CPR Fall 2017 (XVII, 3)

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Masthead & Editor’s Note

Editor-in-Chief Publisher

Anamaría López Bani Sapra

Design Editor

Theresa Yang

Lead Web Editor

Poorvi Bellur

Managing Editors

Copy Chief Senior Editors

Copy Editor

Amanda Kam Dimitrius Keeler Shambhavi Tiwari Karen Yuan Maggie Toner Vivian Casillas Audrey DeGuerrera Brian Gao Belle Harris Melissa Ho Jahan Nanji Sheena Qiao Nina Zweig Song Rhee

Welcome back, everyone! The new school year has brought a number of changes to CPR’s editorial board. We send our best CPRegards to Matthew, our previous editor in chief, who is spending the upcoming year abroad, and welcome the host of new faces that the start of the school year always brings. I am immensely honored and excited to be leading the magazine this semester alongside Bani Sapra, CPR’s publisher, and I look forward to continuing CPR’s mission of serving as a vessel for political discourse on campus.

In the months that have passed since the publication of the Summer 2017 issue of CPR, we’ve been watching carefully as the landscape of global politics has undergone a number of tumultuous shifts. Many have been left wondering what role the United States should be playing on the global stage.

CPR delves into this question in this edition, with two masterful pieces on changes and continuity in U.S. foreign policy in the last century. Shayan Rauf takes a closer look at the evolving U.S. position on Afghanistan, while CPR’s own Belle Harris provides an overview of how American isolationist attitudes have shifted since World War II. We also explored political upheaval elsewhere in the world in this edition. Managing editor Shambhavi Tiwari interviews SIPA professor Dr. Jenik Radon, who played a key role in authoring Nepal’s interim constitution in 2007, on his experiences advising governments across the world, including those of Poland, Estonia, and Afghanistan. Megan Evershed takes us across the pond to the United Kingdom, where she deftly analyzes Jacob Rees-Mogg’s political trajectory and his potential candidacy for prime minister.

Closer to home, Alex Siegal explores the political rhetoric that has kept southeastern Florida red and the danger it poses as extreme weather and climate change become an increasingly great threat to the region.

My sincerest thanks go to our incredibly talented authors and editors, as well as those who contributed their photography and art to the magazine. Special thanks is also owed to our design editor, Theresa, for her hard work, and to our parent organization, CIRCA, for its continued support of CPR’s mission. Enjoy the magazine, and until 2018!

Anamaría López Méndez Editor in Chief

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this magazine belong to their authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Columbia Political Review, of CIRCA, or of Columbia University.

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW 4: REVIEW: My Own Words Review of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s My Own Words through the lens of its relevance to the current political climate and Columbia’s student body.

by Sonia Mahajan 8: Will Jacob Rees Mogg be the next Prime Minister?

An analysis of Rees-Mogg’s potential candidacy as British PM.

by Megan Evershed 10: Interview with Dr. Jenik Radon Dr. Radon, instrumental in the authoring of Nepal’s interim constitution, discusses modern politics in Nepal.

by Shambhavi Tiwari

Published by CIRCA

Fall 2017 Volume XVII, No. 3

18: Hurrican Irma and the Political Whirlwind Republican rhetoric and the need for responsible leadership.

by Alex Siegal 21: The Road Forward for Afghanistan: History’s Role in Contemporary Policy Exploration of the signifiance of recent developments regarding the current war in Afghanistan.

by Shayan Rauf 26: A History of American Isolationism

by Belle Harris

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REVIEW: RUTH BADER GINSBURG’S MY OWN WORDS Sonia Mahajan Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is known today as a pop culture icon and a liberal heavyweight on the Supreme Court. Yet her role in society today was shaped by her past as a women’s rights advocate and one of the few women in the legal profession. My Own Words is a collection of writings and speeches by Justice Ginsburg that outlines life from her working-class roots in New York City to her 2015-2016 term on the Supreme Court. Despite the many insights Ginsberg lends into the workings of the Supreme Court, the book’s main intention is to focus on women’s rights and sex discrimination. My Own Words is thus more than a col-

lection of speeches, cases and bench announcements; Ginsburg and her biographers frame it as a story of the struggles that women have faced in the past and may face in the future.

Ginsberg is perhaps one of the most qualified individuals in the United States to write a book on sex discrimination and the law. She was one of only twelve women enrolled at Columbia Law School in 1958.

Undeterred, Ginsburg then went on to teach at Columbia Law and serve as the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Women’s Rights Project. At Columbia Law School, the book notes, Ginsburg was the “first tenured woman law professor in [Columbia Law’s] 114year history.” Throughout her career in academia, Ginsburg focused on

women’s rights and gender equality.

In 1974, she published Sex-Based Discrimination: Text, Cases and Materials, the first casebook in the United States to focus on sex discrimination and law. In 1993, after 35 years in the legal field, Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton.

In the book, Justice Ginsburg recounts the time she spent working with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice appointed to the Supreme Court. Lawyers would consistently confuse the two women when answering questions. Although there are now two other women serving on the Supreme Court—Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan, appointed by President Obama in 2009 and 2010, respective-

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 05 ly—Ginsburg reminds us that there is always progress to be made. Although many tout women’s increased participation in law and politics, the perception is not the reality. It is true that more women than ever before are attending law school and women make up around half of all law school students— significantly more than the eleven women with whom Justice Ginsburg attended school. However, women in the law profession continue to be the minority, with women constituting only 36 percent of all lawyers in the workforce and 24 percent of all lawyers in Fortune 500 companies, according to the American Bar Association. Women have made partner in only 21.5 percent of American law firms, and only 27.1 percent of US judgeships are held by women.

This guise of progress is nowhere better unmasked than in the field of current American politics.

The results of the 2016 presidential election, for example, were framed by many as a failure for women in law and politics. CNN’s interactive electoral map, still available on their website, projected that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, nominee for the Democratic Party, would easily win the election with 268 elector-

al votes compared to 204 projected votes for Republican nominee Donald Trump. When Trump defeated Clinton with 306 electoral votes to her 232, voters around the country were shocked. Then, on November 14, 2016, Newsweek ran an article titled, “The Presidential Election Was a Referendum on Gender and Women Lost.” Casting Trump as the anti-woman candidate, due to controversial remarks about women that emerged during the campaign, the article outlines how Clinton’s loss came to represent, for many women, a loss for all womankind and blow to women’s issues. The article noted how Clinton’s defeat may “deter other women […] from getting into politics.”

Yet women have responded to Trump’s election with political action. Women’s rights advocates have mobilized against him as a collective force, taking part in events such as the Women’s March on Washington, which protested Trump’s anti-woman comments and policy proposals. And, more than ever before, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a symbol of female resistance, even seen wearing her infamous “dissent collar” in the days following the presidential election.

Although My Own Words was published in October 2016, well before the results of the presidential election were known, Justice Ginsburg placed a focus on women’s rights that speaks to a need for addressing the legal and societal barriers that women still face in all aspects of life.

In the penultimate chapter of her book, titled “The Role of Dissenting Opinions,” Ginsburg addresses the major issues that hinder gender equality today, once again reminding us that our work in advocating for women’s rights is not yet done.

Here, Ginsberg focuses on one of her more famous dissents, Ledbetter v.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. After realizing that she was paid less than her male coworkers, Lilly Ledbetter, an employee at Goodyear, sued her employer for sex discrimination; because it took her two decades to come to this realization, however, the Court dismissed her case. In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg strongly urged Congress “to take action” in fixing wage discrimination. Ginsburg penned her dissent in May 2007.

Two years later, Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. In another case, the Court upheld an abortion act for failing to “contain an

PHOTO CREDIT: PEYTON AYERS

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BREAKDOWN OF WOMEN IN LAW IN THE US

CATALYST / QUICK TAKE: WOMEN IN LAW, NEW YORK: CATALYST exception allowing a doctor to perform [a specific type of ] procedure” if a woman’s health was in danger.

Justices Thomas and Scalia stated in concurring opinions that “Roe v.

Wade and its progeny should be explicitly overruled.” Justice Ginsburg, who is particularly interested in abortion rights, “strongly dissented” in her bench announcement. Despite the ruling of Roe v. Wade, a 1973 Supreme Court case that effectively legalized abortion, women still have trouble accessing abortion services in many states. Very few abortion clinics remain in the Southern states, for example, making an abortion extremely difficult to obtain for the many women who cannot afford to travel out of state. In response to recent legislative efforts to close abortion clinics, Planned Parenthood has created a map of Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi that projects how many clinics will remain in each of these states. In Texas, only ten clinics will remain. Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alabama will each have only one clinic left. Mississippi, a

state with 603,000 “women of reproductive age,” is projected to have no abortion clinics at all. In 2015, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that made it “more difficult for women to obtain abortions.” CNN reported that this ruling, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, could make “clinic-shutdown laws” less prevalent.

