The Politic - Fall 2012 II

POLITIC THE

FALL 2012 II

THE YALE UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL OF POLITICS

VOLUME LXVIII

The Rise of the Right

Despite election losses, the GOP at Yale is going strong.

Inside: Ron Paul, Chris Van Hollen, Maggie Hassan

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A Yale Undergraduate Journal of Politics

Editors-in-Chief Josef Goodman Noah Remnick Managing Editors Justin Schuster Eric Stern National Editors Cindy Hwang Marissa Medansky International Editors David Lawrence Eli Rivkin Features Editors Marc DeWitt Larissa Liburd Online Managers Rod Cuestas James Pabarue Director of Development Raphael Leung Layout Editor David Mandelbaum Editors Emeriti Byron Edwards Jacob Effron Copy Editor Stephanie Heung

Development Illustrator Jin Gon Park, Witt director Madeleine Xiaochen Su Staff Writers Geng Ngarmboonanant, Zachary Plyam, Derek Soled, Aaron Mak, Dmitri Halikias, Amy Chang, Ezra Ritchin, Charlotte Storch, Dhruv Aggarwal, Joshua Faber, Yuval Ben-David, Ben Weiner, Ryan Proctor, Aia Sarycheva, Nitika Khaitan, Rachel O’Connell, Andrés Bustamante 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, or contributions, please contact us at PoliticAtYale@gmail.com or write us at The Politic P.O. Box 205142 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.

Dear Readers, With the close of 2012, we remember a year which saw political and economic turmoil strike Europe, civil strife intensify in the Middle East, and the American presidential race transfix the nation. Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and ends, The Politic looks back on a tumultuous year, while looking forward to what lies ahead.

Emerging from one of the most divisive elections in history, President Obama must turn to Congress to reach a bipartisan compromise regarding the most pressing crisis of the day — the fiscal cliff. In this issue, Congressmen Ron Paul and Chris Van Hollen put forth their views on long-term deficit reduction and preparing America for the future. And in our feature, we take a look inside Yale’s rising conservative culture.

The Politic also sits down with political leaders and scholars, including Governor-elect Maggie Hassan on America’s challenges in the years to come and Professor John Gaddis, on the legacy of George Kennan and America’s place in the world today. From America’s immediate crisis of the looming fiscal cliff, to the future of America’s public education system, to the resurgence of President Bill Clinton’s political image, this edition covers a broad range of national topics. For readers looking for a global perspective, we offer compelling and eye-opening articles on the political turmoil of the Ukraine, China’s ghost cities, and the ongoing Syrian tragedy, to name a few.

As you procrastinate through Reading Period or return home for Winter Break, we hope you turn to page two of our magazine and join the conversation online at www.thepolitic.org, where you will find web-exclusives and our “Starting Five” of the day’s most interesting stories.

Thank you for your support this year. We look to continue to grow and improve in 2013.

Faithfully, Josef Goodman Noah Remnick Editors-in-Chief

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Fall 2012 II - Volume LXVIII

NATIONAL YEAR IN REVIEW The Editors

An Interview with CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL Ryan Proctor

yALE CONGRESSIONAL CLASS The Editors

an act left behind Aaron Mak

COLD WAR MEMOIRS Yuval Ben-David

the patriarch Josef Goodman

2 6 11 14 19 25

4

POWERING THE FUTURE

9

AN INTERVIEW WITH CONGRESSMAN CHRIS VAN HOLLEN

Austin Long

Dimitri Halikias

12 SMALL STATE, BIG AMBITIONS Geng Ngarmboonanant

17

THE CLINTON COMEBACK

21

Smile, Bill

27

FORTY-FIVE?

Zachary Plyam

Noah Remnick

Joshua Faber and Aia Sarycheva

INTERNATIONAL NOT IN MY BACKYARD Cindy Hwang

Waiting for mohandas Amy Chang

A new face for south america Andres Bustamante

Hillary tackles the online world Rachel O’Connell

29 33 36 40

31

ghost cities

Benjamin Weiner

35 Springtime for Sahara Dhruv Aggarwal

38 ukraine’s old bag of tricks Charlotte Storch

42 BORN FROM THE STARS

Nitika Khaitan and Derek Soled

Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

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he said, she said: 2012, the year in quotes “My true adversary... has no name, no face... He will not be elected, yet he governs. My enemy is the world of finance.”

François Hollande, President of France, in the opening speech of his election campaign on January 23, 2012

“Let me say to the soldiers and officials still supporting the Syrian regime: the Syrian people will remember the choices you make in the coming days.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks on rising tensions in Syria on July 6, 2012

“I want to especially thank all the members who took a break from their exhausting schedule of not passing any laws to be here tonight.”

President Obama, speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 29, 2012

“It’s a triumphant day for fundamental physics. Now some fun begins.”

Physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed upon discovery of the Higgs-Boson on July 4, 2012

“The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax.

Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”

Chief Justice John Roberts in his opinion deciding NFIB vs. Sebelius June 28, 2012

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help… somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive… If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

“We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., in a statement on Libya embassy attack on September 16, 2012

President Obama on the campaign trail on July 13, 2012

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

Governor Romney, speaking at a fundraiser on September 17, 2012

“We have tried to be as cautious, prudent and measured as possible but to be in denial of the fact that we have the worst crisis since World War Two would be, in my opinion, the most terrible mistake we could make.”

Jean-Claude Trichet, former president of the European Central Bank, testifying to the European Parliament on October 2, 2012

“Whoever thinks this can be fixed in one or two years is wrong. We need a long breath of five years and more. We need rigor to convince the world it’s worth investing in Europe.”

Angela Merkel speaks in Sternberg, Germany on November 3, 2012

“I screwed up royally.”

- General David Petraeus, former head of the CIA, writes in letter on November 20, 2012

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Powering the future A Look at Renewable Portfolio Standards

By Austin Long

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he United States is currently in the midst of a growing energy crisis that threatens all parts of the American lifestyle. Our economy depends on coal for energy, but our lungs require fresh, unpolluted air.

Since coal is cheap, investors and companies are not willing to put money towards research and development of methods of alternative energy generation. Without monetary support, technologies for generating renewable energy have plateaued in their infancy. America, experts argue, is stuck in the strange position where renewable energy is our last best hope, yet remains too costly and underdeveloped to be of any real help.

Back in 1983, Iowa enacted the Alternative Energy Production Law, which mandated that MidAmerican Energy and Alliant Energy Interstate Power and Light, the state’s two investor-owned utility companies, use renewable-energy sources to generate 105 megawatts of their energy. Thus the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) was born. The RPS is a mandate that utility companies must supply a certain percentage of their energy from renewable resources, usually with a target percentage and target year.

For example, a 20 percent RPS of wind energy by 2020 would require utility companies to derive 20 percent of their energy from wind by 2020.

Today, over half of the states have their own RPS programs, some of which have been established for more than a decade. In theory, RPS programs can stimulate economic growth and the development of renewable energy technologies. The requirement that companies supply a percentage of their energy through renewable sources puts incentive and pressure to invest in new technology onto utility companies themselves. RPSs allow the free market to decide which technologies are most worthy to invest in and develop. It places the burden of compliance on utilities, not states, which 4

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allows for more effective governance.

Although some proclaim that utility companies only offload these costs on consumers by raising energy prices, Professor Benjamin K. Sovacool, Senior Researcher for Energy Security and Justice at the Institute for Energy and the Environment, argues otherwise. In The Politic’s interview with Professor Sovacool, he said, “[RPS] costs the average household no more than a few extra dollars per month, equivalent to the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Benefits far surpass those costs, including cleaner air, and local jobs and tax revenue.”

Almost every state’s RPS programs is different, each offering a different definition of “renewable,” different target percentages, different target years, and different types of enforcement. According to Sovacool, it is in this mishmash of policies that the problems of state-based RPS programs arise. The many inconsistencies and contradictions between state-level RPS policies cause confusion among energy companies, and also give them leeway to exploit loopholes and ambiguities in RPS programs. This ultimately discourages long-term investments in renewable energy generation, nullifying the intent of the renewable portfolio standard.

Nevertheless, the difficulties with state-by-state approach to RPS do not necessarily mean that RPS should be abandoned altogether. Scholars such as Sovacool believe the current situation brings to attention the need for a comprehensive, national RPS.

A national RPS would unify the nation under a baseline RPS and eliminate loopholes and contradictions between state-level RPSs, thereby removing barriers to investment and innovation. Additionally, a national RPS would result in the rapid development of the green energy sector. According to Sovacool, American manufacturing and investment in green energy would soar. The

most obvious benefits would be to the environment, with significant reductions in fossil fuels usage. Experts contend that Americans would be able to enjoy cleaner air and a better environment, and the U.S. might emerge as a new world leader in renewable energies.

Nevertheless, a national RPS program may never pass. The public opposes it under the misguided perception that their power bills will skyrocket, argued Sovacool. Energy companies oppose it because they do not want to reduce their profits by expending resources to invest into developing the technology that will make the U.S. energy independent. Coal and natural gas industries don’t want the price and demand of their products to go down as greener, cleaner, technologies become cheaper.

“By far the biggest [barrier to a national RPS] is a reluctance of politicians at the national level – think Congress – to promote renewable energy in a current environment where the economy is struggling,” said Sovacool. “Congress misses the point that renewables would provide more local manufacturing jobs and enhance US competitiveness in precisely the areas where jobs have been lost and growth is stagnant.”

Sovacool continued, “In the current environment, where our energy policy is focused on appeasing as many lobbies and interests as possible, [the likelihood of a national RPS passing in the United States is] slim. The only RPS to be passed would be one watered down almost beyond recognition.”

Yet without an undiluted national renewable portfolio standard, future generations may be forced to face the consequences of a weakened economy and a more toxic environment.

Austin Long is a sophomore in Calhoun College.

BEWARE THE FISCAL CLIFF INSIDE: An interview with Ron Paul (p. 6) Chris Van Hollen talks compromise (p. 9)

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I never felt like I had to leave the party, because I sort of accepted the way things are, that the whole country has turned away from many of these beliefs as well as the Republican Party. It was not much of a concern to me, but certainly I didn’t believe that the leadership or the majority of the Republican elected officials were endorsing what I was saying. But I knew that and understood that. The laws are so biased against doing anything outside the major parties that it’s hard for a third party to gain recognition, and it’s hard to get on ballots, hard to get in debates. I look at it like we have one party. There are two divisions: Republicans and Democrats.

You probably have a better chance of reaching people and persuading people dealing with those parties. But I strongly encourage people whether they’re on the left or the right or libertarians to speak out and try to organize and overcome the obstacles, even as they recognize the difficulties.

An Interview with outgoing Congressman Ron Paul Conducted by Ryan Proctor For the past few decades, Congressman Ron Paul has been among America’s leading libertarian voices. He has represented Texas’ 14th District in Congress since 1997 and is notable for popularizing libertarian positions on foreign policy and the Federal Reserve.

He has run for president three times: on the Libertarian Ticket in 1988, and for the Republican Party’s nomination in 2008 and 2012.

He announced earlier this year that he will retire from Congress at the end of this session.

The Politic: Looking back on your career, what do you see as your greatest sucesses and your greatest failures?

I think the biggest success is getting people to look at some issues that nobody wanted to talk about, such as monetary issues, and allowing Republicans to once again think that they can still be patriotic and good American citizens without arguing that you have to get involved in every war that comes along. Also, I am very pleased with the fact that the young people, especially those who are on college campuses, have been very receptive to this message. In that sense I feel like it’s been quite successful. Since I’ve had very low expectations — I didn’t think I was going to change the world — I have mostly positive thoughts about what 6

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happened, and I’ve never set my goals to such a point where I was going to become speaker or to run a committee, and therefore I don’t have that many disappointments other than the fact that I didn’t get Congress to move in my direction. You have to get the people to move in a certain direction before Congress will move in that direction, and I have to say, getting the Congress to move in my direction hasn’t been successful, but time will take care of that.

The Politic: What were your goals and expectations when you were running for president, and did you meet them?

My goals have always been the same when I ran for Congress and for the presidency, and that is to promote a

philosophy of liberty where we respect the Constitution, where we understand what personal freedom means, where persons have their personal social liberties and their economic liberties, and also to change foreign policy. When I ran for Congress or worked in Congress or spoke out or wrote books, it was always to try to get people to think that this was the best way to go, and I think of course I reached more people in the presidential races than I did just running for Congress. Although the message was the same, the audience grew exponentially during the presidential campaigns.

The Politic: Did you feel at home in the Republican Party, and do you think there’s a future for the libertarian movement in the GOP?

The Politic: What do you see as the future of the libertarian movement?

Are there any people in public office now who can pick up your standard?

Is there a groundswell of support?

There’s every reason to be optimistic.

There’ll be more members of Congress sharing these views this time even with me leaving; instead of probably one or two going this way, my guess is there’s going to be eight to 12. But that is secondary to the change in viewpoints of people around the country. That’s where we should be optimistic. As far as leadership goes, I think everybody has a role to play. We don’t even know who’s out there running for office, who is maybe a state representative or a state senator that you’ll hear more about in the next few years. It’s truly a philosophical movement that is not directed by one individual or one group or one campaign. It’s very universal in the sense that it’s spread around the country at different levels and age groups, and it won’t depend on two or three people in the U.S. Congress.

As the revolutionary ideas go, you’ll see more and more people in Congress that

will reflect these views.

The Politic: What are your plans for retirement? Are you going to continue to promote the libertarian movement?

I’m going to be very busy. I want to respond to the many invitations I get to college campuses. I will be speaking out. I have a couple educational organizations; I’m interested in promoting home schooling. I have lots to do, and I want to continue learning how to spread this message over the Internet, because

“Everyone has these libertarian instincts and they’re natural, and then they get beaten out of us.” that’s one way we can get around the conventional media. I’ll have a lot to do, and I’ll have probably every bit as much fun because I can do it on my time and not on somebody else’s.

The Politic: Will you be coming to Yale anytime soon?

Not that I know of, but I always have a very open mind to go to the campuses, because if you want to see change, it has to occur on the campuses before it occurs in Washington.

The Politic: If change has to occur on campuses and intellectually before it can become a reality in Congress, what made you want to go into politics in the first place?

I didn’t really decide to become a congressman because I decided I wanted to go into politics. I was just looking for a vehicle to talk about things I thought

were important. The first time I ran [1974], it was the worst Republican year in my lifetime. That was the Watergate year, when there was the smallest number of Republicans probably in 100 years.

Nobody wanted to run as a Republican, and that’s when I became concerned about the total rejection of the gold standard, which I believe would usher in an age of inflation and financial bubbles and debt. I just used that as a vehicle to speak out, and it was sort of on a fluke or accident that I ended up getting elected. That happened a couple years later [in 1976].

It wasn’t so much that I decided to be in politics, but to use political employment and political opportunities to speak out.

The Politic: You’ve mentioned how you’ve sought to call attention to some issues that neither the Republican nor Democratic establishments want to address, particularly monetary policy and the Federal Reserve.

Why is monetary policy so important, and why does everyone seem to pay so little attention to it?

It was true — I think five years ago I would’ve accepted it — that nobody was paying attention; today a lot more people are paying attention. We actually got a bill passed in the House to audit the Fed. Even Romney, who didn’t care about the Fed, endorsed the idea, and they put it in the Republican platform. It is becoming much, much more important. People know that there is something wrong with the monetary system. The monetary system is important because the monetary unit, which is our dollar, is involved in every transaction that we do. If you want to pay for college tuition or buy a book, you have to use a dollar to do that, so the dollar is half of every economic transaction. That’s how significant it is.

