Why so much health care on The International Interest?

It’s a blog about international politics—what gives? (Or, if you will, wtf?)

Without tipping my hand too much, diligent readers may have pieced together that an unusual theory of American hegemony has been developing gradually. This has been an American hegemony for a world that is basically safe and generally improving—a leadership for a progressive world. This view of hegemony requires a sensitivity to the balance of perceptions globally, the balance of that which is persuasive. This is a progressive hegemony characterized by offshore balancing, tacit deterrence, and a devotion to the international interest. Of course, more on this later.

The question of health care falls into the first category. In a world in which more states become democratic by the year, international security concerns put less pressure on domestic polities to centralize rigidly, and the rising capabilities of the world’s citizens mean that more of them are entering politics, the capacity of states to exercise reflexive reason over their foreign policy behavior is increasing. This means that nations will gain more discretion over their behavior, as structural pressures to balance the Soviet Union, say, decrease. For this reason, American hegemony cannot look like British or Roman hegemony, which succeeded in putting in place a system of structural economic and military, constraints on state behavior. If American hegemony is to preside over a system of states possessed with agency, American policy must alter the balance of that which is persuasive to citizens abroad.

Progressive hegemony is one way this can occur: if most people abroad think of the United States as leading an international community of states toward a world that is healthier, safer, more prosperous, their willingness to contribute to the hegemonic order increases correspondingly. On the other hand, if America is seen as an inherently obstructionist, regressive country seeking to maintain hegemony only for its own primacy, that hegemony will be increasingly tenuous. And, of course, convincing the world that we are dedicated to building a healthier world means starting at home. As the only advanced democracy that does not offer some system of universal health care, the prospects for progressive hegemony are dim indeed.

Building a healthier world, and a more compelling international order, starts at home. Accepting an obligation to the welfare of foreign citizens means first accepting an obligation to the welfare of our own. No country in the history of the world could do more to improve the welfare of the world’s enduring poor than we can right now. Making the leap from domestic responsibility to cosmopolitanism that the next generation of progressives will be pleased to fight—but right now we don’t even have the rhetorical and moral substrate to build on. America’s struggle for health care is important for international relations, because in this case, as goes the United States, so goes the world.

a.j.m.

Filed under: Health, Who We Are , autonomy, progressive hegemony, saarr, TII

A Theory of Change

Today, as we steer a new course at the United Nations, our guiding principles are clear: We value the U.N. as a vehicle for advancing U.S. policies and priorities, and universal values…We work for change from within rather than criticizing from the sidelines. We stand firm in defense of America’s interests and values, but we don’t dissent just to be contrary. We listen to states great and small. We build coalitions. We meet our responsibilities. We pay our bills. We push for real reform. And we remember that in an interconnected world, what’s good for others is often good for America as well.

—UN Ambassador Susan Rice, speaking today at NYU.

Brian

Filed under: Grand Strategy, International Organization, Liberalism, Practicing Politics, Who We Are, the next order

Making the recession last.

Every so often I’ve been checking in with the Bureau of Economic Analysis to see the updates to the above chart, and the news keeps getting better and better. As you can see, the personal savings rate has been steadily declining towards zero and is now higher than it has been in at least a decade—in fact, the rate has not been this high since 1995 (a year that hardly comes to mind when one thinks of frugality).

I’ve been watching the personal savings because it is not simply an economic marker but a sign of our national identity: are we to be obsessed with conspicuous consumption to the detriment of our future and our children’s, or can we get a handle on ourselves to let the next generation of American’s decide their own future? The answer is far from clear, but the chart above is but one reason why this recession has the potential to do much good. But, as I have written before, it is a question of whether the recession—with a crucial push from our public leaders—can instantiate enduring norms or whether Americans are simply responding elastically to economic pressures, with the changes vanishing as soon as the economy seems to return to normalcy? Can American’s learn to save again? Can they retain their enthusiasm for reforming ossified, expensive, and hurtful systems? Can they keep their attention and their purchasing decisions on large epochal problems like climate change? Is this a lasting change to American identity, or just the exigencies of the times?