Ginsburg was particularly enthusiastic about the decision. Though Justice Breyer wrote the opinion for the Court, Justice Ginsburg felt compelled to write a concurring opinion that reiterated the reasoning behind the decision. This commitment to women’s rights and to the Court is at the core of My Own Words.

Though women’s rights seem to be regressing in today’s political climate, with men openly objectifying women at the highest levels of government, Ginsburg’s commitment to and passion for change reminds us that some progress in women’s rights and gender equality can always be achieved.

Throughout her prolific career, Ginsberg has seen an increased number of women in the law field, seen the

first female nominee of a major party run for president, and seen abortion rights legalized and protected. Perhaps more than any other woman in modern times, Justice Ginsburg has made significant progress for women’s rights through her work: with the ACLU, as a professor, as a judge, and now, as a justice. Even though My Own Words is largely composed of case briefs, opinions, and dissents, it is a book worth reading for anyone interested in the ways that Ruth Bader Ginsburg has interpreted and shaped the gender-driven society in which we live today.

Sonia Mahajan is a first-year in Columbia College studying Sustainable Development and Political Science.

She is from a small town near San Francisco, California, and is a writer for the Columbia Undergraduate Law Review and the Columbia Science Review. She can be reached via email at sonia.mahajan@columbia.edu.

LUMBIA O C E H T N I JO EVIEW POLITICAL R LINE VISIT US ON RG CPREVIEW.O TISTS, SEEKING AR NERS G I S E D D N A WRITERS,

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OUT OF TOUCH: REES-MOGG ON ABORTION AND AUSTERITY Megan Evershed This past September, Jacob Rees-Mogg gave an interview with Good Morning Britain. During the interview, Rees-Mogg told the hosts that abortion was “morally indefensible” in all cases, and that he was opposed to same-sex marriage. “I am a Catholic and I take the teachings of the Catholic Church seriously,” he said. “Marriage is a sacrament and the decision of what is a sacrament lies with the Church, not with Parliament.” It is no wonder that, following this interview, my Facebook feed was filled with Rees-Mogg’s bespectacled face; every British news outlet was running a story on the interview. Rees-Mogg was starting to make a name for himself.

Of course, I had known about Rees-Mogg for a while. He was the spindly aristocrat with a posh accent, an unearthed relic of the era when Britain kept servants downstairs and used words like “fogey.”

He had been a backbencher for the Conservative Party since 2010 and was a notable figure less for his political views than for his comic value.

When Rees-Mogg graced national headlines in the past, it had been as the subject of banter, usually at his expense. For instance, who could forget his 1999 interview with

Ali G, Sacha Baron Cohen’s fictional, working-class alter ego? In the interview, Ali G asks Rees-Mogg questions such as, “What if someone is so rich they have a swimming pool—would they be upper class?” and “What makes a girl upper class? Is it things like she spits into her hankie?”— questions to which Rees-Mogg usually replied in a confused and bumbling manner, citing “bizarre definitions of class.” At one point, Rees-Mogg even lends Ali G his top hat, which he conveniently had on hand.

You should not think, however, that Rees-Mogg is just a one-hit wonder. Another newsworthy Mogg moment was when he used the word “floccinaucinihilipilification” in the House of Commons. Yet another is the rumor that he attaches his plastic security pass to a gold watch chain at Conservative party conferences.

All of these amusing anecdotes are good fodder for tabloids and stand-up comedy bits. But this September, Rees-Mogg was a hot topic of conversation for another reason altogether. He had been tipped as the next leader of the Conservative party and had expressed on television views about abortion and same-sex marriage which did not correspond to public opinion or current legislation in the United Kingdom. In his defense, the Tory MP had claimed

that the issue was not “party political” and that the views of a single member of Parliament were hardly likely to sway a party that had already passed a bill granting same-sex marriage.

However, the interview made liberals across Britain shift in their seats, thinking the next potential Tory leader could be so anti-LGBT rights.

Although Rees-Mogg does not support abortion or same-sex marriage, the United Kingdom is a progressive country when it comes to social rights. It is highly unlikely that a Rees-Mogg premiership would result in any drastic violations of women’s or LGBT rights. The more concerning hypothetical, though, is what a Rees-Mogg premiership would look like for welfare and austerity measures, an arena where a Prime Minister certainly can have a significant impact.

This past October, anti-austerity protesters confronted Rees-Mogg at the Tory Party conference.

One protester, face-to-face with Rees-Mogg, charged, “There are people who are dying because of the things that you are advocating.” In response, Rees-Mogg retorted, “I don’t agree with that. I think that the policies the government are implementing are actually making people’s lives better.”

This protester had come to the conference as part of a larger group expressing opposition to Rees-Mogg’s

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 09 support for the austerity measures taken by the Conservative government since 2010. In March 2009, the national deficit of the United Kingdom was 11.4 percent of GDP. Each year, as the Conservatives introduced more spending cuts, Britain’s deficit shrunk. In March 2016, the United Kingdom’s deficit was just 4 percent of GDP. One year later, in March 2017, the deficit was 2.4 percent of GDP, a decrease of 28.2 billion pounds from the previous year.

Austerity policies have certainly been eliminating the deficit, but the cuts in spending have also hurt those receiving welfare benefits.

For instance, the Universal Credit policy, introduced in 2013 as part of the Welfare Reform Act of 2012, is an austerity policy that has had and will continue to have drastic consequences for low-income individuals living in the United Kingdom. Universal Credit combines several different benefit payments into one standard payment. Child tax credit, housing benefits, income support, jobseeker’s allowances, and a few other benefits are replaced with a single payment made to a claimant. A claimant thus receives all of the benefit payments for which they are eligible but in a single sum rather than in multiple payments. The policy was meant to streamline welfare benefit payment schemes, but the policy has had negative side effects for claimants.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has predicted that the Universal Credit policy will increase child poverty from 17.8 percent in 2015/16 to 25.7 percent by 2020/21, and the Trussel Trust Foodbank has seen

a significant increase in the number of people using their foodbanks in those areas where the Universal Credit policy has already been implemented. Additionally, the Trussel Trust has seen an average increase of 16.85 percent in the number of referrals for emergency food in those areas. The national average of refer-

fare spending, the number of people using food banks will only increase.

In July, Rees-Mogg appeared on the UK’s Question Time and told the audience that, when the Conservatives came to power in 2010, Labour has passed along a drastic deficit. The Tories, then, were forced to choose between increased taxation, increased borrowing, or cuts to the public sector. In the end, they chose to cut spending in the public sector, a move which has definitely diminished the deficit in the last seven years but has hurt Britain’s poorest in the process.

At the Tory party conference in Oc tober, the anti-austerity protester had asked Rees-Mogg, “What are you on about, people’s lives are better? You’re ruining people’s lives.” Rees-Mogg responded, “The standard of living in the country is improving, it’s consistently improving.” The protester could only shake his head in angry frustration. “No, it’s not,” he insisted.

In a 2011 BBC documentary titled “Posh and Posher: Why Public School Boys Run Britain,” a reporter asks Rees-Mogg, “What class are you?”

In response, Rees-Mogg had claimed, “I’m a man of the people, vox populi, vox dei.” But Rees-Mogg was out of touch with the people then, and he is out of touch with the people now.

Rees-Mogg had claimed, “I’m a man of the people, vox populi, vox dei.” rals for emergency food is 6.64 percent. This rise in food bank use in Universal Credit areas is due, among other things, to delays of up to six weeks in receiving the first payment, to certain reductions in the amounts that claimants receive, and to new forms of conditionality for claimants.

Rees-Mogg, for his part, has said that the existence of food banks is “rather uplifting” and shows what a “good, compassionate country” the United Kingdom is. It should be noted that he voted to introduce Universal Credit in March 2011, voted against introducing a childcare element to the policy in June 2011, and voted for lowering the total amount of welfare benefits that individuals and couples could claim in 2012.

In spite of the fact that the United Kingdom is the world’s sixth largest economy, 8.4 million Brits claimed to live in food-insecure households in 2014. This number is nearly equivalent to the population of New York City. Conservative policies like Universal Credit are exacerbating the problem; as austerity policies continue to cut into government wel-

Megan Evershed is a junior in the School of General Studies. She’s part of the Dual BA Program with Sciences Po and studies political science and English literature. She can be reached at me2574@columbia.edu.

