POLITIC THE
SPRING 2012 II
THE YALE UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF POLITICS
VOLUME LXVII
Volume LXVII
WITH STRINGS ATTACHED The Price of Academic Integrity
Inside: Malcolm Gladwell, Howard Dean, Governor Schweitzer
“
Our mission is to inspire and prepare Yale students for global citizenship and leadership.
”
Jackson Institute for Global A≠airs • Undergraduate major in Global Affairs • Master’s in International Relations • Career Services office for students interested in global affairs • Jackson Senior Fellows – experts in global affairs who teach and mentor students • Conversations on Leadership Speaker Series, Senior Fellows Lecture Series, Jackson Town Hall Meetings
http://jackson.yale.edu
Politic the
Spring 2012 II - Volume LXVII
OPINION FEATURE DANGEROUS LIAISONS Shaun Tan
LET’S MOVE?
Marissa Medansky
CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL Eli Rivkin
UNDERSTANDING POLITICS Linh Nguyen
AN INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN SCHWEITZER Matthew Nussbaum
AN INTERVIEW WITH NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON Josef Goodman and Justin Schuster
28 3 6 9 14 20
NATIONAL
4
THE YALE POLITICAL PULSE
7
AN INTERVIEW WITH BILL BURTON
10
AN INTERVIEW WITH HOWARD DEAN
18
GAME OVER
24
AN INTERVIEW WITH MALCOLM GLADWELL
Eric Stern
Geng Ngarmboonanant
Donna Horning
Meredith Potter
Jacob Effron
INTERNATIONAL WHY NATO MATTERS Donna Horning
WHEN FREE SPEECH GOES TOO FAR Justin Schuster
GAY RIGHTS: A SHIFTING CONSENSUS Rod Cuestas
33 37 40
35 THE FEEDBACK LOOP Michael Magdzik
38 SELF IMMOLATIONS IN TIBET Cindy Hwang
43 PHOTO OF THE ISSUE, SUMMER READING The Politic Staff
Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
SPRING 2012 II
Politic the
A Yale Undergraduate Journal of Politics
Editors-in-Chief Byron Edwards Jacob Effron
Managing Editor Josef Goodman
National Editors Charles Gyer Will Jordan
International Editors Donna Horning Meredith Potter
Features Editor Sibjeet Mahapatra
Directors of Online Relations Eric Stern
Directors of Development Eli Rivkin Justin Schuster
Director of Public Relations Noah Remnick
Layout Editor
David Mandelbaum
Staff Writers
Hamara Abate, Rod Cuestas, Marc DeWitt, Cindy Hwang, David Lawrence, Raphael evelopment Leung, MarissaD Medansky, Geng NgarmboonJin Nguyen, Gon Park, director anant, Linh Matthew Nussbaum, Xiaochen Su Austin Schaefer
Board of Advisors John Lewis Gaddis
Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military & Naval History, Yale University
David Gergen
Editor-at-Large, U.S. News & World Report
Anthony Kronman
Former Dean, Yale Law School
Ian Shapiro
Director, Yale Center for International and Area Studies
For information regarding submissions, advertisements, subscriptions, contributions, or to provide feedback, please contact us at politicatyale@gmail. com or write us at
The Politic
P.O. Box 201452 New Haven, CT 06520-1452 Disclaimer: This magazine is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The opinions expressed by the contributors to The Politic do not necessarily reflect those of its staff or advertisers.
2
THE POLITIC
Dear Reader, This month, high school seniors and their parents are flooding college campuses across the country. Acceptance letters and US News Report college rankings in hand, these glossy eyed youth have much to consider. There’s the square footage of the dorm rooms, the faculty to student ratio, financial aid packages, extracurriculars, and party scene. The purpose of a college education is to enable and endow. The bachelor’s degree is a receipt of necessary skills for the workplace and mores for better citizenship. School mottos provide as much diversity as the crowd at the NASCAR track. Knowledge, truth, light, and virtue are the bread and butter of the college emblem. How well a university lives up to those standards rarely factors into matriculation. This is unusual. We weigh the integrity and character in the spouses we marry and politicians we elect. In 1951, a young William F. Buckley published his book God and Man at Yale, calling out the Yale faculty and administration for being derelict in their duty to present students a well-rounded view of morals, politics, culture, and religion. How resonant are these criticisms of Yale and universities worldwide 60 years later? Have universities failed to abide by the same ethics and ideals they expect from their students? This issue of The Politic is dedicated to answering these pressing questions. In our feature piece, “Dangerous Liaisons,” Shaun Tan explores the tight and cozy relationship between university administrators and authoritarian governments. Donna Horning sits down with former governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean to talk about the failure of the administration to instill a sense of public service here at Yale. The Tea Party protesters and Wall Street occupiers, fringe groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum, agree that the elite has turned its back on the rest of society. Holding the ivory tower, proud defender of the elite class, accountable to itself is essential to a healthy society. We ask our readers to start asking the necessary questions. “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth,” goes the Buddhist teaching. Enough from us, though. Get reading.
Faithfully yours,
Byron Edwards and Jacob Effron
NATIONAL
LET’S MOVE? Considering the Performative Politics of Food MARISSA MEDANSKY
I
n the last two years, Michelle Obama has danced with Beyoncé, planted White House gardens with visiting students, and even jump roped on the lawn of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as part of her Let’s Move! campaign. Let’s Move! represents the East Wing’s contribution to various peripheral White House initiatives on food, lifestyle and policy, focusing on reducing childhood obesity through a trifecta rooted in healthy eating, physical activity, and family fun. Obama makes her platform clear. “As First Lady,” she says, “this isn’t just a policy issue for me. This is a passion. This is my mission.” The language proves decidedly apolitical, alluding to specific policy reforms with only a tangential air. In that respect, Michelle Obama resembles a kind of modern-day Nancy Reagan—though with a penchant for bare arms rather than red. Like Obama, Reagan implemented public awareness programs as First Lady with a similar youth-oriented focus. Her infamous “Just Say No” campaign strived to transcend the partisan politics of President Reagan’s War on Drugs. Here, policy became personal, assuming the rhetoric of old-fashioned family values. So when Michelle Obama recruited superstar musicians like Beyoncé, she took a page from a playbook pioneered by Nancy Reagan. In 1986, Reagan appeared in an anti-drug music video with various celebrities of the decade, including Whitney Houston and David Hasselhoff. Though “Just Say No” endured criticism for simplifying discourse to the point of banality, Reagan’s campaign completely revolutionized the sync between the politics of the President and the public persona of the First Lady. Given the amount of recent controversies surrounding policy decisions from the Affordable Care Act to Sandra
Fluke to economic stimulus, Michelle Obama’s push for healthy eating seems as though it should be small potatoes in the eyes of opponents looking to criticize the Obama administration. But Let’s Move! has endured critical fire since its inception, a testament to the increasing politicization of the healthy-eating-andgreen-living movement, as well as the increasing personalization of politics. “It doesn’t look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice,” said Rush Limbaugh, notorious for his conservative politics. Limbaugh lambasted Obama as a hypocrite, citing a “braised short rib” meal the First Lady ate while on vacation in the resort town of Vail, Colorado. Limbaugh accused Obama of “eating ribs at 1,500 calories a serving with 141 grams of fat per serving,” though, according to the restaurant, the meal contained significantly fewer. According to Eddie Gehman Kohan, whose “Obama Foodorama” blog examines various White House food initiatives, “Let’s Move! has been
pointed to by a lot of critics as an example of big government intervening [into] what American citizens eat.” Yet Obama maintains that Let’s Move! is “not about having government tell people what to do, because government doesn’t have all the answers.” It’s people, not policy, and it certainly isn’t the imposition of a mandatory lifestyle. “What would life be without the bake sale, right?” Obama joked. Limbaugh’s criticism of the campaign—though unique—proves the most interesting. His emphasis on the intersection between the personal and political speaks to an era in which the personal decisions of policy-makers shape public perceptions of that policy. Consider the emphasis placed on food and eating in presidential campaigns. Food serves as a powerful prop on the stage of political performance. During campaign season, politicians stop at boutique cafes and diners in New Hampshire and Iowa, proving loyalty to their constituents by eating their blueplate specials. 2012 Republican primary candidates love their corn dogs, too, especially if eaten at a state fair. Modern American politics construes food as a symbol of political identification: Republicans love apple pies and Democrats are so-called “latte liberals.” Yet the conflation of political identity and culinary proclivities ultimately obscures discourse. Though issues surrounding food and nutrition may have partisan implications, the food choices of particular individuals do not. As the tension between individual choice and policy mandate expands, politicians and their constituents must reconcile the role of the politician as an actor and as a person. Marissa Medansky is a freshman in Morse College. SPRING 2012 II
3
For God, For Country,
s e x a t r o f d an
The Politic polls Yale undergraduate students on taxes, drugs, and war. By Eric Stern
Should taxes be raised on the wealthiest one percent?
23.5%
NO YES
$
76.5% Do you believe there should be a year of mandatory national service?
YES
Methodology: The Politic sent out an email to randomly selected Yale undergraduates at 2:00 pm on the afternoon of Thursday, April 5. In the next 36 hours, 755 students responded, yielding a margin of error of + or – 3.30 (assuming a 95 percent confidence interval).
21.8%
78.2%
NO
Do you support the Roe v. Wade decision?
Should the drinking age be lowered to 18?
12.4%
4.6% 6.2 %
NO YES
YES NO
87.6%
UNSURE
89.2%
80 70 60 50
Percentage of students who support legalizing marijuana and cocaine:
With respect to Syria, do you...? SUPPORT SENDING TROOPS
SUPPORT SENDING ARMS
40 SUPPORT DRONE STRIKES
30 20
SUPPORT DIPLOMATIC AND/OR ECONOMIC SANCTIONS
MARIJUANA
60
COCAINE
Which of the following best describes your categorization of the Unites States’ relationship with Israel? TOO SUPPORTIVE
50
40
30
89%
DO NOT KNOW
20
30
0
NO YES
NOT SUPPORTIVE ENOUGH
10
10
UNSURE
ABOUT RIGHT
00
20
Do you believe same-sex marriage should be legal?
6.2 %
0
4.6%
10
40
5
NATIONAL
CALIFORNIA HIGH SPEED RAIL A Train to Nowhere? By Eli Rivkin
W
hile lawmakers and politicians in Washington continue to argue over job creation, legislators in California looked toward an old form of transportation for a fresh solution to the state’s economic woes: trains. Proposition 1A, also known as “The Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century,” which narrowly passed by 600,000 votes in November of 2008, provides 9.96 billion dollars in bonds to create a high speed rail system connecting cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. California boasts three of the five most congested cities in the United States and ranks as the world’s twelfth largest greenhouse gas polluter. The projected trains will reduce traffic and pollution while traveling at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour. When completed, a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco will take only two and a half hours. By 2030 experts believe the trains will carry 100 million passengers, create 600,000 construction jobs with an 6
THE POLITIC
fornia is projected to reach 50 million people by 2030, placing huge burdens on current airports and freeways. To accommodate the same number of riders that the high-speed rail will serve, California would need to build 3,000 miles of new freeways, five additional airport runways, and 90 departure gates alone in the next 20 years. This estimate does not factor in the environmental costs of increased air and car travel, nor does it consider the safety benefits of decreasing traffic congestion. Last year alone, California experienced 40,000 reported car accidents and 2,715 accident related fatalities. In France, TGVs have been in operation for 27 years without a single rail-related fatality. A network of high speed trains connecting Paris to Boradditional 450,000 permanent jobs deaux, Marseille, Toulouse, Lyon, and in the state, cut 12 billion pounds of Rennes carries 100 million passengers greenhouse gas emissions each year, a year. With a land area 100,000 square and reduce oil consumption by 12.7 kilometers less than France, California million barrels annually. Countries like has the ability to create a similar highFrance, Japan, and China have reaped speed train network linking its most huge economic benefits from operating populated cities. high-speed trains, so why are so many Economic, environmental, and Californians up in arms over the project? safety incentives make the high-speed Opponents have stated that the rail project an important step forward current economic climate is unsuitable in planning for California’s future. As a for beginning expensive new projects. state that pioneered the railroad revoWhen passed, the total cost of build- lution in the United States, California ing and implementing the rail system proved through its history that trains are was estimated at 43 billion dollars, but a fast and reliable form of transportarecently the CHSRA (California High tion. At optimal projected efficiency, Speed Rail Authority) projected that the the California High-Speed Rail Project costs will be closer to 68 billion dollars. will use only one-third the energy of Furthermore, critics point out that many airplanes and one-fifth of that used by billions of dollars will be spent on the cars. High-speed trains are the standard first stretch of the rail project which in other parts of the world, so why not connects the sparsely populated Central move California into the future with Valley and the San Fernando Valley. As high-speed rail? a result, they have deemed the project “the train to nowhere.” Eli Rivkin is a freshman in Trumbull College. But by examining the price in isolation, critics fail to consider reality. Cali-
NATIONAL
AN INTERVIEW WITH BILL BURTON Fighting Money Machines and Dirty Politics Conducted by Geng Ngarmboonanant Bill Burton is a senior strategist at Priorities USA, a political organization, and Priorities USA Action, a PAC, both of which support President Barack Obama’s reelection bid. He served as the White House Deputy Press Secretary from 2009 to 2011, and was the National Press Secretary for Obama’s 2008 campaign.