This is the reason we must deal with it, because if we turn the ability over to a secret central bank, the Federal Reserve, to create dollars out of thin air in order to accommodate congressmen who spend money to stay in office and do things they shouldn’t be doing, they will be facilitators. They accommodate spending, so FALL 2012 II

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you wouldn’t have debt and a deficit crisis if you didn’t have the Federal Reserve, because Congress would have to borrow the money, interest rates would go up, and it would all quit. Without the Federal Reserve, you couldn’t fight these wars, you wouldn’t have the welfare state, and you wouldn’t have this debt. It is crucial, in order to get our house in order and get the economy working right, to have sound money.

The Politic: With regards to getting our house in order, what sort of reforms do you think need to occur to prevent the looming fiscal cliff, and do you think these reforms can realistically be implemented?

No, they’re not going to be; they’re going to have a much worse crisis because nobody’s going to cut spending. In Washington, they don’t admit that the problem is bankruptcy and that they have to cut spending. There are no proposals on either side to actually cut anything.

All they’re talking about is nibbling away a little bit on the automatic increases. A whole generation has to make the decision, and they’re not going to before a major crisis. Afterwards people are going to say, “Maybe we distorted the view of what our government should be like.”

The people have to decide. Do you want a government that runs your lives?

Do you want a government to run the economy? Do you want a government that polices the world? Do you want a Federal Reserve to finance all this? Or do you want a government that was more or less outlined by the Constitution? If we have any desire to have a sensible government, we actually have a pretty good blueprint, which is called the Constitution. That would be a good place to start.

The Politic: Given the current makeup of Congress and where it seems to be headed, what do you foresee happening in the United States over the next couple of years or decades?

The deficit’s going to get worse. They’re going to have to admit that. They won’t 8

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quit spending, and they won’t bring the troops home and quit fighting these wars until the dollar quits working. I expect a loss of confidence in the dollar. Even with the Fed printing money like crazy, interest rates will go up, and the economy will get weaker. Deficits will continue to grow to the point where foreigners will start dumping dollars, and that’s a major crisis. That could come, and that would end all of this spending. Within this administration, these next four years, that’s likely to happen.

The Politic: Do you think that if the cuts don’t start happening now, they will be forced upon us later?

Yes, that’s exactly what’s going to happen if we don’t face up to it. But politically, it’s more difficult to say, “We’re going to cut your program.” I’m not very confident that current politicians in charge will do anything until they’re forced to do it, and they haven’t yet been forced to do it.

The Politic: What is it about libertarianism that you find so persuasive?

Were there any books or thinkers that you found particularly influential?

Everybody has these libertarian instincts and they’re natural, and then they get beaten out of us because the status quo says, “That’s true, but you have to have government doing this and this.”

I naturally was inclined to liberty as a young person, as so many are, and started looking around. I felt the confirmation through economics: when I discovered Austrian economics, it gave the moral justification for property ownership and free markets and contracts and sound money and how that could be connected to individual liberty. It just made so much sense. There was not one book or one person, but I do remember reading Hayek early on — The Road to Serfdom — and most of [Ludwig von] Mises’ stuff.

I frequently talk about a little pamphlet called The Law by [Frédéric] Bastiat. They were all influential, but it wasn’t just one thing. It was just my instincts that I wanted to be left alone, and the fact that there are many intellectuals who will defend that position for us.

Ryan Proctor is a freshman in Saybrook College.

An Interview with congressman chris van hollen Conducted by Dimitri Halikias Chris Van Hollen is the U.S. Representative for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, serving since 2003. He is the ranking member on the House Budget Committee and a leading Democratic negotiator on deficit reduction. In 2011, he was appointed to the 12-member bipartisan Committee on Deficit Reduction, colloquially referred to as the “supercommittee.”

The Politic: What do you think would be the economic consequences of the fiscal cliff, were the tax increases and spending cuts to go into effect?

If we went over the cliff and stayed over the cliff, it would have a very negative impact on our economy. It would essentially mean withdrawing about 500 to 600 billion dollars from the economy over the next year, which would lead to an economic slowdown. But there’s a distinction between fully going over the cliff, and going over for a few days and clawing our way back. We are working very hard to prevent going over the cliff in the first place. There are a lot of proposals on the table to prevent us from going over the cliff, including the

proposal the president has put forward.

The Politic: As the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, are you optimistic about the ongoing negotiations?

I’m optimistic about the tone that has been set. The jury’s still out when it comes to the substance of the Republican proposals. Speaker Boehner set the right tone, but until we see the specifics of his proposal, it’s hard to know whether there is a genuine willingness to compromise.

The Politic: With so many Republicans signing on to Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge, do you see a

real possibility of reaching a “balanced” solution that includes both revenue and spending?

Ninety-eight percent of House Republicans have signed a pledge not to raise one penny of revenue to reduce the deficit. That’s why it’s important to see their proposal before passing judgment on the likelihood of success. Everyone’s expressing good intentions. The president has done more than express good intentions because he’s actually put his plan on the table for the public to see.

With respect to Speaker Boehner’s plan, all we’ve heard is very general statements that can be interpreted in many ways.

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voiced opposition to tax rate increases, but seem to support phasing out or capping tax deductions. Do you think it is necessary to raise top marginal tax rates, or can we raise the necessary revenue just through fundamental tax reform?

To be clear, the pledge prohibits those members from raising revenue by closing tax preferences and loopholes.

There’s a distinction between raising tax revenue by eliminating preferences and what some Republicans have said in the past, that just by lowering tax rates you can generate enough additional revenue, which has just been proven false. With respect to revenue from closing loopholes, the issue is whether we can attain enough revenue to achieve a balanced deficit-reduction plan. I don’t think the math works. When you look at the [bipartisan] Simpson-Bowles framework, for example, they have a total of a trillion dollars of revenue over the next 10 years embedded in their deficit reduction numbers. It’s very difficult to achieve those levels of revenue if you start by freezing the top rate. My view is that we should allow the top rate to return to Clinton-era levels, and then we can discuss tax reform from there.

The Politic: Didn’t the SimpsonBowles plan raise the additional trillion dollars of revenue without lowering marginal rates, and rather by eliminating deductions and broadening the base?

The measure of a good deficit reduction plan is the extent to which it lowers the deficit as a percent of GDP. SimpsonBowles assumed in their baseline the amount of revenue you would generate if the top rate went to the Clinton levels.

Their deficit reduction numbers include what now amounts to a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. All their deficit reduction numbers assume that revenue as a starting point. They then get a trillion dollars of additional revenue through tax reform by eliminating loopholes.

Their deficit reduction numbers assume 10

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a total of 2 trillion dollars. It’s just that their baseline has the first trillion dollars embedded in it. If you want to achieve the kind of deficit reduction they did, you need the overall amount of revenue that they had.

“Speaker Boehner has set the right tone, but until we see the specifics of his proposal, it’s hard to know whether there is a genuine willingness to compromise.”

The Politic: What deductions do you think should be on the table? Specifically, the mortgage back deduction, the charitable giving deduction, and the employer health care deduction.

Would you be willing to eliminate or cap those deductions?

I am not in favor of eliminating those deductions. I am willing to look at the proposal the president has put on the table, which would reduce the value of those deductions for high-income earners. The president has a proposal that will limit the value of deductions to 28 percent, even if you are a taxpayer in the 35 or 39 percent tax rate. I’m willing to look at reducing the value of certain deductions for some high-income earners.

The Politic: With the end of the election season do you see any hope of

movement toward a more productive and civil government, or is this gridlock here to stay?

I certainly hope for more productive results. The fiscal cliff has lots of risk, but it also has a potential for a productive result. The cliff was set up as an actionforcing mechanism, in order to achieve deficit reduction. The fact that there is so much focus on this indicates that at least it has focused people’s minds that we have to work this out. I’m hopeful that we will. The major impediment has been the absolute refusal on the part of Republicans in Congress to agree to any revenue component so far. If that’s changing, then there’s hope. If it’s not, then obviously the revenue will come at the end of the year. At the end of the year, if all the tax rates reset, you’re talking about 10 trillion dollars of revenue over the next 10 years, including about 500 billion dollars of revenue in the coming year.

YALE CONGRESSIONAL CLASS Yale is better represented in Congress than almost any other university. Eighteen congressman and senators received graduate and undergraduate degrees from Yale over the years. Unsurprisingly, given the ideological breakdown of current Yale undergraduates, there are fifteen current Yale alumni on the Democratic side of the aisle compared with only four on the Republican side. Yale graduates are also better represented in the Senate, where their eight members account for 8 percent of the total body. In the House, the ten members make up only 2.3 percent. Below is a full list of the Yale graduates in the 113th Congress.

Sen. Michael Bennet D-CO (LS ‘93)

Sen. Richard Blumenthal D-CO (LS ‘93)

Sen. Sherrod Brown D-OH (‘74)

Rep. Lois Capps D-CA (Div ‘64)

Rep. Tom Cole R-OK (GS of A/S ‘74)

Sen. Chris Coons D-DE (LS ‘92; Div ‘92)

Rep. Ron DeSantis R-FL (‘01)

Rep. Elizabeth Esty D-CT (LS ‘85)

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee D-TX (‘72)

Rep. Brett Guthrie R-KY (SOM ‘97)

Sen. John Kerry D-MA (‘66)

Sen. Amy Klobuchar D-MN (‘82)

Sen. Bill Nelson D-FL (‘65)

Rep. David Price D-NC (Div ‘64; GS ‘69)

Rep. Lamar Smith R-TX (‘69)

Rep. Mel Watt D-NC (LS ‘70)

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse D-RI (‘78)

The Politic: Would you rather vote to allow all the tax rates to expire if the Republicans refuse to agree to marginal rate increases on the upper quintile?

I want to avoid the fiscal cliff, but in my view, the keys to the car are in Republican hands. This was not a hidden issue in the presidential campaign, this was a central issue. Every exit poll demonstrated that the American people want to take a balanced approach to deficit reduction.

We know what a bipartisan approach looks like. It’s the kind of framework you get from Simpson-Bowles. That’s where the country is; they want a balanced approach. The question is, will congressional Republicans adopt the same bipartisan framework that’s been recommended by every bipartisan group that has looked at this? I’m personally willing to adopt that framework.

Dmitri Halikias is a freshman in Ezra Stiles College.

Rep. John Yarmuth D-KY (‘69)

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makers had run for jobs at the economy but ended up promoting a much more radical agenda than voters thought they were voting for.

What we saw during this past November in New Hampshire was a return to a much more balanced body politic in the state. We now have a majority of Democrats in the New Hampshire House again — a relatively slender majority — and we see a slender Republican majority in the Senate, and we see a Democrat continue in the governor’s office. What that says to me is that the people of this state want their government to be balanced, constructive, and for their representatives to come together to compromise and move forward.

small state, big ambitions An Interview with New Hampshire’s Governor-Elect Conducted by Geng Ngarmboonanant Maggie Hassan is the current governor-elect of New Hampshire. She will be the nation’s only Democratic female governor when she takes office on Jan. 2, 2013. Before running in the 2012 gubernatorial elections, she was the majority leader in the New Hampshire Senate from 2008 to 2010. From 2005 to 2010, she represented the 23rd district of New Hampshire.

The Politic: Governor-elect, the entire New Hampshire national delegation is female — the first time this is happened in any state in this nation’s history. Why do you think this happened?

The reason that the all-female delegation and governor’s office happened is the result of New Hampshire’s long history and culture of citizen participation at all levels of community and government.

There are lots and lots of opportunities for women to participate. We have a long tradition of volunteerism where everyone is welcome to participate, as long as you’re willing to work hard and be a part of a team. That’s given lots of opportunities for women.

The Politic: How do you feel being part of such history?

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It feels really wonderful and exciting. It also reminds me and makes me hopeful for a time when it will not be remarkable at all that a state has an all-female delegation.

The Politic: In five of the last six presidential elections, New Hampshire — traditionally a swing state — has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. Why is that so?

We have a swing state of problem solvers.

We have a large population of independents, Republicans, and Democrats who really want the country to move forward.

There are many people who are also fiscally conservative and socially pretty progressive. The national Democratic candidates have usually been a good match because they’ve generally wanted to solve problems and move the country forward — and that’s the attitude the vot-

ers want when they go to the ballot box.

The Politic: Before the 2010 midterm elections, the New Hampshire House of Representatives had 216 Democrats and 174 Republicans.

After the midterms, the breakdown shifted to 298 Republicans and 102 Democrats. The 2012 election will result in at least a 115-seat swing to the Democrats, returning them to control of the chamber. What do you think these dramatic swings say about New Hampshire and the state of national politics?

2010 was a unique set of circumstances, both nationally and at the state level.

Voters were very, very frustrated with the pace of economic recovery. The 2010 election cycle was one in which voters were expressing frustration and elected a new team of lawmakers; these law-

The Politic: You’ve spent a lot of time during your political career in the state Senate. What lessons did you learn there that you will keep in mind as governor?

That every elected official was sent here to do the people’s work. If they are willing to build relationships and listen to each other, then they can find solutions and move forward.

The Politic: Like virtually every candidate who has run in New Hampshire, you pledged not to impose income or sales taxes during your term. Why did you take that pledge?

Do you think it may unnecessarily confine you in terms of ways to raise revenue?

I pledged not to impose a sales or income tax because we have an economy in New Hampshire that is built around not having income or sales taxes. We have an economy that has done better than most, nationally; we’ve had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and one of the lowest tax burdens. We’ve also done things like cut our school dropout rate in half, expanded universal kindergarten statewide, and more. It’s important to keep what works and focus on solving our problems without an income or sales tax — we’ve done that in the past, and we’ll continue to do that.

The Politic: Your husband, Tom Hassan, is the principal of Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation. What have you learned from him that will help you deal with the education reform in New Hampshire?

infrastructure and bring our health care costs down.

I am really proud of the work Tom does as an educator, and I am really proud of the institution he leads, which continues to attract people from around the world. First and foremost, I learned from Tom that every student and every family matters, and that we need to move forward to make sure that every student in New Hampshire has access to quality education and can afford college. I’ve developed an innovation plan that really focuses on how we can strengthen our public universities and college system. In the last legislative session, the tea party legislature voted to cut university tuition reduction by 50 percent. I will find ways to restore that funding. I will also focus on improving our K-12 standard public education system, especially in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and math — because one of my goals for New Hampshire as part of the innovation plan is to have the best workforce in the country, and to do that, we will have to improve public education, particularly in those areas.

We have been challenged in the last two years because the legislature and the executive council, dominated by far-right lawmakers, passed a law that didn’t allow us to set up our own exchange. We are evaluating what our options are in terms of setting up an exchange, such as in partnership with the federal government, or any other opportunities to set up exchanges we had. If we don’t do that, of course, federal law says that we will have to join the federal exchange, which is not my top choice because I’d rather New Hampshire design and control its own exchange.

The Politic: In your victory speech on election night, you mentioned “jobs” and “businesses” multiple times. What is the economic outlook for New Hampshire, and how do you intend to improve it?

The economic outlook for New Hampshire is good. We have challenges like any other state, but we are generally one of the best in terms of unemployment rate and our tax burden. Moving forward, my innovation plan will make sure we have tax credits for research and development, tax credits for businesses to get to the next level. We also want to make sure we have technical assistance available for businesses, especially in the form of strategic partnerships. We also need to make sure that we have strong

The Politic: Speaking about health care, how has New Hampshire readied itself for implementation of Obamacare?

The Politic: As you have seen with Hurricane Sandy, climate change is a huge issue. We often think of clean energy and battling climate change as a federal issue, but do you think states themselves could do more?

What could New Hampshire, for example, do to help?

One of the things I supported in the state Senate and continue to support is an energy efficiency and emissions program called the RGGI, or the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. New Hampshire joined that Northeast initiative, and I want to make sure we continue to strengthen that program. I also want to make sure we have the right incentives in place to extract alternative and homegrown energy to New Hampshire.

We also need to be prepared, on an emergency basis, for any kind of extreme storm we may experience. That’s something we need to be as prepared for as we can.

Geng Ngarmboonanant is a sophomore in Silliman College.

Image courtesy of Maggie Hassan.

