Category Archives: U.S.

by | 20 April 2008 · 1:20 pm

Jenkins by Other Names

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick (U. California Press, 2008), p. 173:

[My defense attorney] introduced himself, and we made a little small talk. He asked me what he should call me. I told him something we used to say ages ago in the army: “You can call me anything you want, as long as you call me three times a day for chow and once a month to get paid.” So with that, he started calling me Charlie. I had never been called Charlie before in my life. Growing up, I was always Robert. When I was a teenager, I was Super. In the army, I was Jenkins. In North Korea, the three other Americans took to calling me C. R., while the Koreans sometimes called me Min Hyung-chan. (They gave me this name when I started acting—they needed something to put on the credits—but in person, I refused to answer to it.) So, although I have gone by many names in my life, Charlie was a new one. But now, thanks to Capt. Culp, a lot of people, especially everyone I now know in the U.S. Army stationed in Japan, refer to me as “Charlie.”

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Filed under Korea, language, military, U.S.

by | 7 April 2008 · 9:26 pm

Narratives of the Rise vs. Narratives of the Fall

From: Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 150-151:

There is a very different story [than that in Jared Diamond’s Collapse] that can be told about human history, one that embraces our agency, and that is the story of constant human overcoming. Whereas the tragic story imagines that humans have fallen, the narrative of overcoming imagines that we have risen.

Consider how much our ancestors – human and nonhuman – overcame for us to become what we are today. For beginners, they were prey. Given how quickly and efficiently humans are driving the extinction of nonhuman animal species, the notion that our ancestors were food seems preposterous. And yet, understanding that we evolved from being prey goes a long way toward understanding some of the feelings and motivations that drive us into suicidal wars and equally suicidal ecological collapses.

Against the happy accounts of harmonious premodern human societies at one with Nature, there is the reality that life was exceedingly short and difficult. Of course, life could also be wonderful and joyous. But it was hunger not obesity, oppression not depression, and violence not loneliness that were primary concerns.

Just as the past offers plenty of stories of humankind’s failure, it also offers plenty of stories of human overcoming. Indeed, we can only speak of past collapses because we have survived them. There are billions more people on earth than there were when the tiny societies of the Anasazi in the American Southwest and the Norse in Greenland collapsed in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. That there are nearly seven billion of us alive today is a sign of our success, not failure.

Perhaps the most powerful indictment of environmentalism is that environmentalists so often consider our long life spans and large numbers terrible tragedies rather than extraordinary achievements. The narrative of overpopulation voiced almost entirely by some of the richest humans ever to roam the earth is utterly lacking in gratitude for the astonishing labors of our ancestors.

Of course, none of this is to say that human civilizations won’t collapse again in the future. They almost certainly will. Indeed, some already are collapsing. But to focus on these collapses is to miss the larger picture of rising prosperity and longer life spans. Not only have we survived, we’ve thrived. Today more and more of us are “free at last” – free to say what we want to say, love whom we want to love, and live within a far larger universe of possibilities than any other generation of humans on earth.

At the very moment that we humans are close to overcoming hunger and ancient diseases like polio and malaria, we face ecological crises of our own making, ones that could trigger drought, hunger, and the resurgence of ancient diseases.

The narrative of overcoming helps us to imagine and thus create a brighter future. Human societies will continue to stumble. Many will fall. But we have overcome starvation, disease, deprivation, oppression, and war. We can overcome ecological crises.

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Filed under Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Europe, Latin America, U.S.

by | 7 April 2008 · 8:46 pm

Concealing Truth, Concealing Meaning

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), pp. 251, 255-256:

Talking could be dangerous at the best of Soviet times, but during the Great Terror a few careless words were all it took for somebody to vanish for ever. Informers were everywhere. ‘Today a man talks freely only with his wife – at night, with the blankets pulled over his head,’ the writer Isaak Babel once remarked. [Mikhail] Prishvin wrote in his diary that among his friends there were ‘only two or three old men’ to whom he could talk freely, without fear of giving rise to malicious rumours or denunciations.

The Great Terror effectively silenced the Soviet People….

In his diary of 1937 Prishvin wrote that people were becoming so adept at concealing meaning in their speech that they were in danger of losing the capacity to speak the truth altogether.