The Politic: Can you talk about some of the work you are doing right now as senior strategist at Priorities USA? We decided to start Priorities USA as a countervailing force to the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove, who decided to spend hundreds of millions of dollars campaigning against the President. Right now, our organization is actively building a team that’s trying to do so through messaging, fundraising and targeting. The Politic: You’ve been at the forefront of politics, serving as Deputy Press Secretary from 2009-2011. What do you think is the best way for President Obama to pitch his first term? And what is the best way for Romney to pitch Obama’s first term? Well, first of all, I don’t presume to know or guide the strategy of the President’s campaign. But I’d say that the President has a record that the whole country can be very proud of: he’s saved the auto industry, the financial sector, gotten the economy into a recovery track, killed Osama Bin Laden, wound down the war in Iraq, among other things. What Americans want to know is what his vision is for the next four years. Ultimately, this election will be fought as a choice between the President’s and Mitt Romney’s visions for the country. Since the consequences of Mitt Romney’s vision would be catastrophic, I’d say that President Obama’s strategy should simply be to lay out his vision for the future. As for the best way for Romney to pitch President Obama’s first term—I don’t know his campaign strategy. But if he really believes in the vision that he’s laid
out for the future of this country, I think the best strategy for him in this election is to lay out his competing vision and the choice this country has to make. The Politic: How do you think the administration lost the fight on pitching ObamaCare? After all, this is a program the administration claimed helped millions of Americans, yet they never quite captured that narrative. Why did this happen, and what can be learned going forward? Well, first of all, there was a brutally negative campaign against the Affordable Care Act by the Republican Party, over which hundreds of millions of dollars were spent. It was nasty, brutal and deceptive. And even after this campaign, the American people are pretty much evenly split on healthcare. The mere fact that the American people are evenly split after all the negative campaigning from the right shows that we didn’t necessarily lose the narrative on healthcare. Going forward, I think the question is if Romney wants to repeal healthcare, what is he going to replace it with? There are a lot of things that people like in this healthcare bill—allowing children to stay on their parents’ coverage, covering preexisting conditions—and taking those things away from the American people will be a hard argument for Romney to make. I think if healthcare’s going to be brought up in this election, it will be by Democrats talking about how good it is. The Politic: What was the biggest lesson you learned as National Press Secretary for President Obama’s 2008 campaign, and how have you applied
that lesson in 2012? Definitely that the speed of politics and messaging is changing. In ’08, we all discovered how much impact the Internet and social media could have, along with how quickly and nimbly we had to respond to threats from other campaigns, no matter how foolish they may seem at first. We’ve been pretty effective online in this election. For example, last November we posted a video called “Mitt Romney’s America” that was designed to drum up interest in Romney’s vision for the country. Because of how we targeted the video, it’s since gotten over 300,000 views on YouTube—we reached more people with that video than Romney’s video of his announcement of his candidacy for president. So being aware and harnessing the power of the Internet is key for us in 2012. The Politic: What is the most valuable thing the Democrats have gotten out of the Republican infighting during the nomination race? Politically, it’s a clear illustration of the Republican Party’s ultra-conservative vision for this country and how damaging it will be for education, the economy, gay rights, Hispanic Americans and the country as a whole. To see Romney embrace these far-right views, such as dramatic reform of Medicare and radical immigration laws in Arizona, is then really illuminating for voters. The Politic: On what issue will the election be fought on? Will the economy be as big a factor as people SPRING 2012 II
7
NATIONAL
thought it would? And will the Supreme Court ruling on healthcare affect Obama’s campaign? The economy will be important, no doubt about that. Healthcare and foreign policy will also be key issues. No presidential election has ever been fought without an extensive conversation on foreign policy, and for the first time in a long time, this will be a conversation that the Democrats can look forward to. It would be electrifying and shocking if the Supreme Court struck down health care. It would also be a huge call to action for supporters of the President because we have to make sure that there is such a type of healthcare package that will help consumers and keep costs low. The Politic: What do you see as Obama’s reelection strategy this time around? And how does it compare to past presidents seeking reelection (Is he trying to frame it as a choice election rather than a referendum)? As I said, I don’t specifically know the strategy of President Obama’s campaign. But I think this election is about two vastly competing visions in this country. The President’s vision of this country makes a lot more sense, and he will try to strengthen that vision and poke holes in Romney’s vision. In the end, no matter what, each election is a choice and people will go into the voting booth to vote for the future, not the past. Winston Churchill, for example, lost the election after World War II. People vote not on what happened, but what’s next.
dollars in a nasty and cynical campaign against Obama, we’re not going to sit on the sidelines and watch the President be washed over in a sea of right-wing money. We are going to play by the existing rules, not the rules that we wish were in place. The Politic: The Obama campaign is trying to bring back the energy it had in 2008 through videos about how far we’ve come: “Fired up! Ready to Go,” and so on. Do you think it can energize its base like it did in 2008, and how will it go about doing it? I think the Obama campaign can definitely do that. Engaging supporters and Democrats was a remarkable accomplishment in ’08 and it’s key that people are energetic this time around. The Politic: Do you see an end to the partisan bickering in Washington after the general election? It’s impossible to predict what Republicans will do regardless of the outcome of the general election. There are strong disagreements in Washington, and that makes sense because people with strongly held beliefs are sent to Washington by voters to make that fight. That’s politics. It’s the act of the trying to find the best way forward out of a diverse set of ideas. The politics won’t
stop, it will never stop; the question is will it still be as unproductive as it was under the leadership of Boehner and the House Republicans? Will they stop at nothing to get what they want? The Politic: What do you think of the future of the Republican Party, considering that this year’s candidates swung so far to the right? The Republican Party is really in terrible shape now and for the future. It’s alienated the fastest growing population in the country by taking radically right-wing positions on immigration and the DREAM Act. It’s alienated more the half of the electorate on issues like contraception and women’s rights. In the long term, the Republican Party really is in bad shape. The Politic: What do you think is the biggest long-term issue facing the country right now, besides the economic crisis? Two things: first, the safety and security of our nation, along with our foreign policy interests in the world. And second, the environment and how clean our water and air are. Geng Ngarmboonanant is a freshman in Silliman College.
The Politic: President Obama has always been in favor of campaign finance reform, yet he has Priorities USA, a super PAC, to support him. Do you think this may be a little hypocritical? Why or why not? President Obama supports campaign finance reform. But if Karl Rove and the Kochs want to play by one set of rules and spend hundreds of millions of 8
THE POLITIC
Utilizing social media will be key for Obama’s reelection campaign.
NATIONAL
UNDERSTANDING POLITICS The Priming Effect in Political Campaigns By Linh Nguyen
T
he psychological effect of priming may decide our next President. With little public awareness, this psychological tool of implanting an idea via implicit visual or verbal device is used extensively in political campaigns. The effect of priming is long-lasting and salient, and is surprisingly at least as influential on voters as conscious recognition memory. Politicians use priming to shape the criteria by which their audiences evaluate them. All politicians have strengths and weaknesses, and they want voters to focus on their strengths. One way to do this is to repetitively mention those very strengths to the audience via speeches and media. For example, if a politician’s economic policy is popular, the candidate can repeatedly mention the economy to establish a positive link between “Candidate X” and “economic policy” in the minds of voters. Then, whenever the topic of the economy is brought up, voters will unconsciously be reminded of “Candidate X.” The key here is that they will evaluate the overall political performance of “Candidate X” based mostly on the aspect they are primed with: the economy. Since the link between “Candidate X” and “economic policy” is positive, voters will look upon the candidate with favor. In other words, by priming voters, a candidate is able to establish a specific criterion for the voters, a reference point by which the voters evaluate his overall performance. It is important not to confuse
priming solely with the intuitive belief that candidates should promote their strengths to voters. With priming, candidates only need to repeat the name of the issue rather than give nuanced information. A good example of a positive association formed by priming is the presidential race of 2004 between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Throughout the campaign Bush continuously mentioned the issue of terrorism. Primed voters were then more likely to associate Bush with fighting terrorism. Since the Republican Party, which Bush represents, is traditionally believed to be a reliable force against terrorism, he was associated with not only terrorism itself but also “adequate ability in dealing with terrorism.” Terrorism came to overshadow other issues and thus became the sole issue by which many voters evaluated Bush. Priming is used not only to promote a candidate’s strengths, but also to highlight opponents’ weaknesses. An example of a negative association formed by the priming effect is the 1875 Ohio gubernatorial election in which contending Republican nominee Rutherford Hayes (who won the election and later went on to win the presidential race) primed the Geghan Bill to voters. The Geghan Bill, endorsed by the Democrats, allowed Catholic service in Ohio’s asylums and prisons. Hayes’ exaggerated anti-Catholic scheme, repeated many times to the voters, was meant to overshadow the Republican’s anti-gold standard measure
that was widely unpopular among voters. By merely bring up the issue in many debates, the Republicans succeeded in priming a negative attitude towards Democrats. Of course, the priming effect does not necessarily come only from participating politicians. During Jimmy Carter’s time as president, the media predominantly covered foreign events, such as the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty or the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Voters were primed with foreign policy, and subsequent surveys show that in general, people evaluated the overall performance of President Carter based mostly on his performance in foreign affairs. While Carter saw some success with his foreign policy, this priming hurt him during his reelection campaign, which occurred during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Priming can be used to either help or hurt a politician, but voters should be aware that primed association is not the same as reasoned voting. In fact, prime association often leads to biased voting. It is the voter’s responsibility to know the politician’s stance on a wide range of issues, and not just on the one that he or she talks about consistantly during the campaign. Linh Nguyen is a freshman in Silliman College.
SPRING 2012 II
9
NATIONAL
AN INTERVIEW WITH HOWARD DEAN Public Service at Yale Conducted by Donna Horning Howard Dean (Yale Class of 1971) is an American politician and physician from Vermont. While serving in the Vermont House of Representatives as Lieutenant Governor Dean received notice that the current Governor of Vermont had died of cardiac arrest, and left his medical career for full-time political office. He served six terms as Governor of Vermont and chaired the National Governors Association from 1994-1995. He ran for President in 2004, but ultimately lost the nomination to John Kerry. Afterward he served as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2005-2009.
The Politic: When did you first become interested in politics, and what do you believe drove that interest? I don’t really know what drove it. I ran for an election in 7th grade and lost, and then became sort of involved at Yale, but the 60s were a depressing time to be involved in politics with Kennedy’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s assassination, etc. No one wanted anything to do with it. But I became very interested again after I went to Vermont and a friend got me interested in working for Jimmy Carter’s campaign. The Politic: What grabbed you about Jimmy Carter’s campaign? 10
THE POLITIC
Yeah I always liked Jimmy Carter. I actually thought that the way to win, which turned out to be true, was to have a southern Democrat run because otherwise we couldn’t win the South, and that was true for both Carter and Clinton, they did win. And I liked him, and I thought he was a good person. So I just read the paper one day, this person who turned out to live four doors down from me who was running for State Senator [Esther Sorrell, running for her fifth term] was running the campaign, and she became my mentor in politics. Her sister, who was living with them, became my treasurer for all my campaigns except the last one.
The Politic: Going back to your time at Yale a little bit, although you said it was a depressing time to be involved in politics — did you try to become involved in politics at Yale? Did you have any mentors? No one was mentoring me in politics. I did become the social chairman, which was the only elected office. We didn’t have any of these student government councils or any of that kind of stuff, so the social chairman was the one who basically ran all the parties, which was very fitting based on my career. But there were professors I admired greatly – John Morton Blum, Charlie Reich who taught at the law school who wrote
NATIONAL
The Greening of America. There were extraordinary numbers – I took a lot of philosophy classes, a lot of classes on Chinese Communism, Russian Communism – one of my teachers had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain in the 50s and jailed in a Russian jail for a while. This is a great university, it always has really interesting people teaching here who had very interesting real-life experiences. I certainly benefited from those great teachers too. The Politic: What were the most worthwhile things you were involved in at Yale? Organizations weren’t big, there were a lot of people who turned down tap. People weren’t into that stuff. Fraternities failed when I was here – they went out of business and went broke. The Politic: What was it that called you to run for President? Well I was clearly not going to be governor of Vermont; I’d been governor longer than anybody else in the state’s history, but not longer than anybody in Vermont’s history. The only governor that served longer than I did served 17 one-year terms, but nine of them served under the Republic of Vermont. Most people don’t know that Vermont was an independent republic for 14 years; we declared our independence from Britain in 1777 but were not admitted to the Union until 1791. Of course New York claimed half of us, and New Hampshire claimed the rest. Your readers if they’re interested should read Thomas Chittenden: Vermont’s First Statesman, by a Dartmouth professor named Frank Smallwood – it’s wonderful. It’s essentially a look at the American Revolution through the eyes of a group of people who were sympathetic but not legally American, which was Vermont. So I was done with governor, and there wasn’t much left to do. I’d worn out my welcome between civil unions, healthcare, putting aside hundreds of thousands of acres never to be developed
– it was a very activist time in Vermont’s government, and I think people need a little break after somebody like me, which they got. Ironically, I wanted to campaign for president on the basis of universal healthcare and balancing the budget, because I was fiscally conservative. Someone reminded me that they used to say on the liberal end of the Democratic Party when I was governor: “why do we need a Republican governor? We have Howard Dean.” I was very conservative about money but very liberal on social issues. There was no place else to go and I wasn’t done, I was in my 50s when I left the governorship — so I really wanted to try to transform the country. We did in some ways, but not the way I intended to. The Politic: So those were the big issues for you — universal healthcare and the balanced budget? And you were also opposed to the war in Iraq. I thought we were in deep fiscal trouble, which I think is much worse now after eight years of Bush, and we ought to have a healthcare program that works for everyone. We don’t. It’s ridiculous that we don’t — we’re the only industrial democracy that doesn’t. I started running, didn’t have a lot of traction at first, raised a lot of money in the LGBT community because I did the first civil unions bill in the history of the country. The message we caught on with we stumbled on almost accidentally — being against the war got me some attention, but the message of the campaign turned out to be self-empowerment. The book I wrote afterwards was called You Have The Power. It was about individuals that can change lives. The interesting thing was I think it fit really perfectly with your generation. I think your generation isn’t interested in politics — people at Yale are, but not in general. I think most people in your generation seek to change the world by living in their communities or someone else’s community – Teach For America is a perfect example. I once said to my son, “do you really think that dropping untrained people in a classroom no
matter how smart they are for two years really can make a difference?” He said, “Look at it this way Dad — most charter schools in this country are started by TFA graduates.” That’s an example of change from the bottom up. I think that’s the hallmark of your generation. The Politic: What unique traits do you believe our generation has to contribute to the public sphere? What are our strengths and weaknesses? The strengths are easy — a deep commitment to change, which I think you have, an understanding that change doesn’t come from the top down, a welldeserved cynicism about the political process, a willingness to avoid the cable shout shows — my generation looks at the 10% of things we disagree with and fights to the death, yours looks at the 90% we do agree on and gets some things done, which is really essential. I think you’re more conservative about money, but more liberal on social issues because you’ve grown up with every different kind of American kid there is. The biggest thing is you have the internet — you don’t have to petition Congress, you can find a thousand people who agree with you online and use the power of that. The perfect example was getting rid of that intellectual property bill, which would have put more power in the hands of the Hollywood creators as opposed to the Internet providers — that disappeared in three days. Bank of America understands how the net works very well — when they tried to raise their fees on debit cards, the people on the net just went on and said pull your money out of Bank of America. In three days they gave up. It’s an extraordinary tool, but the emphasis is probably on fixing communities, and less talking and more doing. I think women are going to assume a more prominent leadership role in your generation, partly because the educational opportunity is better, and partly because I think that after 5000 years it might be time to change things SPRING 2012 II
11
NATIONAL
around a little bit. The skills women bring to leadership are not the same skills that men automatically bring — I don’t think it’s a stereotype to say that women are likely to be more collaborationist, for example, and I think there’s going to be a greater and greater role for collaboration in international affairs and in American politics. My prediction is that it won’t be because of women coming up through the political process, though I’m certain in your lifetime we’ll have a woman president, I think the changes will be elsewhere in the core things that have to happen to make America work – businesses, for example, educational fields, medical fields, law – these are where women will make huge advances and assume leadership roles.
may be the case? What do you think primarily deters people from pursuing careers in public service?
