Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
Eu vi este livro pela primeira vez na Espanha, muitos anos atrás. Li um pouco na livraria, gostei muito – a gente sempre gosta dos livros e dos autores que "concordam" com o que a gente pensa, isso é natural, eles nos confortam nas nossas "certezas" tão incertas –, mas não comprei, porque já tinha mais onde colocar tantos livros, e também porque estava em viagem, já tendo esgotado meu limite, cubagem e peso de literatura pesada. Aliás, quando eu era estudante e sempre morava no último andar (a pé, pelas escadas) das mansardas, eu amaldiçoava um pouco as caixas de livros que tinha se subir escada acima, e ainda arrumar nas estantes improvisadas, com tijolos e tábuas. Mas sempre me arrependi de não ter comprado este livro, que continuaria confortando minhas ideias, contra as pátrias (TODAS, inclusive a nossa). Agora vejo que o autor fez uma nova edição, eliminou três capítulos e acrescentou oito. Hora de pensar em comprar esta nova, ou uma novíssima edição, mas não ao preço brasileiro, que é um roubo. O problema é saber onde colocar: já tem livro esparramando pelo chão, como aquela batatinha da canção infantil. Vamos lá... Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Contra Las Patrias (Espanhol) Capa comum – 1 janeiro 2002
Publicamos por primera vez este libro de Fernando Savater en 1984. Han pasado doce años. Releyéndolo hace poco, nos dimos cuenta de que ―para desgracia nuestra, pero para mayor mérito de Savater― todo lo que él expresaba en Contra las patrias seguía vigente, inmune al paso del tiempo por la indiscutible coherencia de su pensamiento, pero también por la triste evidencia de que, en ciertos aspectos, poco hemos hecho para cambiarlos.
Contra las patrias tuvo entonces el aire de un panfleto. Curiosamente, hoy, ampliado y revisado por su autor, quien además le añade un prólogo, vuelve a nosotros como si fuera nuevo, como una reflexión ininterrumpida, de una impecable coherencia, que estimula nuestra memoria, nos arranca de la indiferencia y nos sacude la indolencia en la que suele sumergirnos el dulce encanto del olvido. De los veintidós textos de la primera edición, Savater hoy tan sólo elimina tres y los sustituye por ocho. Acaso eso ya diga mucho acerca de esa persistencia en el tiempo de sus preocupaciones, de su pensamiento.
Contra las patrias, es decir, contra la colectivización de la violencia, contra las unanimidades forzosas, contra las identidades nacionales prefabricadas, contra la utilización de la peculiaridad cultural como fundamento estatalista, contra la exaltación del ombligo propio por medio del denigramiento de lo ajeno, contra los símbolos sanguinarios: banderas, himnos, mártires, y contra el ridículo entusiasmo de las fronteras.
Contra las patrias, o sea, a favor de los hombres, diferentes e iguales, a favor de la tradición cultural que cada creador reinterpreta a su modo y manera, a favor de la libertad de las lenguas, a favor del exilio y del desarraigo, a favor del federalismo, a favor del antimilitarismo y del antipatrioterismo, y sobre todo a favor del cosmopolitismo, que fue y sigue siendo la verdadera gran idea progresista desde que el viejo Demócrito afirmara en Grecia que «la patria del sabio es el mundo entero».
En este conjunto de ensayos se habla especialmente del problema de las nacionalidades y los nacionalismos en España, empezando por el primero y fundacional, que es el propio nacionalismo español. Es lógico, pues, que el tema de la violencia ocupe un lugar primordial en estas reflexiones tan comprometidas.
Sobre o Autor
Fernando Savater, escritor, Profesor de Filosofía durante más de treinta años, ha escrito más de cincuenta obras, entre ensayos filosóficos, políticos y literarios, narraciones y teatro. Ha sido investido con varios doctorados honoris causa otorgados por universidades de España, Europa y América, y ha recibido diversas condecoraciones, como la Orden del Mérito Constitucional de España y la Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca, entre otras. Distinguido como Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres por el Gobierno de Francia, ha formado parte de varios movimientos cívicos de lucha contra la violencia terrorista en el País Vasco. Ha sido galardonado con el Premio per la Cultura Mediterranea en 2014 y el Premio Internacional Eulalio Ferrer en 2015. Algunos de sus libros han sido traducidos a más de veinte idiomas.