There is some reason to think that the former might be true. SUV sales, for instance, have proven imperfectly elastic to gas prices, having failed to rebound to previous levels. The percentage of Ford sales that go to large SUVs is a quarter of what it was five years ago. If these changes to consumer sentiment can persist, the structural changes they precipitated will help lock them into place: plants will retool to produce smaller personal vehicles; cities will complete projects to make bicycling more attractive; research and development funds for alternative energy will begin to drive unit prices lower; political rhetoric will develop new and irrevocable commonplaces; and, hopefully, once initial political efforts have confronted issues like healthcare, they will lose their sacrosanct patina and reforms can follow reforms.

Recession mentality suits America. U.S. consumers are almost never receptive to political suggestion about their finances, but if we can draw this recession out, we might be able to create a new era of collective and personal American responsibility. (Because when was the last time you thought of this country as responsible?)

Filed under: Economics, Who We Are, sustainability , cascades, responsibility, savings rate

Independence day.

This July fourth I’ve been thinking a bit about patriotism, and about something McCain said during the campaign. He said, ‘My country has never had to prove anything to me, my friends. I have always had faith in it and I have been humbled and honored to serve it. ‘

It strikes me that this has become a defining cleavage between American liberalism and conservatism today. For the latter, patriotism is a matter of faith in the tradition of one’s country, and its lasting legacy; for liberals, patriotism is a matter of reinvention, of progress, of critique. For most American liberals, this country does have something to prove to its citizens. It can, and probably has, gone astray; it is dangerous; it is misguided; it needs the critical effort of its citizens, who build a new America with every new generation and so must hold it accountable. For most liberals, the United States does not automatically live up to its better traditions; its dangerous and frightening traditions remain possible and so faith in its direction is an improper and unproductive response.

Listening to speeches and rhetoric this independence day, it will be easy for all of us to lose sight of a liberal sense of patriotism. But we should remember: America is ours, in the here and now, and we should demand that it be what we want it to be. We demand that America constantly prove itself to us, in our health, in our education, our security, our moral judgment, at home and abroad. To love this country is to guide it, to improve it, to ensure that it is a force for welfare, for learning, and for peace. Too often recently, this country has been a force for ignorance, obstruction, for war and intolerance–for acquiescence in the continued thrall of nuclear politics and genocide, with infant mortality rates more than twice the number of Singapore, behind all other Western developed countries and also Cuba. This is a country with great promise and tremendous possibility, but our political failures mean we cannot save lives abroad, or keep our infants alive.

That this country was born as a revolutionary one meant that we declared independence from undesirable influence to construct the country we desired; our continued independence means we have a responsibility to continue to do just this. Faith is not enough.

Filed under: Who We Are , McCain, patriotism, progressivism

High speed rail for the long-run.

I took the time this Sunday morning to read a piece from the New York Times magazine on the tremendous complexities, the technological sophistication, the dazzling possibilities, and the tantalizing pragmatism of what would apparently be the most expensive single public infrastructure project ever built, California’s new high speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The $10 billion bond measure that passed this election season will be the first of a expected $33 billion for planning, renovation of existing stations, construction of new ones, expropriation of farmland, procurement of trains, electricity infrastructure (and so on) that planners expect could eventually do the same thing to California that it did to France: extinguish regional plane flight in favor of a cheaper, cleaner, faster transportation system that would revitalize large public works in this country.

The piece is filled with delicious details, like: the control systems on new bullet trains shut the train down if the conductor’s feet lose contact with the floor and does not override the process, (or when it gets too close to another train or senses an earthquake or sabotage); “At peak times, double-decker trains carrying more than 1,000 people leave Paris every 30 minutes for Lyon. “Those trains are full, full, full,” Mellier told me. Generally speaking, Mellier added, Alstom’s high-speed trains suffer two or three “faults” — delays of more than five minutes — for every one million kilometers, or about every 621,000 miles, they travel.” Here is my favorite: “Up above, the trains are delicate: the pantograph that touches an overhead electrical wire (the catenary) is far more sensitive than its equivalent on regular trains in order to maintain electrical contact at extreme speeds.”