I don’t think there’s an example being set at the top. The Ivy League when I was here and Yale in particular was the central university in the leadership for social change in the United States. For example they had a program called Transitional Year Program (TYP) which two of my roommates went through run by a 25-year old named Jonathan Fanton who now runs the MacArthur Foundation, and they brought kids from segregated schools from all over the country but mostly the south for a year and did a lot of remedial education, and those kids went on to the best universities in the country. That kind of thing is extraordiThe Politic: Today, partly due to a nary. Kingman Brewster I still think was New York Times piece last Decem- probably the most extraordinary college ber on the proportion of Ivy League president in my lifetime. He was the undergraduates who go on to careers only one who didn’t get fired during the in finance and consulting despite 60s and early 70s of all the Ivy League their universities’ supposed dedica- presidents because he understood you tion to public service, Yale has been could roll with the punches and had doing some soul-searching on why tremendous political skills. This univerundergraduates make those choices. sity was really extraordinary with how Do you have any theories on why this it coped with the social pressures of a very rebellious generation, and understood how to try to fuse a common ground between the older and younger generations. Since that time the university has had great strides in getting its financial house in order, which is very important — when you see the restorations of all the colleges, it’s a remarkable thing. So we’ve had terrific financial management. But the social mission has virtually disappeared as much as I can tell. Dwight Hall is very well-run but is a small piece of it, the high school scholarship program for students in New Haven is very good, the housing program for employees who buy houses in New Haven is very good, but there’s not that leadership to find real social change. It’s more from the students up. So The Woman’s Table at Yale in front of Sterling the message is: it’s okay to go into Memorial Library. consulting and Wall Street and all 12
THE POLITIC
that stuff to make lots of money. The students themselves actually feel guilty about it, a lot of them, and don’t enjoy it once they’re there. Some of them do. It’s never a bad thing to have people who make lots of money because it keeps the university going, but you’ve been left on your own in terms of deciding what you want to do and how that’s going to benefit the world. But I still find a very high quotient of idealism among your generation — I’m a big fan of your generation, I had two of them roll through my house in my life — and I think there’s a deep commitment to real change. But I don’t think the university is leading, I think the university is following in this case. Another area where the leadership of Yale has been extremely lacking is in the area of women’s equality. I think that the university has done a terrible job handling the story about the quarterback; I think they’ve done a terrible job handling the DKE fraternity issues. I think that there are probably some women who feel abandoned by the administration, and I’m embarrassed, frankly, that this is my university and one that I care a great deal about. I think there’s a lot of ducking of issues. And it’s not just this issue. I think in this day and age the older generation deliberately ducks issues that are tough, and sometimes the younger generation does too, particularly around race and gender. I think we’re in trouble in this country today because of the failure of three of our major institutions: 1) the political class, 2) the financial class, because they’re running the country broke by just gambling on Wall Street, and 3) the media. Unfortunately the media here reflects the greater media, because of course they all want jobs in the New York Times one day. I don’t think the New York Times is a particularly good model for where you want to go with the media. I think in general the media presents both sides as though they have moral equivalence, which is absurd, they have policies that allow every wingnut to say whatever they want at any time, and I don’t think they look at things in a terribly thoughtful manner. That’s an example of where they need some lead-
NATIONAL
ership in a strong direction. I think the most innovative Ivy League universities right now are Brown and Princeton, and coincidentally, though I don’t happen to think it’s coincidence, they are headed by women. The Politic: So if the desire for change is already there, how do you re-incentivize the students to go into public service? What specifically could the university be doing differently? First of all, there’s the age-old dilemma of how universities are run — whether you reward teaching or research. This is not a problem that’s new in your generation, the problem is that research always gets the front page and excellent teachers don’t necessarily get the front page. Problem number two is that the university sends a mixed message to the community. They basically have been somewhat generous with the scholarship program and so forth, but we need lots of kids in the schools — if they want to do TFA, why not start in the fourth year
rather than the first year out of college? This effort was led by Princeton President Shirley Tilghman — they don’t do loans, they just do forgiveness below a certain income level. I don’t want to say the university has not done anything, I think they have, but the statement of TYP is that we believe in diversity, and not just racial but economic diversity is important to us, and we are going to put our money there (which is easier when you have $22 billion in endowment) and put our talent there and create leadership programs that undergraduates can get into and learn the skills to bring in new undergraduates from parts of the population in the United States that are underrepresented here. That needs to be pushed much, much harder. The Politic: Have the demographics of the university changed significantly since you were here? The first two years I was here there were no women. So the answer is yes! Other than that I would say that there are fewer middle-class students here. There’s
a barbell distribution. I don’t know if there are more lower-income students here now than when I was here, but there are more higher-income students. And I think that’s just because of the price of higher education. If you’re a valedictorian in your high school and you get in to a state university and Yale, some pick the state university. When I was in college there were probably 15 or 20 universities you could get a top-flight education from in this country, probably now there are 50 or 60. If the state university is going to leave you graduating without debt, I think that gets a better look these days. The Politic: If you could pass on one piece of career advice to aspiring government employees or politicians at Yale, what would it be? Stand up for what you believe in even if it costs you your seat, otherwise you’ve wasted your time. Donna Horning is a junior in Davenport College. SPRING 2012 II
13
NATIONAL
AN INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN SCHWEITZER A New Kind of Democrat Conducted by Matthew Nussbaum Brian Schweitzer, a rancher, was elected governor of Montana in 2004. A Democrat in a Republican-leaning state, Schweitzer was re-elected in 2008 with 66 percent of the vote and, now in the final year of his second term, he has among the highest approval ratings of any governor in the nation. His tenure has seen Montana running large surpluses without raising taxes. Schweitzer is a major proponent of green energy and American energy independence, a topic he addressed, to positive reception, at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008. Schweitzer is seen by some as a possible candidate for President in 2016. In a March interview, Schweitzer discussed a range of issues, including energy, health care, gay rights and his future.
The Politic: You are considered one of the major voices on American energy policy. What would you say to the Republican candidates and the Republican Party in terms of energy policy? And what would you say to the American people who are suffering at the pump? I would say this: the United States produces 10 percent of all the oil that is produced in the world. Now that’s up from about 7 percent. And I would say this: Under this President, we have 14
THE POLITIC
markedly increased our production. More than 50 percent of the oil and gas drilling rigs worldwide, currently are being used in the United States. We’re now down to importing only 45 percent of our oil from more than 60 percent during the Bush administration. And we are producing more oil in the United States than we have during any time in the last eight years. But we’re still only 10 percent of the production worldwide. So we are not the drivers of price. There’s probably 25 or 30 dollars per barrel priced in because of hostilities in the Persian Gulf. That
is a hostility tax, if you will. We are, of course, producing a little more than half of the oil we actually need in this country, but still we are a price taker not a price maker. The biggest driver here is the price of crude oil, and that is the price set by international events and international producers. The Politic: If oil is so unsustainable and prone to the influence of international events, what’s the future of American energy?
NATIONAL
Look, we are blessed in this country ing all over the country, and the ability to us. We can break our addiction to foreign in that we have an abundance of energy produce electricity with wind and solar oil, we can decrease our consumption of resources. We have wonderful wind and and cleaner coal—this is a country that is petro-dictators’ oil, but it can’t be done solar resources. The United States is still poised to break our addiction to foreign in one year. This is a 20-year plan, and the number one country in the world in oil. But this is not a two-year plan. This what we need more than anything is a coal reserves. And while many people be- is not a “wave the magic wand.” This is Congress that will stick to something! lieve that coal is not an important source a plan that requires us to have a large These people, they’ve become like of energy, it still provides more than 50 infrastructure investment in new natural attention-deficit children. They bounce percent of the electricity produced in the gas pipelines so that we can deliver the back and forth off the walls of this issue United States. It is still the least expensive natural gas to the refueling zones all over or that issue, and they can’t stay on the way of producing electricity. Do those America. Every gas station in America same idea or plan for even one week, let coal-fired plants produce pollutants with needs to have the ability to fill cars and alone 20 years. That’s what we need—we particulate matter, with mercury, with trucks with natural gas. We need a huge need resolve in this country. sulfur, with nitrogen oxide, with CO2? investment in transmission so that we can Yes, yes, and yes. Are those newer boil- move electricity from where the wind is The Politic: Health-care today is one ers cleaner than they were in the past? blowing to where the car is driving or to of the major political issues, with the Yes. Is it possible to have zero emissions where the office or home is being heated Supreme Court reviewing the Patient out of coal technology? Not only is it or cooled. That investment is great for Protection and Affordable Care Act. possible, but there is a zero-emission America, because every dollar we send to That was an act that your Senator, coal plant operating in our neighboring a petro-dictator is a dollar that we didn’t Max Baucus, played a lead role in North Dakota since 1984. And there are spend building an infrastructure that’s crafting. What are your views on what dozens of these facilities built all over the designed by American engineers and has become known as Obamacare? world. So coal can be cleaner. America is built by American workers. Every time really in a pretty good position when it they drill another well in one of these Well, it’s an incremental improvecomes to energy production, but where petro-dictators’ backyards, that creates ment over what we had. It isn’t the endI believe that some of these Republicans jobs for them and it creates insecurity for all. We’ve been reforming health-care in get it wrong on the campaign trail, they say they have a plan to create two-dollarper-gallon gasoline. Well, how do you do that, when we’re only producing 10 percent of oil on the planet and we’ve increased the production by about 25 percent since Barack Obama has become President. We might be able to produce another 25 percent increase. We might get all the way up to 12 percent, or 12-1/2 percent of the oil produced worldwide. But since we’re consuming nearly 20 percent of the oil produced on the planet, it means that we are still a price-taker, not a price-maker. So that holds very little promise just to say these things. We could become energy selfreliant in the United States, but it won’t just be with oil. Increasingly, natural gas is going to take the role of our transportation fuel. Natural gas can run every car in America. We’re increasingly going to have a natural gas fleet of cars, which will markedly decrease our demand for oil, and that, coupled with increasing natural gas production, we will be decreasing our reliance on oil that comes “We could become energy self-reliant in the United States, but it won’t just be with oil. from these petro-dictators. You couple Increasingly, natural gas is going to take the role of our transportation fuel.” that with the electric cars that are emergSPRING 2012 II
15
NATIONAL
this country for the last 80 years, and we’ll be reforming it probably for the next 80 years. I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t challenge the underlying costs. The problem with health-care in the United States is we pay too much and get too little. The new law didn’t challenge the insurance companies, it still put them in charge. It didn’t challenge the pharmaceutical companies: it continues to allow them to gouge American citizens, charging us two to three times as much for exactly the same medicine as they sell in the other industrialized countries. It doesn’t make any sense for citizens in Montana to pay three times as much for the same pill, manufactured in the same plant, as they pay in England, or Ireland, or France, or Switzerland, or Italy, Japan. Fortunately there are some good things. People who have pre-existing conditions, there is a way forward for them. In the past, it was bankruptcy—that was all they had. Young people up to the age of 26 can stay on their parents’ health insurance. Those are two good features, but I would just point out that I don’t believe that there can be a mandate for a private citizen to buy a service from a private company.
The Politic: So you oppose the federal mandate that every citizen must buy health insurance? Yes, the mandate, I believe, only works if you have a public option available. The Politic: Would you support a public option? If there’s a public option, then you can have a mandate. That’s what I think. We’ll see what the Supreme Court says. Now, it works like this: If you’re saying to an individual citizen, “When you get up in the morning, you have a requirement to do some certain things as a citizen. If you make money, you’re required to pay your taxes.” But who do you pay your taxes to? You don’t say, “Oh, you should pay your taxes to United Health Insurance Company.” We say, “No, you pay into our government because it’s the government that provides you public safety, and infrastructure, and education.” I think the flaw in this system is that there is a mandate that you buy insurance from a private company. Well, that’s telling a citizen that you have to take your money out of your pocket and
give it to some company over here. That’s a stretch. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the Supreme Court throws it out. Now, I think it’s acceptable if we would have said, “You have a menu of places from which you can buy your insurance. You can buy it from a private insurance company, or you can buy your way into Medicare, for example.” So you would be handing that money to the government for a government service. There was a bill sent to me by the legislature that says that citizens in Montana won’t honor the mandate. I signed that, because I believe that we can’t, and we won’t, honor the mandate as long as there’s not a public option. The Politic: Moving into another area of domestic policy: Gay marriage. Governor Andrew Cuomo, in New York, recently signed gay marriage into law. Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, vetoed a similar bill. If such a bill were presented to you in Montana, would you sign it or veto it? Well we actually passed, by a citizen referendum in Montana with nearly 70 percent, that marriage is reserved for a man and a woman. So it’s actually constitutional in Montana. But if the legislature passed a bill that said the government has no place making health-care decisions for you, or telling you if you can pray or who you can pray to, or telling you who to love, I agree with all of that. The Politic: What are you most proud of in your tenure as governor of Montana?
Governor Schweitzer started the Yellow Ribbon program in Montana to provide help to soldiers before and after deployment. 16
THE POLITIC
That we were able to shepherd Montana’s finances through the Great Recession with surpluses higher than any other state’s; that’s a record that almost no one can match. But I think as much as anything, it’s that we’ve reformed our education system so that, unlike in any other state, we passed a law that we will teach Indian education in every classroom in our public schools. The relationships between Indian people and white people in Montana has not been
NATIONAL
good. I don’t believe that we can change the heart of someone who is 50 years old, but if we start when their child is six years old and they learn some of the language, and they learn the culture of people who have lived on this land for 12,000 years; when they learn the names of the rivers and the animals in Salish or in Cheyenne; when they learn that there was a civilized culture here for 10,800 years before Lewis and Clark arrived—it changes the perspective. I believe that there will be a long-term legacy change because we have done that. The other thing is with our veterans. After converting a perfectly good Montana citizen into a warrior and sending that warrior to Iraq, where he served bravely, then when that warrior returned, we didn’t have a system of helping that warrior become a citizen again. That warrior went out to his ranch and fell into a depression and took his own life. So I started what we call the Yellow Ribbon program in Montana. We start before we deploy these warriors. We start with their families and with them, preparing them for what it will be like for him to be a warrior, but then we prepare the families and communities on how we’re going to convert them back to a citizen. We are there when we put them on an airplane to go to battle. We are also there when they return, and we continue with them, helping them with counseling, making sure that there is another eye and another ear with them and making sure that these warriors fully recover and become full citizens again. The Politic: A question about your future plans: If Senator Max Baucus does not seek re-election to the Senate in 2014, is there a chance that you will seek that Senate seat? I have not expressed much interest in serving in Congress. I think it’s a dysfunctional place, and it probably will be for a period of time. The problem with Congress is that the only thing they really care about is getting re-elected. I’m a doer, not a talker. So I think I’ll pursue whatever ambitions I have in places where I can actually get things done.