10 July:
Behaviour in Moscow: one cannot speak of anything or with anyone. The whole secret of behaviour is to sense what something means, and who means it, without saying anything. You have to eliminate completely in yourself any remnant of the need to ‘speak from the heart’.

Arkadii Mankov noted a similar phenomenon in his diary:

It is pointless to talk about the public mood. There is silence, as if nothing has happened. People talk only in secret, behind the scenes and privately. The only people who express their views in public are the drunks.

As people drew into themselves, the social realm inevitably diminished. ‘People have completely ceased to confide in each other,’ Prishvin wrote in his diary on 9 October. It was becoming a society of whisperers:

The huge mass of the lower class simply goes about its work and whispers quietly. Some have nothing to whisper about: for them ‘everything is as it ought to be’. Others whisper to themselves in solitude, retreating quietly into their work. Many have learned to keep completely silent … – as if lying in a grave.

With the end of genuine communication, mistrust spread throughout society. People concealed their true selves behind public masks. Outwardly they conformed to the public modes of correct Soviet behaviour; inwardly they lived in a realm of private thought, inscrutable to public view. In this atmosphere fear and terror grew. Since no one knew what was concealed behind the mask, it was assumed that people who seemed to be normal Soviet citizens could in fact be spies or enemies. On the basis of this assumption denunciations and reports of ‘hidden enemies’ became credible, not just to the general public but to colleagues, neighbours and friends.

People sought refuge in a private world of truth. Some people took to diary-writing during the Great Terror. In spite of all the risks, keeping a diary was a way to carve out a private realm free of dissembling, to voice one’s doubts and fears at a time when it was dangerous to speak. The writer Prishvin confessed his greatest fears to his diary. In 1936, he had been attacked by literary bureaucrats in the Writers’ Union for a bitter comment he had made at a New Year’s party, a comment he now feared would cost him his freedom. ‘I am very frightened,’ he wrote, ‘that these words will drop into the file of an informer reporting on the characteristics of Prishvin the writer.’ Prishvin withdrew from the public sphere and retreated to his diary. He filled its pages with a microscopic scrawl, barely legible with a magnifying glass, to conceal his thoughts from the police in the event of his arrest and the seizure of the diary. For Prishvin, his diary was an ‘affirmation of individuality’ – a place to exercise his inner freedom and speak in his own true voice. ‘One either writes a diary for oneself,’ Prishvin mused, ‘to dig down to one’s inner self and converse with oneself, or one writes to become involved in society and secretly express one’s views on it.’ For Prishvin, it was both. He filled his diaries with dissident reflections on Stalin, on the destructive influence of Soviet mass culture, and on the indestructibility of the individual human spirit.

It’s not that different if you’re running for office in the U.S. these days—as if trying to please a million Stalins.

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Filed under Russia, U.S., USSR

by | 7 April 2008 · 6:33 pm

‘We have reached the age of the splinter!’

From The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia, by Orlando Figes (Metropolitan, 2007), p. 263:

Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg tells the story of a young woman named Zina, a mathematics teacher from Gorkii, whom she met in the Lubianka jail. Zina had been arrested for failing to denounce one of her teachers, a lecturer in dialectical materialism who came to Gorkii from Moscow once a week. In conversations with Zina the lecturer had openly expressed his criticisms of the Stalinist regime. Because he stayed in Gorkii in a dormitory, he had used Zina’s apartment to entertain his friends and had kept a trunk of his books there. When the NKVD carried out their search, it turned out the books were Trotskyist. Zina acknowledged her guilt. She decided to expiate her sin and ‘clean all the stains from [her] conscience’ by informing on other ‘enemies’ to the NKVD. She told her interrogators about a certain professor who had given lectures at her institute. One day there had been a power cut while the professor was performing an experiment. There were no candles, so, as she explained, Zina

split a ruler and lit a splinter from it, as the peasants do, to provide light. The professor finished his experiment by the light of the splinter and at the end remarked [poking fun at Stalin’s famous phrase], ‘Life has become better, life has become more joyous. God be praised, we have reached the age of the splinter!’

The professor was arrested. Zina did not feel that she had acted wrongly in denouncing him – just a little awkward when she had to confront him during his interrogation. Asked by Olga what she thought about having ‘ruined someone’s life’ for such a petty thing, Zina replied: ‘There are no petty things in politics. Like you, I failed to understand at first the criminal significance of his remark, but later I realized.’

