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Mostrando postagens com marcador Yale University. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Yale University. Mostrar todas as postagens

quarta-feira, 14 de setembro de 2022

Old World Order: The Real Origin of International Relations - Valerie Hansen, Yale University (Foreign Affairs)


Old World Order

The Real Origin of International Relations

Valerie Hansen

 Foreign Affairs, Nova York – Set.-Out. 2022

 

How old is the modern world? Scholars of international relations tend to date the beginning of their field of study to around 500 years ago, when a handful of states in western Europe began to establish colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In their view, the transformations unleashed by European colonialism made the world what it is today. So, too, did the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, two treaties signed by feuding European powers that ended a series of bloody wars. That was the moment international relations truly began, the argument runs. Thanks to this settlement, states for the first time formally agreed to respect their mutual sovereignty over demarcated territories, laying the groundwork for the abiding “Westphalian order” of a world divided into sovereign nation-states.

This rather Eurocentric view of the past still shapes how most international relations scholars see the world. When searching for the history relevant to today’s world events, they rarely look beyond the European world order constructed after 1500. Before then, they reason, politics did not happen on a global scale. And states outside Europe did not adhere to Westphalian principles. As a result, international relations scholars have deemed vast tracts of history largely irrelevant to the understanding of modern politics.

An exclusive focus on a world in which Europeans armed with guns and cannons dominated the various peoples they encountered misses much of what happened outside Europe and the places Europeans colonized. This focus reads history backward from the primacy of the West, as if all that happened before led inevitably to the hegemony of a handful of European and North American states. The rise of non-Western powers, such as China, India, and Japan in recent decades, has revealed how misguided such an approach is.

In Before the West, Ayse Zarakol, a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge, proposes an ingenious way out of this intellectual impasse. Writing in clear, forceful prose, she considers the experience of earlier non-Western empires that sought to create world orders. Doing so makes it possible to present a new history of international relations beyond the Westphalian order. Her study reveals the telling ways that polities in non-Western parts of the world interacted with one another in the past, shaping how modern political leaders understand the international order today.

Zarakol challenges the view that the modern international system began in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, she proposes a provocative alternative, dating the beginning of the modern world order to 1206, when Genghis Khan was acclaimed ruler of all the Eurasian steppe peoples. Zarakol chooses to focus on the “Chinggisid order” he and his various successors brought into being. (Genghis Khan’s name in Mongolian is Chinggis Khan, so scholars use the adjective Chinggisid to describe anything associated with him.)

She presents a stirring and original thesis but overlooks some crucial primary sources about diplomacy in the Mongol empire. Such evidence would sharpen her account of precisely how the Mongols and their successors interacted with diplomats from neighboring states in this fledgling world order.

Zarakol is right to point out the importance of the Chinggisid order as a parallel to the Westphalian order. Starting in the thirteenth century under Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongols created the world’s largest contiguous empire, which extended across the steppe from Hungary in the east to China in the west. Genghis Khan aspired to rule the entire world, and he conducted diplomatic relations with his neighbors on that basis. None of his successors managed to control as large a territory, but taking the Mongols as their model, they would create the Ming, Mughal, Safavid, and Timurid empires respectively in present-day China, India, Iran, and Uzbekistan. Most important for modern international relations today, the peoples now living in the former Mongol empire are fully aware of this past, as exemplified by the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

THE WORLDS GENGHIS MADE

 

Zarakol’s decision to focus on the Mongols allows her to break with Eurocentric conventions of diplomatic and international history in refreshing ways. Interested in Asian polities, she does not assume that their interactions with European actors were more important than their relations with one another. Nor does she make the mistake of assuming that earlier Asian powers were only regional powers. Genghis Khan and his successors all aspired to rule the globe as they knew it. True, they did not succeed (nor, for that matter, did any European power), but they led sprawling armies powered by mounted warriors and established empires that engaged in diplomacy with multiple neighbors and with states far from the Eurasian steppes—a lasting model for subsequent Asian rulers.

The Chinggisid order, as Zarakol describes it, persisted for nearly 500 years (longer than its Westphalian counterpart to date) and had three different phases. The first was from around 1200 to 1400. It comprised both the unified Mongol empire ruled initially by Genghis Khan and, after the empire broke apart in 1260, its four successor states in modern-day China, Iran, Russia and Ukraine, and Central Asia. The rulers of the three western successor states eventually converted to Islam, while Kublai Khan, the ruler of the easternmost quadrant in modern-day China and Mongolia, supported Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians, among other religious figures.

The peaceful coexistence of these quadrants in the fourteenth century marked “the beginning of modern international relations . . . when rational state interest trumped religious affiliation.” Here, Zarakol overstates her claim: religious affiliation was often interwoven with “rational state interests” in polities of that time. A ruler’s choice of which religion, or indeed religions, to patronize largely determined the choice of his political allies.

The second Chinggisid world order comprised the Timurid empire of Timur the Lame (also known as Tamerlane), who lived from 1336 to 1405, and the Ming dynasty in China, which reigned from 1368 to 1644. Timur modeled his state on that of Genghis Khan and even married one of his descendants to strengthen his association with the great khan. In sharp contrast, the rulers of the Ming dynasty in China concentrated all their resources on defeating various Mongol and Turkic adversaries (including Timur’s warriors). Even so, the Ming emperors hoped to establish themselves as successors to the land empire of the Mongols, and they dispatched a fleet of treasure ships carrying 28,000 men as far as East Africa to display their might to the world. As different as their views of the Mongols were, Timur and the early Ming emperors all aspired to rule empires as large and as impressive as Genghis Khan’s.