Teddy Roosevelt, the governor’s political icon. The Politic: Is a 2016 Presidential bid a possibility? I don’t know. I have to get out a map of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and Nevada and Florida and have a look at them. The Politic: Lastly, who is your political icon? You decided you wanted to leave a life of ranching for politics - who motivated you most of all to enter into the world of politics? There are two, and they’re completely dissimilar people. One is Teddy Roosevelt, who took on the trusts, who recognized—as we ought to recognize today—that corporations are controlling not just our governments but our everyday lives, and there needs to be some equity for families and small businesses. It was Teddy Roosevelt who recognized that there are some pieces of land on this planet that are so special that they need to be conserved for future generations. It was Teddy Roosevelt who warned us
about getting into foreign entanglements: “Speak softly, carry a big stick.” It was Teddy Roosevelt who started as a Republican, and when he ran for President the last time he ran as a Progressive. It was Teddy Roosevelt who proposed universal health care, universal suffrage and workplace safety, in 1912—a little ahead of his time. So one is Teddy Roosevelt. And he didn’t back down. I wish we had more leaders like that today. And the second would be Paul Wellstone, for many of the same things. Paul Wellstone was the conscience of the United States Senate. When other Senators would line up and cower behind the curtains of big insurance and the military-industrial complex because of their huge campaign contributions, it was Paul Wellstone who didn’t even take any PAC money. That’s like me—I don’t take PAC money, and neither did he. It was Paul Wellstone who often was the one vote when 99 votes went the other way. Those are the kinds of leaders that we need in this country. Matthew Nussbaum is a freshman in Silliman College. SPRING 2012 II
17
NATIONAL
GAME OVER How War Gaming Affects Military Planning By Meredith Potter
R
ecently, United States Central Command, the combatant command responsible for military operations in the Middle East, conducted a war game to assess the consequences of Israel striking Iran in protestation of their nuclearization efforts. The simulation found that an Israeli strike could lead to regional war; if that were the case, the United States would likely be involved. What are war games, how are they conducted, and who participates in them? How should their predictions about Iran’s future affect American dealings with Iran today? I interviewed Yale University Professor Paul Bracken, who teaches courses in Management and Political Science. Professor Bracken has participated in war games and has advised the federal government in multiple capacities, including United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), which was disestablished on August 4, 2011. War games simulate situations by asking players to adopt the characteristics of real-life personalities – in 18
THE POLITIC
recent games, someone has had the challenge of trying to mimic the often irrational thinking of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and pitting players against one another. Because its players determine its course, a war game reflects the human imponderables that make war difficult to model otherwise. The outcomes of war games help nations, and in particular, their militaries, develop plans. If Iranian leaders attack an American warship in the Persian Gulf – as they did in Central Command’s recent simulation – then military planners must decide how to respond. Their bosses demand nitty gritty details from them, including how many American casualties a counter-strike would cost. When I ask him who participates in war games, Professor Bracken responds with a long list: military officers, diplomats, retired military officers, retired diplomats, intelligence officials, White House officials, virtually all of the Cabinet agencies, and “sometimes,” he says, “they throw in an academic!”
The sponsor of a war game influences its participants; in preparation for the recent simulation in which Israel strikes Iran, Central Command invited trusted colleagues to play. Professor Bracken says war gaming dates back to ancient times. Military personnel developed chess to use for strategic purposes before it became a popular board game. Before computers, war games were conducted manually. Bracken points to buildings in Newport, Rhode Island, a “center for naval games,” as conducive to simulations. There, naval personnel used tiled floors to mock the movement of ships across oceans. For years, war games have been officiated by umpires, as disputes almost always arise. Today, Bracken says leaders do not have to choose between games conducted by computers and games conducted by role-playing human beings. Instead, they try to combine the two. There was a time when only computer models were thought to be objective,
NATIONAL
but Bracken says if people contaminate the decision-making in a simulation, they “contaminate it such that it is more realistic.” The war game conducted to assess the consequences of Israel striking Iran, called Internal Look, has also been used to assess communication and coordination among Central Command units in situations unrelated to Israel and Iran. Though the scenarios of war games have changed with time, the goals of these exercises have not. This time, Internal Look found that an Israeli strike could lead to regional war. I ask Professor Bracken if the United States would – or would have to – involve itself in such a war. In response, he says the New York Times article, published on March 19, 2012, that made the recent Internal Look simulation public was “almost certainly leaked.” Though he admits he cannot prove this, he reasonably asserts that the article could influence domestic public opinion about potential Israeli-Iranian conflict. It could also discourage Israel from doing something rash. The United States does not want to involve itself in a regional war, but Internal Look concluded that the United States would almost certainly be drawn in to a conflict. Why?
Bracken says if Iran starts bombing oil ports in the region, “the United States will have to involve itself.” Though government officials conduct war games to help them predict the results of real-world situations, it is undoubtedly difficult to gather intelligence about the thinking of Iranian leaders. I ask Bracken how accurately war games predict how leaders will react to crises. He asks me, “compared to what?” He continues, “some people do not like [war games] because they would rather handle a complex question with [another] methodology. What would that be? An expert judgment? A staff-directed study?” Government officials approach war games with trepidation because they are less controlled than experts or studies. Bracken says most people “can predict with high accuracy” what an expert or a study is going to conclude. He says both will “hold the party line,” depending on who is in office. Though they can and do make inaccurate predictions sometimes, Bracken insists that games are one of the best ways to plan for future conflicts: only games introduce scenarios experts and officials have not thought of. If played repeatedly, war games can help officials determine how much in-
volvement in an Israeli-Iranian crisis the United States would be able to afford. If the war is long but our effort inadequate, Bracken fears we will “re-create a Vietnam debacle,” but if our effort is sizeable, the American public, fatigued by more than a decade of conflict in the Middle East, is likely to oppose it. Once wars games begin, players consider factors – like the consequences of minimal involvement – that they had not considered before. Bringing those factors to light makes gaming useful. Bracken says, “I think it is good that these things are being gamed…we need to really think them through. We should examine these questions with many methodologies, but gaming should certainly be one of them.” Why include other methodologies in his prescription? Ultimately, Internal Look reminds us that an Israeli strike – and an Iranian counterstrike – will be complex, unpredictable, and potentially uncontrollable. Meredith Potter is a junior in Saybrook College.
The computer from the 1983 American Cold War movie WarGames. SPRING 2012 II
19
NATIONAL
AN INTERVIEW WITH NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON To Infinity and Beyond? Conducted by Josef Goodman and Justin Schuster Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Since 2006, he has hosted the educational science television show NOVA scienceNow on PBS. He is also a frequent guest on The Daily Show and The Colber Report. In the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs Magazine, Dr. Tyson wrote an essay, “The Case for Space,” on why the United States can’t afford to abandon space exploration.
The Politic: At a time when we have $14 trillion in debt and are struggling to fund necessities like Medicare and the military, why should the taxpayer’s dollar go towards space exploration? Because it is an investment. In the free market, capitalist culture, you want more money tomorrow than you have today. The prior arguments that we should go to space because it’s the frontier, it’s in our DNA, that’s all true, but it never convinced anybody to write a check. The driver of large, expensive projects in the history of the human species have never referenced those ideals. They have referenced things much more close to home, like war or defense, and the promise of economic return. In other eras, they would reference the power of 20
THE POLITIC
royalty and deity – that’s, for example, how you got the pyramids. These three sets of drivers – the praise of royalty and deity, the promise of economic return, and the urge to not want to die, are the three only drivers of great expenditure of money. The greatest projects our cultures have ever seen derive from those three drivers, including the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project. NASA was founded in the climate of the Cold War. It was geopolitical forces that created NASA. All but two of the astronauts were drawn from the military. As we go forward, we can demonstrate what NASA’s role in advancing a frontier will play in our economy and in so doing, it’s not a matter of having this amount of debt and these problems. The very construct of this question presupposes
that NASA is some luxury of scientists and engineers. Space may be the only insurance policy against going broke. The Politic: How much will it take, to send a man to Mars? I don’t want to isolate one destination from another. It’s a common tactic that many people invoke and I think it is misguided. When we were thinking about the interstate highway system, we didn’t say to ourselves, “we are going to build one to go from New York to Los Angeles and that’s it.” That’s not how you do it. You enable people to go wherever they want. You do this by creating multiple destinations available to you by developing the interstate system. The government does not presuppose where you want to live or how you
NATIONAL
want to live, but provides you with access to other than one destination. A healthy future in space is not “let’s go to Mars, how much does it cost?” It’s “let’s build a portfolio of launch vehicles that can be strapped with different combinations of boosters that will service whatever the needs of one community or another.” For example, there might be a geopolitical reason to return to the moon. There might be a security reason to stop that asteroid that’s headed our way. You have scientific reasons to explore Mars. You can build a sweep of launch vehicles so that the solar system is rendered as familiar to you as your backyard. You can do that if we double NASA’s budget. Right now, it’s half a penny on your dollar. Double it to one penny on your tax dollar. That will be sufficient to reinvigorate propulsion research and then you can go into space for whatever reason circumstances provide. You might want to go to the moon for tourist reasons. There might be some mining options available on an asteroid or on a far side of the moon. It is the access to space and the act of advancing a frontier that spawns innovation. It’s innovation that will drive the economy. What will it cost? Half a trillion to a trillion to get to Mars. NASA’s current budget over the next 25 years is half a trillion dollars so it’s not like it doesn’t have the money to do some things. I would just like to get to Mars sooner than thirty years from now. Doubling the budget will enable this.
would be an easy marketing ploy to turn that into a destination. China remains an economic competitor, has been for a while, and will surely continue to be. The fact is, the biggest incentive we would feel is not simply that China is an economic powerhouse, but that America is falling behind as an economic powerhouse. We feel that in the foreclosures of our homes and in the number of people out of work. There are consequences to a failing economy. A bigger driver is not that we have to beat China economically, but that we need to get ourselves out of economic doldrums and straits. We can do that without necessarily beating China, but if we do it well and do it right, there’s no reason that wouldn’t be a consequence. The Politic: When a president promises something beyond his years he is unaccountable – how do you expect presidents to have long-term visions? We live in an era in which a president can promise something outside of his tenure. I am deeply concerned about that because if the urge to do it is brought primarily by the charisma or the energy or the political capital spent by a particular leader, then to accomplish that goal will require a president to be named later on a budget not yet established. It becomes another generation’s problem.
It could be that another president is elected who has no interest in space. The goal here is not to have our ambitions in space linked to the ambitions of a president. They need to be a fundamental part of the expectations of our elected leaders. When that’s the case, it doesn’t become a political potato. It doesn’t become a bargaining chip or a point of debate about who is going to do it or not going to do it. It will be embedded in our cultural expectations of our leaders in the same way that veteran benefits are never debated. The Politic: If the federal government is not going to take charge, is privatizing space feasible? If the government doesn’t take charge, the country goes bankrupt. That’s my prediction for us. We don’t go bankrupt, but we just become really insignificant culturally, economically, and militaristically. We just fade. Without advancing a space frontier, there is nothing to drive our ambition and our economies. The engines of tomorrow’s economy will not be there. You are not going to inspire the next generation. All the jobs are going to go overseas. All the things that people are complaining about today and think they have Band-Aid solutions to them are all solved by this one concept. Private enterprise cannot lead a
The Politic: Can the Chinese today have the same catalytic effect the Soviets had back in the 1950s? There are two kinds of forces operating here. One of them is whether or not we fear them militaristically. If China said, “Let’s put a military base on Mars,” we would be on Mars in 10 months. The Politic: Only 10 months? I’m just kidding. But I am capturing for you the urgency with which we would act and take such a threat seriously. I joke that Mars is already red, so in China that
Second cosmonaut German Titov (right) with President John Kennedy at the White House on May 3rd, 1962. SPRING 2012 II
21
NATIONAL
space frontier. They have never led a frontier in the history of cultures, if that frontier was expensive, dangerous, with uncertain risks. When that happens, you can’t value that in the capital markets. Private enterprise comes into the fold after governments have explored the frontiers, drawn the maps, assessed the danger points, and understood the risks. The Dutch East India Trading Company did not lead Europeans to the New World. That was Columbus, on a voyage sent by Queen Isabella. Columbus was an explorer, but the people who wrote the checks were not. It was “find a shorter route to the Far East so that we can make our economic trade more efficient, and oh by the way, if you discover new land, here’s an Spanish flag, put it in the soil, and claim the land for Spain.” There were hegemonic reasons. There were geopolitical forces operating that had nothing to do with whether Columbus would take good notes on the botanical species he found in the New World or illustrations of exotic peoples he would come back and share with anthropologists. These were not the interests of the queen. Science has always piggybacked larger geopolitical funded projects. The astronauts did some science on the moon but that’s not what got us to the moon. The first scientist to go to the moon, a black scientist in fact, went on the very last mission. Another indicator that the moon wasn’t about science when we went.
The Politic: Shifting gears just slightly away from investing in NASA and more to advancing in science education in this country. You mean shifting to higher thrust propulsion… The Politic: That went over my head. That’s like you saying I’m out of steam. The Politic: That is why you are the physicist, and I am not. You are also a big advocate of investing more in science and math in this country. What are some of your thoughts about that and, more specifically, what you would do to change high school science curriculum? You don’t need it. You just go into space, and then everyone will want to become scientists. The curriculum is important and having a good teacher is important. It is as they say in mathematics “a necessary but insufficient condition” to transform the world. You want to transform things? Have great cosmic discoveries of an advancing space frontier written large across the weekly headlines, and then people will want to become scientists, engineers and technologists. People will demand a better curriculum, and they will demand better teachers because they know that when they come
Due to recent spending cuts Mars and Phobos may be a world off limits. 22
THE POLITIC
out, there will be a really cool job waiting for them to design the next airfoil that will navigate the rarified atmosphere of Mars. They will need a biologist to help them study the tantalizing data that may tell us that there was once life on Mars. They will need a planetary geologist who will understand structures on various moons of other planets. There are so many things that a kid will then want to do and think about doing once they are written large across the headlines. Ambitions in space are powerful. I don’t know a more powerful driver. People say “why are we going to think about space when we still don’t know about the ocean floor?” Well, space will attract people in ways that the ocean floor does not. Just do the experiment: go into a classroom and say, “you know this is a vast ocean, it is very dangerous to get to bottom, we still don’t know how to do it, it’s a great frontier, and we still don’t know what’s at the bottom of the ocean. We’ll need engineers to develop the vessels that will take us down there, and we will need biologists because maybe we’ll find life lurking there and we’ll need geologists because maybe there’ll be cool things happening at the bottom of the ocean.” Say that to eighth graders. Then I walk in and I say “We are about to go to Mars, and we might find alien life. I need a biologist. Who is with me?” The Politic: Maybe you are just a better salesman than I am. No, no! I am just saying that alien life… that wins every time. I win every time. I win. I just win. Who wants to design a craft to go to the bottom of the ocean? Who wants to design a craft that will visit Mars? I win. Who wants to design an electronic system that will detect murmurs at the ocean depth? Who wants to design a detection system that will locate and find killer asteroids that would render humans extinct? I win. I win every time because space is rich in ambitious projects that really smart people want to undertake. Some of them will go to the oceans; there is no doubt about it. What we’re talking about here is not specifically the career that someone
NATIONAL
takes but the idea that will entice them to want to become scientists and engineers in the first place. What was that initial spark of inspiration? NASA has got that written large. The fate of the country, in my read, is linked to the fate of NASA. As NASA fails, so too does the country fail. The Politic: After decades in the profession, what keeps you coming back? The boundless frontier. I like learning something tomorrow that I didn’t know today. The universe is full of places, concepts, things about which we know very little. It is a very attractive frontier for me to apply my emotional and intellectual energies. Meanwhile, a big part of my energy is bringing this to the public, and I see the excitement that the public expresses upon learning these discoveries in space. I don’t think it’s an artificial reaction. I don’t think it’s because I tell a good sound bite. I think it is because the universe is an inherently interesting place. Every culture we have ever seen or studied has had stories about their existence or about their presence in the world. It has included some thoughts, some imaginings, about their relationship with the rest of the universe. It is not just modern humans; it is all humans that have ever been. The Politic: Could you talk a little more about public interest? Do you have any cool, more recent anecdotes about the public and that voice still being here? The public interest in space is always, it has always been there, and it will continue to be there no matter where our funding profile for it will be. Consider for example that angry birds, one of the most successful smartphone apps ever written, is now going into space. It’s not angry birds at the bottom of the ocean; it’s angry birds space. The Politic: You really hate the ocean, don’t you?