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AN Act left behind

By Aaron Mak

T

he No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was a reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). ESEA was a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” that funded primary and secondary education. President George W. Bush proposed major changes to ESEA in the form of NCLB in 2001 and signed NCLB into law in 2002.

Like ESEA, NCLB focuses on holding schools accountable for keeping children up with clear academic standards.

NCLB also continues to effort to narrow the achievement gap between students by emphasizing equality in education.

NCLB’s most significant change to ESEA was to give out Title 1 funding to public schools with the condition that schools must first administer statedesigned standardized tests to measure basic math and reading skills. Schools receiving funds would have to show that students were making “adequate yearly progress” (AYP), that is, improvement

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to meet yearly goals.

The public, media, and educators have demonstrated considerable opposition to NCLB largely because of its high standards and heavy reliance on tests. Bush’s senior education advisor and key author of NCLB, B. Alexander “Sandy” Kress, has a different opinion.

“I don’t think that there’s any question that it’s been successful,” said Kress in an interview with The Politic. While Kress admitted that the act has had its shortcomings, he lauded improvements in NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) scores, especially among minority, disabled, and economically disadvantaged students. “[These students] can’t just be swept under the rug the way they could in previous years,” Kress claimed. NCLB disaggregates student test scores to examine progress of historically disadvantaged subgroups of students, rather than just taking a simple average of all students in a school. “Educators and principals are

constantly now searching for tools, for ways of doing business differently, for interventions, for more effective strategies to ‘get those kids up.’” Kress also noted victories in making results more transparent, collecting better data, spotlighting teacher effectiveness, promoting higher standards, and offering students more options by putting pressure on low-performing schools.

The criticism of NCLB’s accountability measures concerns cases of “teaching to the test.” In such cases, teachers work more towards the goal of getting students to perform well on tests rather than teaching in broader terms. Kress refuted this criticism by asserting that such behavior is not inevitable in NCLB’s testing process. He claims it is rather a result of ineffective teaching to standards in the first place.

“Rather than having effective teaching and assessment practice,” Kress stated, “[teachers and administrators] get very anxious, if not desperate, and they try

shortcuts like buying a bunch of practice tests, drilling and killing on the tests, and hoping somehow that the student can be made test-ready rather than prepared academically.” According to Kress, teachers should work on teaching effectively to state standards so that, by test time, students require minimal preparation.

Tests are necessary to ensure that schools have the best teachers who can improve on their technique based on test scores so that students are making good standardsbased progress.

Dr. Kevin Welner, professor of education at University of Colorado Boulder, contends that the use of testing in NCLB and now in “Race to the Top” is excessive and therefore harmful. There are different kinds of accountability that the government can promote, and Welner claims that the extent to which NCLB and RTTT focus on test-based accountability is destructive. “What we’ve come to now is this shifting of schooling from a teaching-and-learning exercise to what is essentially a testing exercise,” commented Welner. While he does think that tests can be productively used as part of an accountability system, he recommends much more circumscribed approaches. For instance, he suggests that schools may administer tests in different subjects every other year, which would allow for states and school districts to detect school-level trends.

Instead of relying so heavily on testing, the government should be putting more energy into promoting accountability through conventional supervision and even through a school’s culture. Welner noted, “In a lot of institutions, accountability is created through the culture, so that there’s a sense of accountability in terms of interdependence, in terms of being responsible for helping one another achieve. So in well-functioning schools, teachers rely on one another and are accountable to one another simply because that is the school culture.” Instilling such a culture should, he explains, be part of a larger system that would involve measures that install high-quality administrative leadership, highly qualified teachers, effective teacher prepara-

tion programs, resources at the school level, and apprenticeship programs for younger teachers in a school.

Another criticism of NCLB was that it set unreasonable goals and standards. Most notoriously, NCLB established a standard in 2001 that said by 2014, approximately 92 percent of all students would have test scores judged to be proficient in reading and writing, according to standards set by grade level in each state. Given the progress we have made since 2001, we cannot feasibly reach that goal in a year. Welner and many others thought this goal was unachievable from the very beginning.

According to Welner, policies should set high goals, but those goals should not be set beyond the levels achieved by the most successful schools in the past. NCLB demanded test score progress far beyond the realm of even the highest past achievers. In addition, the main problems were lack of funding and lack of support for teachers and students. Simply demanding higher test scores is not a productive educational policy; successful approaches increase opportunities to learn. Although in the early days of NCLB, schools saw increased funding for the Title 1 program, and the program saw a later temporary

bump through stimulus spending, the projected spending increases negotiated as part of NCLB have been consistently ignored. Without providing the required resources for improvement, NCLB was requiring schools to achieve improbable goals by mandate. Welner gave an analogy: “If I put a high-jump bar in front of you that’s at 11 feet tall, no matter how much I scream at you and demand that you clear that bar, you’re not going to. Effectively that’s what NCLB did.”

Kress contends that the 92 percent benchmark may have been too high within the allotted time and that the administration needed to slow down the AYP mechanism. Yet, there were ways to relieve some of the pressure on schools by extending or modifying the deadline.

He believes that many of the solutions along those lines would have been better than what President Obama enacted to allow schools to circumvent that standard. Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan essentially gave waivers to states that would give them reprieve from NCLB’s penalties moving up to the 2014 deadline. In exchange, states would have to comply with Obama’s education initiatives.

“It could be the single worst thing

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[Obama and Duncan] have done and could be so negatively impactful that that single mistake overrides the good they did with the better practices they promoted through Race to the Top,” asserted Kress. He observed that, in terms of accountability, it has started a “race to the bottom” in which states are allowed to de-emphasize disaggregation and subgroup achievement. Kress brought up the case of short-lived decisions in some states to set different standards for different subgroups of students. For example, the state would set lower goals for a minority subgroup of students in terms of percent proficiency and higher goals for other subgroups. Kress thinks that this trend of ignoring certain subgroups will grow due to the waivers, undoing the success of NCLB. He also fears a return to aggregation in which schools will only consider averages for an entire class rather than breaking results down on a subgroup basis.

Welner feels that the current administration’s NCLB waivers were necessary,

especially since Congress showed no signs of reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (NCLB) and therefore addressing the sanctions problem legislatively. Yet, he disagrees with the administration’s decision to attach conditions that states had to agree to. Effectively, the conditions substituted Obama’s education plans for the NCLB system. He described two problems.

Many of the specifics of the administration’s plans, as best illustrated by the Race to the Top program, lack support from research evidence. And he sees a problem with the coercive aspect of the deal.

Drawing parallels to the recent NFIB v. Sebelius Supreme Court case on health care, he asked, “At what point is the federal government simply providing an incentive or attaching a reasonable condition to a funding package that a state can either decide to accept or reject, and what point does it become impossible for the state to reject the money and therefore the conditions become coercion?” It is unclear, he cautioned,

President Obama visits a charter school in New Orleans.

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whether the Supreme Court would draw the same conclusion with the NCLB waivers that it did with Medicare. But pursuant to the same principle, he finds the policy very troubling.

According to Kress, one of the most important things we can learn from NCLB as we go forward with Race to the Top is that simply passing legislation is rather meaningless. It is possible, without actually breaking the law, to ignore such education legislation. Race to the Top has been successful in apportioning money out to certain states, though the followup and enforcing consequences will be a challenge. Thus, it’s too early to tell if Race to the Top will be an improvement on NCLB. Kress claimed, “The victory will be when there’s changed practice and better student results.”

Aaron Mak is a freshman in Berkeley College.

The Clinton comeback

P

resident Obama was not Election Day’s only big winner this year. In fact, his victory did more than cement four more years of Democratic control.

It confirmed that we have many, many more years of Bill Clinton.

Over a decade removed from public office, Clinton was invaluable to Democrats’ efforts in 2012, galvanizing audiences across the country. He established himself as one of the most durable figures in contemporary politics and set himself up to have considerable influence for years to come. Obama won the presidency in 2012, but Clinton may have won a legacy.

Clinton’s largest and most noticeable contribution was on the campaign trail, where he delivered vivacious stump speeches praising Obama and ripping into the GOP. The former president may have even upstaged his Democratic successor at certain points, including the Democratic National Convention. In his keynote address, Clinton delivered a powerful endorsement of Obama while meticulously pointing out flaws in Romney’s plans. It was widely considered to be the best speech of the convention.

Donald T. Phillips, author of The Clinton Charisma: A Legacy of Leadership, saw Clinton’s efforts as illustrative of his talents as a persuader and politician.

“Clinton happens to really shine in the spotlight,” Phillips said in an interview with The Politic. “He’s good at taking messages and making them simple so that people understand what he’s talking about.” Obama is clearly in agreement: he joked to an audience in St. Petersburg, Fla. that he should appoint Bill Clinton his “Secretary of Explaining Stuff.”

Commentators across the political spectrum posited that Clinton brought a compassion that was largely missing from Obama’s leadership style. Said Michael Takiff, author of A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Know Him: “Clinton has this famous empathy. People believe that Clinton really understands their prob-

By Zachary Plyam

lems intimately. Obama has trouble of convincing people of that. Obama’s policies are similar, but he didn’t have that same humanity. Clinton has that asset.”

Furthermore, although Clinton has a long history of success on the political stage, he has a new ability to speak his mind now that he is out of office. According to Phillips, “[Clinton] doesn’t have to be muzzled anymore. When he was president, he had to be careful and was in the middle of the road about what he said. He was a diplomat and a politician, and didn’t want to lose votes.

Now, he can say exactly what he wants to say. A lot of people really like that.”

This year, Clinton put his talents to work. And it was work. He headlined 37 events for the president, including nine in the last weekend before Election Day. Including his contributions to dozens of congressional candidate campaigns, Clinton attended about 100 events in all.

In one car ride on the way to the airport, he recorded 40 automated messages on behalf of various Democratic congressional candidates.

Clinton’s value, however, wasn’t

limited to working the podium. He had an important advisory role as well.

Behind the scenes, Clinton was in close contact with Obama, as well as David Axelrod, the chief strategist of the president’s 2012 campaign. He also helped facilitate a shift in the campaign’s portrayal of Republican challenger Mitt Romney from an inauthentic flip-flopper to that of a strict right-wing conservative.

In a big way, one of the biggest beneficiaries was Clinton himself. Yale political science professor Stephen Skowronek noted that after their terms are over, presidents may be able to help secure their legacy through the achievements of their successors. “Clinton presided over a period of peace and prosperity, and having him endorse Obama’s course as the path back is valuable to both [men],” Skowronek said.

“It gives Obama political legitimacy, and it allows Clinton to erase any bad memories of his official failures.”

Clinton also gains from being in the public spotlight and being a part of the national conversation. “Clinton loves being loved,” Takiff noted. “He loves people, the love of people, and FALL 2012 II

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the spotlight. He enjoys basking in the warmth of admiration.”

All of this amounts to a Clinton comeback — further validation of his durability as a popular figure. According to Phillips, Clinton is more popular now than he was when he finished his second term as president. This is no easy task, seeing as he left office with the highest end-of-term approval rating for a president since World War II at 65 percent.

“He’s a very active person, and was always ‘out there.’ It’s part of his personality,” said Phillips. “Now that he’s not the president and doesn’t have something to run for, that meant something was missing from his life. He’s naturally active, a mark of a lot of great leaders.”

Clinton’s prominence is especially remarkable when compared to the recent history of former presidents. In both 2008 and 2012, Republican candidates did their best to disassociate with George W. Bush, their immediate Republican predecessor. In 2000, Al Gore distanced

himself from Clinton — the very same man who pundits are now hailing as a key contributor to the Obama victory.

Of course, having a former president attend rallies and give speeches is not without precedent. Reagan did so for the first George Bush in 1988. But the intensity and scope of Clinton’s role reached new heights. After going through the list of every presidential predecessor since Franklin D. Roosevelt, Takiff concurred: “I think Clinton is really unusual. I don’t know if there’s a parallel I can think of.”

What does Clinton resurgence mean for the next four years? In the short term, it may embolden Obama to take a tougher stance against congressional Republicans. On the campaign trail, the president frequently praised Clinton’s ability to extract concessions from House Republicans. Now that has he won a second term, Obama likely hopes to achieve the same thing.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama

did more things like Clinton now, such as being tougher on Republicans,” Phillips commented. “They are more friendly now than they’ve ever been, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama starts to look to Clinton for advice.”

Clinton is on top of the political world right now. He has great standing at home and abroad, has shown a passion for public speaking, and will likely counsel President Obama over the next four years. Moreover, his comeback undoubtedly aids his wife Hillary if, despite her comments to the contrary, she decides to run for the presidency in 2016.

For better or worse, the old Democratic saying seems to hold true: It’s all about the Clintons.

The Politic: Could you explain to our readers what the X tax does?

The X tax is a two-part tax system.

There’s a tax on households, and there’s a tax on business firms. The tax on households applies only to the wages that people earn. There’s no tax on any capital income such as interest, dividends, or capital gains. Wages are taxed under the X tax at progressive rates. People with higher wages are in higher brackets, people with relatively low wages pay no tax, and just like today, there could be refundable tax credits to put money in the pockets of the lowest-wage workers. The second part of the tax is a tax on business firms. The tax applies not to their income, but to their cash flow. Their cash flow is computed by letting them 18

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immediately deduct the full cost of all of their investments, whether it be equipment, buildings, inventories, or land. There’s no depreciation over a number of years, it’s just a straight-up deduction in the year that the investment is made, and then a full tax of any proceeds from the investment. Neither business firms nor households have to report their financial transactions, so business firms would not be deducting interest expense on their debt, for example. The tax rate on the business cash flow would be equal to the highest tax rate that applies to wages, or in other words, the rate that’s paid by the highest-wage workers. So you could imagine that rate maybe being 35 percent, or maybe being higher depending on how much revenue you were trying to raise and how progressive you felt the tax system needed to be.

The Politic: Under what grounds could Democrats and Republicans come together on this?

An Interview with John Lewis Gaddis Conducted by Yuval Ben-David John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of history at Yale. A prominent scholar of Cold War history, Gaddis is the recipient of a 2005 National Humanities Medal and, more recently, of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for biography for George F. Kennan: An American Life.

Zachary Plyam is a freshman in Calhoun College.

The X Tax: An Interview with Alan Viard Alan Viard ’84 is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Progressive Consumption Taxation: The X-Tax Revisited.

Cold war memoirs

Logically it should appeal to both parties. I don’t think that anyone wants to penalize saving as an end in itself. In other words, the primary reason why we tax saving is in order to make sure we have progressivity, which we know we can’t get with a sales tax or a value added tax. If people realized that you could keep progressivity without taxing saving, it seems to me that would satisfy the objectives that Democrats have.

Republicans are not trying to make the tax system less progressive as an end in itself, but trying to minimize the economic damage that it does. Much of that economic damage comes from taxing savings, so you can achieve the key goals of both parties if you keep your progressivity, but if you tax consumption.

David Lawrence is a sophomore in Calhoun College.

For the full interview please visit www.thepolitic.org.

The Politic: How did the book come about?

It came about because as a young Cold War historian, I had obviously worked on George Kennan and his influence, and because I wrote a book in 1982 about the idea of containment, called Strategies of Containment, for which I’d interviewed him once or twice. But I really did not know him at all, at that time. Then he sent me not just a complimentary letter, but a letter that I would characterize as fan mail. Handwritten: “Wonderful book.

You have understood my views better than anyone else ever has.” I thanked him, but then they kept coming, and there were more and more of these. I finally caught on that maybe he was angling for a biographer, and I wrote him — this is all pre-email days — and asked if anyone was doing his biography, and he said, it had never occurred to him, that anyone would wish to do his biography, but now that I had brought it up, we should talk about it. He was 78 at the time.

We agreed that I would have complete

access to him, to his papers, diaries, and that he would never read a line of what I wrote, that I would have total independence to say what I wanted to say. There was no arguing about that, at all. He kept very, very strictly to that agreement. The only surprise was how long he lived — to be 101. The understanding had been that it would not be published, obviously, until after his death.