The third world order Zarakol proposes encompassed the millennial sovereigns, or sahibkiran, of the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the Safavids. With no family ties to the Mongols, these rulers did not explicitly style themselves after Genghis Khan, but all hoped to govern the world. They succeeded in harnessing the power of mounted warriors to conquer large spans of territory in modern-day India, Turkey, and Iran respectively, and their empires all posed serious competition to the European colonial powers. Appropriately, Zarakol ends her book with the weakening of these three dynasties around 1700.

Spanning five centuries, these Chinggisid states shared certain key features. Rather than choosing their ruler by primogeniture, as many European powers did, they selected new rulers through a system of “tanistry,” a term (borrowed from the historical practices of Celtic tribes in the British Isles) that means that the best qualified individual should rule the group after the death of a leader. Although this sounds vaguely democratic, it was anything but. In practice, it meant that anyone seeking power had to prevail in a violent free-for-all that could last years before all the warriors gathered to acclaim a new leader. The Mongols believed that heaven, or the cosmos, selected the ultimate victor in these succession struggles, and in their efforts to understand heaven better, the Chinggisid rulers invited foreign astronomers to visit their courts and financed the construction of massive observatories.

According to Zarakol, the Chinggisid rulers over the centuries shared “a particular vision of the whole world” and created, modified, and reproduced “political, economic, and social institutions.” Historians have paid more attention to the granular reality of this political and institutional history, but Zarakol does a service by bringing it to the attention of scholars of international relations. In so doing, she moves beyond a Eurocentric vision of international relations by studying actors, specifically those in modern-day China, India, Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan, who aspired to create world empires as impressive as that of the Mongols. Getting past narratives that are limited  to a single country, race, or religion, she explains how different rulers in Asia interacted with each other and in the process created a diplomatic system comparable to the Westphalian order.

 

FELT BOOTS AND METAL PASSPORTS

 

Five centuries is a long timespan to cover, and the first part of Before the West bogs down as it recounts the major events of multiple dynasties and explains why they qualify (or do not) as Chinggisid. But rather striking in her survey is the lack of much material about diplomacy, the book’s stated subject.

This omission is surprising because two detailed eyewitness accounts of diplomatic visits to Chinggisid rulers are widely available in English translation. These narratives describe how the Chinggisid diplomatic order actually functioned—in contrast to Zarakol’s often rosy-eyed claims about the efficiency of Mongol rule.

William of Rubruck, a Franciscan monk originally from Belgium, visited the court of Mongke, a grandson of Genghis Khan, near Karakorum in modern-day Mongolia between 1253 and 1255. The French crusader King Louis IX sent William as a missionary—and not an envoy—to the Mongols, but when he arrived at the port of Soldaia on the Black Sea, his Mongol hosts had already heard from local merchants that he was a diplomat. William decided to accept the privileges offered to emissaries rather than try to explain his hope to missionize. Like all Franciscan friars, he wore a brown robe and went barefoot, attire that made his trip across the freezing steppe especially difficult. (Eventually, he gave in and donned fur clothing and felt boots.)

Although much less well known than Marco Polo’s travelogue, which was written some 50 years later, William of Rubruck’s account runs nearly 300 pages in the 1990 translation by Peter Jackson. It offers the most perceptive and the most detailed description of the Mongol empire available today. An attentive observer, William wrote his dispassionate report for a one-person audience, his sponsor, Louis IX. As he explained of the Mongols, “When I came among them I really felt as if I were entering some other world.” His account shows exactly how the Mongols treated the diplomats who entered their realm.

The Mongols granted a metal tablet of authority to all visiting envoys that entitled them to food and fresh horses at the postal stations located every 30 miles or so along the main roads traversing the empire. Those carrying such tablets could also spend the night at the postal stations. The system worked well but not flawlessly, as William discovered when he crossed the Don River and the locals refused him assistance. It took three days for him to obtain a fresh horse. Travel conditions were arduous. Once William began to travel at the pace of a Mongol warrior, he could cover 60 miles each day, changing horses two or three times. Breakfast was either broth or a light grain soup, and there was no lunch; the only solid food travelers received was at dinner.

In July 1253, when he arrived at the court of Batu, a great-grandson of Genghis Khan, William requested official permission to preach among the Mongols (some of whom already followed the teachings of the Church of the East, the branch of Christianity that spread through much of Asia after the fifth century ad.) Batu sent William to the capital at Karakorum, where his father Mongke, the great khan, presided over the Mongol empire. William does not explain Batu’s decision, but presumably Batu, as a regional leader, handled all domestic matters related to his own jurisdiction but had to refer matters of international diplomacy to the great khan. Zarakol overstates the efficiency of Chinggisid rule: only the khan could make decisions on certain topics. If he was not available, no one else could decide for him.