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INTERVIEW WITH DR. JENIK RADON

Professor Jenik Radon, Adjunct Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), is a graduate of Columbia College ‘67. He obtained his Master of City Planning (M.C.P.) from the University of California, Berkeley and his J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Although he has worked extensively in both the private and public sectors, he is best described as an activist-lawyer. Indeed, Professor Radon co-founded the Afghanistan Relief Committee, which sought freedom for Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion and assisted refugees displaced by the Afghan-Soviet war. Professor Radon also advised Poland on investment laws, which led to his heavy involvement in Estonia before it gained independence from the Soviet Union. He advised the Estonian government during the country’s independence struggle and co-authored the country’s foreign investment, mortgage/pledge, privatization, and corporate laws. Professor Radon was the first foreigner to receive the Medal of Distinction from the Estonian Chamber of Commerce, which recognized his contributions to Estonia’s transition to a market economy, and recently, he was honored with Estonia’s Order of the Cross Terra Mariana. For his oil and gas work in Georgia, he received its highest

civilian award, the Order of Honor.

In 2006, Professor Radon worked with the Nepali government to draft the interim, or peace, constitution, which granted citizenship to the Terai people, many of whom were previously stateless despite having lived in Nepal for decades, and ensured that women held at least 35 percent of the seats in the Nepali parliament.

Professor Radon is also actively involved in academia. In 1990, Professor Radon founded the Eesti and Eurasian Public Service Fellowship, which provided students from select American institutions with the opportunity to intern with government officials and civil society in emerging nations, including Cambodia, Estonia, Georgia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Philippines, Tanzania and Uganda.

Professor Radon continues to teach classes at SIPA. His signature class is Energy, Corporate Responsibility, and Human Rights, in which he examines the role of corporations in the natural resource sector, including their environmental and community practices as well as the necessary regulatory role of the state. He is very popular, having been invited to more than seventy-five student weddings across the globe and only missing two, in one case because two were on the same weekend on different continents.

Professor Radon can be contacted at jr2218@columbia.edu. You can also read more about Professor Radon’s work at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ creative/epub/harriman/2017/spring/ negotiating_transition.pdf

Shambhavi Tiwari, CPR: Can you tell us about what you’re currently reading and whether you have any recommendations for undergraduate students?

Professor Jenik Radon, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University: My readings are extensive and delightfully eclectic—we all learn from different voices and narratives.

For students, I would definitely recommend the classical readings required in the Columbia Core classes, Contemporary Civilization and the Humanities, as these have an engaging and intense grounding in the foundation of Western thought. However, as we are living in an increasingly globalized world, I would definitely also add readings from classical Asian philosophies, including Confucianism and Hinduism, as well as from African and indigenous cultures. I personally appreciate many different writers and genres from different backgrounds, as all people have something to say.

One author who comes to mind is Erich Fromm with his Escape from

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 11 Freedom, which is very human in its thoughts and has given us much food-for-thought. Also Karl Popper’s book The Open Society and its Enemies is excellent for its eye-opening wisdom. And the modern classics

by George Orwell, Animal Farm and 1984, are easy, enjoyable, and yet thought-provoking reads. Friedrich Hayek with his focus on classical liberalism is also worth reading and studying. And the list goes on.

So I do believe in reading the classics, both old and modern, from our Western traditions, as they are the foundation for our culture in the United States and many other nations. But we also need to learn from the traditions and classical writings of other countries and societies. Each culture has something to contribute, and engagement with different people and thoughts is key. The golden rule seems to be a universal principle, embedded in all of our cultures but expressed differently. This conclusion that we have so much in common seems unfortunately to be missed by many people. Moreover, and again unfortunately, we have lost or not paid attention to the wisdom of indigenous societies around the world, which have a lot to teach us about respecting the environment. I have recently increased my focus on the wisdom of Native Americans and what others have passed down to us about nature and the environment. Only if we understand how our thinking came to be and appreciate what others have learned can we build on the wisdom of those who have come before us and advance our thoughts.

To me it is obvious and clear.

We can, and should, learn from each other, from our various traditions and cultures, and this requires respect. Reading and learning is a

lifelong endeavor of getting to know each other and creating respect. So for me, global eclectic reading is in.

ST: You’re known to have traveled extensively, to 105 out of the 195 countries.

What motivates your seemingly endless curiosity about the world?

JR: As a child, I moved from Germany to the United States, several years after World War II. I quickly realized that I had to understand how the culture of my parents, which was the culture I learned at home, fit in the American culture. These were two frames, two ways of looking at things.

People becoming part of a new or different culture always have to ask themselves, “Who am I?” and “How do I fit in?” By asking those questions already when I was very young, I became curious about the world and world events. I wanted to understand why, for example, my uncle’s letters from East Germany were

censored. I wanted to understand why people had to leave their own country in 1956 when I saw the Hungarian Revolution on television. This curiosity about the world has been with me since the moment that I came to the United States, so it has long been part of my nature, of who I am.

ST: You run your own international law practice, Radon Law Offices. Can you tell us a little more about your motivation and experiences when starting your own practice, and how it fits into your career in academia?

JR: I have always been an activist-lawyer, representing and advising, for example, governments that are engaged in negotiations on public interest matters and human rights issues, such as the rights of communities, especially in the natural resource sector and in self-determination, such as was the case with Afghanistan, Poland and Estonia. My teaching is reflective to a great degree of

RADON’S RECOMMENDED 1. THE GREAT CONVERGENCE KISHORE MABUBANI 2. MY MEMORIES - Y.V. REDDY 3. WARRIORS & CITIZENS edited by JIM MATTIS 4. COLLAPSE - JARED DIAMOND 5. BEHAVE - ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY 6. THE AFRICAN KAISER - ROBERT GAUDI 7. 101 VERY FINNISH PROBLEMS JOEL WILLANS

12 // FALL 2017 // COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW my work as a lawyer.

My signature class at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs is Energy, Corporate Responsibility, and Human Rights. After my wife passed away, my mentor and friend John Barton, himself a former teacher of mine at Stanford, suggested that I start teaching. I was not even sure which subject I should be teaching about in the first place; when John suggested that I teach human rights, I initially claimed to know nothing about it, much to his consternation! John proceeded to describe my life and told me that since I have been living and practicing human rights, it was time to teach it.

I realized that my practice and experience made for a unique contribution to the classroom. My specialty in advising governments allows me to teach very practical lessons in my classes, though of course explained and elaborated in an academic context. A large amount of my class’s reading is material from cases that I have been involved with, from which I can draw parallels and lessons.

I’ve enjoyed teaching tremendously. It is a way of giving back, and studying at Columbia College was a very formative and happy period of my life. But teaching also forces me to think more clearly and be more articulate, since students ask questions without having the obvious background and experience I have. As a consequence, I have to make my knowledge, the concepts and issues I take for granted, comprehensible to them.

countered and experiences we had when we were young— what we learned at home from our parents, for example.

ST: Moving on to the technicalities, you’ve worked to formulate privatization and foreign investment laws in Poland, Estonia, and Malawi, to name a few. How do you approach such law making?

Whose best interests do you keep in mind and how do you know what is ‘fair’, in the light of the unavoidable conflict of interests in issues of natural resources?

JR: As it can take a considerable time and effort to draft a law, I always start by looking at the laws of other countries and examining what they’ve done on a particular topic.

But there’s an important caveat: one cannot simply adopt another country’s law without first adapting it for the specific social context. This entails that one has to understand why a precedent law was enacted, what the circumstances were, what the motivations of the legislators were, and what the intended effect or impact was. We have to first understand before we can adapt and adopt.

Laws are not created in a vacuum.

Even within a given social context, what is fair? Fairness is, by definition, a concept that lacks an objective mathematical or clear definition. So I try, as best as possible, to always approach any problem from an ethical and objective point of view; I also examine the costs and benefits of a certain situation. Asking questions like, “Who are the parties that will be affected?” or, “What is the possible end result?” is important.

We have to first understand before we can adapt and adopt. Laws are not created in a vacuum.

One of the most important lessons I took from the Columbia Core is to always ask questions. Have you learned to be curious and to not be embarrassed to ask questions, even if you make missteps sometimes? The reason I say that is because the only “dumb” question is the question you, a student, do not or did not ask. We all have different backgrounds, so it’s easy to take knowledge for granted that others may not find so easy to grasp. Our backgrounds are our second nature, our DNA. Explaining often what you take to be second nature, effectively what you believe is, in fact, more difficult than explaining what you read in a book, as then you only have to explain chapter and verse.

