over unpaid debts led Russia to shut down European-bound gas supplies, for which Russia suffered no serious repercussions.

Even more alarming, Russia has on several occasions used its clout to cancel the construction of a Trans-Caspian Pipeline, a proposed project that would deliver oil directly from Central

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Asia to Europe, bypassing Russia completely.

Although Russia and China both have much to gain by increasing their energy trade cooperation, they have not always cooperated on the issue. Erica Downs, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Horton China Center, tells the HPR, “The Russians wanted to construct a pipeline in the late 90s, when oil prices were low and the Russian economy needed jumpstarting, but at the time China wasn’t interested in spending money on energy security projects. Looking at late 2002 to 2008 there was great interest on the Chinese part because their imports were growing quite rapidly, but the Russians, feeling empowered by the rise of oil process, were less interested.”

Only after the global financial crisis did hard-hit Russian oil companies and energy-thirsty China finally provide mutual support for the construction of a Sino-Russian oil pipeline. The history of the pipeline reflects Sino-Russian energy dynamics, as both Russia and China are inclined to play the needs of the other to their own respective national advantages. Providing further evidence for this competition of interests, the first oil pipeline to cross the Sino-Russian border, completed in January 2011, was funded largely by Chinese loans.

A BOLSTERED RUSSIA There are two potential scenarios that could play out in global politics as a result of accelerating trade on the Sino-Russian border. In the first, less likely scenario, energy trade with China would increase geopolitical cooperation between the two countries, allowing Russia even greater leverage in international organizations. Such a scenario is perhaps plausible in the near future, given that close economic cooperation with Russia will be critical for China to meet its rapidly growing energy demands: not only does Russia have vast oil and gas reserves, but it also has the nuclear expertise to improve China’s nuclear energy production, which is quite small relative to other developing countries.

This scenario entailing planned cooperation in geopolitics would pose a notable threat to certain Western interests. With Chinese support, Russia will retain the bargaining power necessary to veto sanctions on Syria while selling arms to Damascus.

In the same manner, China has the capacity to bolster Russia’s stance on the Iranian nuclear program, especially given that China’s resistance to complying with Iranian sanctions undermines their efficacy.

AN INDEPENDENT CHINA The second, far more likely scenario to emerge is that China benefits from improved energy security while remaining independent of Russia in foreign policy decisions. Unlike Europe, China is unlikely to be strangled by a preponderance of energy imports from any one country. According to Downs, “The Europeans are far more dependent on Russia as a supplier of natural gas than China is on Russia as a supplier of oil.” In fact, China’s natural gas imports from Russia are effectively nonexistent, and the rest of its energy portfolio has been strategically diversified in recent decades. Thus, it is probable that even as a net importer of Russian oil, China will continue to act independently of Russian interests in the global arena.

Furthermore, it should not be assumed that Sino-Russian

trade will grant Russia any strategic advantage over China whatsoever. Russia certainly derives international leverage from its natural resources. Nonetheless, with China this leverage could be outweighed by dynamics that favor China. In reality, Russia, like the United States, is dependent on Chinese imports, but lacks many of the technological advantages characteristic of the U.S. that could offer it a strategic advantage. An article in Pravda actually questions the accuracy of the balanced trade relationship described in Putin’s article. Pravda writes: “For China, Russia has become a supplier of raw materials and metals.

In return, Russia imports technological products from China,” which reflects a Russian fear of becoming an energy appendage to China, rather than an equal trading partner.

This fear is particularly pronounced in that Russia, historically a world-leading net exporter of military technologies, is rapidly losing its advantage in even this specialized industry.

Nadiya Kravets, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, tells the HPR, “The Chinese barely import any technology from Russia. The military technologies that Russia used to export to China, the Chinese are now able to produce themselves. In the case of high-end technologies that the Chinese need, they are not able to get them from Russia, because the Russians themselves are not innovating fast enough.” Accordingly, in April 2010, the Russian military imported foreign arms for the first time, signing contracts with France and Italy to import advanced military vehicles.

ACCOUNTING FOR THE OBSTRUCTIONISM Given the consistently pragmatic nature of China’s foreign policy and that Russia’s energy advantage cannot effectively pressure Chinese policymakers, both nations are unlikely to forge a strong geopolitical alliance. Nonetheless, the two countries do share one tenant of national political philosophy that might be responsible for the false perception of them as allies: a rigid belief in absolute state sovereignty, manifested by their common obstruction of any foreign interventions proposed in international organizations such as the United Nations.

With this in mind, both giants will act similarly on certain geopolitical issues in coming years, but these joint actions do not necessarily reflect a concerted partnership. China’s refusal to accept sanctions in Iran should therefore be interpreted simply as an independent attempt by China to bolster its energy security. Russian opposition to intervention in Syria should, likewise, be interpreted as an attempt to maximize Russian arms exports and influence, validated by Russia’s ideological opposition to intervention in sovereign states.