The Politic: When did you actually finish the book?

He died in 2005. I had not wanted to start writing the book until after his death. Obviously I had done the research; I wanted to write it all at one time. I started in 2007 and finished in 2011, and the book came out at the end of 2011.

The Politic: How did researching the Kennan book for all those years influence your other work?

I was doing other work — I think I must have published four or five other books

in the course of that long period of time, so it was never a full-time project — but I did spend a lot of time on it, and particularly at the beginning of the project, running around with a tape recorder interviewing everybody that I could find — almost all of whom are dead now — to get them on tape before they died. Then I just set that material aside, and came back to it years later. Again, there always was the agreement that the interviews would not be used until after Kennan’s death — and he outlived almost everybody of the people that I interviewed. I was working through his papers and the diaries, and there were other things to do.

I moved to Yale during that period. The Cold War ended during that period, so there was lots of new stuff to assimilate and to write about in connection to Kennan. It did not become a full-time writing enterprise until 2007.

The Politic: Did you popularize George Kennan? How well-known was Kennan before you started writing about him?

He was very well-known at the time as one of the major Cold War strategists and public intellectuals. Since his death, obviously he’s become less well-known.

To some extent, he’s faded from view, though one of the things that surprised me when the book came out is how many people still remember him and regard him as having been very important. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “popularizing” him, because I wouldn’t call him a popular figure but he was a highly visible figure, intellectually. He was regarded as one of the major Cold War intellectuals in the last half of his life, through the 1950s to the time of his death. There’s no need to explain who he was or anything like that; he was very visible.

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The Politic: Which thinkers have overshadowed Kennan?

I’m not sure that we have great public intellectuals of the same weight as people like Kennan and Reinhold Niebuhr and others during the Cold War — Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for example. It’s partly because the Cold War is no longer the center of people’s attention. As far as international relations and the fate of the world were concerned, that was everyone’s concern; it was on everybody’s mind then. We don’t have things like that anymore.

The comparable figure is of course Henry Kissinger, who is still very active.

He played a much more important role in government than Kennan ever did, but has contributed to the world of history and to the world of ideas as well, in a way that Kennan did, and still is a regular commentator on public affairs.

The Politic: The subtitle of the autobiography is “An American Life.” But Kennan felt rather estranged from America, didn’t he?

One reviewer said, not only did Kennan feel rather estranged from America, but Gaddis made a mistake with his subtitle. I was a little bit peeved at that because you don’t take that long to write a book — 30 years, or something like that — and make a mistake on the subtitle. The subtitle is very intentional. What it implies is that, yes, Kennan was a constant critic of American institutions and culture, but it was always from the standpoint that the country could be better than it is, and should be better than it is. It’s a matter of holding the country to standards much higher than the country was capable of achieving.

That’s a kind of patriotism. It’s not unlike the way he regarded himself. He was immensely, and consistently, selfcritical, in a way that some people would think of as pathological. But I think it was, again, demanding a great deal of himself, setting high standards and never living up to them — never coming close to living up to them. That was very much like his view of the country.

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The Politic: How did he fail himself ?

He always said he could have had more influence in government if he’d have done this or that; or he could have made this lecture clearer if he’d taken more time to write; or if he was going to write a great work of history, it was to teach some kind of grand strategic lesson, and he had not.

Then there were personal failings as well, which I talked about in the book.

The extramarital affairs. His own health, which was shaky throughout his life. He regarded these all as personal failings — including, at the end, his failure to die, which delayed the biography. He was very critical of himself to me personally and apologized constantly for not having died so that the book could come out.

This is someone who held himself to much higher standards than most of us do.

The Politic: Kennan was a historian and a policymaker. How could he balance the two?

He saw a connection. He was first a career foreign service officer, which does not normally mean making policy. Policy was the second stage of his career, and he got there due to the convincing nature of his diplomatic reporting during World War II

The policymaking position was as the first head of the Policy Planning staff in the State Department, from 1947 to 1949. It’s a brief period of influence, but mostly he took the view that he had failed as a policymaker, because policy did not evolve in the ways that he wanted it to.

That was partly because he could not control it himself from that position. It was partly because there were a lot of people who had very serious disagreements with him as to what containment really meant.

Did it mean the defense only of very specific, vital interests, or did it mean defending everything out there in the world? If it meant that we were going to defend, were we going to do it by economic assistance to endangered countries? Were we going to do it by

building up Rapid Deployment Conventional Forces? Were we going to do it by building up a huge nuclear arsenal, which obviated the need to build up a lot of conventional forces? But certainly that seemed to him to be immensely dangerous. He was a great early environmentalist, but also deeply religious.

He was saying, isn’t it at the height of arrogance that these people would take it upon themselves to risk the fate of the world with the weapons that they’re developing, knowing that if they were to ever use them, civilization would not survive?

The Politic: You and Kennan disagreed about the Iraq War. How did that come into play in your relationship?

A conservative icon’s heirs keep a legacy alive at Yale.

By Noah Remnick

There were things we disagreed about all the way through. It was never implied in the relationship, the notion that we would agree on political issues. I always disagreed with him about the degree of the nuclear danger — I didn’t think it was as great as he regarded it. I certainly disagreed with about the direction of Reagan administration policy and where it was going.

There were all kinds of things that he and I disagreed about. We talked about them, off and on. I would send him some things that I had written, and he would disagree, and he would send me some things he’d written, and I would disagree back to him, and so on. It was a mutually respectful relationship. I’m rather astonished at some of the book reviews that seem to imply that the only way an authorized biographer can function is to agree in all respects with the subject of the biography.

I don’t think that makes any sense at all, and certainly it was not the expectation on the side of either of us that it would work that way.

Yuval Ben-David is a freshman in Silliman College.

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t was election night 2012, and the Yale College Republicans were feeling hopeful. Buoyed by the Romney campaign’s optimistic Electoral College projections, Yale’s dedicated conservative coalition arrived at the Silliman movie theater to watch the results come in. They came equipped with Jack Daniels, champagne, and fists full of banners reading “Romney-Ryan” and “Believe in America.” They planned to toast a renewed era of conservatism. They planned to paper the campus with victory posters in the middle of the night.

Several cycles of Fox News later, the champagne was flat, and the banners remained in Silliman.

Just over three weeks later, on a cold Friday evening, those same young conservatives packed into Linsly-Chittenden Hall to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Whittaker Chambers’ autobiography Witness. A classic of the American conser vative canon, Witness is one man’s regretful apologia about his ardent days as a secret Communist activist. At the event, the men wore jackets and ties, the women wore pearl necklaces and high-heeled shoes, and everyone laughed at The New York Times.

It was precisely the sort of scene that would have made conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. smile. When the late author and political commentator published God and Man at Yale in 1951, he described the University as a bastion of liberalism that cultivated a hostile environment towards conservatives and stripped its students of any sense of individuality. Buckley went on to found and edit the National Review, the magazine credited with providing the intellectual forum for a new conservative movement and, eventually, the Reagan Revolution. Chambers was Buckley’s hero. Now, students and local Republicans alike, Buckley’s acolytes, attend panels on the perils of communism and listening to Mitch Daniels, outgo-

ing Indiana governor and GOP hero, at an invitation-only formal dinner at the Omni Hotel. The evening’s festivities were made possible by a privately funded program at Yale named for Buckley that was launched in 2010. Many prominent campus Republicans cite the program as an example of an ascendant conservative culture at Yale.

“Something like the Buckley program would never have existed in the past, but things are picking up,” says Alexander Crutchfield ’15, floor leader of the right in the Yale Political Union.

“In the YPU, we’ve seen something like four times more recruits on the

agree with almost anything you say?), conservatives are, in a sense, always on trial, always in the minority. As Elaina Plott ’15 puts it, “If you’re a liberal at Yale, your thoughts can easily disappear into the echo chamber. If you’re a conservative, you might as well be wearing a neon sign over your head.”

Indeed, conservatives are expected to defend a party that often has a hard time defending itself. But here’s the impressive part: they actually can – and with a deftness and confidence that many GOP professionals might envy.

Like college students anywhere, Yalies can be brash and self-important, all too often valuing style over substance. Something about freewheeling intellectual campus debate seems to encourage oratorical ostentation. Many of the conservatives at Yale, of course, fall victim to these same foibles, but in large measure, they actually defy the stereotype. Conservatives at Yale are, in no small measure, well versed in all the day’s issues, unashamed of their political affiliation, and willing to engage with their political adversaries so long as they’re treated with dignity and seriousness. Elizabeth Henry ’14 quotes Reagan on the fly; Alec Torres ’13 peppers his speech with the sort of fanciful vocabulary for which Buckley was famous; Crutchfield talks about the faults of the federal government like a seasoned politician. These qualities don’t arise out of commitment alone, but also out of circumstance, according to Henry.

“I know what I believe, but being at Yale forces me to read more, to know more, to learn more facts and more statistics,” the Yale College Republicans chairman explained. “I’m expected to be able to speak on the entire Republican platform very broadly. A lot of people actively deride what you believe. I thrive in that environment, but for conservative students coming to Yale who don’t read the National Review, I can see how it

“Conservatives [at Yale] are expected to defend a party that often has difficulty defending itself. But here’s the impressive part: they actually can.”

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right than on the left. I think the high recruitment is sign of a new generation of conservatives that’s genuinely excited about conservative principles, genuinely concerned about the direction of the country, and genuinely inspired to take initiative. That’s exactly what you saw at the Buckley conference.”

Last year, in protest of the Occupy New Haven movement, members of the Yale College Republicans placed posters around the city that read “Status quo!”

Truthfully though, to be a conservative on the Yale campus today is to be a radical of sorts. Constantly fielding questions, arguments, and accusations places on young Republicans what professor Charles Hill calls “a real burden of proof.” While liberals seem to enjoy at times a sort of intellectual laziness (how much research does one really need to do when 90 percent of your peers will

would be tough. I had a friend transfer from Yale to Alabama because she just couldn’t stand it.”

Zak Newman ’13 is an admiring adversary of the conservative cohort on campus. As president of the Yale College Democrats, he said he has not seen a growth in the numbers of students at the other end of the political spectrum, but rather in their dynamism. “I would not say that we’ve seen a growth in the number of self-described conservatives on campus,” said Newman. “Rather, the conservative minority has in recent years become active in participating in politics.

Conservative circles have existed on campus for years in the form of parties in the YPU and other discussion groups.

Those leading new conservative activism efforts on campus do so out of a realization that a challenge to progressivism at Yale can only be successful through organizing.”

The left-leaning political consensus at Yale makes the Buckley Program all the more important, conservatives say.

At the organization’s recent second annual conference, the Program’s current president, Nathaniel Zelinsky ’13 spoke to diners as they sipped glasses of wine.

“At a very basic level, we do three things: we host speakers and debate on campus, we run workshops and seminars, and we offer summer internships,

where Yalies receive a stipend to work at places such as the National Review or The New Criterion,” Zelinsky told the conference. “But that doesn’t really explain what the Buckley program does on campus. I am going to borrow the words of one of our faculty mentors: we traffic in ideas – we create a space where intellectual diversity is valued. We

“Coming out as a Republican at Yale is even more difficult than coming out as gay,” says Madison Alworth. challenge people to think differently.”

But a blotch of red paint on a blue political canvas doesn’t make for a purple painting. Yale is still overwhelmingly liberal.

It’s hard to know precisely how many students lean right on campus,

Professor Charles Hill provides a conservative voice on Yale’s faculty.

though William F. Buckley Jr.’s son, Christopher, a celebrated novelist and former Reagan White House speechwriter, said, “I’d guess – conservatively – that less than 10 percent of current Yalies would call themselves ‘conservative.’ In my day (class of 1975) it was probably less than 5 percent.”

Professor Hill, a self-described “Burkean conservative,” sees little difference between Buckley’s Yale and today’s University. Hill, who holds the title of diplomat-in-residence at Yale, is a former career diplomat, who specialized in China and the Middle East, and served as an adviser to Republican-era secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz.

“Back in Buckley’s time, the political culture came as a kind of a shock to him,” said Professor Hill. “It wasn’t quite the Yale he thought he was getting into. There was also a shock from the alumni who read God and Man at Yale.

Now, the pervasive liberalism has been so accepted that it’s just part of life. By my experience, it’s 90 percent-plus liberal, progressive Democrats on campus and that’s just the way things are. It’s been that way for generations.”

According to Hill, this homogeneity exists among the faculty as well: “Everyone here thinks exactly alike.

They think liberal progressive politics is the way things are and that’s the way things should be, so there’s no need to discuss it other than to fend off what they may see as upheavals of other thought – those in the 10 percent. It’s an assumption of agreement, and that’s the test of the political culture, really.”

Crutchfield is a student who stands proudly within Hill’s described 10 percent. The walls of his Branford dorm room are adorned with two posters of Ronald Reagan and another that reads, “I love capitalism.” On his bedside table sits George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points. Crutchfield has certainly made no secret of his conservatism, but others on campus do. “The term ‘closet conservative’ is thrown around a lot, and it’s very much the case,” he explains.

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Yale is even more difficult than coming out as gay,” says Madison Alworth ’15.

“People can judge you harshly for it.”

Henry, too, has garnered her own share of attacks from a segment of the Yale population. “There are actually three groups of liberals at Yale,” she said. “There are the apathetic liberals, who aren’t really antagonistic towards us.

Then there are Democrats like Zak Newman, who I’m friends with because he’s knowledgeable and understanding of us.

And lastly, there are the Democrats who think Republicans are bad people – that we’re somehow immoral. Someone once told a friend of mine, ‘I can’t believe you would hang out with Elizabeth Henry!

You know she’s a Republican, right?’”

Yet, even while this atmosphere persists, Henry sees improvement. “The conservative culture is definitely in a better place now than when I first got here. We fought the fight for existence, but the next fight is for recognition.”

To combat this prejudice and antagonism, Torres says that conservatives need to “be as vocal and as present as possible. If prospective conservative students could visit and see a conservative presence on campus with a community and respect, it could start a snowball effect.”

Crutchfield believes the evolution is rooted in an attitude change and a commitment to action, not only among liberals, but among conservatives, too.

“We often have a tendency to stick together,” he said. “We’re all too content to isolate ourselves with conservative super PACs and Fox News. The problem becomes that we’re not actively engaged in a real dialogue. For too long, we’ve been content to sit in our conservative ivory towers. That has to change.”

Other conservatives overwhelmingly agree with Crutchfield. Torres summed up the sentiment, saying, “It’s impossible to say that change isn’t necessary after a loss that bad, but I disagree that we need to change stances on issues. The philosophical ideals of conservatism underlying the party are good – we just need a new branding. We were painted too well by our Democratic opponents and media as the party of the wealthy when really, our philosophy of limited government, low taxes, and social responsibility is beneficial to everyone.”

Despite their loyalty to principles like limited government, many Yale conservatives – students, faculty, and alumni – readily admit that the Republican Party is deeply flawed. “The cavalcade of GOP candidates during the (far-too long) primary process was a freak show, at the end of which we ended up with Mr. Romney, whose most appealing quality was that he was the least awful candidate,” said Christopher Buckley.

“This is no way to capture the White House. But the GOP ought not to be about personalities. It ought to be about

ideas. And we need some new ones.”

In many ways, Yale’s young conservatives embody the change that they, and even much of the Republican leadership, seek within the party. The Yale College Republicans have spent time this election canvassing for Scott Brown and Linda McMahon, and making phone calls to swing states for Mitt Romney, but the change extends beyond volunteering.

By injecting the campus with a renewed spirit of political action and conversation, today’s conservatives are not only challenging the status quo – they’re keeping alive the legacy of Buckley.