William arrived at Mongke’s winter court on the River Ongin in modern Mongolia; there, the great khan spent the season surrounded by his retinue and his own herds. William made his request to proselytize through an interpreter, but the interpreter and the khan were drunk, and William did not get a definite answer. Initially permitted to stay two months at the court, William remained there for three and spent an additional three at the Mongol capital of Karakorum. He participated in a debate over religion with Muslims, Buddhists, and other Christians—and for once he had a competent interpreter—but the debate was inconclusive, and William left without receiving permission to preach inside Mongol territory.

William’s account captures the reality of Mongol governance. Mongol rulers may have aspired to create a world order, but their empire remained profoundly decentralized despite the efficient postal system that allowed messages and people such as William to cross the empire. The great khan did not administer his empire directly. Instead, he appointed local governors who ruled on their own, largely continuing the policies of whichever authorities had governed before the rise of the Mongols.

About 150 years later, a Spanish diplomat had an experience remarkably similar to William’s. Ruy González de Clavijo visited Timur in Samarkand, a major trading emporium in modern-day Uzbekistan, for two months in 1404. Dispatched by Henry III of Castile, who hoped to form an alliance against the Ottomans, Clavijo and his entourage delivered a letter and gifts to Timur. The wealth of Timur’s capital, where 50,000 of his supporters pitched their tents, impressed Clavijo deeply. Timur hosted the Spaniards generously, offering them ample supplies of meat and wine and inviting them to multiple receptions.

But when Timur fell ill, three of his advisers took over. Unable to exercise any real authority, they urged the Spaniards to return home—which Clavijo resisted because his mission was to obtain a response from Timur for Henry III. Just two months after he had arrived, the unsuccessful Clavijo set off for Spain, only to be caught in the conflicts that broke out among those who aspired to take over Timur’s empire. Clavijo’s experience mirrored William of Rubruck’s: the only person who could decide anything about foreign relations was the khan himself.

Zarakol credits Genghis Khan with “disseminating, through his own example, the norm of the political ruler as the exclusive supreme authority, legitimized by world domination.” She claims that he introduced “an extremely high degree of political centralization . . . subordinating all competing forms of authority to himself.” During military campaigns, the khan had the power to lead, and he rewarded his followers with plunder. But during peacetime, the ruler had much less power. Still, Zarakol’s views do not square with the experience of William of Rubruck and Clavijo. The khan maintained “supreme authority” in the sense that only he could decide on certain matters, such as giving a single Franciscan friar permission to preach or sending a letter to another ruler, but he never enforced policies that integrated the different parts of his empire in a meaningful way.

 

OTHER CENTERS, OTHER WORLDS

 

Scholars can debate whether a given interpretation of the past is accurate, but popular understandings of the past—especially among policymakers—often shape modern international relations. As Zarakol suggests, scholars need to ask of the period she covers, “What logics were operating in this era that are still operating in ours?” Her final chapter explores Eurasianism—a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual movement that identified non-European precedents for world orders spanning both Europe and Asia—and, more specifically, how intellectuals in Japan, Russia, and Turkey understood the long-term impact of Mongol rule on their own societies.

This focus is particularly timely. Since the 1920s, Russian scholars, such as Nikolai Trubetzkoy, George Vernadsky, and Lev Gumilyov, have debated how two centuries of Mongol rule affected modern Russia. They have called for modern leaders to emulate Genghis Khan and to unify Russians so that they can build a new empire that spans Europe and Asia. Such thinking has gained enormous popularity since the collapse of communism, and Putin is regularly compared to Genghis Khan. Putin’s advisers are not concerned with historical accuracy. In making the case for Eurasianism and how it will empower Russia, they invoke traditions that have nothing to do with the Treaty of Westphalia. Zarakol’s point is well taken: the history underlying Eurasianism helps make sense of the events occurring in the territory once ruled by the Mongols.

Vladimir Putin’s drive for a new Eurasian empire seeks to include the heartland of Russian orthodoxy.

Like any genuinely pioneering book, Before the West covers so much new ground that it does not get all the details straight. (In particular, it exaggerates the centralization of the Mongol empire.) Still, Zarakol has provided an important service: she has shown how the history of different parts of the world before 1500 informs the present and the future.

By starting in 1206, however, she risks overlooking the importance of even earlier events. When Prince Vladimir the Great (Putin’s namesake) converted to Eastern orthodoxy in around 988, his capital lay in Kyiv. The Russian president’s drive for a new Eurasian empire seeks to include the heartland of Russian orthodoxy, which formed in the late 900s.

That’s precisely Zarakol’s point: studying societies outside Europe that aspired to create world orders before 1500 reveals much about the modern world. The world orders that earlier rulers outside Europe established remain deeply relevant because the people who live in those regions today recall those past exploits and systems and sometimes try to recreate them. Paying attention to the diplomatic practices that earlier rulers, including the Chinggisids, developed provides a valuable counterbalance to the singular focus on the Westphalian order. In this multipolar world, U.S. leaders spend their days considering the next moves of their counterparts in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Tokyo. And yet they rarely consider the histories of these parts of the world. The time has come for more people to follow Zarakol’s lead and study the past of the many political and economic centers outside Europe.

 

VALERIE HANSEN is Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began.