To explain how this shared definition of sovereignty encourages Sino-Russian opposition to Syrian intervention, Kravets explains: “The Chinese have bandwagoned so much on Russian beliefs in part because the West has tolerated Russia acting as a great power. However, the Chinese have bandwagoned not just because this is convenient, but also because the actually believe that the U.N. should not intervene in Syria, and that the Syrian government has to negotiate with the rebels itself to come up with some sort of peaceful solution.” As such, Russia and China will almost certainly continue to oppose certain interventionist goals in coming years, but their opposition will be independently motivated, not derived from a strategic alliance against the West.

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BOOKS & ARTS

UGLY TRUTHS: THE CASUAL VACANCY Valentina Perez The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling’s debut adult novel, should not be taken lightly. This 500-page book is a firsthand look at various manifestations of disappoints and failings of human nature, yet it also demonstrates the complexity behind personal actions. In the small, picturesque, and fictional British town of Pagford, filled with mostly petty people, Rowling creates intense drama for each individual and the town as a whole.

The Casual Vacancy deals with the aftermath of the sudden death of Barry Fairbrother, a well-liked parish councilor who delicately held together the various social and political factions of the town. His passing creates a “casual vacancy,” an open seat on the parish council, setting off a fight for the empty seat. Through the course of the election, the serious but hidden tensions of the town are revealed. The most controversial issue is the Fields, an estate of public housing. Traditional Pagfordians see the Fields as an imposition from the larger neighboring city of Yarvil, a drag on parish resources spent on junkies who attend the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic, and an overall blight on all that is good and right about wholesome Pagford. The fight over parish control of the Fields and Bellchapel ultimately eclipses Barry Fairbother’s casual vacancy that starts the story and exposes marital struggles, teenage angst and parental attempts to handle it, class conflict, and cultural divides.

THE SOMEWHAT GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE WORSE No character in the novel is truly likeable. They have occasional, fleeting moments of goodness or sympathy. The reader spends the story placing each character on a spectrum of disagreeability in relation to their fellow townspeople. A prime example is Howard and Shirley Mollison, long-time residents of Pagford who see themselves as fixtures of Pagford and all that the town stands for. They are also the leaders of the anti-Fields “movement” in Pagford. Howard and Shirley, like others, mourn Barry Fairbrother’s death very briefly, and only because it is the socially acceptable thing

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The Casual Vacancy, a well-written and engaging novel, would not have garnered the huge attention, speculation, and various reviews that it has were it not authored by Rowling.

to do. Their thoughts reveal their almost immediate scheming to capture Fairbrother’s newly vacant seat so as to augment the anti-Fields faction and finally get rid of the Fields. Howard and Shirley are gossipy, petty, prejudiced, and entitled.

The novel’s teenagers are the most vibrant, relatable, and best portrayed. Considering Rowling’s past in adolescent fiction, this is unsurprising. Though they deal with serious issues, they focus mostly on typical teenage problems: crushes and sex, conflict with parents, and the general tendency to see things in binaries.

One of the most notable teenagers is Krystal Weedon, used as an example of both the good and bad of the Fields in which she lives. Krystal is promiscuous, violent, angry, truants often, and occasionally steals. She is also the effective caretaker of her addict mother and infant brother and helped lead the local girl’s crew team to success. Krystal’s troubled history, her abject living conditions, and the stark choices she faces create sympathy for her situation, yet they do not completely erase her rough, defensive exterior.

REALITY, CRUDE AND UNCENSORED The Casual Vacancy is a raw description of human character and its many immoral imperfections. In Rowling’s sometimes heavy-handed inclusion of almost any horrific experience that people can have, there is little room for redemption for any of the characters. This is a stark difference from the tale that made J.K. Rowling a household name and The Casual Vacancy. This novel is no doubt completely different in genre, perspective, and setting from Harry Potter; not even an about-face, it is on an entirely different literary plane. One of the most noticeable differences is the prevalence, often overly saturated, of sexuality and vulgarity. While Harry and his friends did not even start to like people until they were fourteen and kissing them until they were fifteen or sixteen, the teenagers in The Casual Vacancy have sex on their minds more often than not, either the real thing or the online porn they know far too well. In addition, words like “fucking,” “cunt,” “shit,” and the like are heavily used. One character notes that Krystal Weedon “used ‘fucking’ interchangeably with ‘very’, and seemed to see no difference between them.”

Rowling herself is guilty of a similar authorial charge.

“LITTLE VACANCIES” NOT TOTALLY FILLED The Casual Vacancy has Rowling’s signature strong and engaging writing, but this does not make it easier to digest the novel’s stark subject matter. Frustration, sadness, even slight horror may come up in reading the stories of the interwoven lives of Pagford residents. Barry Fairbrother’s vacant council seat catalyzes and ultimately becomes irrelevant as the town is further embroiled in personal conflicts. Several messages from “The Ghost of Barry Fairbrother” left on the parish council website reveal intimate secrets of various town-members and contribute to the messy drama surrounding the election. Between an eventful council meeting and two more sudden deaths, the superficially polite and delicate seams holding together picturesque Pagford come apart. The town becomes aware of its glaring problems, but solutions are not initially obvious. The end of the novel leaves a sense of opportunity for improvement but uncertainty about Pagfordians’ ability to realize it.

