A Diplomat's Progress (reprise)

This week the Summer 2012 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms, who blamed him for "losing Iran."

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” set in Iran, Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next morning. In this account of embassy life, it seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by his unusual combination of naivete and cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.” May 13, 2012 update: In today's Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews another diplomatic memoir, this one published posthumously, the work of one of the veteran foreign service officers accused during the McCarthy era of having "lost" China. It's worth a read. August 3, 2012 update: The current issue of The New York Review of Books has a very fine review by Roger Cohen of a book by Christopher de Bellaigue about Muhammad Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran who was ousted by an Anglo-American coup in 1953. The review features a cameo appearance by Ataturk and a number of references to U.S. diplomatic snafus that will call to mind some of the stories from Henry Precht's A Diplomat's Progress about the role of Big Oil in Middle Eastern politics and of SAVAK in Shah Reza Pahlavi's Iran.

Turkey on the World Stage (reprise)

An op-ed essay by Kemal Kilicdaroglu in the Washington Post makes me think that now is a good time to repost the following essay about modern Turkey.



Anyone who has ever taught for a living will understand that a large part of the appeal, and the challenge, lies in trying to package a wide range of scholarly sources in such a way as to tell a compelling story. Unfortunately, the charms of syllabus development can lead to the folly of imagining that it can ever be a completely finished product; in this way a reading list is akin to public policy. To quote Lord Salisbury: "There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making."

The result is that a syllabus or a reading list can be the occasion for unanticipated intellectual excursions. Four years ago, when I began leading the WAIP policy seminar that is now PUBAFRS 4020, it never occurred to me that modern Turkey, a remnant of the old Ottoman Empire regarded as "the sick man of Europe" prior to World War I, is a remarkably useful lens for viewing world affairs.

The seminar has evolved in such a way that Turkey intervenes at three different points in the course of the quarter. First, there is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a classic case study in crisis management and a staple of all introductory courses in public policy. The standard treatment has President Kennedy staring down Premier Khrushchev, with the Soviets finally blinking and removing their missiles and dismantling their Cuban bases, all in exchange for our promise to leave Castro alone. It turns out that there was more to it than that. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General, offered discrete assurances to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that we would take our Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, which shared a tense border with the U.S.S.R. at the time. We did so less than six months later.

Second, we read Samuel P. Huntington’s famous, or infamous, "clash of civilizations" essay, in which Turkey is treated as the epitome of a “torn” country, having been riven by competing traditions, some of them Muslim (though not particularly Arabic), and some European (though not especially Christian). Turkey—the secular, Western-oriented republic created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (pictured above)—rejected Mecca, only to be rejected in turn by Brussels; at the end of the 20th century Huntington saw Turkey as "making strenuous efforts to carve out [a] new identity for itself.”

Turkey, mainly a sidebar in 20th century history, promises to feature much more prominently in the narrative of 21st-century world affairs. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Stephen Kinzer discusses four books that assess the profound policy initiatives being pursued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party. Erdogan’s Turkey is a modernizing republic inclined to put the military in its place and turn its back on secularism--though not on economic growth or autocracy. Tellingly, Kinzer’s piece is entitled “Triumphant Turkey?”

Kinzer raises a number of interesting questions about Turkey's changing place on the world stage, and given the current condition of Europe, it may inspire one to ask why the Turks are so keen to join the European Union. To help bail out the Greeks, perhaps?

September 16, 2011, update: For the Washington Post, Craig Whitlock reports that the U.S. and Turkey have signed an agreement that will allow the U.S. to install a radar station that will be part of a system designed to fend off missile attacks from either Iran or Russia. Separate negotiations about predator drones continue.

November 12, 2011 update: Soner Cagaptay has a column in the Washington Post on U.S.-Turkish relations.

Summer 2012 Glenn Fellows in front of Supreme Court building, Capitol in background. From left to right: Anthony DeThomas, Luis Trevino, Mark Zronek, Devon Benson, Alexander Hurd, Kevin Arndt, Brooke Koester, Cameron DeHart, Ceara Carney, Evan Sieradzki, Jennifer Meyer, Ariel Cohen, Christy Beck, Aiesha White, Donniecia Cummings.

The Guns of August (reprise)

When I was a high-school sophomore, I was assigned on the basis of standardized testing to Advanced Placement social studies. After suffering for a year—I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate primary resources or to contribute to seminar discussions—I bailed out of AP. Unfortunately, that meant that I had missed the standard Plato-to-NATO narrative of Western Civilization that the mainstream kids had taken in tenth grade. As a result, my knowledge of European history remains spotty to this day. What were the Wars of the Roses all about? Who was Albert Dreyfus, anyway? And when, exactly, was the Italian Risorgimento? I have to look these things up every time.