We all know the name of Albert Einstein, the German-born physicist who gave us his famous theory of relativity, but what else do you know about the scientist who was voted Time magazine’s Man of the Century? Here are some facts you may not have known.
#1 — Einstein and His Violin Einstein’s mother, who was a talented pianist, got him playing the violin at an early age, but Einstein hated it. It wasn’t until Einstein was 13-years old when he discovered he actually liked it after listening to Mozart. Einstein continued to play the violin for the rest of his life and even used it to help himself think over problems.
#2 — Einstein and School Einstein took an entrance exam to gain admittance to the Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1895, and he was only 16 at the time when the other applicants were 18. While he did well in the math and physics parts of the test, he did poorly in the non-science areas, especially French. Einstein failed the test because of it and had to continue at his current school. He passed the entry exam after he took the test a second time.
#3 — Einstein’s Miracle Year Einstein had a banner year in 1905. As he was working for a Swiss patent office, since he couldn’t get a job in academics at the time, he wrote four papers that turned the physics world upside down.
One paper explained how light could be particles. The second proved that atoms and molecules really did exist. The third was his special theory of relativity that explained that everything moves relative to everything else, and that time was not absolute. And in the fourth paper, he explained that energy and mass were related and not separate, as previously thought.
This is where his famous equation, E=mc², illustrated this thought, with E being kinetic energy, m being mass, and c being the constant speed of light squared. In 1915 he pulled everything together and produced his general theory of relativity after ten years of work.
#4 — Einstein’s Nobel Prize Einstein won a Nobel Prize in 1921, but it wasn’t for his general theory of relativity. It was for his explanation of the photoelectric effect where Einstein theorized that light is composed of tiny particles called quanta. It was the first paper he had published in his magical year of 1905.
#5 — Einstein’s Marriage While in Switzerland attending school at Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein fell for another student named Mileva Maric, the only woman in one of his physics classes. He didn’t have the money at the time to marry her, and in addition to that, his parents were firmly against his choice. The pair had an illegitimate daughter named Lieserl in 1902 after a trip to Lake Como in Italy, but there was little known about his first child since both Einstein and Maric kept it a secret.
Scholars only discovered her existence recently. It’s believed she might have died at an early age from scarlet fever or some other illness, or she may have been given up for adoption. No one knows for sure. Einstein finally married Maric in 1903 after getting together enough money to do so, and the couple had two more children; Hans Albert and Eduard.
#6 — Einstein’s Divorce Things were tumultuous in Einstein’s love life. Einstein wanted to divorce Maric in 1914 and offered her a deal if she would agree. He offered her the prize money from the Nobel Prize he was confident he would win from one of his 1905 papers. She agreed after thinking it over for a time, and the couple eventually divorced in 1919. Maric had to wait until 1922 for Einstein to make good on his promise when he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
#7 — Einstein’s Second Marriage After divorcing Maric, Einstein had a relationship with another woman named Elsa Loewanthal, whom he married in 1919. The strange part was, Loewanthal was his cousin. Elsa Loewanthal was related to Einstein on both sides of his family. Einstein’s father and Loewanthal’s father were cousins, and Einstein’s mother and Loewanthal’s mother were sisters. They had known each other since they were young, but the relationship didn’t begin until Loewanthal had married and then divorced her husband. Loweanthal passed away in 1936, and Einstein never married again.
#8 — Einstein Stays Put Before the Nazis took power before the start of World War II, Einstein emigrated from Germany. He found a job in Princeton, New Jersey, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He never returned to Germany.
#9 — Einstein and the Bomb Even though his famous equation, E=mc2, was essential in developing the atomic bomb, Einstein didn’t work on the Manhattan Project (the project that developed the atomic bomb in World War II). He didn’t receive security clearance by the U.S. Army based on his pacifist views. He did, however, write to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the development of the atomic bomb because he didn’t want Germany to be first to succeed in developing it.