Just as in her Harry Potter series, Rowling notes that her new novel deals with “mortality and morality, the two things that I obsess about,” as she told The New Yorker. The Casual Vacancy gives many glimpses into how these themes play out in real life, but does not provide much hope for their future resolution.

Rowling, in the same New Yorker interview, says that she “was dealing not only with responsibility but with a bunch of characters who all have these little vacancies in their lives, these emptinesses in their lives, that they’re all filling in various ways.” The characters of this novel and the ways in which they interact to form a community are the true focus of this story. The political jockeying that lead to these events is just a premise, becoming secondary to the crude humanity Rowling presents.

At the start of the novel, Howard and Shirley Mollison “were contemplating the casual vacancy; and they saw it, not as an empty space but as a magician’s pocket, full of possibilities.” This novel is worth the read, but the possibilities it presents are dark and unpleasant, with no magic available to lighten the load.

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BOOKS & ARTS

Irony and its Discontents: The Saga of R. Kelly Graham Moyer

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BOOKS & ARTS

F

or as long as art and literature have existed, artists and writers have struggled with the task of depicting reality in a limited medium: from the impressionists who tried to paint how rather than what the eye sees, to streamof-consciousness writers who attempted writing how the mind thinks. Ultimately, though, neither effort was really met with success. People do not actually see how impressionists paint or think like James Joyce writes. Rather than trying to cover up the fact that their creations could not measure up to real life, artists of the subsequent postmodern era started to celebrate this creative reality, to revel in the irony of acknowledging the failure of the medium. Duchamp takes toilets off the wall and signs his name on them, while Paul Auster writes himself into his own novels.

This irony can be intelligent and communicative, but it dominates much of today’s postmodern culture. Author David Foster Wallace, for example, wrestled with this problem extensively, “Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone….

Postmodern irony and cynicism have become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy.” Wallace argues that irony entraps. The point of irony is to make the non-ironic look silly. The problem of literary production is no longer just to make a serious point; you have to do it without looking silly.

And the best way to do that is through ironic detachment and a lack of commitment. And that’s the dangerous problem Wallace refers to. If you are not ironic, you will be silly. If you are, you cannot be serious.

Wallace struggled with this conundrum in his own writing.

Despite his complaints about the style, Wallace’s writings ooze meta-fictional references and self-aware asides. Wallace fictionalized himself into stories even more extensively than Paul Auster. Largely, I think this is because Wallace deeply believed that we cannot take any art seriously if it does not openly acknowledge itself as art through these ironic games. He knew that without a solid backing in irony, his non-ironic message could only be mocked. Despite recognizing this dilemma, he could not escape from it. If a MacArthur Fellowship-certified genius like Wallace could not break out of this irony-trap, what hope do the rest of us have?

REAL TALK IN “REAL TALK:” IRONIC AND GENUINE? I would like to answer this by taking a step back from the long established mediums of literature and painting and look instead at something a bit more populist and modern: a music video on YouTube. More specifically, I would like to look at the music video for R. Kelly’s song “Real Talk.” R. Kelly has been an R&B institution for the past twenty years, writing and producing hits consistently.

In the music video, R. Kelly announces that he has decided “to do this shit, ‘Real Talk’ on YouTube because it’s a great song… we gonna be real man, I’m just gonna be real, we gonna roll the film, and I’m doin’ this for the fan’s around that globe that love real talk.” As he speaks, he pulls out a cigar and whiskey and proceeds to argue loudly in song on the phone with his girlfriend.

In the background, some of his friends play poker. After R. Kelly breaks up with the girl he is talking to, a fight erupts at the table.

Kelly breaks the fight up and yells at the cameraman to stop

filming and the video cuts out.

While the video may initially seem silly, a deeper look reveals the ridiculous contradictions throughout the video. The video is called “Real Talk,” but what could possibly be less real than a pre-scripted music video with paid actors? The fact that Kelly takes such efforts to “convince” the viewer his video is real with the introduction, the drugs, and the fight at the end only rubs the contradiction in the viewer’s face. This is a striking case of medium-aware irony. The lyrics in this situation are going to sound ridiculous because any sort of singing in a real break-up situation would sound ridiculous. Kelly simply chooses lyrics that are going to drive that point home. So is Kelly’s video the sort of thing that David Foster Wallace despises? Is Kelly just a cool, distant, ironist, incapable of conveying any serious message?

Despite the ridiculousness, the contradictions, and the irony, I do not think any viewer walks away with the sense that R. Kelly is trying deceive. When Kelly says at the beginning of the song “I’m doing this for the fans around the globe that love real talk,” it’s hard not to believe him. Despite the meta-fiction, in watching “Real Talk,” you get the sense that R. Kelly really does think that this is what his viewers think about. This is what they love. Irony or not, Kelly means what he says, and the video gives the viewer a nice look into Kelly’s mind.