Political sensitivities in modern American political campaigns seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to those in Stalin’s Russia.

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by | 7 April 2008 · 6:02 pm

Kissinger on Asia as the Next Europe

Henry Kissinger outlines Three Revolutions that present new challenges to the old model of state-based power politics.

These transformations take place against the backdrop of a third trend, a shift in the center of gravity of international affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Paradoxically, this redistribution of power is to a part of the world where nations still possess the characteristics of traditional European states. The major states of Asia — China, Japan, India and, in time, possibly Indonesia — view each other the way participants in the European balance of power did, as inherent competitors even when they occasionally participate in cooperative ventures.

In the past, such shifts in the structure of power generally led to war, as happened with the emergence of Germany in the late 19th century. Today the rise of China is assigned such a role in much alarmist commentary. True, the Sino-American relationship will inevitably contain classical geopolitical and competitive elements. These must not be neglected. But there are countervailing elements. Economic and financial globalization, environmental and energy imperatives, and the destructive power of modern weapons all impose a major effort at global cooperation, especially between the United States and China. An adversarial relationship would leave both countries in the position of Europe after the two world wars, when other societies achieved the preeminence the nations of Europe sought through self-destructive conflict with each other.

No previous generation has had to deal with different revolutions occurring simultaneously in separate parts of the world. The quest for a single, all-inclusive remedy is chimerical. In a world in which the sole superpower is a proponent of the prerogatives of the traditional nation-state, where Europe is stuck in halfway status, where the Middle East does not fit the nation-state model and faces a religiously motivated revolution, and where the nations of South and East Asia still practice the balance of power, what is the nature of the international order that can accommodate these different perspectives?

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Filed under Asia, economics, Europe, nationalism, U.S.

by | 4 April 2008 · 6:40 am

Preaching Dreams vs. Preaching Nightmares

From: Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 1-3:

THIS BOOK was born from an essay, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” that we wrote in the fall of 2004. We released the essay in pamphlet form at the annual conference of environmental donors and grantees, hoping to spark a conversation among insiders. What we didn’t expect was that it would be read and debated by such a diverse audience, from college students to corporate executives, everywhere from Italy to Colombia to Japan, or that it would become a projection screen for the hopes and anxieties of the broader progressive community in the United States.

After all was said and done, the passages of our essay that seemed to resonate the most with readers were those that criticized environmentalists for their doomsday discourse. The most quoted lines in the essay were these:

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech is famous because it put forward an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it. Imagine how history would have turned out had King given an “I have a nightmare” speech instead.

We went on to contrast the environmental movement’s complaint-based approach to politics with King’s positive vision — and called on environmentalists to replace their doomsday discourse with an imaginative, aspirational, and future-oriented one.

What we didn’t know at the time we wrote those words was that King had given an “I have a nightmare” speech. In fact, he had given it just moments before he gave his “I have a dream” speech.

The setting was the August 28, 1963, March on Washington. Hundreds of thousands of people had crowded before the Lincoln Memorial, on the Washington Mall, to hear King and other leaders rally the country to support civil rights legislation. Millions of others watched on television, where the speech was carried live by all three networks….

The operating metaphor in King’s nightmare speech was the debt white America owed African Americans. “We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” he said, but “instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.” The words revealed King’s fears that the march wouldn’t be taken seriously by Congress and the White House. “It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment,” he warned. Those who underestimated the movement’s power, he said, would have a “rude awakening.” It was perhaps the darkest and most discouraged speech King ever gave.

But then something strange and wonderful happened. A voice rang out from the back of the dais. It was Mahalia Jackson. “Tell them about your dream, Martin!” She could feel that King had dwelt too long in the dark valley — he needed to bring the crowd up to the sunlit mountaintop. Having heard him give riffs of the dream speech to earlier audiences, Jackson knew just what King needed to do. “Tell them about the dream!” she cried once more.

King seemed to address his next line — “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair” — as much to himself as to the crowd. He then pattered — “I say to you today my friend” — and paused, triggering soft applause from the tired audience and buying himself the time he needed to reorganize his thoughts.

King then seemed to find the words Mahalia Jackson had tossed him, and he began the new speech. “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” From there King led the hot crowd in a rapid climb out of the valley.

[W]hen we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics — will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

With the words “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” racial integration suddenly felt inevitable.