 

quarta-feira, 16 de março de 2022

NATO Expansion: A Grand Strategy? - John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University (H-Diplo)

First Note:  The essay that follows was originally prepared for the National Defense University symposium, “Strategy and the Formulation of National Security Policy,” Washington, D. C., October 7, 1997.  It was previously published in Survival as John Gaddis, “History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement,” Survival 40:1 (1998): 145-151, DOI: 10.1093/survival/40.1.145.  © 1998 The International Institute for Strategic Studies, reproduced with permission.  It has been slightly revised for publication on H-Diplo and includes a new preface by the author.

H-Diplo Essay 417: Commentary Series on Putin’s War: NATO Expansion: A Grand Strategy? 

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Essay 417

15 March 2022

Commentary Series on Putin’s War: 

NATO Expansion: A Grand Strategy?[1]

https://hdiplo.org/to/E417


Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University

Back Pre-Putin to the post-Putin Future.

I’m teaching a seminar this semester on time travel and have assigned the 1985 film Back to the Future, made well before any of my students were born.  So it seemed somehow appropriate to get an e-mail, on the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, referencing a 1998 article of mine that, as my correspondent put it, “rings true today.”[2]  I’d long since forgotten it and had to ask for a copy, which he kindly provided.

Two days later Diane Labrosse asked me to contribute to an H-Diplo symposium on the Russia-Ukraine war.  I didn’t have time to write anything new, I replied – teaching obligations are always a good excuse – but might she be interested in something old yet possibly relevant?  She said yes, hence what follows.

Prepared originally for a 1997 National Defense University conference, my article preceded, by two years, the surprise elevation of Vladimir V. Putin to the Russian presidency:  Boris Yeltsin, however precariously, still held that position.  It appeared in Survival shortly before the first stage of NATO expansion brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance.  It benefited from James M. Goldgeier’s preliminary research on that subject, but came out too early to draw on his 1999 book, Not Whether But When.  Nor of course could it have anticipated the now definitive scholarship of Mary Sarotte, reflected in her timely new book Not One Inch.[3]  What I’d written in 1997/98 was for these reasons, like Yeltsin himself, precariously positioned.

I saw, upon reacquaintance with it, that I’d accepted the need for a post-Cold War security structure in central and eastern Europe, but that I’d questioned using NATO for that purpose in such a way as to exclude Russia.  That in no way justifies Putin’s invasion of Ukraine:  it’s more like criticizing the post-World War I settlement’s exclusion of Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia without in so doing defending Hitler’s subsequent annexations and aggressions.  Short-sightedness may prepare the way for atrocities, but that’s not the same thing as committing them.  

There is, however, no good reason for clinging to short-sightedness, as if it’s some stuffed security teddy bear, as new opportunities arise.  We’re on the verge of one now, I believe, for as Winston Churchill might have put it, rarely has such ruin been inflicted with such speed upon so many with such incompetence by one little man sitting at the end of a long table.   With luck we’ll have a chance soon, with the help of our allies, of Russia’s victims, and of a post-Putin Russia itself, to frame a new future.  It’s not too soon to begin thinking about what it might look like, and a good place to start might usefully be a reacquaintance with past paths not taken.   

*

**

Some principles of strategy are so basic that when stated they sound like platitudes:  treat former enemies magnanimously; do not take on unnecessary new ones; keep the big picture in view; balance ends and means; avoid emotion and isolation in making decisions; be willing to acknowledge error.  All fairly straightforward, one might think.  Who could object to them?

And yet -- consider the Clinton administration’s single most important foreign policy initiative:  the decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.  I would not want to be thought disrespectful toward a president whose policies I have generally supported.  But it does seem to me that the NATO enlargement decision manages to violate every oneof the strategic principles I have just mentioned.  That really takes some doing.

Perhaps that is why my normally contentious colleagues in the historical profession are in uncharacteristic agreement:  with remarkably few exceptions, they see the NATO expansion as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.  Indeed I can recall no other moment, in my own experience as a practicing historian, at which there was less support, within our community, for an announced policy position.  

A significant gap has opened up between those who make grand strategy and those who reflect upon it:  on this issue at least, official and accumulated wisdom are pointing in very different directions.  I would like to focus here on how this has happened, and that brings me back to my list of basic principles for grand strategy.

First, the magnanimous treatment of defeated adversaries.  There are three great points of reference here – 1815-18, 1918-19, and 1945-48 – and historians are in general accord as to the lessons to be drawn from each of them.  They applaud the settlements of the Napoleonic Wars and of World War II because the victorious allies moved as quickly as possible to bring their vanquished adversaries – France in the first case, Germany and Japan in the second – back into the international system as full participants in postwar security structures.  

Historians tend to criticize (if not condemn) the World War I settlement precisely because it failed to do that for two of the most powerful states in Europe – Germany and Soviet Russia.  The resulting instability, they argue, paved the way for World War II.  It was not for nothing that Churchill, having personally witnessed two of these instances and having studied the third, chose as one of the “morals” of his great history of the Second World War:  “In Victory:  Magnanimity.”

That approach would seem all the more relevant to the fourth great case that now confronts us – the post-Cold War settlement.  The Soviet Union was never an actual military opponent, and the ‘victory’ of the United States finally came, not on the battlefield but as the result of the Kremlin leadership’s change of heart, and then of character, and then ultimately of system.  The use of force, very fortunately for all of us, was not even necessary. 

