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America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part II

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In an earlier post, I wrote about the necessity of redefining the basic principles of American foreign policy in order to have a successful future.  In that post, I also expanded on one of them, the need for American national interests to come ahead of all other considerations in our global relations.  In this post, I’d like to talk about another of those principles, the need to support our friends and allies.

It is possible, though enormously expensive, for us, among a very few nations, to satisfy our national needs unilaterally—that is, we do what we need to do without regard to the imperatives of any other nation.  Even for us, however, it’s also possible only for a short period of time, before both we run out of funding and resources and enough of the rest of the world joins together to overwhelm us.  Thus, while it is imperative that we retain the ability and the will to act alone when necessary, it will be more efficient and cheaper to work with other nations, informally, via a specific treaty, and/or via alliance to achieve our ends.

When it comes to supporting our friends and allies, though, we need to answer some additional questions, for these answers must shape the nature of our relationships.  These questions are first, why should we support our friends (or, why not leave them to their own devices?), followed by understanding who are our friends and why are they our friends, as well as who our enemies are, and why they are so.

Why, indeed, should we support our friends?  The simple utilitarian view is that it’s more efficient to support friends because then they will support us.  Most actions on the global stage are done more cost effectively if done with the assistance of others than if done by us alone, bearing all the costs, even if we then retain all the benefit.  The benefits are greater from the greater joint effort because the mutual support magnifies the benefit/cost ratio.

More importantly than a pecuniary reason, though, it’s our moral duty to support our friends.  The protection and enforcement of the natural rights of all men, rights we acknowledge explicitly in our Declaration of Independence, require that each of us act to support our fellows when those rights are threatened.  Such an obligation, further, is made explicit by the social compact that free men form when we create our nations.  So it is among these free nations.  When a nation that is a friend of the United States is threatened, it is our duty as fellow men to aid the men of that nation, and to do so explicitly in our common cause.

To do this effectively, though, we must know and be willing publicly to acknowledge who our friends and our enemies are.

I suggest that there are two types of friends and two types of enemies.  Of those who are friends, some are so because of our shared heritage and our common interests.  Others are so through our common objectives and/or the threats we both face.  This is not a symmetrical relationship, though; commonality is not a guarantor of a relationship; it only makes such types of relationship more likely.

While not everyone with whom we have some commonality will be our friend, most of them can be, and few of them will be hostile.  One example is Great Britain.  We were colonized primarily by Great Britain; although a significant minority of our forebears came from continental Europe.  We fought a number of wars, both shooting and economic, over the several decades surrounding our breakaway.  We’ve since stood shoulder to shoulder when one or the other of us needed support, even when we disagreed with the means used to answer the crisis.  This friendship is greatly facilitated by our common heritage and by our common interests: respect for the individual liberties of all men, respect for the power of a sound, free economy in supporting and enhancing that freedom.

Commonality of objectives or threats contributes to a measure of friendship; although the ties are not necessarily as strong.  Japan is an example of this.  Even though in the aftermath of WWII, the Japanese government was replaced with a Western-style democracy, Japanese culture remained largely intact and is only slowly—and in accordance with Japanese needs—moving closer to a Western nature: it remains Japanese in its essentials.  Nevertheless, we face together powerful foes in the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, as well as the destabilizing risk of an irrational, nuclear-armed northern Korea.  Aside from the common objective of facing down these threats, we have other common objectives that tie us together: an interest in free trade, the economic welfare of our citizenry, the rights of our citizenry to have a powerful voice in our respective governments, peaceful, profitable relations with our neighbors.  Working together in supporting these objectives has created a strong association between the two of us.

Of those who are our enemies, some are so because their cultural imperatives drive them to open hostility toward any culture different from their own.  Others are so through political or economic philosophical competition and/or through competition for the same critical resources.

Iran is an example of an enemy from its cultural imperatives.  Iran’s political culture drives it toward the bigotry of considering it appropriate to exterminate whole peoples solely because those peoples worship differently than the ayatollahs.  Iran’s historical culture drives it to attempt to control its neighbors simply because Iran needs the control; it cannot bring itself to trust to the peaceful intentions of those neighbors.  These are antithetical to everything for which the United States stands, and so Iran has concluded that we must be its enemy as well as the nations of its immediate region.  We must clash because Iran is intent on destroying a close ally, Israel.  We must clash because Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons and then delivering them to terrorists for their use.

The People’s Republic of China is an example of a nation whose enmity toward us flows from its competition for resources (oil and innovation talent) and for political thought (the sovereignty of the people vs. the sovereignty of the government).  As long as these competitions exist—especially the political-philosophical competition—the PRC will remain hostile to us.  We must clash because the PRC feels itself threatened by the competition over political ideas.  We must clash because the United States supports the right of a people to determine for themselves their future and their government, which puts our two nations specifically at loggerheads over the future of the Republic of China.  We must clash because the United States, as most Western nations, insists on protecting the intellectual and inventive products of its citizens, while the PRC freely seeks to acquire that output through any means possible.  We must clash because we insist on the right of all nations to have access to the resources on sea floors beneath international waters.