The best part about the California plan is that it relies entirely on technology that has been proven safe, popular, and profitable in France and Japan (and now in Spain). The drastic expansion of California’s population means that the high speed rail system should actually be cheaper than a project to expand highways and airports, which would be necessary soon anyway. Put these together and you have a system that is absolutely pragmatic.

High speed rail is another one of those issues for which conservatism and foot-dragging is totally incomprehensible given the benefits. This demonstrates another point I think is absolutely crucial: rather than develop a middling system that meets transportation requirements adequately, high speed rail should be initially expensive, innovative, progressive, inspiring. Because initial ridership numbers will be an important test case, America’s high speed rail system should be advanced, shining, and obviously valuable. Building one train for $33 million that helps out California only goes so far—but building something that helps revitalize how we move around this country, and sets an example for the rest of the world, should be far more valuable.

The concept of leapfrogging is usually used to show that developing countries should be able to follow a different trajectory and develop more cleanly than America did using advanced technologies. The United States is so far behind in high speed rail, we should be able to leapfrog other established countries and put in place an advanced, expandable infrastructure from the start. Strangely enough, one of California’s arcane legal requirements actually facilitates just that: the California train is required to cover the distance between San Francisco and L.A. in two hours and forty minutes; the simulations show that meeting this requirement will demand a cutting-edge train like Alstom’s AGV. This is good, because nothing would be worse for this country’s transportation system in the long-run than a creaking, half-full, perpetually delayed, perennially ignored California system.

Filed under: Domestic, Who We Are, sustainability , california, high speed rail, leapfrogging, transportation

On Powell

Of course, I think Colin Powell did the country a service this morning by endorsing Obama for President, but in the course of doing so, he did a far greater service still. Powell gave perhaps the first major voice to a sentiment many of us have been feeling for months now—

’m also troubled by…what members of the party say, and is permitted to be said, such things as, ‘Well you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, ‘He is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian, he’s always been a Christian.’

’But the really right answer is, ‘What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?’

It’s a notion that is absolutely necessary to express, and perhaps no-one could have but Powell. Excellent.

Filed under: Who We Are

What shouldn’t need to be said.

I don’t want to dwell too much longer on the intricacies of this campaign period, but I did want to say this. For those of you who haven’t heard, some recent Republican rallies have gotten somewhat ugly. Taking out new lines of attack against the Democratic candidate is legitimate, of course, but the process has created some ugly sentiments among supporters. When McCain asked ‘Who is the- who is the real Barack Obama?,’ a heckler yelled ‘A terrorist!’ At a Palin rally, while she was discussing Sen. Obama’s Ayers connection, someone shouted ‘Kill him!’ Of course, neither should be held accountable for what happens in their crowd, but I think this much is true: anyone worth half their weight in statesmanship, upon hearing that someone had yelled that at their event, in response to their speech, even while they were in the building, would be furious. They would storm downstairs, find the nearest television camera, and excoriate the slightest violent sentiment among their supporters and the rest of the country. They would declare themselves ashamed to find someone saying such revolting things in their name. Her silence this week—and McCain’s, who clearly heard, reacted to, and chose to ignore the catcall at his event—is totally impermissible. Violence, threats, bigotry goes far beyond simple divisiveness and no statesman would consent to lead a people they knew held sentiments of that sort. 

Filed under: Practicing Politics, Who We Are , McCain

The lost generation.

I’m not declaring victory. (In fact, in my more somber moments I find myself more than a little nervous) But with the electoral map looking like this, our best guess of the eventual electoral outcome being 353-185, Obama winning a full 90% of the fivethirtyeight simulations, the gallup poll showing a record Obama lead, McCain’s poor debate showing tonight (and so on and on…), it’s hard not to start to think about what an Obama administration might mean. 