The process of rehabilitating this adversary – of transforming it from a revisionist or even revolutionary state to one prepared to accept the existing international order – began, thus, even before the Cold War ended.  It was as if the Germans and the Japanese, say at some point in 1943 or 1944, had suddenly laid down their arms, announced that they had seen the light, and begun for themselves the processes of disarmament, democratization, and economic reorganization for which their enemies had been fighting.

It is all the stranger, therefore, that the Clinton administration has chosen to respond to this most fortunate outcome of the Cold War, not by following the successful examples of 1815-18 or 1945-48, but by appearing, at least, to emulate the unfortunate precedent of 1918-19:  one that preserves, and even expands, a security structure left over from a conflict that has now ended, while excluding the former adversary from it.  If the United States could afford to be inclusive in dealing with its actual enemies Germany and Japan after World War II -- just as Napoleon’s conquerors were in dealing with France after 1815 -- then why is it now excluding a country that, throughout the Cold War, remained only a potential adversary?

The answer I have most often heard is that the Russians have no choice but to accept what the US has decided to do -- that having swallowed the loss of their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the eventual breakup of the former Soviet Union itself, their only alternative with respect to the expansion of NATO is to gulp and swallow yet again.  The US, the victor, is free to impose upon them whatever settlement it chooses.

Not only is that view arrogant; it is also short-sighted, for it assumes that defeated adversaries have no choices.  And yet, even the Germans in 1945, as thoroughly vanquished an enemy as there has ever been, had alternatives:  they could have tilted toward either their Eastern or their Western occupiers.  The fact that they chose the West had a lot to do with American and British efforts to make their occupation policies as conciliatory as possible.  The Soviet Union’s failure to understand that need -- its inability to see that wholesale reparations removals and mass rapes were not likely to win it friends among the Germans -- did a good deal to determine the robustness of one postwar Germany, and the brittleness of the other.  The Germans had a choice, and they made it decisively. 

If the US could be that accommodating, in the post-World War II years, to the wishes of a country that had given rise to one of the most loathsome regimes in history but now lacked any further capacity to inflict damage, I find it difficult to understand why the Clinton administration has elected not to accommodate a country that has chosen to democratize itself, but still retains a considerable capacity to do harm.  By insisting on NATO expansion, it seems, the US is violating a second great principle of strategy, which is that one should never take on more enemies than necessary at any given moment

For Russia does indeed have a choice:  it is in the interesting position of being able to tilt one way or another in a strategic triangle that is likely to define the geopolitics of the early twenty-first century.  It can continue to align itself, as it has patiently done so far, with the United States and Western Europe.  Or it can do what the United States did a quarter century ago under the guidance of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:  it can tilt toward China.

Given the complementarity that exists between Russia’s capacity to export military technology and China’s ability to produce marketable consumer goods, there is nothing inherently implausible in this scenario -- indeed there is a good deal of logic in it.  It would not be the first time Russia and China had linked up out of concern, even if misguided, over American aggressiveness:  we know from Soviet and Chinese documents that this was precisely the reason behind the 1950 Sino-Soviet alliance.[4]  And of course classical balance of power theory tells us that this is what we should expect to happen:  that if country A feels itself threatened by country B, it is apt to align itself with country C.  Which in this case is a country less likely even than Russia to see its interests as compatible with those of the United States.

That brings me to a third strategic principle that’s being violated here, which is the need to take a global and not just a regional perspective.  General George C. Marshall coined the term “theateritis,” during World War II, to refer to the tendency, among some of his military commanders, to see only the requirements of their own campaigns, not those of the war as a whole.  I am hardly alone in the view that the Clinton administration has succumbed to a kind of geopolitical theateritis:  as Richard Haass has pointed out, “in his second term, the first post-Cold War president has focused most of his foreign policy efforts on NATO, a child of the Cold War.”[5]  

The temptation to do is certainly understandable.  NATO was the most impressive institutional success of the US during the Cold War, and it’s only natural to want to find some purpose for it in the post-Cold War era.  But does it fit its current needs?  Will US leaders really be able to say in years to come -- can they say now -- that military insecurity in the middle of Europe, the problem NATO was created to solve, was (is) the greatest one that now confronts the United States?  

The sources of insecurity in Europe these days seem, to me, to lie much more in the economic than the military realm:  disparities in living standards divide the continent now, not armies or ideologies.  But the European Union, the obvious instrument for dealing with these difficulties, has come down with its own form of theateritis, the single-minded push to achieve a common currency among its existing members by the end of this decade.  So it’s been left to NATO to try to reintegrate and stabilize Europe as a whole.  This is roughly comparable, I think, to using a monkey wrench to repair a computer.  The results will no doubt be striking, but perhaps not in ways we intend.  

I am fully aware that containing the Russians has never been NATO’s only role.  Its members quickly found it a useful instrument, as well, for restraining the growth of German power (by including the Germans, note, not excluding them); and for ensuring that the Americans themselves remained in Europe and did not revert to their old habits of isolationism.  “Mission creep” was not invented in Mogadishu.

But the likelihood of German aggression today seems about as remote as does that of an American withdrawal from the continent:  neither of these old fears from the late 1940s and early 1950s is even remotely credible now.  If in the effort to ward off these phantoms we should revive another specter from those years that is a real possibility -- a Sino-Russian alignment -- then future generations would have a good case for alleging “theateritis” on the part of our own.