In another post on this subject, I’ll expand on the matter of identifying who our friends and enemies are, and why they are our friends or enemies.

Education in America

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Here, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, are some alarming data that give insight into the state of today’s education system and the state of our pupils in it.

“Overall, only 45% of 2011 U.S. high-school graduates who took the ACT test were prepared for college-level math and only 30% of ACT-tested high-school graduates were ready for college-level science, according to a 2011 report by ACT Inc.” the article says.  Further, “Students who drop out of science majors and professors who study the phenomenon say that introductory courses are often difficult and abstract.”

According to a study by Richard Arum (New York University) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia), college students spend all of 12-13 hours per week actually studying; students in the ’60s studied 24, or more, hours per week, the article went on.  And math and science students studied 3 hours per week more than did their non-science and -math classmates (that’s all of 25 minutes per day more, for you non-math graduates).

Students often start their college careers in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math track because they got the grades in high school.  However, then they switch out of STEM coursework because it turns out to be hard, and the easy grades are in the so-called soft studies.  And as often as not, it’s just a matter of giving up on themselves: “My ability level was just not there,” said Ms ____ about why she switched out of her original electrical and computer engineering major into a double major in psychology and policy management.  Plainly the ability is there; even in an American college, a double major is no easy path.

What does this mean, then?

In the beginning, our pupils are not being prepared for college in their K-12 careers—and so college cannot prepare them for life in the real world.  Yet without that foundational preparation, our children can only fall further behind—learning and knowledge accumulation proceed on an exponential curve.  Nor are they pushed to work, and so they shy away from work. They’re not pushed to compete, and so they learn to shy away from challenge.

There are a number of reasons for this failure, many of them legitimate.  We can’t fire bad teachers; the unions too often are in the way.  We don’t want to hold Johnny’s feet to the fire and demand that he actually meet serious standards—the effort is stressful; failure to meet them might hurt his self-esteem.  Our children have no work ethic.  And so on.  But if we don’t solve the fundamental problem, these reasons reduce to excuses.

In the end, the fundamental cause lies within us as their parents, and it becomes part of their attitude toward their own children.  We have to ask ourselves—and act on the answers—a number of questions.

Why are we willing to tolerate unions, or any system, that get in the way of terminating the bad apples?  It’s unfair to the bad teachers?  How unfair is it to our children?

How stressful will it be for our children, what will be the impact on their self-esteem, when as adults they’re failures in the market because they’re unemployable or can find only dreary, unsatisfying work?  How stressful and damaging to their self-esteem will it be for them to be citizens of a failing, second rate nation because our economy no longer can compete because we don’t have an educated work force anymore?

Our children are not lazy.  They work as hard as they’ve been taught to work.  They shy away from challenges to take the easy path because they’ve been taught that’s acceptable.

GPS Tracking, Privacy, and the Government

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Today, the Supreme Court began hearing a case, United States v Jones, concerning among other things, whether the police need a warrant to plant a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car: is doing so without a warrant a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights? Is even the mere use of such a device a violation of the suspect’s 4th Amendment rights?

The government makes the following arguments, among others:

the device “did not meaningfully interfere” with Jones’s property rights, because it didn’t affect the Jeep’s gas mileage, drivability or other characteristics.

and

using technology to enhance surveillance, without a warrant, was condoned in the 1983 case United States v. Knotts, a case in which police hid a beeper in a vehicle to track a suspect.

These arguments seem deficient to me.  With regard to the first, it’s disingenuous. A telephone wiretap placed on a person’s telephone system doesn’t “meaningfully interfere” with a person’s property rights, because it doesn’t affect the telephone’s clarity of speech communication, dialability or other characteristics, either, yet a warrant is required.

On the other hand, requiring a warrant to place a GPS tracker on a person’s car won’t meaningfully interfere with the government’s investigation any more than the warrant does in placing a tap on a person’s telephone.

The second argument is equally disingenuous; it’s just a Brandeis-ian excuse to perpetuate judicial error and the ensuing injustice.  Further, the argument is nothing more than a cynical red herring.  The government knew, in Jones, that a warrant would be necessary for this sort of surveillance; they had, in fact, gotten one.  They’d just let it expire before they acted on it, and then the GPS tracker was planted outside the warrant’s jurisdiction: in a Maryland parking lot, rather than in DC, where the warrant had been issued.

The Court, on the other hand, asks these questions.