#10 — Einstein’s Look Einstein had a trademark look that he was known for, and it was relatively sloppy in his later years. He had uncombed and wild hair and never wore socks because they would get holes in them, opting for sandals much of the time. He preferred a gray sweatshirt as opposed to wearing a suit or tie, which he didn’t care for.
#11 — Einstein and Sailing Einstein loved to sail, but he wasn’t particularly apt at it. While spending his summers on Long Island in New York, people recalled fishing Einstein from the water or helping him get his boat back upright after he capsized it.
Einstein knew he wasn’t that great at sailing either, and named his boat, Tinef, which in Yiddish means “worthless.” In true Einstein fashion, he never learned to swim but kept sailing for most of his life.
#12 — Einstein and Smoking Einstein really enjoyed smoking. He was often seen around Princeton as he puffed away on his briar pipe. He even accepted a life membership in the Montreal Pipe Smokers Club in 1950.
#13 — Einstein’s Offer After Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel, died in 1952, Einstein was offered the position to be the second president of Israel. He was 73 at the time and declined, saying he didn’t have the “natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people.”
#14 — Einstein’s Invention Einstein invented a refrigerator with a former student which ran on compressed gases and did not require electricity to operate. It was patented in 1930 but was never produced because of the emergence of new technology in refrigeration, specifically freon systems. Einstein helped create the refrigerator because he had read a story about how a Berlin family had been killed because their sulfur dioxide refrigerator (the refrigerant used at the time) poisoned them.
#15 — Einstein’s Brain Albert Einstein died in 1955 because of an aortic aneurysm, and per his wishes, his body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered. But before the cremation, a pathologist who was on-call at Princeton Hospital after his death named Thomas Harvey conducted an autopsy where he removed Einstein’s brain. Harvey didn’t put Einstein’s brain back, and instead, kept it to study. He never had permission to keep the brain.
Harvey convinced Einstein’s son, Hans Albert, to let him keep it. He tentatively agreed as long as the brain was used for scientific study, but later that agreement became disputed. Harvey quickly lost his job at Princeton and eventually lost his medical license because he refused to give back Einstein’s brain.
But things didn’t stop there. Harvey removed Einstein’s eyeballs and gave them to Henry Adams, Einstein’s eye doctor. They ended up in a safe deposit box in New York City, where they sit to this day. Harvey then had the brain cut by a technician into more than 200 pieces. Many of the slices were properly saved, but others ended up being put in jars that ended up in his basement.
Some of the pieces were sent to other researchers around the country for study, but Harvey never published any results from a study of Einstein’s brain. Finally, in 1998, he returned the brain to the pathologist at Princeton Hospital.
In 2012, two slides of Einstein’s brain that had been properly saved by Harvey made a trip across the Atlantic Ocean and went on display at the Wellcome Collection museum in London. They were on loan from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, where they had been donated by a researcher who had received parts of the brain years before from Harvey. Who knows what Einstein would have thought about all of this.
How much does America’s missing diplomatic leadership matter?
Donald Trump dismisses it as the “Deep State Department”. Yet America needs it more than ever
The Economist, August 11 2020
THE AMERICAN embassy escaped the blast in Beirut’s port unscathed. Many Western countries either have missions in the city centre or diplomats who live in the area. The wife of the Dutch ambassador was killed, as was a German diplomat. But America’s embassy sits in the mountain village of Awkar, five miles (8km) from the port. Security measures are onerous, a hangover from the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut in 1983, which killed 63 people. It took a week before the ambassador, Dorothy Shea, a career diplomat, toured the port. The embassy has been short-staffed for much of the year because of covid-19. Even on social media it has been far quieter than other foreign powers. The ambassador has kept a low profile.