Our brains store a massive amount of information. One of the initiatives that President Bollinger has taken while at Columbia is setting up the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, which studies neuroscience and nanotechnology, so that we can learn more about how our brains actually work. What I have observed, especially in the classroom, is that articulation, in a way, requires us to retrace our thoughts and explain why and how we drew certain conclusions. It’s not an easy task. It can take considerable time and effort, especially when much of our thinking is based on values we en-

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 13

My upbringing was very important in helping me to understand morals and ethics and to include them as factors. In high school, I was taught by the Jesuits, who are great ethical teachers. But most important for the formation of my ethical standards were my parents, who taught me everything I know. I often say that I learned nothing new at Columbia and Stanford beyond what my parents had already taught me; rather, my education helped me articulate what I had learned from them. They also taught me that I have only one real asset: my reputation. Earnings from my practice are only short-term assets.

Despite sometimes being pressured to not speak up, I am pretty forthright and very open.

People have often asked for my services because they know that I try to provide an objective perspective.

And I don’t give up on core princi-

ples. It’s important to be secure in yourself and your abilities and values, which means you have to know yourself. You have to be comfortable with your goals and ambitions and be true to your ethical standards.

One of my concerns in doing work overseas is the people who have not been taken care of, who are being overlooked. Some people are obviously poorer and not as well-educated as others, but it’s important to address their concerns and consider their best interests. The goal at the end of the day, though, is to make sure that such people can stand on their own two feet so that their voices are heard. This is an important lesson I learned in my student days when I visited the Penny Foundation in Guatemala, a front-runner of a microfinance NGO and an organization that truly believed in people.

The founders of the Foundation,

the Greens, felt that it is crucial to ensure a person’s dignity and pride, which can only be done by helping them become independent and self-sustaining. And I firmly agree.

ST: People often may not know what’s best for them. What do you do in those kinds of cases?

JR: I always consider the long-run implications of any action. Often, people I have counseled claim that they can’t conceive of the long term, to which I reply, “I can’t think in the short term!”

You have to believe in the future.

Once again, articulation is important. I have to articulate to the people I advise and counsel as to why something is in their best interests, even if they are unable to conceive of the long run outcome. As an advisor, I have a wider perspective because I have worked on many projects, have traveled extensively, have had the fortunate opportunity to study at great institutions and learn from great thinkers, etc. and so I’m aware of the potential implications of actions. For many people, it is difficult to imagine, realize, or believe that their country can, and will, be better off tomorrow than it is today. Instead, they choose to sacrifice their long-term interests for purely short-term gains, simply because they have no confidence in the future. Such a choice often creates today the problems of tomorrow.

People often ask me to explain how I assess risks. When there’s an information gap, which is normally the case because no one can accurately predict the future, there is potential risk. I therefore believe in the “precautionary principle”, a term originating in the pharmaceutical field that I learned when I advised, and later headed, a pharmaceutical company. Moreover, I am reminded

14 // FALL 2017 // COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW of what my parents told me: “Be a little cautious.” Indeed, caution never hurt anybody. When evaluating a situation, I do a cost-benefit analysis, a combination of considering different scenarios, quantifying costs and benefits to the best extent possible, articulating or specifying those effects that cannot be quantified, and, to me, always considering the long-term impacts. With these skills, I can outline potential outcomes and implications, risks if you will, using both logic and experience at the same time.

I have noticed that most people are incapable of evaluating risk unless they’ve experienced it themselves.

We can read about it in a book, but we do not really believe in the risk that we haven’t seen before. That’s precisely the problem! The risk that hasn’t been experienced is often the one that we need to protect most against.

Admittedly, risks that we do not understand can also create unfounded fears, but this is another topic.

ST: Your work in Nepal, Estonia and Afghanistan are all demonstrations of your passion for contributing to nation-building in developing countries. This kind of work seems quite different from the international corporate law practice that you run.

How and why do you find yourself attracted to two such diverse fields?

JR: All of us have obligations to ourselves—to put food on the table, to educate our children, and to pay for our, and our family’s, health and well-being. Business is a normal part of life, and a way to sustain ourselves and fulfill these basic obligations.

I use my corporate skills, which are, in essence, drafting and negotiation and even thinking a problem through. When you write contracts, for example, you have to anticipate issues and accordingly write with

But fairness, for me, is a human rights issue. I consider human rights to be a universal standard, not just a Western one, and I tried to articulate that in the Nepali context, where there are many different social groups and it is important to be fair to all of them. precision and clarity. My practice is, in a way, like preventative medicine. I try to prevent a problem before it becomes a problem. I simply apply the corporate skills that I have acquired over a lifetime to the public sector but with a different mindset, that of the public interest or the common good.

There are important distinctions between the public and private sectors, which are too often overlooked or ignored. States are not purely economic actors. A state has two obligations to its citizens: to promote the economy by encouraging local and national businesses but also to protect and advance its citizens. A state has a regulatory function. Articulation, then, comes into the picture once again: as an advisor, one has to be able to articulate the difference between a purely business-related transaction and a transaction where one

also has to be a regulator. That can be challenging at times, especially in developing nations, where the state as an economic actor is very pronounced and is often the main employer.

ST: Your work has been undertaken on a larger-than-life scale; from drafting constitutions in Nepal to writing foreign investment laws in Poland and Estonia, you have helped shape the trajectories of entire countries. Indeed, Estonia has commonly been regarded as a success story. Was it ever intimidating for you when you were younger to venture into such uncharted territory?

JR: The honest answer is no.

My father advised me to not accept any job or take on any assignment unless I honestly believed that I had the skills and mindset necessary to complete the task well. He said, “Never fool yourself.” When I agree to participate or contribute to something, I

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 15 have to feel comfortable in my skills and ability to meet the challenge.

I am comfortable knowing both what I do know and what I don’t know—it’s important to have an awareness of both! Importantly, I feel comfortable building on my existing knowledge and applying it. And I like talking and listening to people; that helps.

In Estonia, in fact in all countries where I work, I work with the people of the country, so I am part of a team and I become part of the community. That’s the whole essence of my line of work—it’s impossible to be a lone ranger. One is always part of a group or a community, as one cannot accomplish anything of consequence by oneself. The hard part is when you work outside of your traditional community, which in my case is the United States. In that case you have to become aware and knowledgeable of other ways of doing things, which are often just different.

And you have to respect those ways.

ST: You’ve often spoken about the importance of understanding and the need to “find out the real origin of a disagreement or conflict” when working on a new case. How do you usually go about gaining an understanding about the specificities of each case?

JR: The most memorable class I took at Columbia was a prerequisite to my anthropological field trip to Brazil. I called it “How to Do Anthropology” and it taught me how to engage and communicate with people from different cultural contexts and who speak different languages, in particular those that were new to me.

It taught me to observe how people said things, their body language, and how they engaged with one another.

Professor Comitas, who still teaches at Teacher’s College, was my profes-

sor and had a lifelong impact on me.

If you ask most of my American friends, they would say that I am not very quiet. But when I go to a new setting, when I’m in a new country and engaging with a culture that is new to me, I am actually relatively quiet—I follow what I learned in Comitas’ class, watching and listening, even though I will have read about the culture in question beforehand as well. But I listen first, in order to learn and understand it.

It’s important not to forget that you are a guest when visiting a foreign country. After founding the Eesti and Eurasian Fellowship in 1990, I’ve always told those students that, when they are abroad, they are ambassadors for themselves, their families, their colleges, and countries.

Even more importantly, as a guest, you don’t have all the background knowledge, so you can never fully understand another person’s social context. You have to listen to what people’s concerns and needs are; therefore, you need to engage with people. Understanding the psychology and the sociology of the people you are working with is important in these situations, and engagement at this level can be quite time-consuming. But there is no doubt that such dialogue is very rewarding and fun.

It’s important that you inform and educate the people you work with about your actions and their implications: they need to understand why you do things because they are the ones who will carry on your work after you go back home. If no one understands the work you’ve done, then you’ve failed.

You may excel in your field, but you’re not going to carry it on. Therefore, it is once again important to articulate.

ST: I find your work in Nepal with the Terai particularly interesting.

You have written that, since the Nepali constitution is a form of binding self-government, “all Nepalese citizens become involved in the process of writing the Constitution” through the Constituent Assembly. Evidently, your work was a success. Yet, as an outsider, you helped make the constitution what it is. How did you ensure that all voices were heard and that you were not imposing a Western standard of political structure upon the Nepali people?

JR: A whole committee cannot draft an agreement, let alone a constitution, so someone has to take the lead and write the first draft. Think of it as an essay. You can’t have ten people sit down together to write it!