How does technology change traditional law enforcement?

and

Could [police] get the same information from 30 deputies [devoted to surveillance]?  What you’re saying is police have to use the most inefficient methods.

and

…how are peoples’ privacy expectations [changing] as technology changes….  Technology is changing people’s expectation of privacy.

The answer to the first question is clear: it does not change it at all.  The Constitutional limits and authorities concerning police surveillance and investigation remain entirely intact.  All that changes is police’s capability to operate—still within those traditional limits and authorities.

As to the second question, no, we’re not.  We’re saying get a warrant for the activity, and then (properly) use the most efficient methods at your disposal.  The need for a warrant to do these things is both unchanged and technology agnostic.  Just execute it without the idle delays that led to the original warrant, in Jones, for instance, expiring before the surveillance was carried out.  As I noted above, getting the warrant only interferes with the police’s “methods” if the investigation isn’t…warranted…in the first place.

Additionally, the convenience of the government is not an excuse for abridging individual liberties.  The convenience of the government is limited by our Constitution to 17 enumerated powers, and nothing else.  Just to saucer and blow this, our Constitution also notes that the contents of that “nothing else” are explicitly reserved to the States and to the People.

As to the third question, it shows a misunderstanding of privacy.  Privacy remains the property and the business of the individual, independently of the technology available with which to penetrate that privacy.  Most especially, privacy is not something our government will choose to allow according to its convenience and magnanimity.  Indeed, the fact that there is an ongoing hue and cry over the abuses of our privacy by the various social media and the various cell phone software providers demonstrates that, even in today’s technologically-driven openness capability, we still demand our individual privacy be respected.

America’s Future—Foreign Policy Principles, Part I

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In the next few posts on America’s future, I’ll explore what our foreign policy should entail if we’re to have a successful future as a nation.  In order to identify that policy, though, it’s necessary to understand our purpose, and what our principles are, in the conduct of our foreign policy.  Accordingly, in this post and the next, I’ll talk about our necessary foreign policy principles.  In a later post, I’ll discuss what a foreign policy structure might be that would make our efforts more efficient and more effective in satisfying these principles.  Note that this will not be a restructuring of our Department of State, but of the principles that State should satisfy.

The purpose of our government is to protect our individual, inalienable rights; the purpose of our foreign policy must be to support that on the global stage.  Thus, our primary foreign policy principles must be those things that, if satisfied, serve that purpose and thereby enhance our government’s ability to satisfy its domestic purpose.  These foreign policy principles, then, will be those things that address foreign impediments to our government’s purpose while those impediments are small and overseas, and so neutralize them before they become problems for us at home.

What are these principles that are the extra-domestic support of our government’s purpose?  The overriding principle must be a focus on doing what is in our own national interest and not simply what will enhance our popularity.  (I don’t set aside popularity altogether; that can be narrowly useful in short-term situations, but it can only be useful in this fashion.)  Within this there are three principles that give substance to our national interest: protection of American citizens while they are abroad, assured access to the resources we need for our economy, and support for our friends and our allies.  (Notice that these also have military implications; I’ll address the military aspects of these goals in a post on our necessary future military policy.)

There are a number of reasons, both practical and moral, why our own national interest must come ahead of all else in our foreign policy.  The practical reasons include these.  As noted above, the purpose of our government is to protect our inalienable rights—this is why we formed our social compact those 200 and more years ago.  Wealthy as we are, we have only finite resources, and we must see first to our own welfare with those resources before we can see to any others’ welfare.

Secondly, we must operate our foreign policy from an “enlightened selfishness” perspective.  If we are not as strong as we might be, if our citizens are not as safe as they need to be, if our economy does not have access to the resources we need, then our ability to support our friends and allies, even our ability simply to help other nations, other peoples, will be impaired, perhaps to the point we are unable to provide any support at all.  The depth of another nation’s need has no impact on our capacity to help satisfy that need.

Finally, related to this, is the fact that we simply cannot afford to help others if the damage to ourselves from the assistance is greater than the gains from providing that aid.  An extreme example of this comes from WWII.  Our materiel aid to the Soviet Union and to Great Britain sorely tried our industrial output and our ability to equip our own military forces, both in preparation for the coming fight, and in its prosecution.  Yet helping these two, one an ally and one a friend, were critical to the combined effort of destroying NAZI Germany in Europe.  On the other hand, providing monetary assistance to a bankrupt nation that shows no capacity for learning the lessons of its bankruptcy, and doing so in a time of our own economic crisis, will harm us far more than it will aid that nation—and so we must not provide that assistance.

There are moral reasons for seeing to our own national interest first.  One is that it is our duty, as it is the first duty of all nations, to satisfy our own interests first so as to not become a burden on other nations by shifting the necessity of satisfying our needs onto them.