“The best thing about Buckley was that some of his dearest friends were on the left,” recalled Professor Hill. “I remember seeing him come out of Mory’s once in the late Clinton years. Lanny Davis, a leading advisor to Clinton, was coming up Wall Street in the other direction, and they just kind of fell into each other’s arms and laughed. That was Buckley, and you have to maintain that kind of buoyant character in your politics and commentary in order to succeed.

The conservative students on campus have certainly captured something of Buckley’s spirit.”

Noah Remnick is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

the patriarch An Interview with David Nasaw Conducted by Josef Goodman David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life & Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

The Politic: What makes Joseph Kennedy an admirable character and in what other ways is he less so?

He was a wonderful father. He was very important as part of the New Deal, not only in helping to get FDR nominated and elected in ’32 – and re-elected in ’36 and ’40 – but he was an important part of the New Deal as the first chairman of the SEC. He was probably the best chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. These are all positive moments in a long life.

He was a disastrous ambassador to London from 1938 to 1940. He never understood the threat Hitler posed to civilization, and as war approached – a war which he feared would destroy the economy, capitalism, and democracy in Western Europe and then in the United States – his fears grew greater and greater and he fell back on the ancient scapegoat: the Jews and a Jewish conspiracy. He believed that the Jews were in some way more responsible than others for pushing first England and then the United States into war against a foe they could not defeat. That was certainly less than admirable. It was rather horrifying to write about and learn about this.

Irish Catholic. He always taught his boys: “Trust your family members because they were the ones who were going to watch out for you; everybody else is not going to. You’ve got no friends outside the family.”

The Politic: Joe Kennedy is popularly thought of today as associating with bootlegging and gangsters. You find very little evidence of this in your book?

I tracked down every story, every innuendo, every rumor. I found absolutely no evidence that he was a bootlegger or that he associated with crime figures.

Kennedy was in many ways a very careful man. He knew exactly what the law said.

He was going to use or play the margins of legality, but he was not going to do anything illegal because he knew damn well that if he did he would be caught because there were people looking out

for him. He’d be caught and punished.

That’d be the end of him and the end of his family. So he was very careful in that regard on Wall Street. He played with the laws that allowed him to sell short, to do insider trading, to drive prices up and down and sideways, to form pools, to trade stocks and manipulate prices – all of that. But it was legal until he went to the SEC and outlawed it. Once he outlawed the strategies that had made him a millionaire many times over, he stopped using the market. He stopped trading. He went into real estate.

The Politic: Could you talk a little more about his relationship with Roosevelt?

One of the joys of writing this book was being able to write about the relationship between these two powerful personalities: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph P. Kennedy and the duel between the two. Each

The Politic: Was Kennedy’s outsider status as an Irish Catholic in the WASP establishment the driving force of his life?

College Republicans make phone calls for Linda McMahon.

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Because he was Irish Catholic, because he was an outsider, because when he graduated from Harvard he couldn’t get a job in banking anywhere in the Boston area because the Irish Catholics were not allowed in the door, he never trusted anybody except members of his family. He never felt entirely comfortable, not socially but in other settings, with those who were not

The Kennedy family in 1931. Father in middle, Jack in top left.

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needed the other. Roosevelt needed Kennedy because Kennedy was his link to the Irish Catholic community of voters and his link to bankers, and to Wall Street, and to Hollywood. Roosevelt wanted to keep Kennedy close by and in the New Deal camp. Kennedy wanted very much to be an insider. He wanted to be part of the establishment, and Roosevelt offered him entry into government and into the establishment. Roosevelt offered the positions that would make him an American aristocrat and make the Kennedy name not a reference to Irish Americans or Irish Catholics, but to the political elite.

They needed each other and both intended to use the other. Each knew that the other was trying to use him. It’s this extraordinary test of wills.

In the end, Roosevelt won every battle because he was smarter. Roosevelt was even more charming than Kennedy.

When either man walked into a room, all eyes would be on them and he would be the center of every conversation. Every look would go towards either Roosevelt or Kennedy. But in the end, Roosevelt was craftier and sharper. Roosevelt knew exactly what he wanted from Kennedy and was able to manipulate him and charm him. And Roosevelt was the president. Whatever went on, he had more to offer Kennedy than Kennedy ever had to offer him. He used the magic of the White House, and the magic of the presidency, and the magic of invitation to the White House to keep Kennedy in line.

The Politic: Kennedy and FDR also disagreed over foreign policy, no?

Kennedy represents a strand of American foreign policy that has pretty much disappeared. Kennedy was convinced that the road to ruin for the United States was to be entangled in foreign affairs, to enter into European wars, to leave behind the Western hemisphere. He did not want the Americans to fight a world war against Germany or to engage in a Cold War against the Soviets. He thought it was a waste of resources, that it was diverting resources that were needed in 26

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this country, that if we needed more imports and more exports and more trade then we should do it with Latin America and do it with the Caribbean.

The old world was poison and it just made no sense to be involved in spending money or sending American boys to their deaths to save one European dynasty against the other. He was consistent in this. He was an isolationist. Another way to put it, although he never joined the America First Organization, he was an America First-er. He believed in a world in which the American economy would be strongest if resources were spent in this country, not overseas.

The Politic: In what ways did JFK and his father differ?

Jack Kennedy was much more of a mainstream liberal. He began to understand in a way his father never did that civil rights, poverty, housing, and education were imperatives. His father just didn’t pay attention to such things. He was much more aggressive rhetorically than his father would ever be. His father believed that it was possible to negotiate an Old World settlement with the Soviets.

I don’t know if Jack did. The difficulty we have is that the Kennedy administration was cut short. It was 1,000 days.

We don’t really know what was going to happen with Vietnam. In the end, Kennedy pushed negotiations, not war, in Berlin with the Soviets and in Cuba.

One of my readers sent me a note saying that if you go further into the Kennedy administration and Kennedy foreign policy, especially over the Cuban Missile Crisis, you see something of the father in the son’s actions.

The Politic: How much influence did the father wield over his son’s presidency?

Almost none because, number one, the father had a major, major, major, stroke less than a year into his son’s presidency in December of ’61. Number two, Jack was his own man by then. His father didn’t run his campaign for the presi-

dency in 1960 and his father stayed far away from the White House. Every once in awhile Jack would call and would talk about something, but it was clear to both of them that Jack was going to make all of the decisions. The one major influence and the only thing his father demanded of him, and Jack came around to this, was that he make his brother, Robert Kennedy the Attorney General so that he would have someone in the cabinet that he could trust and look after his well being. The father insisted on this and Jack and Bobby, who didn’t want to be Attorney General, agreed. But once the presidency began and even during the campaign, Jack was his own man. There was absolutely no doubt about that.

The Politic: Why does the family continue to capture the imagination of American society today?

The thing about the Kennedy family is that there is a glamour, there’s a celebrity, and there’s an intelligence that just shines through. Whether you agree with them or don’t agree with them, you can’t help but be fascinated by the members of this family. Not only by the men in the family, the three men who entered public life, Senator Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and the President, but the women as well are extraordinary. I think Eunice Kennedy Shriver in the years to come for her contributions to the disabilities rights movement and the push that people who were disabled mentally and physically are as much citizens of the nation as anyone else – her accomplishments are going to be looked at. Jean Kennedy Smith was the ambassador for the United States to Ireland at a time of the peace settlement and she played a part in that. This is a family that, through three generations and now into the fourth generation, has been active in addressing questions that devil all of us. We’re fascinated by them and some of us grateful to them.

Josef Goodman is a junior in Morse College.

Forty-Five?

The Politic Looks Ahead to the Likely 2016 Presidential Candidates

By Joshua Faber and Aia Sarycheva

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ust one month after the polls closed on Election Day, speculation and preparation are already well underway for the 2016 presidential contest. Democrats are searching for a candidate that can generate the enthusiasm President Obama inspired in his 2008 — and to a lesser extent, 2012 — run. Any credible Democrat must also match the President’s turnout machine and fundraising prowess while maintaining his diverse coalition of supporters. Republicans, on the other hand, will have to endure a period of soul-searching after losing to a president many believed was eminently beatable. Before long, however, candidates will emerge for both the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations.

According to Richard Socarides, a Democratic strategist and commentator who served as Special Assistant and Senior Advisor to the Clinton Administration, “Voters always gravitate towards candidates that can inspire and articulate a vision of the future.”

As of today, four candidates stand as the most likely choices for the Democratic nomination come 2016: Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo and Martin O’Malley. Four of the most likely GOP standard-bearers are: Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan.

The Democratic Field Hillary Clinton No speculation about potential Democratic candidates could begin without a mention of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. A widely popular former U.S. Senator and Secretary

of State, Clinton has solid domestic and foreign policy credentials, as well as significant campaign experience. A poll of likely 2016 Democratic candidates in Iowa found Clinton with a 41-point lead. The problem? Clinton says she has no intention of running for office and plans to step down as Secretary of State in early 2013.

Whether she is serious — and if she can be convinced to again pursue elected office to the national spotlight

may not be the last time he votes for himself. A veteran of numerous national campaigns, Biden shares Clinton’s campaign experience, though his reputation for gaffes and advanced age could hamper a 2016 run.

John Samples, Director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government, expressed doubts that a Biden candidacy would be successful — if he chooses to run at all. Samples posited that Biden’s decision to run hinges on Obama’s second term and that “if the administration is running well, he can continue with that platform.”

Regardless, Biden’s decades in the national arena have exposed him to the public and give him a fighting chance for the Democratic nomination.

Andrew Cuomo Another potentially strong candidate is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who would begin the contest with the support of a large, blue, and cash-flush state. A former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Cuomo has accomplished much in with her popularity intact — remains his time in the governor’s mansion, to be seen. Meanwhile, other possible from legalizing same-sex marriage candidates are left in a gray zone as to cutting spending to maintaining a they wait for her to make a decisive glittering 71 percent approval rating. move. Said Socarides, “If she decides According to Socarides, a New not to run it would be a much more York-based attorney, “He’s extremely open field, with Vice President Biden popular here in New York. Cuomo being a very formidable candidate.” has done a great job at reestablishing New York as the progressive center Joe Biden of the country.” Cuomo has been coy While he has made no outright men- about his national ambitions, yet even tion of a 2016 presidential bid, Vice if he does not run in the upcoming President Joe Biden has not aban- presidential election, he is only 55 doned the possibility either, com- and — as Socarides noted — could menting that his recent reelection very well “run in 2020 or 2024.”

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Martin O’Malley Although he may presently be the longest shot on this list, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is perhaps the most likely to throw his hat into the race for the Democratic nomination. In Maryland, O’Malley has been instrumental in pushing education reform, legalizing same-sex marriage, raising taxes on high-income spenders, and providing conditional in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.

Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, O’Malley gained valuable media exposure from his frequent talk show appearances and trips around the country as an Obama surrogate. Indeed, party insiders are confident that O’Malley — who is already barnstorming early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire — is gearing up for a run. Whether this will be enough to seriously compete remains to be seen.

The Republican Field Chris Christie Chief among the potential Republican candidates for president in 2016 is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. A blunt former U.S. Attorney, Christie has significant policy achievements despite the blue tinge of his state. Christie signed a bill this August that overhauls the New Jersey school system, for example, mandating that teachers will now be graded themselves and easier to fire.

Yet according to Roger Pilon, founder and director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, Christie will likely struggle to win any national office. “Christie damaged himself and his prospects by [getting] unnecessarily close to Obama in the days before the election after Hurricane Sandy struck,” said Pilon, asserting 28

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Not In My Backyard

that Christie’s hurricane response weakened his standing among Republicans. Moreover, Christie has decided to run for reelection as governor in 2013, delaying the start of any potential national campaign.

Jeb Bush Jeb Bush served as the Governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. During his tenure as governor — and subsequent years as a Republican rainmaker — Bush is perhaps best known for his enthusiastic embrace of Hispanics and immigration reform. Because Hispanics represent an increasingly large voting bloc, strategists argue that Bush’s ideas are ideal for a Republican Party that failed to garner even 30 percent of the Hispanic vote this year.

Many Republicans, however, are wary of supporting another Bush, given the relative unpopularity of his father and brother. “We’ve had two Bushes and that’s quite enough” said Pilon. Nonetheless, Jeb Bush would undoubtedly command a significant following if he decides to enter the presidential race.

Marco Rubio An eloquent and charismatic son of Cuban immigrants, Florida Senator Marco Rubio may also help the GOP appeal to Hispanic voters. Rubio’s legislative record has not yet been particularly noteworthy, but his public speeches -- including an address at the Republican National Convention -- have endeared him to Republicans across the country.

Rubio stoked further speculation about a possible 2016 run this November when he headlined a fundraiser in Iowa, which hosts the first-in-the-nation caucuses. Influential Republicans privately worry that Rubio’s youth and dealings as a Florida state legislator could hamper

China’s Environmental Conscience Fights Back

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his candidacy. But if he does decide he run, Rubio will nonetheless begin with perhaps the most support of any Republican in the field.

Paul Ryan Arguably the recognizable candidate in the possible Republican field is Paul Ryan, this year’s vice presidential nominee. Ryan, a congressman from Wisconsin, is notable for his tenure atop the House Budget Committee and his budget blueprint, which he titled “The Path to Prosperity.” The document catapulted Ryan to fame for its sharp criticism of Democratic spending policies, as well as proposals to cut several trillion dollars in spending and close tax loopholes.

The chief architect of the Republican fiscal platform, Ryan garners support from both the GOP grassroots and his party’s most influential fundraisers. Moreover, that Ryan emerged from his 2012 loss with his reputation intact indicates that his time in the national spotlight is far from over.

he Chinese government’s relentless push for rapid economic development is finally hitting a formidable roadblock: rising environmental consciousness among Chinese citizens concerned about the effects of pollution on their health and well-being. In the past year alone, scores of Chinese have taken to the streets to protest industrial projects in their towns, giving shape to the NIMBY — or “Not in My Backyard” — phenomenon now burgeoning across China.

These demonstrations have taken place in blatant defiance of local governments and escalated at times into violent confrontations with police, indicating a notable shift in the Chinese government’s relationship with the public.

Unabated environmental degradation has chipped away at the tacit compact

By Cindy Hwang between the government and populace — that citizens would dutifully comply with the government in exchange for a better quality of life — due to the growing notion that a better quality of life entails not just greater economic freedom but also a clean environment in which to live.

“[Chinese citizens] are questioning whether an increase in material wealth really means an improving quality of life,” explained Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor at UC Irvine specializing in modern China.

Strikingly, many of the protesters have come from China’s rapidly growing population of middle-class urbanites.

“With rising incomes and education, there is a greater awareness of these potential environmental threats and concerns about health,” said Jessica Chen

Weiss, an assistant professor at Yale University who specializes in Chinese politics.

Indeed, middle-class Chinese are growing increasingly outspoken against the government’s constant prioritization of investment and profit over public health and safety — or “the way in which modernization has been achieved,” as Wasserstrom put it. In recent months, angry protesters have succeeded in forcing local governments across China to suspend industrial projects — but their achievements have proven to be shaky, calling the prevailing narrative of NIMBY victories into question.

In 2007, protests erupted in the southeastern coastal city of Xiamen against Taiwanese business plans to build a chemical plant that would produce paraxylene, or PX, a toxic chemi-

Joshua Faber and Aia Sarycheva are freshmen in Branford College.

NIMBY protestors in the Chinese coastal city of Dalian in August 2011.

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cal used in the production of plastics and polyester. Mobilized by a mass text message that called for a public rally and compared building the plant to dropping an atomic bomb on the city, thousands of mostly middle-class Chinese demonstrated for days against the proposed plant. The local government finally relented and agreed to suspend the project. The outcome was celebrated as a triumph of the public will, and PX became a “symbolic target for activists everywhere,” as John Ruwitch and David Stanway stated in a Reuters article.