On this day 40 years ago, the day Dr. King was shot, I was finishing up my freshman year of college at the University of Richmond, Virginia, after spending most of my life as a foreigner in Japan, where I learned about segregation in the U.S. but did not experience it the way I did its legacy while working at my uncle’s filling station in Tidewater Virginia: old black men who still insisted on addressing a young white boy as ‘sir’, old black women who could not bring themselves to use the formerly “whites-only” restrooms, and movie-goers who still segregated themselves at the drive-in theater in Suffolk by entering through the formerly segregated entrances (whites to the left, blacks to the right) and parking on the white side or the black side of the lot.

On my first solo trip to an American drive-in theater in my uncle’s car, I unknowingly drove in through the black entrance. Despite the cold reception at the ticket booth, I didn’t discover I was on the black side of the theater until I went to the refreshment stand between features and discovered that I was the only white kid on my side and that there were no black folks on the other side.

Nowadays, blacks are much less segregated in the South (and West) than in the big Northern cities. And the world is much less black and white.

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by | 3 April 2008 · 5:48 pm

Fallows on China the Fragile Superpower

In a blogpost about the disconnect between China’s internal poverty and external superpower status, James Fallows ends up quoting from his own piece on American values in the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

When living in Japan, I heard accounts from many Japanese who had gone to the U.S. for business or study in the 1950s, after the Allied occupation ended. They looked at the factories and the farms and the vastness of America and asked themselves: What were we thinking?

How could tiny Japan have imagined challenging the United States? After the Soviet Union fell and the hollowness of its system was exposed, many Americans asked: What were we thinking about “two superpower” competition with the U.S.S.R.? Its missiles were lethal and its ideology was brutal and dangerous. But a rival to America as an overall model? John F. Kennedy was only one of many to suggest as much, in his 1960 campaign references to the prestige gap as well as missile gap that had opened. Eventually, we all learned there was no comparison at all.

I think if more Americans came to China right now and saw how hard so many of its people are struggling just to survive, they too might ask: What are we thinking, in considering China an overall threat? Yes, its factories are formidable, and its weight in the world is huge. But this is still a big, poor, developing nation trying to solve the emergency of the moment. Susan Shirk, of the University of California at San Diego, recently published a very insightful book that calls China a “fragile superpower.” “When I discuss it in America,” she told me, “people always ask, ‘What do you mean, fragile?’” When she discusses it here in China, “they always ask, ‘What do you mean, superpower?’”

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Filed under China, economics, nationalism, U.S., USSR

by | 1 April 2008 · 10:42 pm

Cuyahoga River Fires of 1868, 1912, 1936, 1952, 1969

From: Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus & Michael Shellenberger (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 22-24:

On June 22, 1969, oil and debris on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, burst into flames and burned for twenty-five minutes. The burning river quickly became national news. Time magazine published an article headlined “The Price of Optimism,” complete with a spectacular photo of the river aflame. Randy Newman wrote a song about the famous fire. And decades later, environmental leaders remembered the fire as an emblematic cause of the burgeoning environmental movement. “I will never forget a photograph of flames, fire, shooting right out of the water in downtown Cleveland,” President Clinton’s EPA administrator Carol Browner said years later. “It was the summer of 1969 and the Cuyahoga River was burning.”

But the famous photograph that appeared in Time was not of the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969. It was of a far more serious fire in 1952 that burned for three days and caused $1.5 million in damage. In fact, the Cuyahoga had caught fire on at least a dozen occasions since 1868. Most of those earlier fires were much more devastating than the 1969 blaze: A fire on the Cuyahoga in 1912 killed five people. A fire in 1936 burned for five days. The 1969 fire, by contrast, lasted just under thirty minutes, caused only $50,000 in damage, and injured no one. The reason Time had to use the photograph of the 1952 fire is that the 1969 fire was out before anyone could snap a picture of it.

For at least a hundred years before 1969, industrial river fires were a normal part of American life. In his scrupulous reconstruction of the era, the environmental law professor Jonathan Adler writes,

The first reported Cuyahoga River fires were well over a century ago. Indeed, it appears that burning oil and debris in rivers was somewhat common. Due to the volume of oil in the river, the Cuyahoga was “so flammable that if steamboat captains shoveled glowing coals overboard, the water erupted in flames” … The Cuyahoga was also not the only site of river fires. A river leading into the Baltimore harbor caught flame on June 8, 1926 … The Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan, “repeatedly caught fire” like the Cuyahoga, and a tugboat on the Schuylkill burned when oil on the river’s surface was lit.