ESCAPING THE IRONIC CLOSET Kelly’s magnum opus, his long and periodically updated “hiphopera,” Trapped in the Closet, provides an deeper context to understand Kelly’s ability to be read genuinely and be understood beyond the irony. Trapped in the Closet is the convoluted tale of a man, Sylvester, his wife Gwendolyn, and a legion of their lovers and acquaintances, including a midget named Big Man, a pastor and his gay lover, a pimp named Luscious, a reverend named Mosley James Evans, gangsters, cops, drug dealers, and Rosie the Nosey Neighbor. All of the actors lip sync as R. Kelly sings every part and also serves as the narrator. Trapped in the Closet is filled with irony and meta-fictional tricks. For example, we have R. Kelly as Sylvester, R. Kelly as Narrator, R. Kelly as Commentator, R. Kelly as Commentator on the Commentator, and somewhere through all this we have R. Kelly as Creator R. Kelly, moreover, explores the issue of how an artistic medium can depict reality accurately. He lampoons the inconsistency between the modes of expression possible in a music video and real life. Kelly makes this inconsistency comically clear during the commentary for one episode, “Y’all notice there’s such a lot of profanity in this part, because I wanted to bring such a reality to people with the dialogue and the lyrics… I wanted to put it there and the lyrics to be in 3D, you know?” R. Kelly does not actually swear in this part of the opera. Instead, he actually sings the word “boop.” As in, “Whoah, whoah, whoah, what the boop is this? / Another man in my bed? You better start talking boop.” The effect is absolutely absurd. This is the only chapter Kelly censors himself in which he comments on the reality of language. His ironic intent is obvious.

Trapped in the Closet was released in three pieces and each has a distinctly different feel to it and makes Kelly’s thought process clear. The first part is serious and dramatic. Infidelities are discovered and lives are fundamentally altered. We hear things like, “I thought your name was Mary / That’s what you said at the party / Man this is getting scary / I’m gonna shoot some-

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The singer approaches real life, full of its absurdities and complexities, with a sense of humor and profound passion, as another imperfect but authentic guy—not as some cold, distant ironist.

body.” In the commentary, Kelly mentions that he put in “things that happen in real life.” The viewer gets the sense that she’s looking at the heart of the world as Kelly sees it, regardless of necessary fictional impossibilities and ironies. But Kelly’s ridiculous exploitations of irony make it difficult for a casual viewer to empathize at all with Kelly’s vision. There is really no choice but to laugh at the absurdity of the first part. The plot then heads even deeper into the absurd in the second section of Trapped in the Closet. A police officer’s wife has an affair with a midget, a man is shot in the arm only to fully recover five minutes later, and the dramatic entrance of a nosey neighbor with a spatula sends three gun-bearing men over the edge. Kelly has taken what made the first part ludicrous and overtly worked it into the plot itself. The artist has recognized what made it impossible for viewer’s to empathize with his vision in the first part and claimed it fully as his own. He has essentially become the ironist Wallace warned us of, albeit with a good deal more self-mockery.

In the third installment, R. Kelly is finally able to find a happy medium between ironic awareness and genuine emotion. He keeps up the silliness with the bickering of the elderly couple next door and the attempted conversion of a pimp during a church service. He goes back to building the world of Trapped in the Closet. The back stories of characters are laid out more fully, and the world widens from one plot track to a whole series of simultaneous but interconnected events. The plot at this stage presents a compelling mixture of silliness and seriousness, far from the overblown melodrama of part one or the total ridiculousness of part two.

Nevertheless, the experience of the first two parts plays an important role in our experience of the third. R. Kelly has

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shown us that he is well aware of all the absurdities involved in attempting to resemble reality in an artistic medium. He has been through the requisite irony. But in the process of doing so, Kelly has exposed himself as a potentially ridiculous figure. As you watch parts one and two, you have to wonder what sort of person would make such a thing. When you see a giant picture of R. Kelly on stage hanging on Sylvester’s wall, you cannot help but laugh a little bit at R. Kelly. By exposing himself to this sort of ridicule, Kelly has placed himself squarely on our level. The singer approaches real life, full of its absurdities and complexities, with a sense of humor and profound passion, as another imperfect but authentic guy rather than a cold and distant ironist.

When his plot lines grow serious again in part three, we do not laugh like we did in part one. Instead, we feel what Kelly wants us to feel: genuine empathy for those people in “real” situations like the ones Kelly can hint at through the medium of the music video.

Is R. Kelly a paragon of modern creativity, a triumph of the human spirit and the solution to the problem of irony and emotion in art? No. Well, maybe a little. R. Kelly is able to incorporate a considerable amount of postmodern irony into innocent little works. He has a certain delightful naiveté, a willingness to seem ridiculous and a desire to entertain, but also a desire to help us out, to show us we are not alone in the real world. R. Kelly is able to signal his knowledge of the difficulties of modern artistic communication while also telling us he does not care.

What he cares about is us, real people, and he is willing to tease himself to prove it.