Well, the top grossing films of all time, just look at the top ten, at any given time, will involve space. The Politic: One of them was Titanic. Yes, but Avatar has overtaken it, which was completely based in space. If you look at the appetite that we have for space based things, it is boundless. Some of the greatest films that we will remember that have made it into the top ten have involved space. You look at Star Wars and Star Trek. Look at ET; that was just an alien, coming to visit Earth. Look at Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Deep Impact, Armageddon – these are big, blockbuster movies. There is a huge appetite for them; it is huge. I don’t take credit for any of it. I’m really just a conduit to allow that preexisting interest to manifest itself, as I show people different places and ways that they can apply that interest and energy. The Politic: Building on that note, for the art history student at Yale or for the political science student like myself, what would be the one science book that you would recommend? Of course I think we live in a healthier society if everyone has some basic level of science literacy. What I think we need to stamp out is the attitude at the cocktail party or the intellectual gathering where a pocket of them who are the liberal arts types and one of them says, “I was never good at math” and the rest of them chuckle “Oh, neither was I.” Then you have another pocket of the science geek set, and just imagine if one of them said, “I was never good with nouns and verbs.” You’d be laughed out of the room. So, we need to change the culture of it somehow being comically okay to be scientifically and mathematically illiterate. That puts a base level out there. Are there books people can read? Sure. There are tons of books. Typically what is good is if you can find a science book that makes it to the bestsellers list
that usually means that people who are not scientists are reading it and have enjoyed it. If you look at Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything, much more readable than Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time. People bought that, but it is basically the most unread, bestselling book of all time. I have a couple of books that were low-level bestsellers, so that meant that a lot of nonscientists were reading them. One of them was Death by Black Hole. It’s a book that I’m quite proud of because it communicates to the reader how science works rather than using the reader’s time to teach them science. There is an unlimited amount of science that you could teach someone, so I think it is more important to learn how science works, what makes it tick, what it means to pose a question about the world and what are the methods and tools that we invent to answer them. In spite of the morbid title, Death by Black Hole, it is really about how science works. It was my awareness of that need to plug that hole in people’s science illiteracy that led me to put together that book. That is the kind of exposure that I think a person should have if they count themselves among the scientifically literate of the land. By the way, I’m intrigued that you mentioned art history majors. I’ve seen an increasing number of artists who have been inspired by cosmic themes. Think back to the Renaissance when biblical stories made it to so many illustrations that people made or the stories of the ancient mythologies. Things that drive artists tell you something about what is operating the society and the culture. As we come into modern times, I see more and more artists stimulated, inspired, and triggered to create by modern cosmic discovery. That is another way that this kind of influence spreads across the land. It is not just the scientists. It is everybody becoming a participant in dreaming about tomorrow and making tomorrow become today. Josef Goodman is a sophomore in Morse College. Justin Schuster is a freshman in Branford College. SPRING 2012 II
23
NATIONAL
AN INTERVIEW WITH MALCOLM GLADWELL An Outlier’s Opinion Conducted by Jacob Effron Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and bestselling author. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, he has also written four New York Times Bestsellers, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw.
The Politic: How do you generate such interesting ideas? Well, I don’t generate most of them. That’s the genius of it. I just go to the library and read stuff. The astonishing thing to me about American academia is how incredibly fruitful it is. There is an extraordinary number of incredibly smart people—industrious, smart, creative people who put out an extraordinary number of ideas, theories, and findings, most of which never see the light of day outside of the academic world. It’s just easy picking for someone who wants to read it. I get enormous sources of inspiration from that stuff. So, my contribution is to find ways of making those ideas come alive, but the 24
THE POLITIC
pressure’s not on me—I don’t have to come up with the original work. I always describe myself as that bird that sits on the back of the elephant and just picks off the ticks. The bird is really important. The bird keeps the elephant free of ticks. The elephant is very happy the bird is there. Everyone gets along. But it’s important to know that I’m the small bird picking ticks off this enormous elephant. The Politic: What have you been thinking about lately? I’m really interested in what it means to be a child of a very wealthy person. We know that it is a bad thing to come from extreme poverty and we
know that it gets better the more money you add to the equation. But does that keep going forever, or is there a certain point where it becomes bad again. I think being the child of a billionaire would suck. The period of anxiety when you’re young and you’re making it, where everything is on your shoulders, is incredibly important. It’s what spurs ambition and motivation and creativity. And if my father had a billion dollars, I would never have had an anxiety. I would never have even left Canada. So if you’re thinking about how much money you want to make, there are two issues. How much money do you want to make personally—what’s good for you? And the second question
NATIONAL
is what is good for your kids. And the answer to those two questions is different. If you get a random sample of very successful and driven people, their background will skew not to the very poor, but to the low end of the middle class. That’s interesting. The Politic: In a recent New Yorker piece you talked about the inability of social media to inspire people to take significant action. Given this reality how do you think non-profits can best use social media? I was addressing the very specific part of the equation, which was high risk activism. So not getting together to have a march for breast cancer or organizing a meeting at some place or fundraising for a political campaign. None of those things are high risk. They are all very important, but they don’t require putting your life in danger or defying institutions or any number of things. They don’t require personal sacrifice. In fact the beauty of social media is, in many cases, it allows us to do things productively without any kind of great self-sacrifice. If I’m a political campaign and I have a fundraising model which says I can get 20 million people to give me five dollars, none of those 20 million people is making a great economic sacrifice. Collectively, we are raising an astonishing sum of money. At that end of the continuum, social media is brilliant. But I suggest the other end of the continuum, where the contribution of each person in the crusade requires considerable sacrifice, such as revolutions against dictators, is different. There was a weird moment at the beginning of the Arab Spring where all the articles being written about what was going on in Tunisia and Egypt were the products of press releases from Twitter. Was Twitter useful in helping some of the activism we saw in Egypt and Tunisia? Absolutely. Would that revolution never have happened but for Twitter? Absolutely not. That kind of thinking is absurd, and I think diminishes the extraordinary courage of people who have been involved in that. They
don’t just sit in a room, they actually go meet people. And it also diminishes the incredibly hard work over years and years that predated the revolution and made it possible. So my argument is that there is a whole class of organizing activities that are necessary for a revolution that have nothing to do with social media, and that in fact social media might be antagonistic toward. So if you have a world where you condition people to think that they can participate meaningfully just by doing this or standing in their backyards, do you maybe make it harder for them to participate in situations where they need to make genuine personal commitment? I was most taken by a paper written by someone at Yale looking at Egypt, pointing out that when the Egyptian government shut down the Internet was when the revolution took off. That was when people actually went out into the street. The revolution dispersed and became so large and unwieldy that the army could no longer control it in the same way. I found that fascinating. So the argument in that paper is that there was a role played by social media, but it was only a small role, and it might actually have hindered the crucial stage of political mobilization.
in advance in every single stage where every single person has to play a very specific role and they are anticipating the move of others. That’s the furthest thing from Occupy’s model. That’s not to say that a network model is not the equal of the hierarchical model, it’s to say that they are profoundly different ways to organize social movements and they have very different strengths and weaknesses. Networks are really, really hard to destroy. Once al-Qaeda became a dispersed network, it became really hard to root it out. On the other hand, once you are this disperse network, it is really hard to put together coordinated, sophisticated, strategic operations. Al-Qaeda is a great example. What we did when we broke apart al-Qaeda after 9/11 is to turn what had been a traditional hierarchical organization into a far-flung network, and that organizational change we forced on al-Qaeda made it more resilient, difficult to get rid of, but less threatening. If you think about the civil rights movement, it was an incredibly effective hierarchical force, but had you wiped out the five leaders of it, it would have taken a long time for that movement to get going again. That was very apparent from its leadership model.
The Politic: In that same piece you talk about the necessity for movements to have a hierarchical structure to affect legislative change, citing the Civil Rights Movement. What are the implications of your finding for the Occupy movement? It’s very interesting to go back and read publications of the civil rights movement because you are forcefully reminded about what a tightly run hierarchy that was. That was not a loose association of people who formed these networks and got together and gathered in fun. That was a military operation run by Martin Luther King and a number of others with incredibly clear lines of command and where every move was plotted out in advance. If you look at some of Martin Luther King led a highly organized the critical campaigns they’re plotted out Civil Rights movement. SPRING 2012 II
25
NATIONAL
The Occupy movement’s disorganized structure may actually have helped its cultural influence. With Occupy, the real question is what do you want. Do you actually want to accomplish in the course of the next several years a profound change in the regulatory structure and economic inequality in the United States? You’re not going to do it without a leader. On the other hand, if what you are thinking is over the course of a long period of time you would like to slowly and gently, but powerfully, shift American public opinion in a different direction, then I think actually it is an effective way. When I look at what has happened to the American conversation over the last couple of years, and I see how issues of economic inequality have—in ways I would have found unimaginable a few years ago— taken center stage in many conversations, that is, in part, the work of Occupy. And I think that, to the extent that is what they wanted to do, they have succeeded. And that is how you succeed, by having far flung networks to move things gently. It’s not how you get a piece 26
THE POLITIC
of legislation, but it’s a question of what you want. The Politic: You also wrote a piece for The New Yorker in which you talked about the history of Ivy League schools deviating from an academic meritocracy to look for applicants who would have successful careers. Do you still see that today? My views of Ivy League schools continue to evolve. I now think it doesn’t matter. I’m against the Ivy League. I used to be against it because I thought it was a pernicious force that perpetuated privilege in America, and should be actively opposed because of the damages of that. Now, I’ve shifted and I think it’s a pernicious force and it doesn’t do any damage—it doesn’t do anything at all. It perpetuates a myth about privilege, but the actual advantage to your career that is conferred by attending an Ivy League university is somewhere between zero
and just about zero. It really doesn’t make much difference, and in my new book I have an entire chapter about how almost all of you would have been better off if you had gone to your second choice school. This is not something that’s hatched from my accommodation of my imagination or resentment. It’s because there is this really interesting recent group of papers from economists that try to figure out what the advantage of going to an elite school is. Before what people were doing is they were observing career outcomes of people who went to Ivy League schools and the careers outcomes of those who didn’t and comparing them. This is foolish because it doesn’t distinguish between who you are as a person and the effect of your school. Maybe you all are so smart that you could have been educated in a closest and ended up as a CEO. So we have to distinguish between your personal abilities and the effect of the school. And the way you do it now
NATIONAL
is really clever. What you do is you take two students who have identical high school academic records. One of them chooses to go to Penn State and one of them chooses to go to Yale, and you follow them for ten years because we know that they have the same inherent level of academic ability. What do we see? No difference. In fact, Penn State does slightly better. Now, you can do endless versions of this, and they are all the same.In New York, you have all these academically elite public schools—Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech. To get into Stuyvesant you have to take this standardized test, the SHSAT. They let in the 950 top scores. If you’re 951st you go to Bronx Science, a half a standard deviation worse than Stuyvesant or you go back to your lousy public school. We know that the difference between the kid that scored 950 and 951 on the SHSAT is negligible—it’s the same kid, margin of error. So if we look at the kids who are in position 940 though 950 and compare them to the kids in position 950 to 960, half of them went to a lousy school and half of them went to Stuyvesant, We can get a clear sense of whether the school made a difference. The students are academically equivalent. One went to the best high school, maybe in the history of the world. Stuyvesant has seven Nobel Prize winners; most countries in the world don’t have seven Noble Prize winners. The other half of kids go to Lousy High. So we look at these kids, we follow them for years. Do they get into different schools? Are their SAT scores any different? How much money do they make when they graduate? No difference. None. 30,000 people take the SHSAT every year. Phenomenal. They’re worried about it years in advance, tutoring to get into the best school. And yet, when you look in a rigorous way trying to find what the effect of Stuyvesant is, you can’t find it. No, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Maybe there is something we’re not measuring. Maybe you have a warm glow in your heart, and that warm glow persists for the rest of your life and
makes you a better person. But you’d think if the schools were as good as we think they are, it’d ought to show up. It should make a difference. And we can do this game with magnet schools; we can do it on and on again. In the last couple of years, we’ve done tons of these studies, like six of them now, and we can’t find it. Don’t delude yourself into thinking Yale has dramatically changed your life process. Had you gone to your safety, you’d be the same person. The Politic: So what do you think about preferences for legacies, affirmative action and athletes? It doesn’t matter. If there is no measurable marginal value associated with going to this school as opposed to Penn State, then why should we care how much this school deviates from a purely meritocratic approach to admissions. In fact, why should we care at all about the admissions standards? I’d be just as happy if they picked names out of a hat at this point. You know, that’d be more intellectually honest. The truly intellectually honest way to do admissions is to say, what is the threshold level of ability and motivation and curiosity you need to have to succeed at Yale. You’re way smarter than you need to be to thrive. There are all kinds of people who didn’t get in who could thrive here. Let’s say you need to be this smart and curious and open minded and motivated to thrive here. Everyone who applies to Yale who is there or above, their names should be thrown into a hat, and they should pick out 1300 names. If they did that, I would stop writing about the Ivy League. The Politic: One conversation we’ve been having on campus is if too many talented people are going into finance and consulting. What do you think? The net returns to society from a smart person going into finance are small. So, it’s sort of a shame. You could do a lot better. It is a nice, safe career I
suppose. I would hope that you would aim higher than that. A lot of stuff it’s just pointless. You just want to get money from here to there. The world is not better off. The amazing thing about the time that you live in is that this incredible thing has happened in the past ten years, which is a whole series of technologies have made it possible to start businesses far more easily than at virtually any other time in the history of the modern economy. All the things that made it difficult to start a business before have now been commodified and digitized. All the headaches, one by one, are being picked up and dealt with. We’ve reduced a lot of entrepreneurship to the interesting part, which is come up with something that people need or want, solve some problem, and execute it. It seems like such a shame to squander this moment. The Politic: You put in your “10,000 hours” at The Washington Post. Would you recommend that students interested in journalism today go a similar route? If I was coming up today, I wouldn’t go and work at a newspaper. The thing about the Washington Post is that it was culturally really relevant, and it was really fun. It’s no longer fun because, with the exception of a handful, they don’t pay any money, and they’re kind of weird, depressed places. There are so many opportunities to get into the thick of things quicker on the web. Now, there is the caveat they don’t pay in nearly the same way, but I think I would try and go the penniless web route to get practice, because you can just enter the mainstream so much quicker. There was a real sort of apprenticeship when I was coming up but now you can learn a lot faster in the web environment. Jacob Effron is a junior in Silliman College. For more Malcolm Gladwell read the entire interview at www.thepolitic.org.