But then the engagement, after there is a draft for people to read and comment on, becomes critical. As a drafter, all I did was take the first steps and bring in alternate perspectives and ideas for the parties to consider. Admittedly, putting ideas and concepts in a draft is influential, as they then have to be accepted or reacted against with explanations. A concept cannot simply be rejected once it is in writing.

And I am very proud of what I introduced into the Nepali constitution.

I introduced updated human rights principles into the draft constitution in Nepal. However there will always be social issues that you don’t know as an outsider, and that’s where a good informant helps. The informant is not a spy, as the word might imply, but a person who understands both your culture and the local one and who can translate back and forth in between them and bridge them. I worked closely with Pravakar Adhikari, a Columbia Law School graduate and a native of Nepal, while drafting the constitution.

Pravakar was a super informant. He

16 // FALL 2017 // COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW was able to engage with the government, with the other parties and with the community due to his background and qualifications. He also obviously engaged with me—frequently asking questions about why certain provisions of the constitution were included, what their purpose was and, most importantly, how they helped to create a better Nepal.

The engagement with the people was primarily Prime Minister Koirala’s responsibility. He had to engage with the community and explain why certain provisions were there and why some were not. He of course also had to engage with the opposing political forces. As I said before, we are all part of a team and no one can do it alone.

However, being an outsider gave me an advantage in preparing drafts. That may sound paradoxical, but if I was not an outsider I would have quickly been associated with a specific Nepali political party (the Congress, UML or the Maoist party), and would have made enemies simply by association as a result. But, as a foreigner, I was viewed as being neutral. This allowed me to articulate issues that were being avoided and so not even considered, let alone discussed. This included, for example, the rights of the Terai people and their right to Nepali citizenship. Most of the Terai people did not have Nepali citizenship but were instead deemed foreigners. They were stateless. So I am proud that I raised the issue, granted them citizenship in my draft, and that this was accepted.

I based the interim constitution of Nepal on the original one of 1991, choosing not to superimpose anything completely new or foreign. But fairness, for me, is a human rights issue. I consider human rights to be a universal standard, not just a Western one, and I tried to articulate that in the Nepali context, where there are many different social groups and it is important to be fair to all of them. One of my achievements that I think was par-

situation of the Terai people versus that of the Rohingya. Atrocities on such a scale were never committed against the Terai, and the main issue was about their citizenship status as Nepali, which had been denied to them. With the Rohingya, there are crimes being committed against them almost daily, atrocities with the goal of ethnic cleansing.

On a related note, one of the unfortunate things occurring around the world, especially in emerging nations, is that some national leaders have come to consider federalization a bad term, a slippery road to secession. But the United States, Canada, India, Australia, and Germany, as well as a host of other nations, are all federal states. These examples show that it is possible to have a unified state and yet still have delegation of authority to localities, provinces, or regions, which is the essence of federalization. By granting local control, people get the sense that their voices are being heard, that they can have an impact through meaningful political participation.

The Rohingya have been in Myanmar for centuries. So what is the harm in making Myanmar a federal state? Like in other federal nations, it is still possible to maintain a unitary state in terms of foreign policy, defense, and other common interests.

In the case of the Rohingya however, before federalization can even be considered, you have to stop the fighting, the killing, the burning of villages etc. Only then can you start the path to rebuild trust, which has

But one should also ask, “Is it fair that the nation decides whose interests it should sacrifice for the sake of the national interest?” ticularly impactful was the inclusion of a quota mandating the representation of women in the parliament. I wanted to make sure that all voices could be heard, regardless of gender.

I strongly believe that everyone should participate in the political sphere because if people are ignored, then they talk amongst themselves. And that has never lead to any good, sometimes even resulting in what I call groupthink, which may in turn lead to social turmoil!

ST: I would like to know about your take on the Rohingya crisis, given that it is an urgent issue with the UN Human Rights Chief calling it a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

JR: First, I’d like to make an important distinction between the

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 17 clearly been lost. But, sadly, I believe that rebuilding trust in Myanmar is going to be a difficult and lengthy process, as destroyed trust takes a long time to restore. It will have to be a step-by-step, bridge-building process.

It will unfortunately be long and hard.

ST: In your opinion, should Bangladesh continue to welcome the Rohingya? If so, do you think that we need a more efficient system for migrant care? It seems that the migration crisis is quite unregulated, which can be problematic for both parties.

JR: Migrations are always unregulated. From a humanitarian point of view, I applaud that Bangladesh is sheltering the Rohingya because they urgently need physical security. We often do not appreciate the contribution of neighboring countries in the case of refugee crises. In the Syrian refugee crisis, for example, Jordan has sheltered refugees well out of proportion to its overall population. Lebanon has also taken in thousands of refugees. And Turkey took in millions of refugees. Neighboring countries always bear the brunt of refugee migration and frequently, as is the case with Bangladesh, are not the ones with the capacity to bear this burden.

The international community should offer whatever support it can to the countries that are bearing the brunt of refugee crises. But moreover, the international community should also impress upon Myanmar that, although the Rohingya are of a different ethno-religious group than many of the people in Myanmar, it is possible to have a united country notwithstanding such diversity and that the atrocities must stop. It should be mentioned at every meeting.

In fact, diversity is enriching, as it brings in different perspectives.

So it’s important to balance the hu-

manitarian instinct, to provide new homes and safety, with the need to ensure that the Rohingya are not driven from their historic homes. The international community must do more.

ST: Regarding your work in the extractive industry, you’re known to work in the favor of countries like Afghanistan and Georgia to help prevent the exploitation of their land and natural resources by multinational oil corporations. Do you think that the paradox of plenty, or the resource curse, can be avoided by the correct regulations and institutions?

JR: Very few countries suffering from the resource curse have managed to escape it. The solution is to prevent the curse from ever happening in the first place. It all comes back to articulation: a country that has a permanent resource needs to manage it environmentally and sustainably over the long term, so that a liquid resource, cash, can be generated from the permanent asset, and then this cash must be invested productively. A resource in the ground is permanent capital, but once it’s taken out of the ground, it becomes liquid capital.

Natural resource development by definition poses not only the challenge of effective commercial or development management of that resource, but also, as by the very nature of the resource, its environmental and community impact; natural resource development also needs to be regulated. A question that has troubled many countries is, “How do we establish environmental regulations which also balance the interests of the country to grow economically and how should they be enforced?”

I personally believe that precautionary principle should be applied. Sometimes going slow is, in reality, going fast. Going slow gives

time for deliberation. In addition, there should be regulations requiring companies to apply the best available technology, which would lower the cost of technologies that are expensive if no one uses them. The more demand for the technology, the lower its cost over time. So there is a Catch-22: a product is not used as it is too expensive; therefore, costs do not go down; and therefore, the advanced technology continues to not be used.

This cycle has to be broken and this requires forthright political leadership.

I read an article about Colombia, whose constitution allows local communities to decide themselves whether to allow natural resource development within their community.

One reader commented that it was not fair for a community to decide what was in the best national interest.

But one should also ask, “Is it fair that the nation decides whose interests it should sacrifice for the sake of the national interest?” In my opinion, communities ought to be deemed partners in the development of the natural resource in their areas, and they should receive a larger stake of the proceeds, as they have to endure the day-today impact of the development. And if the community is unable to use the funds productively in the short term, these proceeds should be invested in a trust fund for future use.

And if I may add a closing comment: all students should go forth with their youthful idealism, as that will sustain them for a lifetime and support them in tough times—and there will be tough times. You can make a difference and a contribution, so do it.

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HURRICANE IRMA AND THE POLITICAL WHIRLWIND REPUBLICAN RHETORIC AND THE NEED FOR RESPONSIBLE LEADERSHIP Alex Siegal “We have for 90 years avoided this day, but I think our day has come.”

Legendary Tampa Bay mayor Bob Buckhorn uttered these words just a day before the gigantic Category 4 Hurricane Irma was set to slam into Tampa as the next Katrina.

Had it happened, entire communities would have been annihilated by the storm surge. My hometown would have suddenly become a group of three islands overnight.

By almost prophetic coincidence, The Washington Post’s Darryl Fears wrote a story about Tampa Bay’s incredible vulnerability just weeks before the storm materialized.

Fears focused on a political angle as he discussed the unwillingness of local Republican officials to prepare for the heightened climatic threats, as well as the dangerous self-assuredness of builders who participated in a construction boom directly along the waterfront, with few safeguards and even fewer hurricane-proof buildings.