I want to make a point that I’m not sure most people have a good handle on—that is, most people over 25. Having turned that age this year, I am just at the leading edge of a generation that can remember Kosovo and the Lewinski impeachment proceedings; I remember President Clinton, but not in detail or in context, and I certainly wasn’t invested in him; he was my parents’ President. I remember Al Gore debating George Bush and staying up all night to watch the election returns—but the long and short of it is, there is an entire generation in this country that is finishing college and considering public service and political activism who have grown up feeling deeply and totally ashamed of their country and its politics. There is an entire generation of us who have known nothing other than the ugliest, most cynical, most irresponsible politics. This is a generation who have formed their political intuitions in concert with this type of politics or in dramatic contrast to it—there was very little in-between. 

For so many of us, all we know of a politics conducted in good-faith, with mutual respect, dignity, and integrity is what we saw on The West Wing or what we could read in textbooks. People laugh at me for thinking of The West Wing as more than a show, but for tens of thousands of politically literate young minds it was a source of political intuition that we couldn’t obtain from the world we were born into. 

It has become an inconsistent and imperfect cliché to say, but I want to underscore the point: this country’s primary responsibility of the next decade and beyond will be to heal the indignities and devastation to its moral culture and international standing suffered under this President. I can’t emphasize enough that young Republicans have before them a task of enormous importance: to recraft and recover the American conservative tradition, to jettison a politics of terror and anti-intellectualism, and meanness, and reassert the honest and noble principles of fiscal prudence, community, realist national security.

But should Barack Obama become our next President, the primary responsibility will be his. Before we embark on a progressive liberalism, we must stop, and breathe, and remember what it means to disagree with one another, honestly, productively, and in good faith. I don’t think it’s right to say we should be looking for a post-partisan politics. I think this would be impossible, to be sure, but also don’t think we should take this as our normative goal. As Josiah Bartlett said, sharing a stage with Gov. Ritchie: ‘partisan politics is good. Partisan politics is what the founders had in mind. It guarantees that the minority opinion is heard..’

This is why I really do like John McCain’s emphasis on national service: we need to recover my lost generation and invest them in this country, which needs it as much as this country has needed any single generation since the Civil War. But it is not only we who need to find service, but established politicians—those with authority and power—who have to recover an inclusive patriotism rather than an exclusive one, to remember what it means to put country first.

Filed under: Practicing Politics, Who We Are , Obama, recovery, strength

Why moral consistency?

Forgive me if I leave this here as a marker for myself and don’t explain the idea fully—but it has recently struck me as odd that so many international theorists assume a value equivalence between internal and external ideational systems. This is to say: most assume that when a polity coheres around a set of normative commitments at home that these will be necessarily externalized in their conduct with other nations. This is the primary neoconservative wager; it motivates Christian Reus-Smit’s (lovely) model of moral purpose of the state and international normative structure; maybe my favorite example can be found in David Halloran Lumsdaine’s arguments and a whole litany of others.

But there are a number of good reasons, empirical and theoretical to think this is not always (or even usually) the case. Realist suppositions of the causal force of anarchy are the least among these. The fact of nationalism is usually argued to require differential duties toward our fellow citizens relative to foreigners, for example, which immediately establishes differential moral systems for domestic and foreign policy. There may be problems of aggregating pluralistic domestic moral conceptions. Domestic normative structures may combine with other equivalent (but not identical) structures abroad in unexpected ways. Path-dependency in international conduct may impede direct symmetry—and so on.

In practice, I think the United States do apply different moral standards to the two areas of policy: domestic policy is predicated more on issues of fairness, equity, common action, toleration, assurance; foreign policy tends to turn on probity, transparency, even, occasionally, assistance (and this is only when we mean to act morally—most often we do not). Not only are these lists drastically different, but the former tends to take priority over the latter when the two are seen to conflict, and this is taken to be a moral stance in and of itself. The two do bear resemblance to one another, and it might be true that this resemblance cleaves along different patterns for different types of states—democracies prefer transparency; empires prefer hierarchical domination—but it is not clear to what extent this is based on institutional facts rather than moral consistency; but the fact is that even slight specifications of a change in value system commits us to widely differing structures of obligation.  

We think about domestic and foreign policy in dissimilar moral terms, and our international theory encourages this result. I think this is problematic both theoretically and in practice—a moral cosmopolitanism is at the heart of incorporating some conception of the international interest into our policy. But note that there is no reason that moral cosmopolitanism should press us to make institutional changes: to say that we should value life abroad like we value life at home is not to commit us to abrogating our sovereignty or forming a world state. But politics are politics and people are people—why should we adhere to different moral systems depending on the hat we happen to be wearing?