SPRING 2012 II
27
OPINION FEATURE
DANGEROUS LIAISONS Just how tight are our universities with authoritarian governments? By Shaun Tan
F
or many people around the world the Arab Spring was a cause for great hope, as thousands of Arabs banded together to overthrow their corrupt and repressive governments. For the London School of Economics (LSE), however, it triggered a revelation that embroiled the institution in one of the biggest university scandals in history. On the 3rd of March 2011, Sir 28
THE POLITIC
Howard Davies, the Director of LSE and the institution’s highest official, resigned in disgrace amidst a media firestorm. The firestorm was sparked when the British press found extensive links between LSE and the Gaddafi family, links forged under the oversight of Davies through Saif Gaddafi – Colonel Gaddafi’s son, who had been a PhD student at LSE. The PR fallout for LSE was im-
mense, with LSE unsuccessfully striving to downplay its cozy relationship with the brutal regime. But perhaps the most telling response was the indignant sense of betrayal articulated by Saif Gaddafi. “Just a few months ago we were being treated as honored friends,” he railed. “Now that rebels are threatening our country, these cowards are turning on us. The way my former friends at
OPINION FEATURE
the LSE have turned against me and my father is particularly upsetting. These people…abandoned us after taking our money for years.” The Libyan School of Economics Perceiving his future as a powerbroker, LSE’s administration admitted Saif Gaddafi to the PhD program in Philosophy in 2003, despite his poor English skills and weak academic record. At LSE, Saif enjoyed special privileges, including special assistance from professors and permission to use a personal assistant to help him with his thesis. This special treatment produced great returns. Through Saif, LSE solicited a $2.5 million donation from the Gaddafi Foundation in 2008, as well as a $3.5 million contract for a special exchange program to train Libyan bureaucrats. LSE’s services to the Gaddafi regime also included glossing its image. In December 2010, LSE arranged a live video-link conference with Colonel Gaddafi. The Colonel, his gigantic visage projected onto a screen in LSE’s auditorium, took the opportunity to denounce the Lockerbie bombing as a “fabrication” of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whilst the LSE moderator addressed him as “Brother Leader” and “the world’s longestserving national leader.” At the end of his speech, Gaddafi was presented with a LSE baseball cap as a gift. “A cap was first given to your friend Nelson Mandela, on his visit to the LSE” the moderator told him, “and since then it’s become something of a tradition.”
The events of the Arab Spring shattered these illusions. As Colonel Gaddafi tried to shell his people into submission, denouncing them as “dogs” and “traitors,” and Saif warned opponents of “rivers of blood,” the Gaddafis’ reputation plummeted, bringing LSE’s down with it. By insisting throughout the relationship that “Libya is changing internally,” LSE’s officials blinded themselves to reality. An inquiry conducted by former Lord Chief Justice Woolf found that the relationship was allowed to grow unchecked, without due diligence assessments, such that LSE came to be known in academic circles as “The Libyan School of Economics.” That the LSE-Gaddafi scandal was a black mark against academic integrity is undeniable. But how far was it an anomaly? Could it, in fact, be just the tip of the iceberg? A Free Lunch In 2006, Harvard and Georgetown came under fire for accepting $20 million each from the House of Saud – a heavy financier of terrorist groups – to fund their Islamic Studies departments. Critics deplored accepting money from the Saudis, who also funded similar programs at Berkeley and the University of Arkansas. Former Congressman Anthony Weiner accused the Saudis of “trying to cleanse their bloody hands by taking contributions to institutions like Georgetown and Harvard.” British universities also receive heavy funding from Gulf States, Ox-
ford’s Centre for Islamic Studies receiving $119 million from a dozen Middle Eastern rulers, and LSE’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies receiving $14 million from the UAE. A further UAE donation of $4 million endowed LSE’s Sheikh Zayed Theatre, named after the UAE dictator whose foundation funds lectures and publications blaming Zionists for the Holocaust and the U.S. military for masterminding 9/11. Another dubious source of funding is the Chinese government, which has financed Confucius Institutes at universities including Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Ostensibly meant to promote study of Chinese language and culture, something many Westerners rightly perceive as important, the cash comes with strings attached. Affiliated universities must sign a “memorandum of understanding” endorsing the “one-China policy” that precludes recognition of Taiwan as a state. Confucius Institutes have also been known to act as lobby groups in universities, attempting to block guest speakers who they perceive as anti-Beijing. Likewise, accepting money from Gulf States has pernicious consequences. The $12.7 million the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh accepted from the House of Saud, for example, enabled the Saudis to appoint members to the management committees of their Islamic Studies centers. A more subtle effect of these donations is the universities’ increase in self-censorship. Martin Kramer of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy outlined the risk of academics skewing their work or censoring their
Three of the world’s most prestigious universities have been funded by questionable sources. SPRING 2012 II
29
OPINION FEATURE
statements to please donors, either to show appreciation for their generosity or in the hopes of attracting future donations. In 2009, Yale University Press refused to print images of Prophet Muhammad in a book about the Danish cartoon controversy, a move Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute linked to Yale University President Richard Levin’s outreach to Persian Gulf funders at the time. Such incidents ranked Yale among the 12 worst colleges for free speech, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. While such donations can seem like easy money for universities, they’re about as free as the chimerical free lunch. “[T]his is like taking out a subprime mortgage,” commented David Prager Banner, Associate Professor of
Chinese at Columbia, on the Confucius Institutes. “[I]t may seem like a good deal at first but it will surely have consequences we may not be able to foresee at the outset.” The Great Game Upon visiting the office of John Sexton, University President of New York University, Zvika Krieger wrote in New York magazine that it resembled “a shrine to Abu Dhabi”, replete with “a massive Oriental rug, a gift from the crown prince, on one entire wall,” and a framed portrait of Sheikh Zayed, founder of the UAE, on the other. Clinched by a $50 million donation to NYU, and the promise of much more to come, NYU-Abu Dhabi opened in fall 2010, making
it the first liberal arts college outside America. Awarding full NYU degrees and financed completely by the government of Abu Dhabi, NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus is Sexton’s brainchild, conceived through his mad obsession with dethroning what he calls “the holy trinity” – Harvard, Yale, and Princeton – from their perch at the pinnacle of American education. This collaboration with Abu Dhabi, Sexton believes, will help boost NYU’s endowment and its international reputation. In the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Sexton found the ideal partner. Sexton described his first meeting with Sheikh Mohammed in his opulent majlis social hall as “electric.” “The Crown Prince told me that he
Ernst Hanfstaengl (waving), Hitler’s aide and a Harvard graduate, at Harvard for his 25th class reunion. 30
THE POLITIC
felt
OPINION FEATURE
it in my handshake, in my eyes, in my aura at that first meeting,” Sexton recounted breathlessly, “I knew right then and there, that we had found our partner.” Having decided on his plan, Sexton pushed it through with autocratic fervor. “It was negotiated secretly and announced to the rest of us with only a veneer of serious faculty consultation, but we knew it was a fait accompli,” said a senior NYU professor who declined to be named because of “a sense that people who get on Sexton’s wrong side get punished.” Indeed, reservations about the project seemed to batter uselessly against Sexton’s bewildering naïveté. “The Crown Prince chose us,” Sexton said, “and he wants us to be the best.” At the same time, Sexton warned students and faculty at the new campus that they couldn’t criticize Abu Dhabi’s leaders and policies without repercussions. However, he denied that such restrictions would betray the spirit of a liberal arts college. “I have no trouble distinguishing between rights of academic freedom and rights of political expression,” he said. There are disturbing parallels between the NYU-Abu Dhabi venture and the planned Yale-NUS College, which is set to open in fall 2013. YaleNUS too was conceived by university presidents, negotiated surreptitiously, denied the process of a faculty vote, and then presented as a fait accompli, much to the chagrin of many students and faculty. Although the deal with the Singaporean government seems to guarantee free expression on Yale-NUS’ campus, this guarantee is still subject to Singapore’s draconian laws on defamation and sedition. Most worryingly, Yale-NUS seems to have led to increasing authoritarianism on the part of the Yale administration. Faculty members have voiced fears of appearing to oppose University Professor Richard Levin on this project, according to Victor Bers, Professor of Classics at Yale. The administration has also dis-
played an eerie moral relativism on Singapore. In reference to Singapore’s restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, Charles Bailyn, the designated Dean of Yale-NUS, said simply: “They take demonstrations in a kind of different way. What we think of as freedom, they think of as an affront to public order, and I think the two societies differ in that respect.” When asked whether the Singapore government’s close surveillance of political blogs was antithetical to Yale’s values, President Levin declined to comment. When debating a resolution urging the Yale-NUS College to respect civil liberties on campus, Levin opposed a clause expressing concern at Singapore’s “lack of respect for civil and political rights,” objecting that it “carried a sense of moral superiority.” His sentiments were echoed by Economics Department Chair Benjamin Polak, another proponent of YaleNUS, who worried that such language would be “offensive” or “arrogant.” As the project comes to fruition, the Yale administration has grown increasingly reluctant to make any kind of value judgment with regard to Singapore. A similar attitude was expressed when Chinese Premier Hu Jintao came to speak at Yale’s Woodbridge Hall. After his speech, Hu was not subject to questions from the audience like a normal speaker at Yale. Instead, he was given two softball questions preselected by the Yale administration. Students who wanted to protest Hu’s visit were restricted to the enclosed area of Old Campus, where they could not upset Hu and cause him to rethink his recent decision to allow Yale to be the first foreign university to trade on China’s heavily regulated stock market. As a large proportion of power shifts from the West to the East, many university presidents have come to see Asia and the Middle East as the next frontier, the next stage in the Great Game played by generations of university presidents in their endless struggle to outmaneuver each other. For them, Asia and the Middle East are exotic
and lucrative markets that cannot be resisted and that they all have to get a little dirty to tap. Before making the extraordinary investment of building a campus in these regions however, universities should consider the difficulties faced by the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, a joint-campus established in China by Johns Hopkins and Nanjing University 26 years ago. Writing on the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Bloomberg, Oliver Staley and Daniel Golden relate how the Chinese government kept tight control of the Center’s activities, by interrupting a film screening and blocking a human rights lawyer from speaking at a panel. Staley and Golden also described the pressure Brendon Stewart, an American student, faced when he tried to publish the Center’s first academic journal in 2009. Administrators prevented it from circulating outside campus and tightened the Center’s rules, requiring all clubs or events to be submitted for their approval. “I didn’t expect such a rigid monitoring over students’ behavior,” said a Chinese student, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal. “I don’t think the US side had a lot of bargaining power to protect the interests of its students,” Stewart related. Ultimately, Johns Hopkins could do little to resist government interference with the Center’s affairs, and allowed an atmosphere of paranoia to constrain students in a campus that bore its name. Never Again? In the 1930s, American schools held significant exchanges with two foreign countries. One of them was fascist Italy. Jonathan Zimmerman recounted in The Christian Science Monitor how, a decade after seizing power, Mussolini promoted Italian language exchange programs where top American high school students were given free trips to summer camps in Italy. There, they wore fascist uniforms and learned to SPRING 2012 II
31
OPINION FEATURE
hail the Italian flag. who is credited with lifting Rwanda out act within his rights as the moderator), The other country was Nazi Ger- of poverty. He is also a despot who rigs and when Kagame denounced human many. Stephen H. Norwood, Professor elections, tortures dissenters, and kills rights organizations, Gearty didn’t even of History at the University of Okla- political opponents. blink. And I squirmed in my seat thinkhoma, wrote about how Harvard sent At the lecture, Gearty heaped ef- ing that either I or everyone else in the a delegate to Heidelberg University’s fusive praise on Kagame. It went above hall had gone mad. 550th anniversary celebration to take and beyond what courtesy required; it I close with this story because it’s part in “a Nazi propaganda festival bordered on the sycophantic. It was my most vivid experience of this pheorchestrated by Josef Goebbels.” This also misleading. Gearty described nomenon. University administrators was after the university had expelled its Kagame as winning “a landslide victory often justify their ties with authoritarJewish faculty members. in democratically contested elections,” ian regimes by citing the need to engage Harvard also welcomed Ernst and lauded his “experience in dealing with the rest of the world in order to Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s foreign press with rights abuses.” change it for the better. Ideally, the chief and Harvard graduate, to its Most alarming of all was the reac- university should also learn from the campus where he gave the engagement and change for Commencement address to the better too. Harvard College’s class of However, unless uni’34. Together those acts of versities engage with a comrecognition lent credence mitment to upholding their to the Nazi regime. At values of free inquiry at the time, Harvard Univerleast equal to the commitsity President James Bryant ment of the regimes that Conant called the student stifle it, they themselves will protestors against Hanfsend up changing – for the taengl’s visit “ridiculous.” worse. These parallels are Valuable engagement not to sug gest a moral requires robust leaderequivalence between Nazis ship, something difficult and fascists and the governto see in many university ments of Singapore, China, officials today – “They take and Gulf States. Rather, demonstrations in a kind they demonstrate the extent of different way,” “The to which esteemed academCrown Prince chose us,” ics may be willing to ignore “Oh Brother Leader!” inconvenient truths when In the absence of such dealing with the rich and leadership, it will be the powerful. Hopefully this Are university presidents like LSE’s Howard Davies repeating truth, and the freedom to Harvard’s earlier mistakes? time round it won’t take a pursue the truth – the two declaration of war for university ad- tion of the audience. Probably knowing core values of any university – that ministrators to start calling a spade a little about Rwanda, they looked to suffers. spade. Gearty’s behavior for guidance. And they followed his cue. Shaun Tan is an international relations Who Changes Who? They laughed at Kagame’s terMasters student. rible jokes, and when, at one point, a In 2007 I attended a public lec- Congolese rights campaigner got up References for this article can be found ture at LSE’s Center for the Study of and criticized Kagame for his abuses, in the online version of The Politic: Human Rights. The moderator of the the audience laughed and jeered at the http://thepolitic.org/ lecture was Conor Gearty, the Rausling campaigner like he was a clown. Professor of Human Rights Law at Kagame, of course, loved it. He The thoughts expressed in this article are the LSE, and a leading human rights law- smiled smugly. With no hint of irony personal opinions of the author and do not yer, a man who, till that day, I held in he criticized African “one-party states” necessarily reflect those of The Politic. Please high esteem. and addressed his lone critic like he feel free to email Shaun at The guest speaker was Paul was indulging a local loon. Not once shaunzhiming.tan@yale.edu. Kagame – the President of Rwanda – did Gearty even question Kagame (an 32
THE POLITIC
INTERNATIONAL
WHY NATO MATTERS By Donna Horning
A
simple search of “NATO” in JSTOR reveals overwhelming fatalism amongst academics concerning the future of the Alliance — a sample of article titles on the first page of results include “NATO in Trouble,” “NATO — Where To?” and “Saving NATO from Europe.” Based on this sentiment, one conjures up an image of NATO as yet another anachronism of the Cold War: burdened by too many weak, free-riding nations, geriatric weapons systems, and interminable European bureaucracy. Coverage of NATO in the American media continually suggests that our European allies are not pulling their weight within the Alliance, and function as little better than a barbell tied to the ankle of American foreign policy. President George W. Bush’s condemnation of the world’s largest military alliance as “not willing to fight” in Afghanistan has become a widespread popular perception.