A particularly telling anecdote is the fact that a local museum dedicated to Salvador Dalí is much better protected than one of the largest hospitals in the state, the Tampa General Hospital.

And while that might be great news for fans of surrealist art, this con-

trast is representative of the terrifyingly lopsided nature of Tampa’s infrastructure. Homes and businesses are not properly elevated, large stretches of highway along the water reach barely above sea level, and the streets of many neighborhoods flood after even small storms.

A couple of years ago, local watchdogs in the regional planning council conducted a series of simulations designed to show the effects of a disaster. Project Phoenix was one of these disaster scenarios, in which the woefully unprepared area suffers a direct hit from a Category 5 storm that kills more people than Hurricane Katrina and causes $200 billion in structural damage alone. In the scenario, nearly one million buildings—homes, hospitals, banks—are severely damaged or utterly destroyed, producing a total of 41 million tons of debris. That scale of destruction is akin to the city of New York collapsing overnight.

And then, “the big one” came, in the form of Hurricane Irma. Facebook feeds flooded with re-uploads of the Phoenix Project’s video from years before. This new behemoth was set to bring economic and environmental devastation and, most dishearteningly, a devastating loss of life as well.

Although Irma did not hit the area, thanks to a brief but debilitating landfall in Cuba, the increased in-

tensity and frequency of hurricanes today make the eventual appearance of such a monster inevitable. Tampa Bay has now made two razor-thin escapes in the 21st century—first from Hurricane Charley in 2004 and now from Irma—but the current rate of global warming and climate change suggest it will not continue to be so fortunate. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, the arrival of a devastating storm in Tampa Bay is not a question of “if ” but a question of “when.” Global warming means warmer oceans, which is what fuels these disasters. Melting ice caps contribute to rising sea levels and heighten the danger of flooding.

Global warming is a problem that is growing exponentially, which is why it is crucial to take urgent action.

This is also why it is so alarming that our politicians have flatly refused to take meaningful action against global warming. All of the facts lie before us in plain sight.

2017 is on track to be the second most active hurricane cycle in history after 2005. We had never before seen a storm as large and sustained as Irma. Ten of the fifteen most active hurricane seasons since the decade before the Civil War have occurred in the 21st century—in just the past

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 19 17 years. The percentage of intense Category 4 and 5 hurricanes among the total has doubled since 1970. Now, roughly one in three storms is one of these behemoths.

Our current climate change-skeptical Republican government, at both the federal and state levels, chooses to ignore the problem or, even worse, to actively exacerbate it.

The reality is disturbing. And yet, it is brushed off by the population with a complacent, “it’ll never happen here” kind of attitude.

Why? It is equal parts luck and politics. In fairness to the skeptics, Tampa Bay hasn’t been directly hit by a powerful hurricane in almost a century. Some attribute that luck to favorable weather patterns. Others, Floridians being Floridians, give the credit to Native American burial mounds.

And if you remind a local of the ramifications of climate change, especially the inevitability of rising of sea levels, there is a significant chance that they will simply brush it off as not being a real problem.

Many may even call it “fake news.”

Yet, this area is still offers a large base of support for President Trump and the Republican Party. On dangerously low-lying barrier islands, Trump bumper stickers decorate cars in driveways and Trump flags wave from mobile homes which face the threat of flooding even by common thunderstorms.

The entire population of Florida obviously does not hold these views, as the residents of bigger cities tend to be more educated and alarmed about climate change. But a strikingly large proportion of the bay area’s populace—the more vulnerable part

of it—is blissfully ignorant of the consequences of our commander-in-chief ’s actions. The man behind our withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the return of coal “like you’ve never seen” is sacrificing the very lives of his own constituents to benefit himself—and those very constituents seem to be celebrating it.

The phenomenon, the people apparently disregarding their own interests, is not just specific to Tampa Bay or the issue of climate change—the GOP is taking advantage of their vulnerable constituents all across the country: Heat waves grounded flights this summer in Arizona, and the Republicans’ various healthcare ideas pose an existential threat to Trump’s very own Forgotten Men. He has abandoned them in favor of big business. So why, then, do these individuals still champion him so zealously?

The secret lies, as you may have guessed, in the widespread appeal of Trump’s populist message. Its power to unlock emotion while abandoning logic was unmatched by any other candidate’s platform in the 2016 elec-

tion. But Trump’s appeal is only part of a much larger issue —after all, his constituents have been voting red against their own logical interests for some time now.

The story of the strength of Republican rhetoric really begins in the 1990s with the appearance of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.

In a study conducted by researchers at Stanford, Brown, and Microsoft, the 1994 election was defined as a “watershed moment in political marketing.” From that point onward, the ability of the average person to correctly identify a politician’s party from his speech leapt from 57 percent to 73 percent accuracy, after remaining fairly constant for decades.

The mastermind behind the strategy was an innovative media strategist and focus-group guru who changed the way Republicans speak: Frank Luntz. He masterfully transformed the estate tax into the “death tax,” drilling for oil into “exploring for energy,” and the Bush tax cuts into “tax relief.” When Luntz put together the strategies of Gingrich’s Contract With America in 1994, he turned a capital ART CREDIT: CHRIS COYNES

20 // FALL 2017 // COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW gains tax cut into “job creation and wage enhancement” and tax-sheltered retirement account reform into a “restoration of the American Dream.” It was a genius move, allowing the GOP to shift the nature of political discourse and tilt the playing field in their favor. The way Republicans now frame their key ideas allows them to tap into deeper, more subconscious emotions in their audiences, sidestepping the realm of logic and critical thinking. Luntz’s breakthrough resulted in a Republican majority in Congress for twelve years following 1994. His strategy even had ripple effects outside electoral politics. When you listen to a conservative pundit on the television today, chances are that you are listening to rhetoric that has been fundamentally shaped by Frank Luntz.

Today, Luntz’s rhetorical strategy allows local Republican officials to get away with not paying for the maintenance and upgrading of storm drains in the vulnerable Tampa Bay area. As Republican officials might say: Taxes are evil, and we’re not sending your hard-earned tax dollars to Washington and those corrupt elitist Democrats. It seems incredible that they can get away with this—surely one would figure out the truth eventually?

But some people do not want the truth and many Republican-led administrations are happy to oblige this. In Florida, one of the states most threatened by climate change, Governor Rick Scott has repeatedly discouraged state em-

Conversely, compare Clinton’s failures in this realm with the success of Bernie Sanders, who focused his campaign not on appealing to demographics haphazardly but instead on a cohesive message of economic justice. The biggest irony is that all of the groups which Clinton desperately tried to flatter ended up comprising Bernie’s base, without his lifting a finger. He, like Trump, offered a central focus, a real message, not merely platitudes.

This the context—the macro scale, the things people can clearly see and recognize. But what happens when we compare these two candidates under a Luntzian microscope? As we saw earlier, the content of their platforms certainly had some effect, but what really mattered in this vitriolic election was how they talked.

Clinton used long-winded, waffling, and abstract language, like when she confusingly promised in West Virginia to “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” but then followed this by half-heartedly saying, “We don’t want to forget these people.” This comes across as insincere, mostly because it is not concrete, not a promise, and not down-to-earth.

She could not connect to her audience through her language, a critical misstep that was repeated time after time. It seemed that all Trump had to do was put on a hard hat, and he won.

Sanders did not make Clinton’s mistakes. The man who said “to hell with the fossil fuel industry” managed to win over West Virginia by also saying things like ,“We have got to invest

...transformed the estate tax into the “death tax,” drilling for oil into “exploring for energy,” and the Bush tax cuts into “tax relief.” ployees from using the words “climate change,” as discovered by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting in 2015. In July of this year, Scott and the Florida state legislature passed laws allowing any citizen to challenge school textbooks and other material, with issues like evolution and climate change blatantly in his crosshairs. How does he get away with it? Simple—the law is designed to get that Washington government out of the classroom because this is America, land of the free and home of the brave.

It is not complicated. In fact, that is entirely the point. Rhetoric has been around for thousands of years—persuading people is, after all, fundamental to politics. So, then, why are the Democrats so bad at it?

Many would cite the mire of identity politics into which mainstream Democrats have fallen, most recently in the form of Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign which tried to appeal to various demographics with some pretty opaque pandering. The problem is that, in electoral politics, a strategy like this is difficult and impractical—the risks are high, and the rewards are low. You must be sure to tick every box, and if you forget a group, you have lost them. Clinton forgot the white working class—wherever on the political spectrum you land, this is objectively why she lost.