Even if we should grant, though, for the sake of argument, that NATO expansion is, or should be, an urgent priority, there is yet another strategic principle that has been bypassed here, which has to do with providing the means to accomplish selected ends.  We all know the dangers of letting interests outstrip capabilities.  One would surely expect, therefore, that on as important a matter as this -- the designation of three additional countries in the center of Europe as vital to the defense of the United States -- those charged with organizing those defenses would have been consulted, and carefully listened to.

Perhaps I have missed something, but it is hard to find evidence that the Department of Defense, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played any significant role in making this decision.  The fact that US interests have been expanded but their budget has not been suggests that quite clearly.[6]  It is true that the military were very much involved in the now-eclipsed Partnership for Peace.  But that initiative was to have included the Russians in a relationship with NATO as originally constituted.  It did not involve enlarging the alliance in such a way as to advertise the Russians’ exclusion.[7]

One might conclude, from the administration’s failure to match military means with political ends, one of two things.  Either the countries the US is proposing to include within NATO are not in danger, in which case one wonders why it is then necessary to include them.  Or they are in danger, in which case it has yet to prepare adequately to protect them.  Either way, ends and means are misaligned. 

So where did the decision to enlarge NATO come from anyway?  The most authoritative study so far, that of Professor James Goldgeier, of George Washington University, singles out three individuals as having played key roles:  President Clinton himself, who got interested in the issue as the result of an impromptu conversation with Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa at the April, 1993, dedication of the Holocaust Museum in Washington;  former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, who kept the idea alive within the administration through the next year and a half;  and the redoubtable Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, who intervened at several critical moments in the fall of 1994 to inform others within the bureaucracy that NATO expansion was indeed official policy – thereby, or so it appears, making it so.[8]

With almost no public or Congressional debate – and with remarkably little inter-agency consultation – a momentum built up behind something that seemed a good idea at the time to a few critically-placed individuals.  Why, though, did it seem a good idea?  This is where things get murky, for although we can more or less trace the process by which the decision was made, the reasoning of the principal decision-makers – since they chose not to articulate it – remains obscure.

To be sure, the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians badly wanted their role within the “new” Europe recognized, both symbolically and institutionally.  How did it happen, though, that the Americans responded so much more favorably and rapidly than the members of the European Union did?  The most frequent explanation I have heard is that the Clinton administration, recalling the West’s abandonment of these countries, first to German and then Soviet domination during the 1930s and 1940s, felt an emotional obligation to them.[9]  

If so, the history behind that sentiment is pretty shaky.  The United States, after all, had no hand at all in the 1938 Munich agreement, and it could have challenged Soviet control of Eastern Europe after World War II only at the risk of World War III, which would hardly have liberated anybody.[10]  Nor is it clear that the Czechs, the Poles, and the Hungarians suffered more during the past half century than did the people the US proposes to leave out -- the Slovaks, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, and even the Russians themselves -- all of whom were, in one way or another, victims of German and/or Soviet oppression.  

What we are seeing, then, is a kind of selective sentimentalism.  The historic plight of some peoples moves American leaders more than does that of others, despite the fact that they all have compelling claims as victims.  Emotionalism, but of a surprisingly elitist character, appears to be at work here.

One of the strongest lessons that has emerged from the new Soviet documentation on Cold War history has to do with the dangers of making emotionally-based decisions in isolation.  Joseph Stalin’s authorization to North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to invade South Korea, Nikita Khrushchev’s placement of missiles in Cuba, and Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to invade Afghanistan all took place because leaders at the top responded to events emotionally, and then acted without consulting their own subordinate experts.[11]  Those who raised doubts were simply told that the decision had been made, and that it was too late to reconsider.

I do not want to be misunderstood here.  I am not claiming that decision-making in the Clinton administration replicates that within the former Soviet Union.  I am suggesting, though, that on NATO expansion emotions at the top appear to have combined with a disregard for advice coming up from below -- and that given what happened in the Soviet Union when decisions were made in this way, that pattern ought to set off alarm bells in our minds.  

Well, you may be right, people will say, in questioning the way the NATO enlargement decision was made.  Maybe it was not the best model of thoughtful, consultative, strategically-informed decision making.  But the decision’s been made, for better or for worse, and going back on it now -- especially having the Senate refuse to approve it -- would be a disaster far greater in its scope and consequences than any disasters NATO enlargement itself will bring.

This sounds to me rather like the refusal of the Titanic’s captain to cut his ship’s speed when he was informed there were icebergs ahead.  And that brings up a final principle of strategy, which is that consistency is a fine idea most of the time, but there are moments when it’s just plain irresponsible.

Only the historians will be able to say with any assurance whether this is one of them.  Their current mood, though, ought not to give the administration much comfort.  So is there anything that might yet be done to avoid the damage so many of us see lying ahead if the United States holds to its present course? 