Secondly, this helps prevent our hand up aid from being transformed into a handout, thereby shifting the receiving nation into dependency on us rather than leaving them responsible and capable in their own right.   As German Chancellor Angela Merkel noted a year ago as the present Greek crisis was becoming fully developed, the other EU member states would not make as much of an effort (in helping Greece or themselves), nor would Greece make as much of an effort on its own behalf, if Germany proved too generous.  Making other nations dependent on us does not support their moral health or ours.

The failure from losing this moral aspect is illustrated by these examples.  Fifty years of dependence on the American military umbrella left Europe completely unable to deal with the mayhem in the Balkan states that followed President Josip Broz Tito’s death and Yugoslavia’s subsequent dissolution.  We had to apply American airpower so that the scant European troops could have the protection they needed in order to impose a semblance of peace on the region.  The situation had gotten little better 20 years later in Europe’s attempt to support the rebels in Libya.  After less than two months of a low key air “campaign,” the European air forces began dropping American ordnance—they’d run out of their own.  And we had to supply almost all of the air surveillance, command and control, and air refueling assets: the Europe nations, still dependent on us, had too little of their own military assets.

In a later post I’ll talk about the foreign policy principle of supporting our friends and allies.  This principle not only is important in its own right, it also facilitates the remaining two principles.  For that reason, I’ll spend that later post on this principle, and I’ll talk about the remaining two principles after that.

What Can We Learn from Europe?

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Between 1995 and 2008, which is prior to the onset of the current Panic, goods prices inflated by 67% on average in Greece, and by 56%, 47%, and 41% in Spain, Portugal, and Italy, respectively, in that same period.  German prices inflated by 9% over those years.  The difference between the PIGS and Germany centered on the nations’ domestic policies.

The Germans went through social, tax, and spending policy reforms which, among other things, limited the amount of money in their economy that didn’t have savings or goods to absorb.  The PIGS spent their money, and they also freely spent other people’s money which they borrowed, without regard for the amount of goods available from their domestic production, or from foreign imports, to absorb their money.  Indeed, as domestic prices rose, the PIGS spent more, tautologically from those increasing prices, and via printing and borrowing more in order to spend more in absolute terms in the face of those rising prices.  An additional result from those increasing prices is that the PIGS’ own production lost competitiveness in the international markets (including the rest of the EU), and so they couldn’t earn money from trade to cover their spending.

Hmm….

I suggest that there is a lesson for us, here in the US.  More money in our economy from government spending, whether fueled by borrowing or printing or both, will produce rapid inflation as our economy attempts to recover if there aren’t production increases to keep the growth in the supply of goods for sale in step with the growth of the money available with which to buy those goods.

It is the nature of demand and of production that the former can, and does, turn on a dime, while production can only increase slowly as plant is ramped up and as workers are hired and trained (with training an especially large problem today, given the length of time today’s used-to-be-experienced work force has been unemployed), and production can only decrease quickly at the expense of jobs.

Today’s American economy has already accumulated a vast overhang of funds (in the trillions of dollars) from Federal Reserve Bank printing and government spending and from subsequent funds retention by businesses and families in the face of ongoing economic uncertainty.  We are thus at severe risk of a burst of potentially ruinous inflation as those funds come out of their personal and business piggy banks to be spent on production that cannot meet that demand as the economy tries to begin a recovery.  That inflation will threaten what should be a robust post-recession growth period.  Some of this money, to be sure, is being absorbed by businesses and families paying down their own accumulated debt, but the present “stimulus” spending, borrowing, and money printing greatly outstrip absorption through private debt reduction.  And in the end, private debt reduction doesn’t reduce the overhang; it just changes the overhang’s location.  Further, this overhang shift is exacerbated by the current lack of employment in our economy.

This situation is made worse by repeated bouts of government spending.  Under present conditions, the overhang only increases: the money is simply sequestered in those business and personal accounts against future spending needs, rather than used for current spending, in anticipation of continued unemployment.  That unemployment and associated uncertainty about the future puts a premium on having savings with which to pay the mortgage or to buy food, since there is no income with which to pay for these things.

This is an important lesson in its own right.  But underlying all of this is the fact that the economic crisis faced by the United States and the European Union (of which Greece is only a present example) is at bottom a debt crisis, not an “ordinary” cyclic (if unusually deep) recession/spending crisis.  Solving the spending/inflation problem, important as it is, will do little to solve the debt crises; these can be solved only through actually paying down the debts or by going through default and bankruptcy.

The spending question can feed into debt crisis resolution in an important way, though: reducing spending below revenues, more than eliminating budget deficits, produces budget surpluses that then can go directly to paying the debts.  And reducing spending below revenues by reducing spending rather than by raising tax rates leaves more money in the hands of the individual citizens and their businesses, who are far better equipped to make spending—and debt repayment—decisions than any government has shown itself to be.