BOOKS & ARTS

VOICING DISCONTENT: #YOSOY132 AND ITS ART Alexandra Méndez On September 20th, 2012, Aleph Jiménez Rodríguez went missing. He was the spokesperson for the Ensenada, Baja California division of the Mexican student movement #YoSoy132. He had been one of 20 students arrested a few days earlier for protesting alleged electoral fraud in the July presidential elections. The rumor of Jiménez’s disappearance spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter and was soon picked up by more traditional forms of media. Disappearances are, unfortunately, the regular subject of news in many parts of Mexico. The disappearance of Jiménez led to some unease because he was one of the faces of a pacifist group critical of the authorities. When he turned up alive in Mexico City on September 26th, his father explained that he had felt physically threatened by authorities and had gone into hiding.

WHAT IS #YOSOY132? #YoSoy132 was born on May 11, 2012 when students at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City began protesting an appearance by Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Peña Nieto was giving a campaign speech at the university but was drowned out by hecklers. The heckling evolved into a demonstration, and students from all over the city and the country joined forces quickly, thanks to the almost instantaneous spreading of information via social media. The hashtag thread #YoSoy132 organized and coordinated students who allied themselves with the 131 students who had earlier posted a YouTube video criticizing Peña Nieto, who was later elected president of Mexico in June. Meaning “I am number 132,” the movement sparked protests in Mexico City and in cities across the nation, beginning in mid-May. The movement proclaimed to be non-partisan, although many of its constituents were supporters of the leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Some consider it to be a thinly veiled campaign movement in his favor. Nonetheless, its proclaimed focus has been to promote freedom of speech and the press. It has denounced the television news monopolies of Televisa and TV Azteca, and decried the traditional media’s skewed version of events and unbalanced coverage of presidential candidates. Naturally, the group has turned to unorthodox media and forms of expression.

Jiménez’s recent disappearance underscores the fact that, although the movement may not be receiving much sustained media

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BOOKS & ARTS

attention, it is still an active force in Mexican politics. Although Peña Nieto was elected in June and traditional media outlets have mostly stopped covering the movement, the incensed youth have already been aroused. Students have clamored for free speech, and they will not give up easily. Like the Arab Spring, it is a social network movement that became a social movement. Unlike the Arab Spring, however, it has not resulted in a complete upheaval of the government, a goal of at least a few of its participants. Despite these setbacks and internal conflicts, #YoSoy132 continues its political struggle, not least by way of artistic expression.

THE ART OF #YOSOY132 Much of the artwork that has arisen from the movement reflects the tension between humanistic creativity and propaganda. While #YoSoy132 may have unleashed a flurry of quick and fiery rhetoric that consisted of a necessary release, like air from a pressure valve, it does not seem to have allowed young, angry artists to express themselves with complete freedom. Too often, the artwork is simply propaganda, valued for the ideals it represents and not primarily as art. #YoSoy132 has been a sort of volcanic eruption of pent-up frustration with the violence, the kidnappings, the unfulfilled promises of change. Its soundtrack is upbeat music with angry but confident lyrics that attempt to offer an alternative to the lies they perceive that the government, authorities, and mainstream media are feeding to the general public. One cumbia, a dance song in the Colombian style, states radically, “Ya no es suficiente cambiar de partidos, cambiemos la forma de gobernar” [“It’s no longer enough to change parties, let’s change the way of governing”]. Like many of today’s politically charged music, such as the songs of Rage Against The Machine, Molotov, and many others, the music born out of #YoSoy132 is meant to put the listener on her feet, to spur her to action with quick pulsating beats. While this cumbia is angry, there is hope in the rhythmic dance music; the actors in the song’s video smile even as they shake their heads, “Fíjate que no, fíjate que no” [“No they don’t, no they won’t”], asserting that the government, the authorities, and the press neglect the Mexican people, lie to them, and do not have their interests at heart.

The musical, visual, and literary arts that have come out of the movement reflect some of its internal tensions. The cumbia is on the more radical end of the spectrum. Most of the movement’s art and rhetoric reflects a wish for freedom of expression and freedom of the vote within a democratic system. While the movement purports to be nonpartisan, many of the artistic renditions of its message are blatantly anti-Peña Nieto. A motif of his hair as a piece of excrement runs through some of the visual representations, a reference to an incident during the May 11 protests in which Peña Nieto was cornered in a restroom by a mass of students at the Universidad Iberoamericana.

Many of the slogans and visual representations that have arisen, often in static meme form, conflate the message of freedom of expression with the freedom to vote against him.

Other artistic renditions, such as the cumbia and images calling for simply “un voto libre y responsable” [“a free and responsible vote”] do not invoke the PRI candidate and allow for more ideological liberty within the movement. Others take aim not at Peña Nieto but at Televisa. As a result of these conflicting

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messages apparent in the art, the movement has been difficult to categorize. Its divisions and lack of consensus have weakened it. Many of its original leaders have found that it sprawled like the tentacles of a wayward squid and have extricated themselves from the tangle.