It is not unknown for great nations -- even the United States -- to acknowledge mistakes publicly and change their policies.  President Ronald Reagan did it in Lebanon:  in 1983 that country’s security was one of the United States’ vital interests; in 1984 (after over 200 Marines had been killed there) it was no longer so.  The US certainly reversed course in Vietnam, although only after years of resisting that possibility.  Surely the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China was an acknowledgement that the long-time policy of isolating that country had been misguided.  John Foster Dulles once threatened an “agonizing reappraisal” of the United States’ whole policy toward Europe if the French did not approve the European Defense Community; they did not approve, Dulles did not reappraise, and the skies did not fall.  And, lest we forget, America’s entire containment strategy after World War II constituted an implicit acknowledgement of error in having believed, as US leaders had during the war, that the Soviet Union under Stalin could be a lasting peacetime ally.  Mistakes happen all the time, and governments usually find ways to survive them. 

In the case of NATO enlargement, though, an acknowledgement of error -- a reversal of course -- is not really necessary:  US leaders could resolve most of the problems their policy of selective enlargement has caused by acting upon the implied premises of their own argument, and enlarging the enlargement process.  They could say that NATO expansion is such a good idea that they think it unfair just to apply the benefits to the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians -- that it will open the alliance to the other East Europeans, and ultimately to the Russians themselves.

But that would totally change NATO’s character, its defenders will protest.  Precisely so -- NATO ought to change to meet the conditions of the new world in which it exists, otherwise it will wind up looking like the British royal family.  But there is no precedent for such a dramatic move, NATO’s advocates will insist.  Precisely not.  Including Russia now could hardly be as dramatic a step as it was to bring France back into the Concert of Europe as early as 1818, or to include Germany as a recipient of Marshall Plan aid as early as 1947.  But Russia is not yet a predictable, democratic state, NATO’s supporters will complain.  Precisely beside the point -- for neither were Greece and Turkey when they were admitted as NATO members, quite uncontroversially, way back in 1952.

There is here illustrated one more lesson from the past, which is that what people think of as radical innovations often actually exist as historical precedents.  People tend to be shocked in rough proportion to the amount of history they have managed to forget.  

George F. Kennan, a man who remembers a great deal of history, was one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of NATO expansion, just as he was of the Vietnam War.  In 1966, commenting on the Johnson administration’s claim that any reversal of course in Southeast Asia would fatally compromise American credibility, Kennan reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives.”[12]

Perhaps, as Kennan’s biographer, I am slightly biased.  But he was obviously right then.  I think he is right now.

 

John Lewis Gaddis is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, where he teaches courses on the Cold War, grand strategy, biography, and historical methods.  His most recent books include The Landscape of History:  How Historians Map the Past (2002), Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004), The Cold War:  A New History (2005), George F. Kennan:  An American Life (2011), and On Grand Strategy (2018).  Professor Gaddis co-founded and was the first director of Yale's Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.  He is also a recipient of two Yale undergraduate teaching awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for biography.


Notes

[1] The essay that follows was originally prepared for the National Defense University symposium, “Strategy and the Formulation of National Security Policy,” Washington, D. C., October 7, 1997.  It was previously published in Survival as John Gaddis, “History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement,” Survival 40:1 (1998): 145-151, DOI: 10.1093/survival/40.1.145.  © 1998 The International Institute for Strategic Studies, reproduced with permission.  It has been slightly revised for publication on H-Diplo and includes a new preface by the author.

[2] Philip Hardy to John Gaddis February 25, 2022. 

[3] James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether But When:  The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington: Brookings, 1999); Mary E. Sarotte, Not One Inch:  America, Russia, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 

[4] See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know:  Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 68-70.

[5] Richard N. Haass, “Fatal Distraction:  Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, #108 (Fall, 1997), 119. 

[6] See Paul Kennedy, “Let’s See the Pentagon’s Plan for Defending Poland,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1977. 

[7] Vojtech Mastny, Reassuring NATO:  Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Western Alliance (Oslo: Institutt for Forsvarsstudier, 1997), 61.

[8] James M. Goldgeier, “U.S. Security Policy Toward the New Europe:  How the Decision to Expand NATO Was Made,” paper delivered at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August, 1997. 

[9] See, for example, Sherle R. Schwenninger, “The Case against NATO Enlargement:  Clinton’s Fateful Gamble,” The Nation, CCLXV (October 20, 1997), 26.  

[10] Michael Mandelbaum, The Dawn of Peace in Europe (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996), 55-56. 

[11] Gaddis, We Now Know, 290-91; also, for Afghanistan, Odd Arne Westad, “The Road to Kabul:  Soviet Policy on Afghanistan, 1978-1979,” in Westad, ed., The Fall of Détente:  Soviet-American Relations during the Carter Years (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), 132-33. 

[12] Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings.  Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966 -- Vietnam(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1966), 335-36.

quinta-feira, 2 de julho de 2020

Um bônus do século XVII que ainda paga juros - Yale University

Collectible coins and banknotes

University Discovered 1648 Bond that Still Pays Interest – And they Collected!