In terms of international theory, the consequences should be clear: rather than thinking of a direct equivalence between domestic and foreign political moral systems, theorists should expect to have to specify some mechanism by which domestic values are transmitted into international norms. If it is true that the relationship is nonnecessary, we should also consider the possibility that state agency allows a polity some purchase in altering this relation—that states can choose how to apply their domestic values internationally.

Filed under: Theory, Who We Are, the next order , agency, GJT, morality, TII

How to Steal a Trillion

What is this $700 billion? Look at it this way: $700 billion is the price to the country of forgoing regulation of certain financial sectors for the last decade or so, and the enormous profits gained by the financial sector for dealing with these actions. 

I think this is right, but it still deserves heavy and important qualification. The price to taxpayers is the interest on a loan of roughly $700 billion from overseas central banks plus (or minus) some quantity the Treasury cannot recoup through the sale of these assets plus the same on $85b to A.I.G. plus interest and a loss on $30b worth of non-recourse debt to JP Morgan Chase for Bear Stearns plus god only knows how much for Fannie and Freddie. The ‘roughly’ is necessary because the way the bill is currently framed, the Secretary has the authority to spend a good deal more than that figure—the cost of the assets bought must not exceed $700b, and it looks like the cost scheme to be applied will overvalue the assets relative to how the market is currently pricing them (in other words overpaying for these loans). Secondly, the ‘minus’ is there because it is possible (but unlikely) the government comes out ahead in this scheme if homeowners prove able to repay these loans, the government buyout reassures the market, and we can sell them for more than they were bought. David Leonhardt, in an excellent article, reminds us this happened in the Chrysler bailout in the eighties. 

Leonhardt’s article is also particularly good on the following point: any bailout has to have extensive regulatory powers attached to it to begin to address the underlying problem that precipitated the bailout rather than throwing one fistful of money down the drain after another. A country that socializes the losses of industry and privatizes the gains is one that is deeply confused.

Attaching oversight provisions to the legislation is a no-brainer, by the way. How these securities are bought, which are bought, from whom, exactly when, and at what price will produce drastically different costs and liability structures for the Treasury program—and with $700b for bureaucrats and political appointees to work with, some of whom will have just left the financial sector and be dealing with their old firms, the opportunities for mismanagement or quasi-corruption are vast, with little chance to recoup the costs in the event it is discovered. 

Robert Reich has posted a list of five qualifications on the deal itself, all of which are sound. Calling for a complete cessation of political lobbying from Wall St. firms for the duration of the program seems particularly naïve, but particularly appropriate.

Thinking of the $700 billion as a price tag rather than as a necessity helps us put political discourse in perspective. While it’s not quite right to say that John McCain is ‘always for less regulation’, I think it is indicative of a broader outlook. (Though he did say that; he did say that one.) Much of the work done on this page on the intergenerational contract and temporal dynamics in our political discourse is meant to underscore this basic liberal insight: that there are costs to deregulation—often enormous ones—that happen to be less visible because of how we think about these types of things. The costs of deregulation come in the form of risk, which is less quantifiable but often incurs far larger costs than preventive action. The same works for health care and the costs of preventive v. responsive health care. The same works for investment in human capital (education, training, health care, and so on) v. the invisible forgone profits of higher productivity that could have been gained by these investments. The liberal wager is that invisible forgone benefits outweigh visible preventive and prospective costs; that the costs of risk outweigh the costs of regulation. The willingness to better factor costs over time is one of the primary features of contemporary liberalism.

Lastly, to return to the theme of this wildly popular series of posts: even a well-educated American has no idea of what a billion dollars is, let alone one trillion. Even saying that the bailout is half over again as much as a year’s Pentagon budget is not enough. In cases like these, transparency is not enough: active education is a moral imperative.

—a.j. mount

Filed under: Domestic, Economics, Who We Are , Liberalism, regulation, time