The art, or propaganda, is a manifestation of the tension between the calls for democratization of expression and its consolidation under a single banner. The act of marking the movement’s very title with a hashtag categorizes it in a way that has not been unequivocally defined. Despite the variety and creativity of the various visual representations, many of them bear the #YoSoy132 “logo” which standardizes the images. Hashtags have this very purpose and effect: they serve to funnel a wide range of information into a single feed. Hashtags are shorthand and therefore leave no room for nuance, while acknowledging no complexity; anything categorized under a hashtag is so distilled that it is devoid of all meaning not involved with the hashtag label itself. As is the case with any standardization, the visual message becomes co-opted by its categorization and the viewer’s understanding of this categorization. Just as the meaning of a television commercial becomes distorted when the viewer is made aware of the product it advertises, so these visual mininarratives take on a different meaning when they are stamped with #YoSoy132.

GOING FORWARD The “mainstream” media in Mexico has understood that #YoSoy132 is still an important movement that has already had a lasting effect on the country’s politics and media. After Televisa was lambasted by Antonio Attolini, the vociferous and charismatic spokesperson for the ITAM (Autonomous Technological Institute of México) division of #YoSoy132, the television monopoly offered him a position on the new program Sin Filtro [“No Filter”], which he accepted. Shot in a brightly wallpapered studio, the program is supposed to provide a forum for young Mexicans to discuss the issues of the day each week.

Attolini’s acceptance prompted outcries from the movement, which almost unanimously accused him of being a traitor. In an interview on October 25th and again during the program’s first transmission on October 28th, Attolini defended himself, saying that his actions are congruent with his efforts to promote the democratization of the media. Traitor or not, Attolini is among the leaders who identify with the initial bubbling spirit #YoSoy132, but who have realized that their own views are perhaps not best encapsulated in a split-second hashtag label.

Going forward, where will #YoSoy132 and its art lead?

Will mainstream and traditional media swallow it up? Will social media continue to have substantial subversive effects? And what will be the fate of the artistic #YoSoy132 movement? The problem of categorization and standardization has largely overshadowed the artistic potential and message. The pent-up anxieties and frustrations of the Mexican youth found a premature outlet that was pigeonholed from its very formation. In order for art to convey a truly complex, human message to capture the spirit of young Mexican rebellion, it must be freed from tethers of political and social categorization that can easily devolve into propaganda. Perhaps #YoSoy132 was just the precursor to something larger and more complex that will give free rein to artistic expression.

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: DAVID MARANISS with Jenny Choi and Matt Shuham Do you think that relationship is going to stay as strong in the future? Obama has been described as the Pacific President, considering China the priority for U.S. foreign policy, and the EU is becoming more important for the U.K. I think it’s more a matter of perception than reality. And the interesting thing is that if you go back and watch his 2008 campaign and listen to his first inaugural address, it’s a fairly bleak address. He’s talking about how there’s so much difficult work ahead. It wasn’t about hope and change; it was about the hard work that he knew was coming.

David Maraniss is an Associate Editor with The Washington Post. He received a Pulitzer Prize for covering Bill Clinton’s campaign during the 1992 Presidential Election, and has written several bestselling books, including Barack Obama: The Story.

Mr. Maraniss has been with The Post since 1997.

What are the things that we miss or misunderstand about President Obama as a person?

I think the most important thing to understand about President Obama is that he works in a somewhat different rhythm than the modern American mentality. Oftentimes, you see people that support him that are perhaps a bit left of him being frustrated by what they see as an unwillingness to confront the opposition and fight certain battles in the way they want him to. But he’s doing it in his own way and he gets as much done. That’s what I call his thinking two or three steps ahead about where the traps are and how to get around them.

He doesn’t always succeed, but he’s always thinking about how to get where he wants to go.

You said Barack Obama’s on a different pace than the rest of the country, and I assume that includes the media and Washington political class.

Many people say that he needs to adjust in his second term to get things done. Does this include changing his pace and the way he thinks?

I think he will adjust in that sense as well. But I also think that the media is adjusting to him. He came into the presidency with not a whole lot of administrative experience. This has been a learning experience for him, and he’s learned where to make adjustments in his rhythms and personality to accomplish what he wants to.

You actually wrote a book about Clinton as well.

You’ve now written about Clinton, Obama, and Al Gore, but you’ve skipped President Bush. Why did you make that choice? Does that reflect anything about your political affiliation?

It doesn’t reflect anything about my political affiliation. I have to be obsessed with something before I write about it.

That doesn’t mean that there certainly couldn’t be a conservative or Republican that I would be obsessed about, but George Bush didn’t quite do that for me.

And, neither did Al Gore by the way. For Al Gore, I wrote a series for The Washington Post, and they turned it into a book.

But for Clinton and Obama, I spent three years writing on each one, and I did write a book on Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution.

While you’re doing these biographies of living subjects, you trace them back generations. Why do you think this tracing back is important, and what does that reveal?