At about the time I was seceding from Western Civ, Barbara Tuchman was putting the finishing touches on The Guns of August, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1962. I have imagined ever since that the book might offer a painless way of addressing some of the deficiencies resulting from my misspent youth. The Guns of August has been on my reading list for a very long time.

Now, a half-century later, I have done my duty. All in good time. The Guns of August turns out to be an extraordinarily good read, as President Kennedy recognized while it was sitting atop the best-sellers lists fifty years ago. Kennedy gave copies to members of his cabinet and top military advisors. There are those who say that Tuchman’s analysis of the first month of the Great War influenced Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It’s hard to know which of the book’s many virtues Kennedy valued the most, but for me it’s Tuchman’s vivid account of how military goals are routinely undermined by the random blundering and miscommunication that inevitably occur in the fog of war.

For example, Tuchman relates the story of the Goeben and Breslau, two of a handful of German warships that happened to be in the Mediterranean in early August, 1914. When Germany attacked France, the Goeben and Breslau got busy shelling French ports in Northern Africa. The British naturally assumed that the German ships would worry about getting trapped in the Mediterranean and so would make a break for the Strait of Gibraltar and the open seas in the event of a British declaration of war against Germany. And so, when Admiral Milne cabled London to report the position of the German ships at 37.44 North, 7:56 East, Prime Minister Winston Churchill telegraphed back: “Very good. Hold her. War imminent.” Unfortunately, Tuchman writes, “when reporting their position, Admiral Milne had neglected to say which direction the Goeben and Breslau were steaming. Churchill naturally assumed they were heading west with further evil intent upon the French.”

In fact, the ships were heading east, and so Admiral Milne was halfway between Malta and Greece when he was informed by the Admiralty that Austria had declared war on England. Milne abruptly gave up the chase to avoid an encounter with any Austrian fleet that might emerge from its base in the Adriatic. “Unfortunately the word [i.e., the cable from Admiralty] was an error by a clerk who released the prearranged code telegram for hostilities with Austria by mistake. . . . One more opportunity was lost.” That meant, to make a long story short, that the Goeben and Breslau were now free to proceed to Constantinople, where the Germans negotiated an alliance with Turkey. From there, the German ships moved into the Black Sea, blocking Russian access to the Mediterranean and provoking them into declaring war on Turkey.

Then there were the French, whose military was smitten with the idea that effective warfare consisted of two things: élan, or the will to conquer, and a policy of relentless offense, even to the point of neglecting national defense. Britain’s Lord Kitchener was among those who recognized the absurdity of such a plan of campaign, but “it had to be accepted because there was no time to make another. . . . The momentum of predetermined plans had,” Tuchman concludes, “scored another victory.”

But none of Tuchman’s stories about the futility of master planning is better than the one about the German plan to attack France by sending an enormous army through the heart of Belgium, which was a neutral country whose security was guaranteed by the five Great Powers, including both France and England (not to mention Germany herself!). The great disadvantage of this plan was that it would draw England into the war on the side of Belgium and France. And yet, the Belgian route had been the Germans’ game plan for many years.

And for the Chief of the German General Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, the predetermined plan was the only thing that mattered. And so, on August 1, 1914, the night before the start of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm (pictured above), finally recognizing the grave risks inherent in the default plan of attack against France, announced to General Moltke that he wanted him to turn his armies east, initiating a Russo-German war instead. Moltke, we are told by Tuchman, “refused point-blank.”

Moltke was in no mood for any more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters, or with meddling of any kind with the fixed arrangements. To turn around the deployment of a million men from west to east at the very moment of departure would have taken a more iron nerve than Moltke disposed of. He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history.

Tuchman’s book destroys a number of shibboleths along the way, including the idea, prevalent in the early years of the twentieth century, that free trade had made the leading economies so dependent on one another that major, continent-wide wars had become unsustainable, which meant in turn that 20th-century wars were likely to be short and to turn on a small number of decisive battles. No such luck! Finally, The Guns of August excelled at demonstrating that military men stubbornly refused to appreciate the significance of Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the extension of politics by other means; in other words, they underrated the importance of politics.

In addition to influencing actual decision makers in the Kennedy Administration, The Guns of August profoundly affected the academic study of public policy by shaping the thinking of a young scholar named Graham T. Allison, who came up with a model of decision making based on Tuchman’s insights, one that he posited as an alternative to the notion of unitary states basing policy on a perfectly rational calculation of costs and benefits.