The low visibility is a small sign of a wider malaise in American diplomacy. The country’s foreign service is damaged and demoralised. Last month Bob Menendez, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released a report warning that the State Department was “at risk of catastrophic failure”. The report is a catalogue of the damage done to America’s oldest federal agency, founded in 1789. It describes a department haemorrhaging talent and influence. The litany of woes is summed up in a leaked recording of a briefing on Washington last November by Colombia’s ambassador there, Francisco Santos, to his incoming foreign minister: “The US State Department, which used to be important, is destroyed, it doesn’t exist.”
Hand-wringing over the state of State is hardly new. More than two dozen government agencies now have people overseas, eroding the State Department’s primacy. Nowadays, the boss of a global American company may have a one-on-one with a head of state without going through the embassy, notes Stuart Holliday of Meridian, a centre for diplomacy in Washington, DC: “There’s been a recognition that the diplomatic channel is not the channel through which all American engagement happens.” In 2015, well before Donald Trump became president, the American Academy of Diplomacy, a club of senior ex-diplomats, warned that the country’s foreign service was in trouble because of its increasing politicisation, poor professional education and outdated career structure.
Mr Trump has tried to cut the department’s budget, most recently by 34%. Congress ignored him. But deep cuts came in the mid-1990s after the end of the cold war, when America thought it could scale back diplomacy—resulting in problems when the government found itself needing to deploy extra diplomats to Afghanistan and Iraq. More belt-tightening followed under the Obama administration. In 2018 Barbara Stephenson, then head of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), which represents the country’s diplomats, pointed out that America’s spending on “core diplomatic capability” (excluding outlays on security) declined by nearly a quarter in real terms between 2008 and 2016.
So the State Department was already wounded. But “it’s not an exaggeration to say this is the most difficult time in a generation,” says Eric Rubin, AFSA’s current president. Nicholas Burns, an ex-ambassador to NATO now running a project on the future of American diplomacy at Harvard (the project is non-partisan but Mr Burns is an adviser to Joe Biden), believes it’s time to “ring the village bell”. William Burns, another former top diplomat, who heads the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank in Washington, DC, decries the “demolition” of the State Department and argues that the damage is “even more severe than we imagine”.
Three things have created a sense of urgency. One is covid-19, the kind of crisis where America is expected to take a lead, but has faltered. In future more global issues—from climate change to cyber-security—will need managing. “Diplomacy is becoming far more important globally now than it has been before,” argues Harvard’s Mr Burns. But the diplomatic landscape is more contested. “We’re going to have to fight for influence and for our priorities in a way that maybe we didn’t have to in the past,” says Mr Rubin.
The second worry is the rise of China. Last year China overtook America as the country with the most embassies and consulates around the world, says a Global Diplomacy Index compiled by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank (see chart 1). Mr Trump has sought to slash America’s spending on diplomacy; Xi Jinping doubled China’s between 2011 and 2018.
China’s advances are evident at the United Nations, where Chinese nationals now head four of 15 UN specialised agencies, compared with America’s one. America has started to push back. It stopped China claiming the leadership of a fifth agency, the World Intellectual Property Organisation—the job went to a candidate from Singapore, a country, as Mr Pompeo said last month, that “actually gave a darn about intellectual-property rights”. But as America withdraws from bodies such as the World Health Organisation it gives China a chance to exert yet more influence.
American carnage
Hence the third reason for alarm over the state of American diplomacy: its undermining by its own government. A senior US diplomat says the White House is “blatantly hostile” to the foreign service. Mr Trump publicly refers to “the Deep State Department”, implying its people are out to sabotage him. “Diplomacy is simply not valued,” says Roberta Jacobson, who resigned as American ambassador to Mexico in 2018. “The only form of foreign policy that this administration seems to understand is one of threats.” Mr Trump’s threats have sometimes targeted his own diplomats—including Marie Yovanovitch, who was his ambassador to Ukraine before being abruptly recalled. In the phone call in July 2019 that led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives, Mr Trump told Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that she was “bad news” and that “She’s going to go through some things.”