Well, I did it with Obama. I did it only a little bit with Clinton, and the book starts the day he shook John F. Kennedy’s hand. With Obama, I did it for a completely different reason.

What an author has to do is write the book they want to write, and I wanted to explore that incredible confluence that made Obama possible and use that to write about the modern world.

To the degree that it explains Obama, that’s great. But, that wasn’t the only motivation; I was interested in it. I think you can see it through the story of both his white ancestry and the brilliance and frustration that came out of his Kenyan ancestry. There are a lot of the threads that weave into President Obama’s life.

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INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: DAVID AXELROD with Daniel Backman

ahead of the curve in 2012, and the campaigns that are going to succeed in 2016 and beyond are going to have to continually upgrade themselves and be aware of emerging trends in communications.

Do you think there was something your campaign was doing in terms of technology and media that was ahead the Romney campaign?

I cannot tell you fully what the Romney campaign was doing, but I know we had a very well-conceived strategy for how to use social media. We had a very sophisticated strategy for how to deploy mass media and advertising on broadcast and cable, and how to buy [advertising] time so that we were targeting our voters more precisely and saving a lot of money doing it. And, we also knew who our voters were, and we knew a lot about them because of all the information that was available through various means. Technology was central to our ability to do as well as we did.

How did you and the campaign react to the first debate?

David Axelrod served as Chief Strategist to President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns and was Senior Advisor to the President from 2009 to 2011. Before entering politics, Mr. Axelrod wrote for the Chicago Tribune. He is currently working to establish the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

How did the use of technology and media change from 2008 to 2012?

There’s been a dramatic evolution of particularly social media since the 2008 campaign. Twitter was in its infancy when 2008 began, and obviously it became an integral part of this campaign. How Facebook got used was far more sophisticated in 2012. Our ability to transmit media was much greater in 2012.

You know, the real challenge in the 21st century, from election to election, is to really understand the changes that are occurring on an almost daily basis in communications, and to get out in front and make the greatest use you can of it.

I think we were ahead of the curve in 2008. I think we were

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I was always concerned about the first debate, because the first debate for incumbent presidents running for reelection have traditionally been kind of a quagmire. There is a traditional kind of barrier for presidents who haven’t debated for four years, who haven’t had people grill them the way debate opponents do. You know, back in 2008, we had I think 28 debates with our primary opponents. This time, the president hadn’t debated in four years; Mitt Romney had had something like 20 debates before he came in. So there were a lot of reasons to have worried about that debate, and we talked about it and thought it through. But, nonetheless we fell prey to the same problems.

Once it happened, we clearly had an impetus to do better in the next debate. And, I was candid with the president. I feel like he showed up for a discussion and Mitt Romney showed up for a performance. Debates largely are that, and you need to know exactly what you want to say and you need to find the opportunities to say it. The president approached the second and third debates much differently, and he went in with a very clear sense of how he was going to handle every question and every opportunity that arose.

INTERVIEWS

What were the other most significant moments of the 2012 campaign, or things that forced the campaign to change its strategy?

You always have to make adjustments along the way, and obviously the debate was the big one for us. You don’t know, for example, who their vice presidential nominee is going to be. That occasioned some changes in strategy. When he appointed Paul Ryan, that offered a bunch of opportunities for us around issues like Medicare and women’s health.

At the end of the campaign, one of the significant events was the decision of the Romney campaign to air a commercial in Ohio that implied that Jeep was going to move its production to China, and to essentially blame the president for that to try and take the edge off of the advantage he had for having intervened to save the American auto industry. We hit that pretty hard, and I think that backfired on them dramatically.

I think we would have carried Ohio anyway, but it made it exponentially more difficult for them.

So, there are things you can plan on—you can plan on your conventions, you can plan on the debates, there are certain set pieces—and then a lot of it is reacting to events and trying to do it within the context of your strategy. I think we did, by and large, a good job of that.

How do you respond to those that claim that Obama’s 2012 campaign was different in its message, that 2008 was about hope and change and 2012 was about…?

I’ll tell you something: I traveled around the country with the president, particularly in the last few weeks, and I was struck by how reminiscent it was of the last campaign, both in terms of the themes he was striking and the way people were reacting. The one thing about the president that I appreciate, and I’ve known him for 20 years, is he’s very consistent; consistent in his values, consistent in his vision. He talked all through 2008 about the need to create an economy in which the middle class can thrive and people who aspire to be in the middle class can get ahead. This was still central to our campaign in 2012. And obviously we’ve been through a lot as a country, and that colored that debate, but the fundamental values and vision were the same.

Every election is about hope, and every election is about change. The question was what kind of change we were going to have, and what kind of change would offer the greatest hope. So I feel like there was a real continuum between 2008 and 2012. I didn’t see it as a stark departure.

Looking at 2016, do you expect the battleground states to remain the same?

I do think that the battleground states will remain the same. Some of the states that are battleground states have become such because of demographic changes that are only going to increase over time—states like Colorado, Nevada, Florida.