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 21 $41 billion rebuilding coal mining communities and making sure that … [they] receive the job training they need for the clean energy jobs of the future.” What Sanders has done here is to transform the negative into a positive with a simple trick of framing. He also uses buzz phrases like “crumbling infrastructure” and “rigged economy.” Sound familiar?

Phrases like this trigger an intuitive emotional response in everyone, as Frank Luntz recognized. The world’s proudest nation cannot have its bridges crumbling. We cannot rig the economy against the American Dream.

This dynamism is what the Democrats are missing in their rhetoric, and it is what the GOP has mastered.

For the time being, it seems as if the Democratic Party has lost touch with its voters. Clinton lost the Obama coalition, and Democrats on the whole lost a significant chunk of the middle class’s support in the last election. To many, the Democratic politics are synonymous with Washington elitism; Democratic leaders are characterized as corrupt insiders, thanks in part to their own actions but especially due to the Republicans’ successful war of words.

The Democrats are trying to figure it out—every few months you can hear news of their “re-branding”—but they still have yet to find themselves. If they are hope to do well at the local and state levels again, as they did before 1994, then they will need to find a cohesive identity, some cause with widespread relevance for which to fight, and to win this game of linguistics.

In order to re-level the playing field, they must use Luntz’s tactics against the Republicans themselves, an idea championed by left-wing UC Berke-

ley linguistics professor George Lakoff, another expert on this sort of metaphorical language. This is why the Democrats have started to use the term “gun safety” instead of “gun control,” and “raising revenue” instead of “tax increases.”

But this is not enough—they need to get better. The party needs a real following, not just an ad-hoc collection of the intelligentsia and the “woke” groups that are inherently anti-Republican anyway.

But seems that the Democrats have not really tried to do that. Even their message of compassion has not been translated from identity politics to other areas. For example, I have never heard a Democratic politician say, “We are trying to protect you and your family from global warming.”

The rhetoric is always more along the lines of, “We need to stop pollution in our oceans, so you need to recycle, or else.” It is aggressive, domineering, and alienating. This is the crux of the Democrats’ identity problem—Republicans have been able to create almost a cult of personality around their ideology and politicians, while the Democrats have not. If their language were more candid, cohesive, and framed better, perhaps the Democrats would be able to turn the tide in this battle.

The irony is that the answer has been right under their nose, in the form of the Sanders campaign. It is not too late for the Democrats to learn from the parts of his campaign that dominated Clinton’s: his message and the way he delivered it. It is not too late for Democrats to secure the ability to connect with their audiences in the way Sanders did and in the way the Republicans still do. It is not too late for them to save their party by ditch-

ing the stigma of Washington elitism.

The stakes have never been higher.

It is not just party poll numbers that are on the line—there are millions of lives and livelihoods on the line, at a scale we have scarcely seen before.

The most vulnerable areas and populations in the nation are becoming even more vulnerable by the minute.

Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States, was recently devastated by Hurricane Harvey. Puerto Rico was entirely torn apart by Hurricane Maria. In coming decades, Phoenix, the sixth-largest city in the country, will face such an increase in heat and heat waves that its survival and sustainability will be put into jeopardy. New Orleans, Tampa, Miami, and other coastal cities will face ever greater dangers from hurricanes.

Responsible leadership is needed in these vulnerable regions now more than ever before.. For the time being, it seems that our government, of the people, by the people, and for the people has decided that “the people” are not really that important.

But that can change, and it should, if the Democrats can adapt Sanders’s strategies to effectively challenge the Republicans’ deceptive messaging and irresponsible policies.

Maybe, one day, I will see some donkeys decorating bumper stickers back home on those islands. Right next to some brand new storm drains.

Alex is a freshman at Columbia College studying political science, economics, and history. He is from Bradenton, Florida, and is involved on campus with CIRCA, the Federalist satire newspaper, and several other political groups. He hopes to some day run for public office. He can be reached via email at a.siegal@columbia.edu.

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THE ROAD FORWARD FOR AFGHANISTAN: HISTORY’S ROLE IN CONTEMPORARY POLICY Shayan Rauf

On August 21, 2017, President Trump announced his administration’s long awaited policy towards South Asia, particularly Afghanistan. As a part of the new policy, the United States will remain inside the war-torn country indefinitely and so will continue the longest conflict in American history.

If you ask most Americans why we are in Afghanistan, they will answer something along the lines of: to fight Al-Qaeda or to end terrorism. After all, those are the stated goals of the Pentagon and were legitimate reasons for going to war following the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. However, after sixteen years of bloodshed, with thousands of lives lost on both sides, the core issue remains: Why are we still in Afghanistan and what have we achieved up to this point?

During the 2016 election, politicians from both major parties barely acknowledged the conflict.

As early as 2009, President Obama vowed to end the war, but he instead escalated the effort by deploying more troops. President Trump, although initially opposed to the war, has announced his intention to con-

tinue with no end in sight. In fact, during his first formal address about this issue, he promulgated: “My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts. But all my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office; in other words, when you’re President of the United States.” This trend, of switching from using peaceful rhetoric during campaigning to choosing a continuation of war policies when in office, is nothing new.

For example, the same occurred under the policies of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War and in countless other examples. However, in contrast to the case of Vietnam, the media coverage on Afghanistan has been severely lacking, to an appalling degree. Moreover, politicians’ refusal to address the issue while still continuing the war effort has caused most Americans to remain unaware of the immense monetary and humanitarian costs of the war. As a result, since the mid-2000s, Afghanistan has become a background issue in the wider arena of American domestic politics.

So what are the actual costs of the war? In numbers: over $1 trillion has been spent since it began, more

than 22,000 American coalition members have been injured or killed, upwards of 173,000 Afghans and Pakistanis have suffered fatalities (the majority civilians), and, just this year, there has been a 25 percent increase in the number of children who have been wounded or perished. All of this excludes the immense economic and infrastructural damage that Afghanistan and surrounding countries have incurred. Given all of this information, one must wonder: What have we achieved during the conflict?

Unfortunately, not much.

In 2011, American deployments reached a peak of 100,000 troops.

Because troop levels started falling shortly afterwards as part of an initial withdrawal policy, the Taliban have been resurging in immense numbers. They have secured control of over 40 percent of the nation’s districts and continue to challenge the Afghan National Security Forces and the American military. Members of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a coalition of countries that aid American war efforts, have also shown a reluctance to carry on with the war. Furthermore, the United States is facing major diplomatic setbacks, as regional powers have been attempting to exert their own

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CHANGES IN PUBLIC OPINION ON WHETHER THE US MET GOALS IN AFGHANISTAN SURVEY IN JUNE 2011

SURVEY IN JUNE 2014 PEW RESEARCH CENTER / USA TODAY

influence in the strategically located country. Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China, Qatar, and to some extent Turkey have all been engaging with the Taliban in an effort to reach a peaceful resolution to the war—independent of the United States. These factors, in turn, may entangle America in even more complex diplomatic issues. In addition, greater involvement by surrounding nations implies that other powers do not see the American campaign as a successful one and are instead moving to assert their own influence in Afghanistan.

Despite the changing geopolitical interests in regards to other countries’ movements in Afghanistan, there is no doubt that the United States will need the cooperation of the most powerful regional players if it is ever to broker a resolution to the conflict. During the Soviet-Afghan War that lasted from the late 1970s through the 1980s—and referred to as the Soviet’s Vietnam by historians for its devastating failure—Pakistan was instrumental in helping the CIA bring down the USSR in the country.

In 2001, President Bush approached

Pakistan to request assistance for transporting soldiers and supplies through Pakistani soil to landlocked Afghanistan. Regardless of the precarious diplomatic relationship between the two nations since then, it is evident that Pakistan is one of the most influential players in this conflict and will be a vital ally if the United States is to succeed. President Trump’s decision to attempt circumventing Pakistan in his new policy and to involve countries that have no prior experience in Afghanistan may only obstruct the long term goals for regional

24 // FALL 2017 // COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW stability. In a panel with the Council on Foreign Relations on September 20th of this year, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan mentioned that, “We have engaged with the US. We continue to engage with them to resolve any differences that come up and move forward.” It may thus be in the best interests of both sides to work together and cooperate on the issues plaguing Afghanistan.

Given the declining trend in American effectiveness in Afghanistan, we are left to evaluate whether more troops will actually do anything to affect the outcome of the war. The Pentagon makes a valid argument when it warns that the logistical and military failures in Iraq, where the premature removal of troops opened a dangerous power vacuum in that country, might be repeated. Similarly, many argue that it would prove devastating to end the war effort in Afghanistan right now, as it might allow some other group, like the Taliban, to once again regain control. Therefore, President Trump’s announcement to send 4,000 troops, in addition to the 8,400 already on the ground, ostensibly seems like the wise thing to do.