 Reginald Martyr
Collectible coins and banknotes
Experts at Yale University discovered a Dutch water bond from 1648 that amazingly still pays interest. At some point or another, people usually hear about some of the outrageous bond agreements to which persons have been subjected over the years. That said, hearing about a bond which was originally issued in the 17th century yet is still accruing interest 300 years later doesn’t happen often: in fact, some might argue that it’s impossible. Well, that’s not quite the case – it would seem that there isn’t just one, but a few bonds issued in the 1600s which have stood the test of time and are still very much relevant to the respective payers’ pockets.
YaleNews revealed that a water bond dating as far back as 1648 still contractually binds the obligated parties to pay annual interest today. Upon its discovery and subsequent analysis of its terms and agreements, reports indicate that at the time of its execution, the bond operated as a perpetual bond.
The original clauses of the agreement bound the payer to “5 percent interest in perpetuity,” a rate which was later lowered to 3.5 percent and then 2.5 percent respectively in the 1600s. At the time, physical notations of interest payments were inscribed on the bond as they were made as a means of recording them. Being of Dutch-origin and made out of goatskin, when the bond was issued, it was apparently made out to Mr. Niclaes de Meijer, a man who was ordered to pay the “sum of 1000 Carolus Guilders of 20 Stuivers a piece.”
Yale Dutch water bond
This bond was issued in 1648 by a Dutch water board to finance improvements to a local dike system. A perpetual bond, it continues to pay interest. Photo courtesy of Yale News.
The manuscript was filed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library in 2003 after Yale managed to come into possession of it. After Timothy Young, the curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the library, conferred with a Dutch water authority named Stichtse Rijnlanden, not only did he discover that this bond was only one of five ever found, all five of them were administered by the Hoogheemraadschap Lekdijk Bovendams.
Beinecke rare book library
Beinecke rare book library at Yale. Photo by Michael Kastelic CC by SA-4.0
This entity was actually a water board which comprised a combination of highly-esteemed citizens and landowners. Apart from collecting the interest payments, the board oversaw a number of man-made constructions, including canals and dikes. Based on YaleNews’ report, the money collected served to compensate workers who had just completed a project in which they had to construct a formation of piers located close to a bend in one of the rivers. The project was supposed to help prevent erosion by assisting the river in properly regulating its flow.
In 2015, when Timothy Young returned from meeting with the relevant Dutch authority, he also brought back with him 12 years of back interest which was owed on the bond, a total which amounted to approximately 136.20 euros. Prior to 2015, the last time that the bond payments were collected was in 2003 when Yale first acquired it. At that time, as the reports states, “Geert Rouwenhorst, professor of corporate finance and deputy director of the International Center for Finance, took the bond back to the Netherlands to collect 26 years of back interest.”
Related Video: The modern day revival of the Knights Templar
https://youtu.be/gb5U053HP6g
Rouwenhorst was quite surprised that such a bond hadn’t been deemed null and void yet, going on to say “Yale’s bond is an extremely early example of a security that was issued without maturity and still pays interest. One ought to be astounded that such a thing exists.”
That said, when the bond initially came into Yale’s possession, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library did experience some difficulty in categorizing it considering that the bond was still very much valid.
According to Young, in order for the bond to remain valid, “we need to take it to the issuing authority in the Netherlands every couple of decades to collect the interest, but unless we’re loaning an item to another institution, we don’t allow collection material to leave the library.” For this reason, authorities were a bit divided as to how to best proceed with the filing of the document.
However, later on, something happened which enabled the relevant parties to come to an agreement. In 1944, the vellum no longer had any more space where the new interest payments could have been recorded. As a result, authorities elected to add a paper addendum which served to record future payments, a paper which they allowed to be sent to the Netherlands in order to retrieve and record the necessary payments.
At present, the bond is considered a bearer bond as anyone who shows the attached addendum to the authority in charge of issuing the payment is allowed to accept it.

sábado, 16 de setembro de 2017

Yale Climate Conference, 18-19 September (video live)


The Kerry Initiative will host the Yale Climate Conference on Monday, September 18, and Tuesday, September 19, 2017.

The conference will feature five sessions with key business, political and diplomatic leaders on critical topics including the future of energy; the role of the private sector; state, city and international efforts; bipartisan U.S. leadership; and citizen engagement and activism.

Members of the Yale community who were unable to get tickets are welcome to wait in the stand-by line at each session in case open seats become available. Plan to arrive at least 30 minutes before the session begins.

Many of the sessions will also be live-streamed. Go to yaleclimateconference.yale.edu for links to each session.


Speakers and sessions topics include:

Session 1: The Future of Energy
  • Ernie Moniz, Former U.S. Secretary of Energy
  • Jonathan Pershing, Former U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy for Climate Change
  • Tony Earley, Former CEO and Current Executive Chair of the Board, PG&E Corporation
  • Mark Boling, CEO, 2CNRG
  • Heather Zichal, Airbnb, Former Climate and Energy Advisor to President Obama

Session 2: The Role of the Private Sector
  • Hank Paulson, Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury
  • Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman of the Board of General Electric
  • Anne Finucane, Vice Chairman of Bank of America

Session 3: State, City and International Efforts
  • Jerry Brown, Governor of the State of California
  • Jay Inslee, Governor of the State of Washington
  • Jim Kim, President of the World Bank
  • Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris

Session 4: Bipartisan U.S. Leadership
James Baker, Former U.S. Secretary of State
Featuring video messages from:
  • Lindsey Graham, U.S. Senator of South Carolina
  • John McCain, U.S. Senator of Arizona (tbc)

Closing Plenary: Citizen Engagement & Activism
Leonardo DiCaprio, United Nations Messenger of Peace for Climate
 

Learn more about the speakers and other details on the conference website:
yaleclimateconference.yale.edu