This will be influenced, of course, by the candidates. There may be qualities about one or another candidate that make it harder to compete in one or more of these battleground states, and we just have to wait and see. But what really makes battleground states ‘battleground states’ are the demographics.

We’ll see how competitive Ohio is in 2016. It was competitive for us because of the steps the president took to save the American auto industry, because Governor Romney opposed that auto bailout, and because Governor Romney’s profile at Bain Capital was a particularly concerning one for people in these aging industrial states. But I expect that Ohio will be competitive as well. I think you’re looking at the same set of states.

Do you plan to be involved in the 2016 campaign?

I’ve run my last presidential race. My next project is to start an institute of politics, like the one here at Harvard, at the University of Chicago, because I think you can’t have enough of these. What this country needs more than anything are bright, committed young people to go into the public arena— not just as candidates, but as strategists, as policy people, into the media to cover the public debate, and to non-profits to help drive public policy. And, if I can help contribute that way by encouraging young people to get into that arena, that will be a great coda on my career.

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ENDPAPER

NAVIGATING AMERICA AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY FORWARD Alexander Chen

The 2012 election, fraught with bitter rhetoric, has finally passed. Yet, for the billions that were spent by the two parties and their respective allies, this campaign was largely devoid of details and vision, leaving major questions unanswered about the country’s future. My fellow Republicans especially must face political reality heading into the 113th Congress.

First and foremost, we have yet to debate the fundamental question of this generation. Over the next few months, Congress must decide which avenue the United States should follow to control its profligate deficits and stabilize its debt-to-GDP ratio.

Consider the two primary drivers of future federal spending.

House Democrats, with their staunchly liberal caucus, ignore reality by refusing to consider meaningful reforms for Medicare and Social Security. On the campaign trail, many Democratic candidates exhorted that the GOP would end those two programs as we know it. However, with their rigidity, the country will be bankrupt within a few decades.

For years, most Americans received more payouts from entitlement programs than they ever paid in through payroll taxes. This phenomenon was possible through robust wage growth, a burgeoning population, and incrementally higher tax rates. Recently though real wage growth has slowed immensely, and most politicians are unwilling to raise the payroll tax rate any further, a feat that would endanger job creation. Without these options, significant reforms must be implemented soon to preserve the solvency of those two critical programs on which millions rely.

Meanwhile, consider the revenue aspect. The Republican ticket’s budget plan that involved ratcheting up defense spending and cutting marginal income tax rates by 20 percentage points across the board was equally foolish. Limiting tax deductions and closing loopholes, while economically an excellent idea, would not increase revenue nearly enough to counter the strains created by increased spending and extensive tax cuts, even under the rosiest economic conditions. The only red Republicans would see would be the extensive red

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ink bleeding from reports by the Congressional Budget Office.

The Simpson-Bowles commission’s proposal that increased revenues from capped deductions be used to help lower tax rates modestly provided a more plausible and practical roadmap.

Now, I have choice words concerning the Republican Party.

I joined the GOP because of its dedication to small government, enterprise, and opportunity for those with a strong work ethic.

Those values are the ones that helped the son of Taiwanese immigrants and proud American citizens reach Harvard. I intend to remain a Republican for years to come.

However, few individuals in my generation share this faith in the party of Lincoln and Reagan. Today’s GOP is perceived as overwhelmingly white and elderly, utterly unreflective of the diversity that pervades American youth. We cannot afford to lose the Latino and Asian-American vote by over 40 points, and rhetoric of “self-deportation” does nothing to remedy the situation. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush exemplifies the type of leadership the GOP needs in confronting the party’s deep, long-term structural problems. We must encourage talented, aspiring individuals from around the world to live, work, and ultimately become citizens in this nation.

We must also nominate candidates that are intelligently conservative: for instance, I will be pleased when Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) arrives on Capitol Hill next January. Cruz speaks passionately about conservative principles with intellectual rigor, and will contribute greatly to our political discourse.

Unfortunately, other staunch conservatives, through inexperience or sheer idiocy, have cost the GOP valuable U.S. Senate seats. Some fellow Republicans celebrate this as the ascendancy of ideological purity. However, I caution that purity also provides a one-way ticket to perpetual political and electoral insignificance.

When Speaker Boehner and President Obama meet in early 2013, I earnestly hope that they reach a grand bargain.

This does not entail conservatives bending over backwards to sharply increase taxes, but it will require compromise on our part in raising revenues primarily from the wealthiest Americans through capping deductions and restructuring the tax code. Similarly, I hope Democrats, like President Obama did during the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations, will offer meaningful entitlement reform. A significant debt reduction and tax deal is the strongest stimulus government can provide, simultaneously reducing the uncertainty clouding job creators’ business prospects and invigorating investor confidence.

From there, Republicans can expand the playing field.

This entails not only improved rhetoric, but also actual policy proposals ranging from immigration reform to a plausible and rational economic vision. Perhaps then, the American people will entrust the White House and Senate to GOP hands once again.

The Harvard Political Review Literature Review.

Long-form investigations covering nuanced issues.

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