Allison’s Organizational Process model of decision making stressed the importance of pre-established routines in limiting policy options to Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Organizations, Allison argued, are “blunt instruments,” which is why they cannot be expected to come up with nuanced policies, and why the decisions taken by their leaders are “frequently anticlimactic” and not necessarily rational in any conventional sense. They are, in short, about as rational as the curriculum-planning decisions of a fifteen-year-old.

The Brief Against Brandeis (reprise)

There is no denying that the long-lived Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) was an American treasure. The son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he graduated at age 20 with the highest GPA in the history of Harvard Law School. He made his reputation as a Progressive lawyer and as a leader of the worldwide Zionist movement. In 1916, he was nominated for a seat on the United States Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson.

The definitive biography of Justice Brandeis was published by Pantheon in 2009. The work of Melvin I. Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University, the 955-page tome has received rave reviews. One, written by Anthony Lewis, appeared in The New York Review of Books. Brandeis, according to Lewis,

was intensely interested in facts. His law clerks did research on facts as much as law. When the Court considered a case on presidential appointment power that involved the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, Brandeis had his law clerk, James M. Landis (who became the dean of Harvard Law School), go over the Senate journals of 1867 to see what the views of the times were. Landis spent months in the Library of Congress reading the journals page by page.

Brandeis even tried to get Justice Holmes, who read philosophy in the original Greek, to take more interest in facts. He urged Holmes to spend the summer break reading up on working conditions and visiting the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. A year later Holmes wrote Harold Laski that “in consideration of my age and moral infirmities, [Brandeis] absolved me from facts for the vacation and allowed me my customary sport with ideas.”

Brandeis’s obsession with facts continues to reverberate through American law and politics. Consider, for example, what Wikipedia has to say about the term “Brandeis brief,” which refers to

a pioneering legal brief that was the first in United States legal history to rely not on pure legal theory, but also on analysis of factual data. It is named after the litigator Louis Brandeis, who collected empirical data from hundreds of sources in the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon. The Brandeis Brief changed the direction of the Supreme Court and of U.S. law. The Brandeis Brief became the model for future Supreme Court presentations in cases affecting the health or welfare of classes of individuals. This model was later successfully used in Brown v. Board of Education to demonstrate the harmful psychological effects of segregated education on African-American children.

This week members of the Summer 2012 class of Glenn Fellows are reading essays and court cases organized around the theme of fact-finding and its jurisprudential consequences. As they read these materials, my hope is that they will perform a little thought experiment by asking themselves about the facts that the Court recognized in Muller, Brown, and Roe v. Wade, and whether it would have been wiser for the Court to base its rulings on strictly legal grounds, rather than conducting fact-finding expeditions.

In Brown, for example, the Supreme Court had the option of resurrecting Justice Harlan’s stirring dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which would have meant striking down school segregation on the grounds that “our constitution is color-blind,” rather than on the less substantial grounds that segregated schools inflict psychological damage upon African-American children. Likewise, in Roe v. Wade, there were a number of precedents that the Court, rather than wrestling with the question of fetal viability and formulating a national “right of privacy,” might have used to finesse the issue of abortion by declaring that public health is a matter that the Constitution, through the Tenth Amendment, reserves to the states. I hope the Fellows will ask themselves, in short, whether the Brandeis brief, so well intentioned, has been responsible for a great deal of legal and political mischief in the century since Muller v. Oregon.

Summer 2012 Glenn Fellows Visit National Gallery of Art

George Bellows (1882-1925) was an important American artist whose work is being shown in a special exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.  The fellows received a special tour of the exhibit on Friday, July 13.  Bellows was a Columbus boy, an Ohio State alumnus (though he dropped out and headed for New York just before he was due to graduate), and an excellent ballplayer who eschewed a chance to play professionally with the Cincinnati Redlegs.

From left to right, above:  Joe Sadek, program coordinator; Carolyn Behmer; Kevin Arndt; Ceara Carney; Christy Beck; Donniecia Cummings; Aiesha White; Cameron DeHart; Ariel Cohen; Alexander Hurd; Anthony DeThomas; Mark Zronek; Addison Hutcheson; Brooke Koester; Evan Sieradzki; Jenn Meyer; Devin Benson; Ken Kolson, Washington Office director; Estera Pirosca, G-WAIP.

A Thorn Between Two Roses

Namely, Susan Mainwaring and Allison Barbo, alumnae of WAIP, Winter 2010.

Rationality and Public Policy Making (reprise)

It's Week 5, which means that a close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis is long past due. Bardach's book has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books had a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

Here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars and Euros in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know the causes of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?