Prominent members of the U.S. national security establishment, including former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have stated publicly that NATO faces a “dim, if not dismal future.” The difficult question is finally being asked — does the United States still need a defensive alliance with Europe to ensure our national security? If the answer is “no” and the U.S. is indeed capable of doing everything itself, many policymakers would argue that the Alliance isn’t worth the time and resources spent maintaining it. But the answer remains a resounding “yes” — the United States needs Europe more than ever. In the 63 years since NATO was formed, its raison d’etre has evolved dramatically. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949 between 12 founding nations — Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portu-
gal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The first Secretary General of NATO, Lord Ismay, famously asserted that the purpose of the Alliance was to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” NATO is still trying to keep the Americans in, but its posture toward Russia and Germany has changed profoundly. Russia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and cooperation has deepened with the development of the Russia-NATO Council in 2002. Despite friction between the two powers on various issues including military strategy in Afghanistan and missile defense, Russia and NATO now collaborate extensively on fighting terrorism, joint military exercises and personnel training, anti-narcotics policy in Afghanistan, and nuclear non-proliferation. Meanwhile, Germany has emerged as a leader within the Alliance in recent years after its reSPRING 2012 II
33
INTERNATIONAL
unification in 1990. The integration of Germany and Russia’s increased cooperation left NATO casting about for new issues on which to focus its energies, culminating in the New Strategic Concept published in 2010. The document characterizes the current threats to NATO’s security environment as the proliferation of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, terrorism, instability beyond NATO borders, cyber attacks, and environmental and resource constraints. The United States has no hope of addressing any of these threats entirely outside the rubric of NATO. One main tenet of the New Strategic Concept explicitly states “the goal of creating the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons,” a vision articulated by the international organization Global Zero and endorsed by President Obama, former Prime Minister Medvedev, and other prominent statesmen around the world. The Global Zero action plan — in which the United States and Russia negotiate bilaterally to reduce their stockpiles to 1,000 warheads each, followed by multilateral negotiations among all nuclear weapons states to reach zero — requires the rigorous support of NATO. The nuclear status of the United Kingdom and France, the continued presence of American tactical nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe, and NATO’s geostrategic location with respect to Russia and Iran (in comparison to the isolated position of the United States) ensure that the Alliance will remain a powerful force in ongoing negotiations. Furthermore, if the United States must eventually achieve compelling deterrent capability with conventional weapons alone and support a comprehensive anti-nuclear verification and enforcement regime, maintaining a military coalition of peaceful, highly developed, like-minded nations will be more important than ever. The United States also cannot achieve the legitimacy necessary to aggressively combat terrorist networks and manage instability in nations beyond NATO borders without the political endorsement and tactical support of 34
THE POLITIC
the Alliance. Aside from the backlash unilateral U.S. military action tends to inspire around the world, the United States would be ill-advised to pursue military intervention in countries like Afghanistan without the intelligence and logistical support of Europe, particularly when pursuing long-term counterinsurgency strategy. The latest issue of Foreign Affairs hailed NATO’s operation in Libya as a “model intervention” by providing the conditions necessary for the rebels to overthrow Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime while effectively involving regional partners and sharing the burden among the Alliance’s members. According to the authors, NATO saved tens of thousands of lives, conducted a precise air campaign that greatly minimized collateral damage, enabled the rebel opposition to overthrow one of the world’s worst and longest serving dictators, and accomplished it all without a single Allied casualty and at a fraction of the cost of the interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Of course, what do those three less successful and more expensive interventions have in common? The United States tried to go it alone. Finally, the nations of NATO together have unmatched intellectual and technological resources to creatively address transnational threats like cyber attacks and climate change. Constant grousing within the Alliance about burden sharing needs wholesale reconceptualization — the member states should instead be considering how to leverage their comparative advantages and economies of scale for the benefit of the whole. This kind of cooperation is particularly indispensable in meeting threats that are indifferent to national borders, a prominent feature of the modern security environment and cyber attacks in particular. The philosophical argument for the United States’ continued dedication to NATO is powerful as well. Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” traces the development of a “pacific federation of republics” from inherent features of the human condition, drawing on the natural
comparative advantages of different societies, the impossibility of forming an all-inclusive world government, and the superiority of republics as a way of achieving justice through transparency. NATO is the real-life embodiment of this pacific federation of republics as a way of achieving “perpetual peace,” and so far Kant’s theory of international politics has held up for more than 200 years. The historical trajectory he outlines has largely played out, and the absence of war between republics remains a striking empirical fact. The United States is the logical choice to lead the expansion of NATO’s influence if it can bring the world even a little closer to “perpetual peace.” Dean Acheson, U.S. Secretary of State during the Truman administration and American signatory of the North Atlantic Treaty, reminds us that “the best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.” Dire predictions of NATO’s long-term decline may be inevitable, but in the meantime the Alliance will quietly continue to assure an enduring European peace, build security in Afghanistan, fight piracy in the Gulf of Aden, develop missile defense technology to protect Europe from rogue nuclear threats or accidental launches, and liberate the people of Libya from Qaddafi’s monstrous regime. The United States would do well to provide a little affirmation to its staunchest and most valuable allies once in a while. Donna Horning is a junior in Davenport College.
INTERNATIONAL
THE FEEDBACK LOOP United States-Russia Relations By Michael Magdzik
I
s Russia really America’s greatest geopolitical foe? Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested as much following the Obama-Medvedev open mic faux pas at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, in which our president asked his Russian counterpart for breathing room on missile defense. Election strategy aside, Romney’s comments are emblematic of a larger phenomenon evident in the national security and political establishments of both countries. Forty plus years of Cold War nuclear standoffs, proxy wars, and ideological showdown have inculcated a profound mutual suspicion that frequently results in strident rhetoric and occasionally tangible political showdowns. Is the mistrust warranted? Does Vladimir Putin’s Russia pose a serious existential threat to the United States, or
could it serve as a strategic asset? Views among American leadership and intelligentsia run the gamut on this and other related questions. Post-election Russia has also resisted the rapid development of the Arab Spring revolutions, leaving no easy answers. What follows is a brief exploration of Russia’s mentality toward the United States. The first thing anyone should know about Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly the central player in the contemporary Russian drama, is that he is very much a product of the Cold War. He joined the infamous Committee for State Security, better known as the KGB, after graduating from Leningrad State University in 1975. As an agent, Putin was influenced by and grew to admire Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chief whose penchant for crushing dissent and maintaining authoritarian governance in Russia and
the Soviet sphere of influence was legendary. When Putin came to power after the presidential elections of 2000, many thought he brought along that old KGB attitude and cultivated it in the Russian bureaucracy. Under Yeltsin, members of the state military and security apparatuses constituted approximately 11% of the government. In Putin’s early years, these siloviki (“people of force”) became roughly a fourth of the bureaucracy, particularly in “hard ministries” dealing with foreign policy, energy, and other crucial state interests. In 2005 Putin expressed the sentiment that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Russia’s national pride was damaged by the loss of a significant chunk of landmass, population, and economic productivity, and SPRING 2012 II
35
INTERNATIONAL
Putin’s regime has had little tolerance for attempts by Western powers to curtail the Kremlin’s efforts to reestablish power. “We will do everything possible to prevent the accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO,” declared Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in 2008, only months before the Russo-Georgian War that canned talk of NATO expansion. More recently, the Kremlin has pushed for an economic and political union called the Eurasian Union, building on the already-existing customs union between Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Russia. It has also sought to draw Ukraine into its orbit. Russia has also proved willing to work against Western ambitions in spheres beyond the former Soviet Union. The Russians used their Security Council veto power to effectively protect Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, an act which earned them vilification from Western commentators, many of whom argued there was a moral obligation for the UN to intervene there. This maneuvering made it appear as though Russia exports and protects global authoritarianism, just as the Soviet Union exported and protected global communism during the Cold War. Worldwide, Russia has become a country that is perceived as corrupt, unjust, and sinister. The hyper-politicized trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Yukos petroleum company, illustrated the state’s willingness to intervene in business affairs and also serves as a continuing deterrent to sustained foreign investment. The Committee to Protect Journalists decreed in 2009 that Russia is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for investigative journalists. The mysterious polonium assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in Britain and the discovery of the Anna Chapman spy ring in the US demonstrate that the Russian method is not limited to its borders. In light of all this and more, it is understandable why Romney and others view Putin as an authoritarian villain and Russia as a sinister geopolitical foe. In many ways, this neat narrative is overly simplistic. Unlike some Warsaw 36
THE POLITIC
Pact countries, post-USSR attempts by Russia to develop liberal democratic institutions and a market economy have gone terribly awry. At the apex of a constitutional crisis shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin ordered a tank attack against the Russian Parliament in October 1993, resulting in the deaths of over 100 people. Early experiences with privatization were also profoundly negative. The 1995 loansfor-shares scheme saw the government lease state industrial assets through a rigged auction and never pay back the loans, effectively selling the industries for an extremely low price and creating the infamous Russian oligarchs. Russia has fought two brutal wars against separatist Chechnya and suffered mass casualties at the hands of terrorists. One of the most salient and scarring of these was the Sept 1, 2004 Beslan School hostage crisis. Perpetrated by Islamic militants, the crisis resulted in the deaths of at least three hundred hostages. Scarring incidents like these have contributed to a sense of chaos and uncertainty in the country, and in a way have led to the rise and popularity of Putin because he represents stability—a strong state authority dedicated to cracking down on corruption and terrorism. Shortly after Beslan, Putin ended popular election of regional governors and opted to have the Kremlin appoint them, subject to regional legislative approval. Far from being manifestly undemocratic, Putin was curtailing a system where regional seats were bought and sold by local elites. Russians have largely been proud of Putin’s image on the international stage. Yeltsin was a drunkard and an embarrassment; Putin is a teetotaler and an outspoken advocate for Russian greatness at a time when Russians worry their status on the world stage is fading. This complicated Russian relationship with authoritarianism is by no means a recent phenomenon. Even now, the Russian people have by no means united in denouncing their Soviet past. Lenin’s haunting mausoleum continues to occupy prime real estate on the Red Square, and flowers are constantly laid
on Stalin’s gravestone. Contrary to popular belief, much of the electoral support Putin experienced in March was not fraudulent. This does not, of course, mean there were not irregularities in the last election. Few elections, in Russia or otherwise, are completely free and fair. But Putin is far from being reviled like Gaddafi or al-Assad–he is not the distant tyrant without the consent of the governed, as some in the West have tried to portray. In fact, much of the antagonism Russia exhibits on the foreign stage has been in response to diplomatic incidents like the Romney comment or Hillary Clinton’s harsh criticism of the March elections. This is the feedback loop of United States-Russia relations, in which American politicians issue harsh rhetoric and Putin fires back, causing Americans to see him as a hardliner trying to undermine our country. If American politicians want a more democratic and cooperative Russia, it is imperative to keep the Russian boat steady and keep interference in Russian domestic political affairs to a minimum. This is critical not only to advancing American interests (e.g. nuclear non-proliferation and balancing China), but also because the easier it is to point to protestors as agents of American influence, the easier it is to discredit them. The unipolar moment is past, and Russia may be a key component of a new multipolar world order, but Americans ought to maintain a healthy awareness of the complexities of Russia. To do otherwise is to risk misunderstanding and mistrust, both inimical to a peaceful world order. Michael Magzdik is a junior in Berkeley College.
INTERNATIONAL
WHEN FREE SPEECH GOES TOO FAR Said Nafa and the Knesset Ethics Committee By Jusin Schuster
I
n late March 2012, the Israeli Knes- Jewish and Arab-Israeli relations. They Court.” set Ethics Committee rejected the also threaten to isolate the silent major- Benji Preminger, a Yale student Legal Forum for the Land of Israel’s ity of Arab-Israelis. and former IDF military journalist, complaint against Said Nafa. Nafa, an This is not the first time that an attempts to convey the magnitude of Israeli MK, had participated in a rally Arab MK has exhibited egregious be- some of these actions: “This is antiin support of Syrian dictator Bashar havior. Firebrand Hanin Zoabi of the Israel to an extreme. Imagine a US SenaAssad. While the Legal Forum argued Balad Party participated in the Gaza tor going to meet Al-Qaeda on his own that the rally in Haifa violated laws Flotilla on May 31, 2010, which violated volition. Imagine a Congressman fratagainst public support for terrorism, Israeli sovereignty and resulted in nine ernizing with the Taliban. That’s what committee chairman Yitzhak Vaknin deaths. In response to Israeli interven- you have here. I feel very close to Arabs, countered, “Participation in a political tion, Zoabi called her government’s and I wish this weren’t the case, but they conference, even if its messages are actions a “pirate military operation.” call Osama bin Laden a martyr. When not pleasant to the ear, to you have a member of your say the least, falls under the government go to someone freedom of political action that you are at war with, it and expression of MKs.” is a problem. There should There is something parbe laws against it. I’m not ticularly troubling with the against conversations with Ethics Committee’s ruling Hamas, but such actions and even more so regarding that these Knesset members Nafa’s actions. The rally not have done are massive quesonly demonstrated support tions of allegiance.” for a regime with troubled Two years ago, the relations with Israel, but also Israeli Knesset passed a confor a ruthless dictator who troversial piece of legislation has already killed more 9,000 called the Loyalty Oath Law Syrian protestors. While that required all non-Jews Syria burns, Nafa parades wishing to become an Israeli with a picture of Assad. citizen to vow loyalty to “the The “Rules of Ethics State of Israel as a Jewish for Members of the Knesand democratic state.” Howset” states that the Knesset ever, the backlash against the member “is a trustee of the bill suggested that it failed to Israeli MK Said Nafa of the Israeli Arab party Balad. public, and his duty is to repproperly address the issue of resent the public that voted for him in Deputy speaker of the Knesset and loyalty among MKs in Israel. Before a manner that will serve human dignity, leader of Ta’al, Ahmad Tibi, praised mandating allegiance oaths, perhaps the advancement of the society and the the “martyrs” of the Palestinian Au- Israel should focus on upholding MKs’ good of the State.” Nafa’s actions are a thority on “Palestinian Martyr’s Day,” common respect for human life.The violation of human dignity as expressed adding that “there is nothing more “Rules of Ethics” states that members in the aforementioned rule; when an praiseworthy than those who die for shall “uphold the dignity of the KnesMK defends the slaughter of innocent the homeland.” Finally, Afu Aghbaria set.” In refusing to sanction Nafa, it civilians, he surrenders his right to free of the Hadash Party spoke in front of was the Ethics Committee that failed speech. Furthermore, Nafa’s actions the European Parliament and accused to preserve the Knesset’s dignity. are antithetical to the interest of the Israel, his own country, “of deliberately democratic Jewish state, and given that harassing the residents of the Gaza Justin Schuster is a freshman in Nafa is a member of the Arab party Strip and called for Israeli leaders to Branford College. Balad, they exacerbate already tenuous be tried at the International Criminal SPRING 2012 II
37
INTERNATIONAL
SELF-IMMOLATIONS IN TIBET By Cindy Hwang
A