The Xiamen protests were a pivotal milestone in Chinese environmental activism, and, according to Weiss, “the initial precedent that people refer back to, particularly the use of text messages and the degree to which the government and local authorities were taken by surprise and quickly felt that they needed to make concessions in order to placate these concerns.” Wasserstrom agreed, calling them the “logical starting point” for the NIMBY phenomenon. However, it suffered a setback a year and a half later, when the government relocated the $3.6 billion plant to the nearby, smaller city of Zhangzhou. There, sporadic protests among residents were unsuccessful.

Similar cases cast doubt on the ultimate outcomes of the recent string of public “victories” over local governments concerning industrial projects.

In August 2011, some 12,000 residents demonstrated against a chemical factory in the northeastern coastal city of Dalian, prompting an official government promise to move the plant. But the factory has since quietly resumed production. Once protesters disperse and public uproar dissipates, government concessions appear to have little credibility. It would not be surprising, then, if the proposed $8.8 billion expansion of a state-run petrochemical plant in the coastal city of Ningbo continues as planned, despite a government pledge to cancel the expansion after days of fierce protests this past October.

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early November’s 18th Communist Party Congress — a once-in-a-decade affair that determines the next generation of party luminaries. Rising environmental activism will likely be a major challenge the incoming leadership will have to confront. According to the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, the number of environmental protests has increased at an average rate of almost 30 percent annually for the past 15 years.

The government’s response to the recent environmental protests has been characteristic of its official “stability preservation” policy. This policy aims to maintain social stability at all costs, including the use of force if necessary.

In what has become a familiar pattern, local governments have taken coercive measures to suppress the protests — but when those measures proved unsuccessful, authorities capitulated in a matter of days, choosing to defuse the protests instead of risking escalation.

According to Wasserstrom, the “localized” nature of the protests might explain this conciliatory strategy, or, as Weiss offered, the fact that they are “potentially less socially destabilizing and aren’t seen as a high-level threat.” But it is important to keep in mind, as Yueran Zhang suggested in a Tea Leaf Nation op-ed, that local governments might have backed down more out of a desire to restore stability than out of genuine respect for the public will. Perhaps the recent demonstrations should then be seen as victories not for the protestors, but for stability preservation.

Ironically, the government’s stability preservation approach has likely only fueled a “self-perpetuating cycle” of protests, as the Tea Leaf Nation op-ed further observed. Activists have learned that they can only wring concessions out of the government if they organize mass demonstrations. Yet even then, the concessions may only be provisional measures designed to appease the protesters, as in the case of Dalian.

This dynamic only intensifies mistrust between the government and the public, underscoring the basic unsustainability of the government’s approach to the

NIMBY protests.

It is clear that China desperately needs institutionalized channels for the public to voice its concerns before major projects are approved, as well as a more transparent decision-making process.

By taking public input out of the equation, the government has only invited direct confrontation and incurred massive costs from having to handle street protests and cancel multibillion-dollar projects.

However, there are heartening signs that the government is reconsidering its problematic approach to the NIMBY protests. It recently announced that all future industrial projects will have to pass assessments of their risk to social stability before they begin, in the hopes of reducing the number of mass protests. “We are beginning to see a ‘not in my backyard’ phenomenon,” Zhou Shenxian, the Chinese environment minister, acknowledged at a news conference held in conjunction with the 18th Party Congress. The government also pledged to increase transparency and public participation in decisions surrounding major industrial projects.

“It’s these types of concrete procedural changes that might pave the way for less of this particular type of protest,” Weiss explained. Still, it remains to be seen whether the government will actually follow through with this change of policy. “We have to see how well these procedures are implemented, and what kinds of other measures or tactics are brought into play by local governments, as they still seek lucrative deals and can potentially subvert this more regularized process of public hearing and consent,” she continued.

To forestall future NIMBY protests, the Chinese government should fully engage the public in the planning process of large industrial projects. For what Chinese citizens really need are not hasty concessions, but a government that truly acknowledges their demands for a safer, cleaner environment.

Cindy Hwang is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

ghost cities A Tale of Two Chinas

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t’s the best of times in China. With its GDP growing an average of 10 percent over the past 30 years, China has catapulted itself from rural obscurity to the world stage and overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy.

According to experts at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the country’s urban population will expand by 300 million people — almost the existing population of the United States — in the next two decades due to metropolitan migration on an unprecedented scale. Thanks to China’s forward-looking command economy, these hopeful migrants will be greeted by millions of governmentsubsidized apartment units, all built well ahead of time.

“It’s a ‘Field of Dreams’ approach,” said professor Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. “If you build it, they will come.”

The soaring towers of Kangbashi, a section of the Chinese city of Ordos,

By Benjamin Weiner are prepared to accommodate a million new residents in the next decade; one of the world’s largest shopping malls waits expectantly outside the city of Dongguan; and a huge development project in Angola stands poised to extend China’s influence to the resource-rich continent of Africa. China is on the cusp of an age of prosperity. *** It’s the worst of times in China. With growth over the past 30 years based almost entirely on exports, China has emerged in this millennium with a severely unbalanced economy.

When world trade plummeted more than 10 percent in 2009, it took China’s growth along for the ride, a phenomenon for which the Chinese government compensated by fueling an already worrying housing bubble and substituting real estate speculation for real growth. The result is an economy with almost 50 percent of its GDP in fixed-asset investments, as opposed to something like 20 percent in the United States and Japan, and millions of empty

The city of Ordos in inner Mongolia, China.

apartment units.

This folly has left Kangbashi, a development built for 1 million people, nearly deserted more than five years after construction began; it’s created the world’s second-largest shopping mall, an abandoned behemoth that remains 99 percent vacant seven years after it opened; it’s gone so far as to allow a city built for half a million people, with apartments valued close to $100,000, to sprout up outside impoverished slums on another continent. China is blindly racing towards economic collapse. ***

Which is the real China? Both perspectives are compelling, and the story that future generations will tell depends on the convergence of a complicated set of factors over the next decade.

On the one hand, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. China’s leaders recognize the precariousness of the situation, particularly for a government whose legitimacy largely rests upon its spectacular economic successes since the Cultural Revolution. Some 8 or 9 million people enter the workforce each year, and those in charge have a vested interest in maintaining a healthy economy and preventing the sort of unemployment that leads to social unrest.

To that end, China unveiled its 12th Five-Year Plan in 2011, which seeks to restructure the Chinese economy. It lays out a program to facilitate urbanization and makes it possible to fill those unoccupied “ghost cities” through a massive social housing program for low- and middle-income individuals — with China actually committed to building 15 million more units to meet the demand.

Although the model may seem dangerous to Americans recovering from a financial crisis catalyzed by a housing bubble, there is logic behind China’s plan. “You can’t do urbanization without investment,” Roach explained.

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“In a centrally directed economy that is implementing urbanization-led investment, the time horizons of any disconnect between supply and demand are a lot longer.”

But what about structural problems inherent in an economy with such a high ratio of fixed-asset investments, where construction dwarfs consumption? To simply say that the Chinese have 50 percent of their GDP locked up in these investments is somewhat misleading, even before taking into account the new reforms. Indeed, a low amount of capital per capita exists today in China.

“What drives productivity and economic growth over the long haul is the stock of capital relative to the stock of labor. And so given the fact that they started with basically nothing on the capital stock front post-Cultural Revolution, the high investment economy is designed to better equip workers with productive tools, and they can run high investment ratios for a long time before

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they get into an overhang of excess capacity,” said Roach.

China still faces a long road ahead beset with pitfalls. The country remains susceptible to fluctuations in world trade, and another major recession could wreak havoc on an economy counting on constant growth to pay off debts.

Filling empty cities also remains a huge logistical problem, especially when many lie in barren and faraway environments.

Chenggong, one new development, sits in Yunnan province, more than 1,500 miles from Beijing or Hong Kong. Meanwhile, property prices in Shanghai and other high-end markets have stabilized only due to government intervention to cool down the real estate market.

The 12th Five-Year Plan contains the seeds for China’s future; its effectiveness, however, remains anything but certain.

The 11th Five-Year Plan outlined similar intentions to restructure the economy, but it lacked a clear framework to accomplish those goals, with the result

being business as usual: rapid growth was emphasized over sustained, healthy growth.

It remains to be seen whether the new leadership can actualize its big promises. China’s economic future is hugely important to the United States, as China is our third-largest export market and our fastest growing one. Thus, the structural changes prescribed in the plan could be a huge boon to domestic manufacturing.

In the end, which story will our children and grandchildren tell about China? Will they see places like Ordos and Chenggong flower into vibrant cities, their streets buzzing with life and business – or will they see crumbling monuments to China’s folly? The answer, which rests with the new Five-Year Plan and China’s new leadership council, is anything but certain.

Waiting for Mohandas Can Anna Hazare bring revolution to India?

By Amy Chang

Benjamin Weiner is a freshman in Branford College.

Breakout Nations

Ezra Ritchin interviews Ruchir Sharma Ruchir Sharma is head of the global emerging markets equity team at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

He is the author of the recent book, Breakout Nations.

The Politic: How do you define a breakout nation?

I have two definitions. One is countries that beat expectations, and two is nations that are able to grow faster than other countries in the same per capita income bracket. The reason I use these two criteria is because, over the last decade, a lot of misconceptions have been built. People ask me, “If China slows down from growing at 9 percent to 4 or even 5 percent, what’s the big deal?

It’s still going to be growing much faster than many countries in the West.” And my counter to that is twofold – one, expectations are really key, because if 32

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China really grows at 5 or 6 percent, that’s going to feel like a real recession in China and for the rest of the world, because people have gotten so used to growth rates of 8 to 9 percent.

The same was the case in India.

India’s growth rate has slowed to 5 or 6 percent from rates of 8 to 9 percent over the last decade. It is feeling in India like a real, real slow down. Secondly, growth rates matter a lot, and so does where you start. If a country, like Nigeria or India, with a per capita income of only $1,500, is able to grow at 5 percent, that’s an underachievement. But if a country with a per capita income level of $20,000, like Korea, grows at 4 or 5 percent, that’s a huge achievement.

The Politic: You said that Brazil, among many other breakout nations, needed crisis. How important is crisis in promoting growth?

The one thing that I always see is that most governments only tend to reform when they have their back to the wall.

When things are good, they tend to sort of lose the initiative to reform. In Brazil, all the initiatives and all the other good things happened when they really had a big crisis in the late 1990s. Similarly in India, the reforms were always carried out once every 10 years when you had some sort of a macroeconomic crisis in India or some sort of a growth crisis in India – that’s the lesson. I think in China, what is very impressive is that they kept reforming all the time.

Ezra Ritchin is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

For the full interview please visit www.thepolitic.org.

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s India’s war on corruption continues to drag on, corruption seems to be winning. Scarcely a week goes by without news of another scandal, another public fund pocketed, or another vote bought.

Amid a flurry of scandal reports this year – including the defense industry’s attempted bribery of army officials and scams involving politicians’ purchases of homes intended for army widows – one of the most telling examples of corruption emerged when business tycoon Manoj Jayaswal was accused of selling coalfields to uncompetitive companies owned by his friends and family. Originally praised as an example of India’s growth, Jayaswal’s meteoric

accumulation of wealth was uncovered as a hallmark of the crony capitalism that plagues India today.

With corruption intensifying, millions – and in India this number should be taken literally – await the arrival of a modern Mohandas Gandhi to lead the charge and cleanse the Augean stables.

According to Tariq Thachil, director of undergraduate studies of the South Asian studies major at Yale University, “There have been successes. But certainly, for every success, there have been many who were able to find some initial popular support but not necessarily convert that into long-term sustained political change.”

In the past two years alone, count-

less self-proclaimed heirs to Gandhi’s legacy have emerged. Just as their paragon shook off the yoke of foreign oppression, so too, these activists claim, will they free India from internal oppression. Yet while many activists have attached themselves to Gandhi’s revered name, so far none has successfully channeled his values, sustainably mobilized the masses, or delivered real change.

The most promising of these figures is the ascetic, bespectacled Anna Hazare. For the past two years, Hazare has championed nonviolent sit-ins and hunger strikes as a solution to political discontent, in an effort to pass the Jan Lokpal Bill, an anti-corruption measure.

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Gandhi, Hazare has recently seen a drop in attendance to his protests. At a time when India is still far from seeing the end of daily manifestations of corruption, this occurrence raises the question of why his movement, one that began with so much promise and support, is losing the attention of the people.

Initially, what set Team Anna – how he and his followers brand themselves – apart was a widespread media presence that appealed to a broad range of citizens. A master of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, Team Anna rose as a media phenomenon that appealed to the ever-elusive, less politically involved youth demographic; within the first few months, Hazare amassed 80,000 Twitter followers, a number that has since risen to 230,000. But even more importantly, videos of a peacefully protesting Hazare and inspirational tweets such as “be a light unto yourself ” drew parallels between Gandhi and Hazare, who benefited from the popularity of the beloved figure with whom he was associated.

In an environment where the people had become resigned to corruption as a constant way of life, Hazare revived political transparency and morality, two values long espoused by Gandhi as the paradigms of existence.

Less than two years into the campaign, however, Team Anna finds itself at an impasse; racked by internal dispute, the movement, embodying India’s biggest struggle, has lost its ability to lead by example. While condemning the lack of a proper anti-graft watchdog, some of Hazare’s advisers were found guilty of diverting funds for personal expenses.

According to Thachil, this is a frequent problem in India. “Corruption calls attention to the unsavory details of the leadership of the movement itself,” he said. In India, many activist movements fall prey to the very vices they seek to combat.

However, the biggest problem for Hazare is his lack of overarching objectives. “It’s easier to mobilize the people when there is a proximal goal to be met, and there’s lately been less focus on what Hazare wants. There’s been confusion 34

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over political ambitions,” Thachil said.

Lately, Hazare’s movement has become focused solely on the Jan Lokpal legislation. And while this may allow for several positive changes later on, one bill cannot possibly eliminate corruption in its entirety. “Popular legislation enabling some stricter code on corruption could be valuable,” said Thachil, “but at the end of the day ... thinking that we can solve it through creating a new body or rule is not systemic enough. The deeper social causes of corruption need to be rooted out for institutional change.”

What Hazare likely needs is the key to Gandhi’s success: a social revolution.

Today, experts argue that this translates to a revival of the independenceera belief that justice can prevail, that the citizens don’t have to desensitize themselves to the ubiquitous offenses around them. It means a movement that uses policy reform largely as a rallying point – like Gandhi’s once did – and grows beyond this to spark a social transformation.

In order for Hazare to live up to the Gandhi legacy preemptively assigned to him, Thachil argued that he must establish greater social objectives. Indeed, the paradox of political reform is that it is most effectively brought about through a predominantly apolitical approach. It is only with a grass-roots social revolution that comprehensive political reform can last.

This is perhaps where Team Anna’s approach has erred; after only a year of attempting to apolitically create a movement against corruption, it flirted with the idea of forming a political party, announcing in August that it would run candidates in the 2014 parliamentary elections. Despite his initial support, Hazare reneged mid-November and announced he would not involve himself in the elections. Given the public support Hazare gained from playing to this idea that he was above politics, both Thachil and Steven Wilkinson, professor of India and South Asian studies, believe Hazare will encounter greater success by remaining apolitical; the public would likely see the formation

of a political party as the anti-corruption movement’s assimilation into the heart of corruption itself.

Today, the Indian people are looking to a slew of individual leaders to drive the anti-corruption movement, which has consequently changed forms countless times. In addition to Hazare, these leaders include Baba Ramdev, a yoga-centric spiritual leader recently turned political advocate, Arvind Kejriwal, a tax-inspector-to-activist-to-politician convert, and several others.

Yet faced with multiple and often simultaneous leaders, the anticorruption movement is riddled with internal conflict. “It’s hard to maintain momentum when there are conflicting interests,” Thachil said. The group solidarity necessary for large-scale political change is consequently weakened.

But ultimately, the power for change is still with the people.