In appointing ambassadors Mr Trump has favoured political picks over career diplomats to a degree that is unprecedented in modern times. America has a long tradition of deploying political emissaries. They can have the authority of a direct line to the president. Many also have the financial means to entertain in some style. Don Beyer, a businessman appointed by Barack Obama as ambassador to Switzerland, now a congressman for Virginia, says he spent about $1m of his own money on entertainment over four years. The budget allocated by Congress was a fraction of what he spent (“I was just blessed that Obama didn’t send me to Paris or London, which I could never have afforded,” he quips).
Typically, between a quarter and a third of a president’s ambassadors have been political appointees, often hefty campaign donors. In Mr Trump’s case the figure is 43%. The quality of those picks can be as unsettling for the career diplomats who serve under them as the quantity. Mr Trump’s ambassador to Iceland has been through seven deputy mission chiefs in little over a year. His man in London, Woody Johnson, removed his deputy whose mistake seems to have been to have included a favourable anecdote about Mr Obama in a speech at an English university. At Mr Trump’s behest, Mr Johnson reportedly tried, unsuccessfully, in 2018, to help push the British Open golf tournament towards the Trump Turnberry course in Scotland (Mr Trump has denied making the request).
Although ambassadors are the most visible sign of the politicisation of diplomacy, appointments back home are at least as significant. “The senior jobs in Washington is where policies are made,” says Ronald Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. “There you have a wiping out of the career service.” Between 1975 and 2014, the share of career diplomats in the 50 or so jobs at assistant-secretary level and above shrank from about 60% to 30%; now, says Mr Neumann, it is down to 8%. No career foreign-service professional currently occupies a Senate-confirmed assistant-secretary post; according to AFSA, that has never happened before. Talented diplomats leave because of the lack of senior jobs available to them (America’s foreign service, like its army, operates an “up or out” system).
These days it is also hard to spot any senior foreign-service officers working in the White House. Mr Burns of Harvard spent five years seconded to the White House under presidents George Bush senior and Bill Clinton. “Those opportunities are not happening,” he says, “so the State Department has been sidelined.”
Many posts that require Senate confirmation have remained unfilled for long periods, creating a sense of drift and neglect. The position of assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasian affairs has been without a nominee since February last year. The Trump administration has so far had no confirmed nomination for assistant secretary of South and Central Asian affairs. Hiring for Africa roles has been painfully slow.
All this has contributed to a hollowing out of expertise that has been particularly severe thanks to a hiring freeze introduced by Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil boss whose brief tenure as Mr Trump’s first secretary of state was a disaster. “Tillerson did more damage to the State Department than I could have imagined was possible in one year, particularly in the loss of experienced senior people,” says Mr Neumann.
Mr Pompeo ended the hiring freeze and has sought to bring back “swagger” to the department. He has taken a lead in belligerent policies towards Iran and, especially, China. He has restored a degree of vigour at the top. But he has not soothed critics.
They worry that he asked Mr Trump to fire his department’s inspector-general, who was investigating complaints against Mr Pompeo himself. They grumble that hardly any career officers are involved in his staff meetings. And they question whether he really has his diplomats’ back. True, he has not actively added to his boss’s attacks on his own envoys—yet, mindful of the art of survival in the Trump administration, neither has he actively defended them. In Senate testimony last month, he refused to say whether Ms Yovanovitch was a talented ambassador. “Hey, look at you, smiling and laughing and calling it silly,” concluded Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat. “I don’t think it’s silly to Marie Yovanovitch or the people who work for you.”
Staff surveys suggest that confidence in the department’s leaders has plunged. Some of its lawyers resorted to a rarely used “dissent channel” to question an agreement to designate Guatemala as a “safe third country” for migrants. The numbers of people taking the foreign-service entrance exam has fallen by more than half over the past ten years (see chart 2). The inflexibility of foreign-service career paths is a problem: how many high-flyers today are happy to envisage a 35-year stay with the same employer and to wait 15 years for a senior job? Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a former head of the foreign service, recalls the case of an African-American woman who asked for three years’ leave to do a Harvard Law degree but had to apply one year at a time; her second year’s request was turned down and she left the department.