In reality, however, the president’s decision does not differ much from those of his predecessors, and many analysts claim that the new policy will be futile in its efforts. If the Taliban have not capitulated yet and instead continue to flourish in the country, more troops being deployed may actually backfire in the end. The Taliban will be able to recruit more members for their cause under the banner of “protecting against an occupying power,” as they perceive it.

The introduction of more troops will only inflame extant anti-American ART CREDIT: CHRIS COYNES

fervor and could even be misused to fuel the growth of the terrorist organization. Given that in 2011 there were upwards of 100,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan, it is difficult to see what effect just a fraction of that total will now have on the outcome of the war. For its part, the central government in Afghanistan has failed to tackle vital problems, such as inadequate security organization

and government corruption, which itself hampers American efforts. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the growing presence of other nations in the conflict only exacerbates the situation and makes it more difficult for troops to battle the terrorists efficiently . This, in turn, has prompted criticism from some politicians, such as when Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) asserted, “The mission

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in Afghanistan has lost its purpose, and I think it is a terrible idea to send any more troops into that war.”

President Trump also proclaimed in his speech that, “We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists.” This rhetoric of explicit restraint in helping Afghanistan rebuild could be disastrous in the future. One of the primary reasons that ISIS was able to rise to prominence

in Iraq after the American withdrawal was due to the lack of a coherent postwar plan for the country. The decimated infrastructure and deficient bureaucracy meant a weak, decentralized state that was unable to maintain unity. If America hopes to see some success in its fight against Afghani insurgents, it is imperative that this nation help rebuild the country. Reflecting on history, the Allied powers

assigned an inordinate and unrealistic amount of debt to Germany following World War I. The economic pressure eventually allowed Hitler to take advantage of debilitated government institutions and to seize control—and we all know what happened next. After World War II, however, the Marshall Plan allocated vast funds to Japan and Germany, both of which were primary enemies during the conflict, eventually allowing them to rebuild and preventing fascist and radical forces from once again rising. Today, both of those countries are close allies of the United States and boast robust economies. History teaches us that we must do the same in Afghanistan if we are to maintain the legacy of those who valiantly lost their lives in the war effort.

Conventional warfare does not seem the path to success at this point. Rather, the United States must wage a war of ideology through education. Every war is won through the hearts of the common people and, right now, many Afghan civilians do not clearly understand America’s goals in their country. If the people of Afghanistan do not know what we are fighting for, then our efforts will ultimately be useless. It is also imperative that American generals and the federal government take into consideration the cultural differences that exist in the deeply conservative country. Using religion and culture to paint an image of America’s goals will be essential to both preventing the growth of the Taliban and to potentially changing it from within.

Furthermore, it seems counterintuitive for President Trump’s adminisART CREDIT: CHRIS COYNES

26 // FALL 2017 // COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW tration to abolish the special envoy to Afghanistan-Pakistan. Instead, the administration should expand efforts to research the future of the region and engage in cultural dialogue.

Every alternative solution to continuing the War in Afghanistan requires involving all current players in the country and greater region.

Instead of escalating the conflict, the United States should look at other factors that could reduce costs, in all its forms, for both civilians and militaries. First, the United States should try to rein in government and security corruption in Afghanistan and should eventually transfer control to a better trained and more adept version of the Afghan Security Forces. Second, America should continue diplomatic outreach to major foreign powers

that have both cultural and political footholds in Afghanistan in order to initiate a war of ideology. This ideological warfare can only be achieved if more funding is provided for education. Finally, the United States should help to rebuild Afghanistan’s institutions and provide jobs and better communication networks for the remainder of the population. This will feed economic growth and encourage people to turn away from the Taliban, to look towards the positive future that peace can bring. In turn, this could give America much more political leverage, as the Taliban would be reluctant to attack development projects, a move which would cause more civilians to turn against them.

Afghanistan has been in a perpetual state of conflict for centuries,

with all of the world’s greatest powers involved at one point or another. It has also been the site of longest running war in which the United States has been entangled, and it is thus necessary to step back for a moment and reflect on the role that we, as citizens and upcoming policymakers, have played in the war in Afghanistan and how we should proceed in the future.

Shayan Rauf is a student at Columbia College studying Economics-Political Science. He is passionate about foreign affairs and economic policy especially in areas concerning the Middle East and Asia. In addition to the Political Review, Shayan is a contributor to other prestigious publications like Encyclopædia Britannica. He can be reached via email at sr3460@columbia.edu.

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ISOLATIONISM Belle Harris

As of January 20th, 2017, the American government has had at its helm one of the most flagrantly isolationist—yet simultaneously hawkish—presidents in the modern era. Donald Trump has demonstrated little coherence in his overall approach to foreign policy, saying everything from “NATO is obsolete and it’s extremely expensive to the United States, disproportionately

so” to “we have wasted an enormous amount of blood and treasure in Afghanistan. Their government has zero appreciation. Let’s get out!” While both statements were later reversed, and Trump has yet to act on either of them, this disjointedness suggests that his tough talk was everything from a negotiating strategy to ill-informed, off-the-cuff remarks. Behind the scenes, though, an understaffed State Department, withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, and threats to withdraw from NAFTA

signal that the Trump Administration has little interest in collaborating with foreign governments.

While it would be difficult to navigate the quagmire that is Donald Trump’s governing principle of international relations, one thing is clear: his “America First” agenda has roots in a longstanding American political tradition. In July 1797, for example, an American envoy was sent to Paris in hopes of defusing tensions between the newly-formed French Republic and the United States. Upon their ar-

COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW // FALL 2017 // 27 rival, the diplomats were approached by three agents of the French Foreign Minister, who demanded bribes and a loan before formal negotiations could begin. The Americans were offended by such a request, despite it being relatively common practice in contemporary European politics, and left France without engaging in formal negotiations. United States Congressman Robert Goodloe Harper later rebuffed the French at a Philadelphia dinner party with a widely-admired toast: “millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.”

This, one could say, was the birth of the American isolationist movement. While iterations of this sentiment have shifted throughout the centuries— from Thomas Jefferson’s insistence on no foreign entanglements, to the Monroe Doctrine of avoiding inter-European conflicts in the New World—skepticism towards foreign interactions, diplomatic or otherwise, is not a phenomenon unique to Trump.

One example among many stands out for its historical resonance with our current moment. On the evening of January 6th, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his annual address to Congress. Across the Atlantic, Germany was conducting an air raid campaign against the United Kingdom, later dubbed the ‘Blitz’. These raids lasted from September, 1940 until May, 1941, but the singular most destructive day was December 29th, 1940, a week before Roosevelt’s address to Congress. The Lend-Lease bill, which Roosevelt advocated for in this address, gave the president “authority and funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations.” The passage of the bill, many historians have argued, was the difference between victory and defeat for the United Kingdom in World War II. And yet, despite the fact that British triumph over Nazism was obviously in America’s interest, a dedicated contingent in Congress, weary of American intervention in Europe after World War I, strongly opposed the passage of the Lend-Lease bill.

In our modern era, when many Americans are critical of involvement in long and costly wars in the Middle East, or the perceived inequality of NATO funding, there have again been calls for a withdrawal of American presence abroad, both militaristically and diplomatically. There is, however, a marked difference between our time and Roosevelt’s.

According to an article published January 1st, 1941 in The Boston Globe, the isolationists in Congress “seem to have tried, quite consciously and as a matter of strategy, to make up in noise what they lacked numbers.” This desperate approach at public persuasion drew the contempt of politicians on both sides of the aisle who understood that opposing the Axis powers was more important than politically safeguarding themselves against the possibility of vague ‘foreign entanglements’. And yet, the isolationist fear-mongering was so visible off Capitol Hill that it led “casual headline readers [to] believe the isolationists [had] great congressional power.” This strategy backfired: the non-isolationist contempt for alarmist rhetoric ensured that the isolationists would ultimately gain neither votes nor respect.

Unlike in the era of Roosevelt, however, contemporary isolationists are no longer a fringe group of cautious Congressmen, but rather constitute a broad swath of the American public. The impact of this tradition, for better or worse, can be felt full-force in American politics in this very moment.

Belle Harris is a sophomore in Columbia College studying American history. When she’s not working for the Columbia Political Review, Belle serves as Digital Editor of the Columbia Review, and often has to remind her parents that these are two separate publications. She welcomes any conversations about American isolationism or American political history in general, and can be reached via email at ih2308@columbia.edu.

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