“A lot of efforts that have made large differences in levels of corruption lie outside of legislation,” said Wilkinson. “One study found that a very successful measure has been simply posting lists around the villages of who should be receiving what political position, what land, and etc. Something as small as that has proven to be very effective.”

Even the most compelling grassroots movement, however, needs a leader. Lack of central leadership can be fatal to a movement, as America’s all but petered-out Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated. Anna Hazare initially seemed to hold more promise than most of his colleagues and competitors. But with his dwindling popularity with the people and the emergence of other activists, is he the man for the moment?

And if not, will the real Mohandas Gandhi please stand up?

Amy Chang is a freshman in Trumbull College.

Springtime for Sahara?

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here, exactly, did the Arab Spring – which has both literally and figuratively set the Middle East ablaze – begin? Conventional wisdom has placed its origins at the door of Tunisia, with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor appalled by his country’s corruption. But there may actually be another source for this unrest: Western Sahara, a territory in northern Africa that lies at the very periphery of the Arab world. Ravaged by colonialism, it has long been a blind spot for selfdetermination.

In 2010, activists belonging to the Sahrawi tribe put up protest tents, called jaimas, in Gdeim Izik, a refugee camp in Western Sahara. The tribe was protesting Morocco’s control of the territory, which had been free from foreign domination since Spain granted the region independence in 1975. The protests, though conducted largely outside the gaze of the international community, forced the Moroccan sovereign Mohammed VI to appoint replacement local governors. ***

For experts in African history and geopolitics, the conundrum in Western Sahara is a textbook case.

First, there exist the vestiges of European colonialism. Morocco was tossed around between the Spanish and French before finally gaining independence from the latter in 1956, 19 years before Spain did the same with Western Sahara. However, Morocco soon claimed to have historical and cultural ties with Western Sahara and moved in to conquer the region, with the support of both the French and the Americans.

Second, of course, is the “paradox of plenty” that wracks many African territories. Western Sahara has one of the world’s largest deposits of phosphate – an important fertilizer and an essential mineral used in the production of ceramics, textiles, and paints. This lucrative phosphate reserve has often

By Dhruv Aggarwal

been touted as the reason Morocco has interfered with Western Sahara in the first place. If the region further falls into jeopardy, the entire world’s food supply could be imperiled.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reiterated international resolve to arbitrate the conflict over Western Sahara in a recent press conference. Unfortunately, while much has been said of the issue at the U.N., there has been little progress on ground.

U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2229, passed back in 1966, called for self-determination for inhabitants of what was then called the Spanish Sahara.

Not satisfied, Morocco took the case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The ICJ delivered an advisory opinion on Oct. 16, 1975, acknowledging the historical ties between Morocco and the region. However, it also held that Western Sahara had not been terra nullius before Morocco occupied it – in other words, it had been the property of the indigenous Sahrawis. The ICJ ruling, which conformed to popular sentiment, allowed the indigenous people of the Western Sahara to seek self-determination.

The international community has since called for a referendum so that Western Saharans can participate in a free and fair electoral process to determine their political future. But Morocco has steadfastly refused to even consider extending an independence option in any referendum.

Morocco, however, faces a precarious path forward in the region. The Polisario – an Algerian-backed Sahrawi resistance movement that has been fighting the socalled occupation for more than three decades - currently controls one-third of the region. The U.N. officially regards Western Sahara as a “non-self-governing territory,” and the Polisario as its legitimate representative. ***

According to experts, the Western Saharan conundrum strikes at the root of what American foreign policy has advocated for the last century: selfdetermination. Backed by the U.N., ICJ, and other nongovernmental organizations the world over, the Sahrawis’ desire for self-rule is unlikely to be overlooked in the coming years.

If a referendum is ever actually put up for a vote, its details are nebulous at best. Will independence be included as an option? And, more importantly, what will be done about the region’s hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced people?

The conflict over the Western Sahara will be not be resolved soon. When it finally is, it will resonate beyond the borders of the Saharan desert, bringing new meaning to self-determination and statehood across the globe.

Dhruv Aggarwal is a freshman in Jonathan Edwards College.

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A new face for south america Trouble Returns to the Falkland Islands

By Andrés Bustamante

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n April 2, 2012, marking the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War, Argentina renewed calls for dialogue with Britain over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. After fighting a 10week war in 1982, the debate remains a sore point in the diplomatic relationship of the two nations. As the question of the islands comes to the forefront of international political discourse once more, Argentina now counts on the support of a new actor poised to change the face of Latin American politics: the Union of South American Nations.

Since its formation in 2008, the Union of South American Nations, or UNASUR, as it is known colloquially, has emerged as a powerful player in hemispheric affairs. Modeled after the European Union, UNASUR is an intergovernmental body representing all 12 South American countries. Through the unification of two customs unions, the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), the formation of UNASUR represents a leap forward in a process of regional integration. To this end, in addition to the function of UNASUR’s commissions and committees, the presidents of all member nations meet every year, with their foreign ministers meeting every six months in order to coordinate policy initiatives.

Earlier this year, Argentinian President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner called for renewed talks over the sovereignty of the Falklands before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization. UNASUR immediately released a public declaration of support.

The declaration, signed by all 12 member states, condemned the British military presence on the islands. The then secretary-general of UNASUR, María Emma Mejía Vélez, presented the declaration to the secretary-general of 36

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the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, and urged the United Nations to encourage the dialogue between Argentina and Britain in accordance with past resolutions promoting international negotiations.

Although the declaration may serve as a largely symbolic gesture, UNASUR has also taken concrete action to back up its demands. In an unprecedented move of solidarity, the nations of MERCOSUR agreed to close their ports to any ships flying the flag of the Falklands.

The agreement, which promises to adopt a policy to restrict the entrance of ships from the disputed territories “in conformity with international law and respective domestic legislation,” deals a blow to the economic prospects of the islands.

The Falklands lie about 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and have a combined area smaller than the state of Connecticut. Due to their diminutive size and remote location, they rely heavily on their ability to land ships at South American ports for trade. Without access to the harbors of MERCOSUR nations, the closest available port is Cape Town, South Africa, nearly 4,000 miles away.

In accordance with the policy, ships flying the flags of other countries would still be allowed to travel between MERCOSUR ports and the Falklands.

At the same time, Uruguay took an even stricter stance by restricting all port access to ships from the British navy en route to the islands. The actions of Uruguay, MERCOSUR, and UNASUR in solidarity with Argentina herald a new step in the creation of a unified South American political and economic bloc.

Although the actions of UNASUR in 2012 with relation to the Falklands dispute are unique in that they mark a turning point for South America on

an international stage, the idea of regional integration is by no means a new phenomenon in Latin America. Since the early 1800s, at the founding of independent republics in Latin America, there has been extensive discourse on the virtues and drawbacks of unification.

The most prominent advocate of regional integration, Simón Bolívar, a hero of the movement for liberation from Spanish colonial rule, worked to create a superstate called La Gran Colombia. Although this union, which encompassed the territories of currentday Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, and northern parts of Brazil and Peru, was short-lived, it left a profound mark on the Latin American collective imagination.

Since Bolívar’s attempts to foster inter-American cooperation, further actions have been taken intermittently, most notably through the formation of the Organization of American States.

The First International Conference of American States in 1889 marks the origins of an international organization of the Americas. As stipulated under Chapter VIII on Regional Arrangements of the Charter of the United Nations, the OAS acts as a regional representative body for the Americas. At the same time, with the increasing political presence of UNASUR, one must ask: what role will the OAS play in South America?

Assessing the position of the OAS, Susan Stokes, John S. Saden Professor of political science and director of the Yale Program on Democracy, contends that “it would be hard to point to moments where the OAS has changed the course of history in the region,” but nevertheless, “it’s useful to have.” It has undoubtedly served as a vehicle for coordination, but at least within South America, the OAS no longer holds a monopoly on regional representation

and cooperation.

In fact, UNASUR has taken steps to promote policies that go far beyond the scope of the OAS, ensuring that it plays a more prominent role in interstate dialogue. For example, MERCOSUR led the way with an ambitious proposition to allow free movement of peoples between the six member nations. The plan would grant anyone born in a MERCOSUR country an initial two-year residency in other member nations, and grant amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

Even so, UNASUR’s path to becoming a fully fledged intergovernmental organization is by no means complete. In 2008, ex-secretary general of the Andean Community of Nations, Allan Wagner Tizón, predicted that UNASUR would succeed in achieving a union on par with the European Union by the year 2019. Perhaps this is overly optimistic, and Stokes adds that “2019 sounds really soon” to achieve such a goal.

Nevertheless, UNASUR has demonstrated that it is more than willing to take the lead on regional issues. The role of UNASUR in the Falklands dispute is notable mainly because it so clearly demonstrates the progress towards the creation of a real South American bloc.

In light of the efforts to pressure Britain to engage with Argentina over the Falklands, the British government has announced that it will host a referendum in 2013 to determine the “political status” of the islands.

Through coordinated action, the nations of South America have begun to exert their economic and political clout to defend regional interests. Regardless of the outcome of the territorial dispute, this process has made one point abundantly clear: South America is not willing to stand passively at the sidelines of the global political landscape.

Andres Bustamante is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner addresses the Falklands issue.

Talking Belgium-American Relations with Ambassador Howard Gutman

By Matthew Finney

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ince taking office in 2009, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman has championed a renewed friendship between the two countries following nearly a decade of frosty relations. In a few short years, Ambassador Gutman has rebuilt a key partnership between his “two favorite democracies” that was on the brink of disaster under both countries’ previous administrations.

There was a time not too long ago, back in 2007, when there was talk within the Belgian parliament of closing the Port of Antwerp to American vessels. The parliament also floated the idea of closing Belgian airspace to U.S. carriers. Belgian Cabinet Ministers considered subjecting then U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to criminal prosecution in Belgium on charges related to the war in Iraq.

At the height of the tensions, the U.S. threatened to move NATO headquarters out of Brussels if a solution could

not be reached.

ship with ministers and barons, but you had to rebuild it with the people,” Gutman recounts. This started with daily language lessons – French and Flemish on alternate weekdays – so that the Ambassador could communicate in the vernacular.

It was then that, armed with a basic knowledge of the national languages, he introduced himself to the Belgian people through his campaign of appearances in the national medias. He met with small business owners, community leaders, and private citizens in Belgium to bridge the wide impasse that existed between the two allies in the decade prior to his arrival.

Matthew Finney is a sophomore in Calhoun College.

For the full interview please visit www.thepolitic.org.

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ukraine’s old bag of tricks Parliamentary Elections Highlight Inequalities of Power and Influence

By Charlotte Storch

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n Oct. 28, 2012, millions of Ukrainians went to the polls to elect their new representatives to the country’s parliament — and to deliver their verdict on the performance of the ruling Party of Regions and its leader, President Victor Yanukovich. Definitive results would not be available until some two weeks after the elections — Ukraine uses a complicated hybrid system of apportionment, involving both single-mandate districts and proportional representation from party lists — but, as polls closed and counting began, officials reported a likely win for Yanukovich and the PR. The close second-place finisher was the Fatherland Party, led by the imprisoned former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. Two anti-establishment parties — the former boxer Vitaly Klitschko’s Punch coalition and the nationalist right-wing Svoboda (Freedom) Party — also made substantial gains.

Going into the elections, Yanukovich and the PR benefited from a number of structural advantages. As the party in power, they had access to extensive media resources and to local networks of patronage and influence trading.

They played on regional and linguistic divisions, drafting and promulgating controversial legislation that permits the use of Russian — the language spoken by many of their most ardent supporters — in certain official contexts.

In November 2011, they passed an electoral law that may make it even easier for incumbent and incumbent-affiliated candidates to win and keep seats in Parliament. A delegation of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe expressed concern about the overall fairness of the campaign process. Writing in their “Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions,” observers reported that the elections “were characterized by 38

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the lack of a level playing field, caused primarily by the abuse of administrative resources, lack of transparency of campaign and party financing, and lack of balanced media coverage.”

This flawed process unfolded in an exceptionally polarized political context.

In the autumn of 2011, Ukrainians witnessed an extraordinary legal spectacle: Yulia Tymoshenko, who served as prime minister until her loss to Yanukovich

“[The protesters] believe the regime is playing for keeps and will do everything it can to destroy, perhaps even physically, the opposition.” in the 2010 presidential elections, was arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to seven years in prison for failing to secure advantageous prices for Ukraine during negotiations over the sale of Russian gas to the country’s utilities. (Her trial was widely condemned as a politically motivated power play; she is now receiving treatment at a hospital in Kharkiv for injuries sustained in prison earlier this year.) Tymoshenko’s supporters, incensed at Yanukovich’s harsh treatment of his rival, staged passionate protests in the heart of Kiev and turned out in force to support her party on Election Day.

Tymoshenko herself, having been

banned from politics for seven years as a condition of her sentence, was entirely excluded from the electoral process.

Her trial is significant, according to Alexander J. Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark, because it “persuaded the opposition that compromise with the PR and Yanukovich is impossible. They believe the regime is playing for keeps and will do everything it can to destroy, perhaps even physically, the opposition.” ***

The battle between Tymoshenko and Yanukovich is an old one. In November 2004, Yanukovich was accused of attempting to steal a presidential election that pitted him against Victor Yushchenko, a moderate, pro-European, Ukrainian-speaking ally of Tymoshenko’s. As early vote counts came in, indicating that Yanukovich had eked out a narrow victory, Yushchenko’s supporters flooded Kiev’s Independence Square in the tens of thousands to protest an electoral process widely criticized as unfair and unreliable. A tent city sprang up in the square, as protesters, dressed in orange to show their support for the opposition, demanded the recognition of Yushchenko’s victory.

The peaceful “Orange Revolution” succeeded: Yushchenko was declared the winner, and he asked Tymoshenko, who had addressed protesters on the square on his behalf, to serve as his prime minister. By 2008, their coalition had collapsed amid recriminations and accusations of corruption. The government was condemned as ineffective and divisive. Many of the younger Ukrainians I spoke to at the time, who remembered the Orange Revolution with great pride, told me that they had given up on politics, that the government they had willed into being had failed them.

In 2012, this disaffection fed the

Words come to blows in a session of Parliament in Kiev. The opposition parties protest a bill proposed by the ruling party that would make Russian an official state language along with Ukrainian. anti-establishment vote that boosted Svoboda over the 5-percent threshold for representation in Parliament. The party is blatantly xenophobic and vocally anti-Semitic; the 10 percent of the vote it received after early counting alarmed observers in Ukraine and abroad.

Olga Shumylo-Tapiola, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that many Ukrainians worry not only about Svoboda’s rhetoric, but about the possibility that its empowerment could strengthen the ruling party’s claim to power.

“Many local observers believe that the authorities allowed Svoboda to come through first in local elections, and now in the national elections, to create a more comfortable opposition for the ruling party,” she explained in an email. “With the approaching presidential elections in 2015, the authorities see a possibility of

an old Ukrainian scenario — when the current president would run against a radical, and would most likely win.”

Mikhail Pogrebinsky, director of the Kiev Center of Political Studies and Conflictology, linked Svoboda’s rise to its recent alignment with some of the country’s vested political and media interests.

The party’s vote share, he wrote, has increased due to “the power’s information support, which over the last year secured the presence of Svoboda’s speakers on major political programs and talk shows on TV channels controlled by oligarchs close to power.” In the current context, he added, “simple decisions and aggressive rhetorics appeal to the electorate, who were negatively disposed against power.” ***

After his election in 2010, Yanukovich took steps to bring Ukrainian

policy into closer alignment with Russian economic and security interests. His government’s relationship with the EU — to which Ukrainians once had hopes of acceding — has soured dramatically since Tymoshenko’s trial. The recent election has left him with a slightly reduced majority in Parliament and a set of important choices to make: does his country’s future lie with Europe or with Russia? Is the purpose of government the service of the people or the defense of individual interests?