Such experiences have not helped the department’s record on diversity. “As far as African-Americans are concerned the numbers are appalling,” says Ms Thomas-Greenfield. Just 2.8% of the senior ranks are black; a few years ago the figure was “upwards of 8%”, still short of a representative share. Only three black Americans are currently serving overseas as ambassadors, and four Hispanics. Last month Karen Bass, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, introduced a bill, along with the heads of Congress’s Hispanic, Asian and Native American caucuses, that seeks to help the foreign service “reflect the rich composition” of the country’s citizenry.
Making the foreign service great again
“It’s really important to understand just how much more quickly the deterioration of the State Department has gone under this administration than under previous ones,” says Ms Jacobson. Seasoned diplomats (including a former secretary of state for a Republican president) think it may take a generation to repair the damage. But several efforts are under way to come up with ideas. In September the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan think-tank, will suggest reforms for the months after the presidential election, whoever wins. At Harvard Mr Burns and three other ex-ambassadors are leading an ambitious project to reimagine the longer-term future of American diplomacy; they will publish their proposals after the election.
Some changes could come swiftly. A push to fill top positions and promote the brightest career diplomats would help. And a president who believed in diplomacy would be a powerful start in setting a different tone and direction. Clearly, that is not going to happen if Mr Trump is re-elected. A Biden presidency would seem to be a necessary condition for a real revival.
But it is not a sufficient one. The problems of American diplomacy run deeper than the Trump administration’s assault on it. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign envisaged doubling the size of the foreign service—pointing out that “we employ more people to work in military grocery stores than we do foreign-service officers”—and professionalising its envoys instead of “selling swanky diplomatic posts to rich buffoons”. Harvard’s Mr Burns also favours a drastic shift in the mix of ambassadors, with perhaps 90% career diplomats and only 10% political appointees.
Ambassadorships are just the tip of the iceberg. “A total review of the personnel system should be a top priority for the next secretary of state,” says Ms Thomas-Greenfield. An inflexible career structure means that the department forces some of its best and brightest out and then doesn’t let them back in. A nimbler entry-exam process, faster promotions and greater opportunities to enter at all levels would all help.
So would better training. The State Department is lousy at it. Yet the skills diplomats need are only going to grow. America’s armed forces has about 15% of its officers in training at any given time. Reformers argue that America’s diplomatic service should create a similar “training float”, which would require hiring enough people and spending enough money to have that extra capacity.
Reformers also call for a deeper cultural change. Clunky procedures can require dozens of names to sign off a policy statement. “The State Department as an institution is rarely accused of being too agile or too full of initiative,” says Carnegie’s Mr Burns. He thinks it should be stripped of layers of bureaucracy, with authority pushed down to regional heads and out to ambassadors overseas. The place has become risk-averse, and needs to question conventional wisdom, Mr Burns argues.
Diplomacy first
The scale of the transformation needed in American diplomacy leads some to believe that its mission should be codified in a new act of Congress. Three times in the past century Congress stepped in. At the time of its last reform, in 1980, Leonid Brezhnev was in power in Moscow, China was beginning its one-child policy and the internet was just emerging. There is a case today for Congress to issue new marching orders.
But sceptics wonder when—or whether—lawmakers might agree on the terms of a comprehensive new act for the foreign service. Reform cannot wait.
That means changing not only the way the State Department works, but the weight diplomacy carries in foreign policy. America will always rely on a mix of military might and smooth talking. The two complement each other. “If you don’t fund the State Department fully then I need to buy more ammunition,” General Jim Mattis, then head of us Central Command, told Congress in 2013. Since 9/11 the emphasis on military force has made foreign policy lopsided.
Reformers say America must make diplomacy a first resort. Robert Gates, who was defence secretary in 2006-11, writes in Foreign Affairs about the “overmilitarisation” of American foreign policy and the neglect of its non-military tools. “The State Department should be the central non-military instrument of us national-security policy,” Mr Gates argues. But if it is to be up to the job, it will need more money, more manpower and far better management.