new, completely unprecedented pattern of political resistance has swept across the Tibetan plateau. In the past year, more than 30 Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule, in what amounts to one of the world’s largest waves of selfimmolation in the past several decades. The Chinese government’s systematic cultural and religious repression have driven some Tibetans to these desperate acts of resistance, in the hopes of ending government interference and bringing the Dalai Lama back from exile. Ten of the self-immolations have occurred in the past month alone, and 23 are known to have been fatal. Strikingly, most of these immolations have taken place far from Tibet’s capital, in the ethnic Tibetan regions of China’s Sichuan and Qinghai provinces— most have also been carried out by Tibetans under 30, some in their teens. The exact reasons for this particular method of protest—possibly the most radical form of political self-expression—are unknown. The self-immolations may have been inspired by the Arab Spring demonstrations, although according to Tsering Tsomo, the Executive Director of the Tibetan Centre on Human Rights and Democracy, the protest method is not a direct result of whatever happened in Tunisia. “It’s more that it’s a desperate measure that some Tibetans feel forced to undertake because they want the world to listen,” she said. Although suicide is normally shunned in Buddhism, self-sacrifice for a noble cause is highly regarded. Tibetans have celebrated the self-immolators, many of them monks and nuns, as martyrs of the Tibetan cause. At the same time, Tsomo, a Tibetan-in-exile herself, remarked, “It’s really troubling and heartbreaking for Tibetans to see this sort of thing.” The roots of the self-immolations can be traced back to 1994, when the Chinese government, in a reversal of the 38
THE POLITIC
self-management policies of the 1980s, dramatically tightened its grip on Tibet. It declared the Dalai Lama an enemy, forced monks and nuns to denounce him, and greatly intensified regulations on monasteries. It first implemented these policies in the Tibetan Autonomous Region—the western half of the Tibetan plateau that contains the Tibetan capital, Lhasa—but in the past decade, it has gradually expanded them to the eastern half, where most Tibetans live and where most of the current selfimmolations have occurred. It’s unclear why the government extended these policies to the eastern regions, since they had been relatively peaceful since the late 1970s. Robert Barnett, director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program at Columbia University, speculated, “I think the answer is that it’s a kind of bureaucratic paralysis, that the issue of Tibet got handed down to second-caliber officials who in the early ‘90s came up with very aggressive shortterm policies that involved attacking the Dalai Lama and Tibetan culture, and their careers depend on their maintaining these policies.” Describing something similar to a positive feedback loop, he added, “It seems to be just a kind of internal vicious circle, that the more you oppress, the more those officials benefit, and the more they provoke more protests.” These intrusive policies, vary from county to county and continue to expand in reach. Some include “patriotic reeducation” programs in monasteries— in which refusal to comply can result in forced expulsion from a monastery as well as bans on worshipping the Dalai Lama, encouraging Chinese migration into Tibetan regions, and downgrading the role of the Tibetan language in schools. This past March, Maqu County Tibetan Middle School in eastern Tibet switched from Tibetan to Chinese as
its language of instruction, provoking a series of protests across the region. Shortly afterward, twenty-year-old Tsering Kyi set herself on fire in her town’s vegetable market and died on site. The entire eastern region is bristling with antipathy and frustration, fueling a growing sense of nationalism. “It’s not that these people are radical,” according to Barnett, in an interview with Asia Society. “It is that China’s policies…[have] turned a formerly complex Tibetan cultural sphere into a relatively unified sphere of political dissent.” Tsomo echoed his sentiments, noting, “The sense of Tibetan identity is now very strong in non-TAR [Tibetan Autonomous Region] areas. The resistance among Tibetans is much more than anything I’ve ever witnessed.” The epicenter of this recent surge of resistance has been the Kirti monastery, which is one of the largest and most influential monasteries in eastern Tibet. It has also been subjected to increasing scrutiny since 1997. When a 20-year-old monk from the monastery set himself on fire in March 2011 to mark the anniversary of a brutally crushed protest in the last bout of Tibetan unrest in 2008—in what became the first of this past year’s wave of self-immolations— the Chinese government responded dramatically. It blockaded the monastery and arrested over 300 monks. The move only provoked more self-immolations: at least 20 took place in the surrounding county alone, most carried out by current or former monks at the monastery. Furthermore, it flooded the surrounding town, Aba, with security forces and barricades, so that it now resembles a military post. As part of its crackdown, the government has fastidiously confiscated any images of the immolations and suppressed any coverage of the events within its borders. Interestingly, the vast majority of the self-immolators were of young age, implicating a new generation of
INTERNATIONAL
politically engaged Tibetans who are frustrated with the Dalai Lama’s conciliatory “middle way” approach to China and who feel the need to resort to extreme measures to induce any change. “There is disillusionment among certain youngsters who think that things are not moving as fast as they should,” Tsomo remarked. Barnett agreed, saying, “It probably comes from the fact that they live in a very exciting, opening world where they do get some sense of what China promises to its own people and to some extent delivers in the big Chinese cities in the east. But they find that in areas where they live, these promises are not delivered.” This outburst of self-immolations, however dramatic, has garnered relatively limited attention in the outside world. Without graphic images for the world to rally around, the concerns of the immolators have gained little inter-
national momentum. “China is such a huge economic power that a lot of countries don’t want to jeopardize their own interests by talking about problems in Tibet,” Tsomo suggested. But Barnett commented, “International coverage is a kind of thermometer to measure what’s happening, not a solution. The real, key issue is how the Tibetans respond, how it changes the whole relationship between Tibetans and China.” He added, “The indications are that [the self-immolations are] a huge mobilizing device that radicalizes Tibetans and brings them together. They may have a profound effect on political thinking among Tibetans inside Tibet—we don’t know what form that will take but it could be a sea change in the whole history of this issue.” The long-term effects of the self-immolations, which could be considerable, are unclear. Short-term con-
cessions seem unlikely, as the Chinese government has only escalated its repression in Tibet—a counterproductive approach that has only provoked more suicide-protests. “I think what we have here is a real dilemma and a potential tragedy,” Barnett observed. “The Chinese government is an authoritarian government that always has to look strong and has a huge disincentive for giving any concessions, but if they don’t give any concessions, the situation is going to get worse.” Undoubtedly, the self-immolations have brought Tibet to another decisive moment in its relations with China, but unless some sort of solution is found, they may likely just continue. Cindy Hwang is a freshman in Berkeley College.
Tibetan dissidents have adopted self-immolation as part of their protest movement to bring back the Dalai Lama. SPRING 2012 II
39
INTERNATIONAL
GAY RIGHTS: A SHIFTING CONSENSUS By Rod Cuestas
O
rights highlighting fundamental shifts taking place in public perceptions of homosexuality. A staunchly Catholic country, Chile has long lagged behind its neighbors on gay rights. Since Chile’s Congress shot down anti-discrimination laws in each of the seven years prior to 2012, few observers expected the scene in the capital on the day of Zamudio’s funeral procession. Throughout Santiago, individuals wore shirts and waved banners bearing the face of the slain 24-year-old. Chilean President Sebastian Piñera asserted that his government is “not going to tolerate any kind of discrimination against Chilean citizens
based on their…sexual orientation.” The impact of Zamudio’s attack also reverberated beyond Chile’s borders. Rallies were held throughout South America, and the United Nations released a statement calling for anti-discrimination laws. On the night of April 4, Chile’s Congress passed its stalled anti-discrimination measure, but only by a two-vote margin and after a contentious debate that stretched late into the night. An increasing number of South Americans believe that homosexuals deserve an equal place in society. Zamudio is already being called “Chile’s Matthew
Gay Rights Index
n the night of March 2, Daniel Zamudio, a clothing store assistant in Santiago, Chile, was tortured and left to die by a group of individuals who allegedly singled him out for being gay. Zamudio was found the day after his attack with multiple broken bones, cigarette burns, and swastikas carved into his body. Human rights observers in Chile called the incident one of the most gruesome hate crimes in Chile’s modern history, and news of Zamudio’s death triggered massive protests in cities across the country. Reaction to Zamudio’s death has been swift and determinedly pro-gay
Human Development Index Colors represent percentage of people who consider themselves very religious: 0-25% yellow, 25-50% blue, 51-75% green, 75-100% red 40
THE POLITIC
INTERNATIONAL
years. Most battles in these two nations will be fought in the public sphere— both gay-rights and anti-gay groups will fight to win over public opinion. Any ultimate result will be watched closely: many experts consider the two nations good litmus tests of how developed nations will address gay rights. Uganda and Iran If Australia and the UK represent one end of the gay-rights spectrum, Iran and Uganda constitute the opposite end. In Iran, a theocracy that binds church to state, religious opposition to homosexuality is codified in law. Furthermore, many Middle Eastern Chileans of all generations have sharply reacted to the brutal death of Daniel Zamudio. countries perceive homosexuality as a construct of Western civilization, a Sheppard,” a reference to the Wyoming done little to decriminalize homosexual- fact that many human rights groups say college student whose 1999 murder trig- ity. On the entire continent, only South makes it hard to increase awareness of gered a massive wave of protests across Africa grants protection to homosexuals. homosexuality in the area. In 2005, Iran the United States. Not unlike the public The Middle East and Asia have not done caused an international uproar when it fury that led to the introduction of the much better: In Iran, homosexuality is executed Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Matthew Sheppard Act (which was ap- punishable by death, and the Russian Asgar, two teenagers convicted of enproved by Congress in 2009) the anger city of St. Petersburg recently passed a gaging in sexual acts with one another. sweeping Chile echoes a growing opin- law barring the distribution of any print Pictures showing the teens crying in ion that anti-gay rhetoric is increasingly or media materials that reference homo- a truck before their execution created anachronistic. Across the globe, human sexuality. This dichotomy between West- particular furor, yet Iran did little to alter rights groups are launching campaigns to ern and non-Western countries is one of its position on homosexuality. Iranian end anti-gay discrimination and persecu- the main hallmarks of the international President Muhammad Ahmadinejad tion. gay-rights debate, but one that can be summarized his view on same-sex at As recently as 2000, the gay-rights more fully understood by analyzing key traction in a 2009 speech to students at movement was seen as a platform nations in various geopolitical regions. Columbia University: “In Iran,” he said, with no foreseeable benefits. Support “we don’t have homosexuals like you do for homosexuality was increasing only United Kingdom and Australia here in America.” modestly—and even then only in certain Uganda is frequently considered Western countries. China and India both What the UK and Australia lack in the most anti-gay country in Africa. In listed homosexuality as a mental disease geographical proximity they compensate 2009, Uganda passed a law punishing while fourteen U.S. states had laws de- for in political similarity. In 2012, both homosexual activity with death. The law claring same-sex acts illegal. In 2000, nations’ governments voiced support also included a provision that made it ilno country or territory in the world for marriage equality. Recent polls have legal not to report a homosexual to the recognized gay marriage either. pegged support for same-sex marriage authorities. A 2007 poll by the Pew Re Fast-forward to 2012. Gay-rights anywhere from 47% to 61% in the UK search Center showed great opposition organizations are a sweeping interna- and from 53% to 62% in Australia. The to same-sex activity throughout Africa. tional movement. In many Western two nations already offer major anti- When asked their opinions on homocountries, support for homosexuality is discrimination protections and equality sexuality, a mere 3% of respondents either at or close to reaching majority- provisions in sectors like employment in Uganda, Senegal, Kenya, Ethiopia level support. Ten countries worldwide and healthcare, and both rank as some replied that same-sex activity should allow same-sex marriage. The United of the highest gay-friendly countries be accepted by society. Few observers States Supreme Court has struck down in the world. Because these countries expect change in Uganda, Iran, or their the country’s remaining sodomy laws. are relatively secular, outside observers surrounding areas any time soon. Other countries, however, have seen widely expect one, if not both, to recno progress. Most African nations have ognize same-sex marriage in the coming SPRING 2012 II
41
INTERNATIONAL
China and India Though Beijing and New Delhi frequently clash over policy, they agree more on the issue of homosexuality. Neither country persecutes homosexuals to the extent Iran does, but neither one offers significant protections. Societal attitudes towards homosexuality do not indicate widespread support either: less than 20% of people in China and India think homosexuality should be accepted by society. China decriminalized same-sex acts in 1997 and since then has gone on to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses and diseases. India decriminalized homosexual acts in 2009. Beyond those provisions, the status of gays and lesbians remains uncertain. India does not prohibit discrimination based on sexuality, but neither does it explicitly forbid homosexuals from adopting children. China is said to have a “Three-nos” policy on gay rights: no approval, no disapproval, no promotion. The ambiguity displayed by
China and India is a situation similar to other Asian countries like Japan, where homosexuality has never been addressed at the national level. Mexico and Russia Mexico and Russia are two countries with relatively similar levels of development but vastly different gay rights scores—13.5 and 6.5, respectively. Furthermore, gay rights in the two countries appear to be moving in opposite directions. Net approval (% approval minus % disapproval) of homosexuality in Mexico stood at 29% in 2010, whereas Russia polled at -36%. Several of Russia’s northern provinces have banned the word “gay” from publication, saying it “introduces children to destructive influences.” By contrast, human rights groups in Mexico have been ticking off wins in recent years, culminating in the legalization of gay marriage in Mexico City in 2010. Placed into a broader context, Rus-
sia’s position on gay rights highlights a growing disparity: nations making progress on gay rights are doing so quickly, but other countries have seen little or no change recently. In places like Chile, incidents like Daniel Zamudio’s death serve as game-changing moments for fledgling gay-rights campaigns. In nations like Iran, the deaths of men like Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgar do little to arouse significant public emotion. As long as nations in the Middle East and Africa continue to see homosexuality as an issue of Western moral corruption, change will not come easily. Gay rights activists are hoping to change the conversation even in those areas, although they acknowledge that significant change will take years, if not decades, to occur. Rod Cuestas is a freshman in Pierson College.
COME TRY OUR WENZELS!
42
THE POLITIC
INTERNATIONAL
Photo of the Issue Over Spring Break, I traveled with a team of six Yale students to study creative expression in the January 25th Revolution. We met many Egyptians who expressed disillusionment with the post-Mubarak political climate. The somberness of this scene, captured by my friend, encapsulates the nation’s fading optimism. The subject’s downcast look reflects the lowered horizons. By Marc DeWitt
Summer with The Politic What are you planning on reading this summer? Here’s what The Politic staff suggests... History: The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (Editor’s Pick) Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter The Abolition of White Democracy by Joel Olson Politics: Third World America by Arianna Huffington The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris by Peter Beinart The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson The Paradox of American Power by Joseph Nye Boomerang by Michael Lewis (Editor’s Pick) SPRING 2012 II
43
Yale Students: 10% off with ID
Please visit rolypoly.com
Who’s next?
You Decide.
Write for Us! Email PoliticAtYale@gmail.com
HOW’S YOUR HISTORY?
1. Which of the following countries exports the most oil to the United States?
5. Which of the following was not accepted as a tax write off or deductible by the IRS in 2010?
(a) Saudi Arabia (b) Russia (c) Iraq (d) Canada
(a) Sex change operation (b) Breast implant (c) Vasectomy reversal (d) Pet’s health expenses
2. Which of the following presidents did not die in office?
6. A Malthusian Catastrophe, so named after economist Thomas Malthus, is the worry that:
9. What percentage of children is born out of wedlock in the United States?
(a) Printing money to pay back debt will lead to hyperinflation (b) Decreased fertility will lead to an older population, more welfare expenses, and a shrunken tax base (c) Population growth outpaces agricultural production (d) Median incomes stagnant and prices increase
(a) 20% (b) 30% (c) 50% (d) 70%
(a) Zachary Taylor (b) James Garfield (c) Woodrow Wilson (d) Warren Harding
3. Which of the following was the capital of West Germany during the Cold War? (a) Berlin (b) Hamburg (c) Bonn (d) Munich 4. Winston Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty after which military defeat? (a) Battle of Gallipoli (b) Battle of Zama (c) Battle of Britain (d) Battle of Dien Bien Phu
7. Who was FDR’s first Vice President? (a) Thomas Dewey (b) John Nance Garner (c) Henry Wallace (d) Harry Truman
8. Which of these countries was the last to grant women suffrage? (a) United States (b) Great Britain (c) France (d) Turkey
10. Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen told who, “You’re no Jack Kennedy”? (a) Walter Mondale (b) Dan Quayle (c) Nelson Rockefeller (d) Spiro Agnew
Check out our website www.thepolitic.org to score your historical knowledge and see how you stack up with The Politic staff. Spring 2012 I I
45