Finally, and crucially, are elections to be manipulated, their results treated as foregone conclusions, or are they to be honest contests between parties with competing visions of Ukraine’s future?

Charlotte Storch is a sophomore in Pierson College.

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hillary tackles the online World

By Rachel O’Connell

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n January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on Internet freedom and the future of global free expression. On this historic occasion, President Obama’s chief diplomat drew a bold line in the “cybersand” regarding the United States’ stance on online freedom.

Speaking with rhetorical bombast worthy of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, Clinton guaranteed America’s commitment to promote freedom of the Web. Echoing Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain,” she spoke of the spread of restrictive practices and the “new information curtain” descending across much of the world. Again paralleling Kennedy, who five decades prior had called the United Nations “our last best hope,” Clinton held high hopes for this modern technology. The Internet was the “great equalizer” that would spread political freedoms and deliver economic prosperity.

The secretary of state tempered her grand and lofty rhetoric with a warning: “Just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns … modern information networks and the technologies

they support can be harnessed for good or ill.” The Internet enables terrorists and criminals, opening up dark channels of communication and financing. With the promise of this new technology, there are also dangers. Maneuvering between the two has required embracing the Web to promote American ideals abroad while limiting it to protect U.S. interests. As much as the Arab Spring or the war in Afghanistan, this balancing act has come to define Clinton’s term as head of the State Department.

Clinton has internalized the centrality of the Internet in international affairs by organizing the State Department around social media and the Web at large. The department has an active Twitter presence and operates nearly 300 Facebook accounts. Diplomats in the Foreign Service Institute undergo mandatory training in social media. The department has tripled its budget to train individuals in computer use and surveillance evasion and funds technology initiatives aimed at overthrowing oppressive regimes. In Libya, for example, the U.S. restored rebels’ restricted Internet access by facilitating their use

This photo of Hillary Clinton and her blackberry became an internet sensation.

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of fiber-optic cables.

Nikolay Marinov, assistant professor of political science at Yale University, commends the State Department for latching onto a particularly novel and effective means of promoting democracy.

“Movements are really using the Internet much more than we realize they are,” he explains. The Web lets dissidents “call a protest [in a way] that the government cannot really control or interfere with.”

While Clinton has taken advantage of the Internet to promote U.S. interests and political ideals, she has also confronted the resulting diplomatic tensions. Her denouncement of China’s Web policies raised the heat on SinoAmerican relations. She has pushed the Chinese government to investigate the hacking of the search engine Google, and she more broadly criticized its censorship practices.

In response, Chinese officials warned that Clinton was harming already shaky relations. According to Paul Richter and David Pierson of the Los Angeles Times, as a country seeking allies against Iran and North Korea, the U.S. would do well to avoid increasing animosity with its Asian neighbor.

The Internet caused more problems for the U.S. in the autumn of 2010, when the website WikiLeaks released 250,000 sensitive State Department cables previously unavailable to the public. The documents contained blunt, unflattering feedback on world leaders and revealed that the U.S. had sought personal information on U.N. officials. In one embarrassing instance, Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, called President Hamid Karzai “paranoid” and “weak.”

Clinton branded the leaks as “an attack on the international community” that jeopardized carefully crafted partnerships vital to global security. Leading up to the release, she phoned world leaders to warn them of the impending

fallout. She later spoke with these officials during a preplanned trip to Central Asia and the Middle East.

Still, America’s image suffered.

Some countries have invited fewer U.S. diplomats to their meetings, and the diplomats who do attend must leave behind their notebooks. Meanwhile, CNN journalists Jill Dougherty and Elise Labott predict that world leaders will refrain from speaking candidly with the U.S. for fear of their statements being publicized.

The leaks call Clinton’s dedication to Internet access into question.

In her 2010 speech on technology, she neglected to lay down America’s views on the Internet as a forum for publishing government documents. Clinton had lambasted authoritarian censors, so perhaps she felt it would be counterproductive or hypocritical to say how her own government would react if its dirty laundry were aired.

Clinton’s actions in response to the leaks have qualified her previous statements on technology; freedom has

its limits, and the law will punish those who use the facade of open speech to undermine the government. Yet, this view seems eerily similar to that of censors in oppressive regimes. The line between free speech and treason remains blurry, especially when it comes to distinguishing the U.S. administration from authoritarian governments.

Clinton has also had to confront the fallout from Internet scandals involving private citizens. In the autumn of 2012, the anti-Islamic “Muhammad Movie Trailer” incited violent protests from Egypt to Libya. YouTube restricted access to the video in these two countries, although it pointed out that users could still access the content elsewhere.

The U.S. government treated the video as the sort of online hate speech Clinton had decried in her landmark address in 2010. But, as pundits pointed out, the video was a harmless, misguided satire of Islam, hardly worthy of hate speech. Nonetheless, given that the clip aired in a volatile region, where some countries ban defamation of Muham-

mad, the U.S. tailored its response in recognition of Middle Eastern sensitivities. The American embassy in Egypt condemned efforts “to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.”

Hence, Clinton’s love-hate relationship with cyberspace. She has embraced the Internet overwhelmingly, but the Internet has not always returned her warm overtures. The tension has shone light on the subtle delicacies in American foreign policy, leaving unanswered questions for the next secretary of state.

Should the U.S. decry censorship at the cost of losing strategic allies? When does free speech cross the line into treason?

And how involved should the government become in crises caused by private citizens’ online activity? As more people engage in the global online community, the U.S. will undoubtedly continue to grapple with such questions.

Rachel O’Connell is a sophomore in Davenport College.

COME TRY OUR WENZELS!

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Born from the stars The Alawites in Syria

Alawi beliefs “non-Islamic.” Alawites have faced systemic abuse and oppression for centuries. In Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, Alawites have served as slaves and low-paid employees to members of other religious groups.

In the early 20th-century, while Syria was under French colonial rule, Alawites assumed a new role in Syrian society. The country’s majority Sunni population refused to serve in a military controlled by the French, so the Alawites filled in the ranks. By the mid-1950s, the Alawites made up most of the officer corps. In 1970, a powerful Alawite officer in the army, Hafez al-Assad, galvanized support from the military and led a power coup known as the Corrective Revolution of 1970. A bloodless revolution, the coup replaced an unstable dictatorial government with another one just as unsound. Uncomfortable with his religious identity, Assad instituted a secular reign, but made sure to take care of his fellow Alawites. He installed members of his religion in key government positions and improved economic conditions for Alawites throughout the

country.

At last, this formerly subjugated minority had a rallying point and a political voice. Alawites felt a strong religious and cultural connection with their new president, hailing him as “Uncle Assad” in the media. Through policies of political and economic nepotism, Assad solidified his religious base.

Any form of Alawite security shattered in 1982. In the Syrian city of Hama, in February 1982, thousands of Alawite troops ruthlessly decimated over 20,000 citizens in an iron-fisted act of political repression. From that point onwards, the identities of the Assad family and the Syrian Alawite community were inseparable.

During his presidency, Assad took great caution to ensure a seamless regime-Alawite relationship. In many cases, Alawites were actually subject to harsher punishments than the rest of the populace due to Assad’s fear of a breakdown of his political base. In his article “Syrian Alawites and the Politics of Sectarian Insecurity,” Foreign Affairs contributor Leon Goldsmith writes that

“Alawite dissenters like Dalia [a prominent economics professor who was sentenced to seven years in prison for criticizing the regime] seemingly received harsher punishments than non-Alawites, which shows that the regime was highly conscious of a potential ‘lethal’ breakdown of Alawite asabiyya [solidarity].”

Hafez Assad protected himself from Sunni opposition by placing his family members and other Alawites in high government posts. Assad’s son, Bashar, became his chief political adviser. In 2000, Hafez Assad died, and Bashar became the new leader of Syria.

As Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad continued his father’s tradition of imposing harsh military law on the Syrian people.

Unlike his father, however, Bashar has allowed the Alawites – who comprise about 3.5 million of the 21 million people in Syria – liberty to pray in public places and hold high offices. Approximately 70 percent of the government positions and military are controlled by Alawites. This means that a small minority controls the government and military apparatus over a restless population that

By Nitika Khaitan and Derek Soled

B

ashar al-Assad has governed Syria with absolute authority for over a decade, controlling the military and ruling unopposed. On March 15, 2011, the Arab Spring hit Syria. Since the start of the Syrian uprising, the Assad regime has unleashed a ruthless crackdown, leaving over 40,000 Syrians dead in its wake.

Armed thugs roam the streets, government tanks continue to shell major cities, and nearly 500,000 refugees have fled the country. Still, opposition towards Assad continues to grow, and the regime’s days may be running out.

Roy Gutman, the European bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, believes the Assad regime is destined to fall. In an interview with The Politic, he stated, “The highest-ranking military defector from Syria told me recently he estimated six-months life for the regime, because the national economy is in a downward spiral, morale in the military 42

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is low, and recruiting is nearly impossible.” Newsweek correspondent Mike Giglio adds that the Assad regime has already collapsed in most of the country, surviving only in key centers of power.

In contrast, Jay Winter, Charles J. Stiles Professor of History at Yale, thinks that the Assad regime will survive, although possibly in a weaker state. At the center of this uncertainty regarding Syria’s future are the Alawi people.

The Alawi are a small and controversial sect of Shia Islam to which the Assad family belongs. This sect rejects the call to prayer and the pilgrimage to Mecca, two practices most Muslims consider pillars of Islam. Additionally, Alawi contains elements of Zoroastrianism (an originally Iranian religion that incorporates teachings of the Prophet Zoroaster) and Christianity. The foundation of Alawi Islam is that every human was once a star, and thus each person is a part

of nature. Although the Alawites believe in the Islamic God Allah, they also worship the sun and the moon because they see themselves as one with nature.

Consequently, they commemorate the arrival of seasons with celebrations. This includes the birth of Jesus on Christmas and his rebirth on Easter because he was a “man of the seasons.” Though it is not typical in Muslim culture to drink alcohol, Alawites traditionally complement each dinner with wine. Instead of praying in mosques, Alawites pray in family homes or outdoors.

Because Alawites have unique customs and traditions, many Muslims consider this sect a threat to the sanctity and holiness of the Islamic faith. Ibn Taymiyyah, a renowned 14th-century Islamic scholar, even called for a holy war against Alawites, declaring them “greater infidels than Christians, Jews, or idolaters.” Many Shia Muslims deem

The Shabiiha, pro-regime thugs, demonstrate in April 2012.

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is extraordinarily dissatisfied with the current state of affairs.

Like his father, Bashar cultivated the support of his Alawite base through force and fraud. In the wake of sectarian, anti-Alawite violence and rhetoric, Assad propagated the illusion that Alawite security rested in the regime. According to Goldsmith, “Six years into Bashar al-Asad’s rule, it appeared promotion of sectarian insecurity was the primary method for holding Alawite ‘asabiyya’ in place. When scare tactics did not work, the Assad regime did not hesitate to use force.” Giglio notes, “Early opposition to Assad was Alawite. But he cracked down hardest on Alawite dissenters, so they were forced to leave the country or [were] killed early on.”

Unlike previous, anti-Alawite rhetoric, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood sought to undercut Assad’s political base through a conciliatory tone. Members of the Syrian opposition were determined to steer the conflict away from a fragmented, sectarian battle, and have reached out to their Alawite countrymen touting the slogan “Syrians are one.”

Despite calls for reconciliation, the future of Alawite political support and security are in question. The majority of Sunni citizens believe it is unfair that the Alawite minority dominates the Syrian government. Moreover, many Sunnis wrongly associate Assad’s oppressive practices with his religion.

Gutman adds, “Assad has recruited Alawites into the Shabiha and set them loose to loot, rape and murder non-

Alawites. … It’s embittered a lot of Sunnis, no doubt.” The Shabiha, or “ghosts,” explains Giglio, are often clanbased, informal militias of local thugs and career criminals that the regime uses to terrorize citizens. They are not part of the military and have no discipline.

They are usually the first to be targeted by rebels, as they are the most likely to commit ethnic massacres.

The future of the Alawites is shrouded in uncertainty. “It is in the waning days of a rebellion or a regime that people are most likely to resort to desperate measures,” says professor David J. Simon, lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Yale. Should the regime collapse, Alawites might be vulnerable to persecution. Former United States Ambassador Peter Galbraith stated that “the next genocide in the world will likely be against the Alawites in Syria.” Small-scale massacres against the Alawites have already been perpetrated.

If Assad were to fall, factionalism could generate ethnic violence. Giglio reports that no rebel group currently has sufficient money and weapons to take control. If a power vacuum were created, rebel leaders could mobilize support along ethnic lines, “creating an atmosphere of tacit permission to settle scores on both sides,” in the words of professor Simon.

Giglio disagrees, asserting that if Assad falls, rebel leaders could divide Syria and maintain order, averting sectarian conflict. Some opposition leaders, he

points out, are already trying to administer courts and utilities in areas where the regime is absent. Gutman adds, “A lot of Sunnis realize that Syria’s cultural richness is in its mosaic character.” McManus adds, “Syrians prided themselves on their country’s stability and tradition of tolerance. And now, if you look at prominent figures in the FSA [Free Syrian Army, the main armed opposition group] and former SNC [Syrian National Council, opposition coalition], you’ll see a lot of emphasis on intersectarian cooperation, tolerance, and a Syrian nation open to all.”

As professor Winter pointed out, “The Middle East is a region that defies political prediction and has confounded every conceivable political theory.” Even with Alawite-Sunni relations, “it’s not possible to generalize,” says McManus.

“There are Sunnis who support the regime and Alawites who are prominent in the opposition. While some Alawites have benefited immensely from the Assad regime, others have continued to live in abject poverty.” “The problem,” says Giglio, “is no one really knows what will happen.”

Nitika Khaitan is a freshman in Silliman College.

Derek Soled is a freshman in Branford College.

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test your political pulse 1. How did “Black Friday” get its name?

5. What typo did the U.N. accidentally tweet?

8. Ron Paul fell into controversy during this year’s GOP primary when:

a) The stock market crash of 1929 b) Employees skipping work the day after Thanksgiving c) The high levels of crime associated with Thanksgiving in the ’20s d) The overflow of trash cans after Thanksgiving

a) Support for a one-state solution in Palestine b) Support for the Assad regime c) Congratulations to Mitt Romney for winning the election d) Self-congratulations on the U.N.’s success in combating human rights violations

a) Racist articles from a newsletter he published were discovered b) He was caught having an affair with Michelle Bachmann c) He claimed victims of “legitimate rape” cannot get pregnant d) He was caught lying about his war record

a) The choice of the new Chinese president b) Ownership of the uninhabited Senkaku Islands c) Discovery of Chinese use of extensive lead paint in exports to Japan d) The collision of a Chinese and Japanese battleship

a) A unicorn lair from ancient times b) An economically sustainable collective c) Domestic stores of uranium d) The world’s largest supply of untapped coal

7. A New York county unveiled plans to increase revenues by:

10. How many Fridays is the House scheduled to work in 2013?

a) Tripling property taxes b) Doubling parking meter fees c) Selling County Hall d) Charging for snow removal

a) 42 b) 26 c) 21 d) 15

2. After the election, President Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina said the greatest relief of the campaign came when: a) Obama won b) Jon Huntsman dropped out of the race c) Mitt Romney insulted 47 percent of the electorate d) GM reported record profits this summer

3. In a phone call with donors, Mitt Romney said President Obama won reelection by: a) Revitalizing the American economy b) Talking about rape c) Mobilizing his base d) Buying off minority groups

6. In a display of nationalism, Chinese and Japanese protesters took to the streets calling for war in response to:

9. North Korean researchers announced a groundbreaking discovery, finding evidence of:

4. What magazine will print its final ever edition on Dec. 31? a) The New Yorker b) Sports Illustrated c) Newsweek d) Time

Email your answers to eric.stern@yale.edu for a chance to win a free copy of George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis.

Fall 2012 III FALL

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