It wasn’t that nobody had noticed that the river had become a disaster. In 1881, the mayor of Cleveland called the Cuyahoga “an open sewer.” The problem was that there wasn’t the political will to do much about it. After the Civil War, the city was understandably more concerned with building a new sewer system to prevent more cholera outbreaks than with addressing the occasional river fire.

Like the sad and largely unacknowledged history of the Cuyahoga, smog in Los Angeles and other cities was bad in 1970 but hardly worse than the foul air Americans breathed in earlier eras. All of which begs the question: if modern environmentalism was born in response to the dramatic visual evidence of industrial pollution, why wasn’t it born in 1868, 1912, or 1952?

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Filed under economics, industry, U.S.

by | 19 February 2008 · 9:45 pm

Japanese Internment in Canada and the U.S.

A recent article by Stephanie Bangarth in Japan Focus examines Nikkei Loyalty and Resistance in Canada and the United States, 1942-1947. Here is an excerpt.

A basic accounting of the similarities and differences in the situation of American and Canadian Nikkei sets forth something like this: In North [and South] America in general, the Japanese were subjected to discriminatory treatment upon arrival, including the denial of citizenship rights in the US and franchise rights in Canada; they negotiated this impediment by clustering in “ethnic enclaves” primarily on the west coast and increasingly became objects of suspicion, fear, and envy over the course of the early twentieth century. Following the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, both countries “evacuated” Japanese aliens, Japanese nationals, and their North American–born children from their west coasts and “relocated” them to inland camps on the basis of “military necessity,” a politically expedient term legitimating an historic racist animus. This movement involved about 112,000 people in the US and nearly 22,000 in Canada.

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, both the US and Canada also developed policies that were used to defraud the Nikkei of their property and to encourage a more even “dispersal” of the population throughout the country. The policies diverged in the mid-1940s when the Canadian government expatriated Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry and deported some Japanese aliens (those who signed repatriation forms requesting to be sent to Japan). The Americans also deported some, but only those who renounced American citizenship. Japanese Canadians were disfranchised by provincial and federal legislation; by virtue of the Bill of Rights, those Japanese Americans who had been born in the US were not. In addition, they were permitted to enlist and many did so proudly in the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. It is also worth noting that many Nisei who joined the armed forces did so while their families remained in the camps; still others resisted pressures to join, particularly after 20 January 1944 when the draft was reinstated for Japanese Americans.

Throughout much of the war, by contrast, their Canadian counterparts were prohibited from serving in the armed forces and thereby demonstrating their loyalty. Canadian government officials feared that in return for serving their country, Japanese Canadians might agitate for the franchise. It was only toward the end of the war that about 150 Nisei were permitted to work as translators for the Canadian military. Another important difference is that the US government allowed persons of Japanese ancestry to return to the Pacific coast in 1945 as a result of the Endo decision, whereas Japanese Canadians had to wait until 1949 when wartime government legislation finally lapsed.

via K. M. Lawson’s Asian History Carnival #19 at Frog in a Well

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by | 19 February 2008 · 8:14 pm

Bosnia, 1998: A Colony Once Again

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 337-339:

My Sarajevan friends are delighted with the ten thousand foreigners living there, and the nine billion dollars being spent on the country every year. They tell me that Sarajevo has actually never in its history been so genuinely cosmopolitan. The new cafés are pulsating. Increasingly, the Office of the High Representative, headed by the Spanish diplomat Carlos Westendorp, rules like a colonial administration. It’s tempting to say that Bosnia-Herzegovina has again become an Austro-Hungarian protectorate, as it was after the Congress of Berlin, with the Americans as the Austrian Habsburgs and we Western Europeans as the Hungarian junior partner (although picking up most of the bill). But it’s not a real protectorate. Rather, it’s a bizarre novelty in international relations. We have had protectorates before. We have had partitions before. This is half protectorate, half partition.

The official ideology of all Western agencies in Bosnia is that the unitary state is being pulled together again. It’s just taking rather a long time. Alas, I don’t think this is true. I fear all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not put Humpty-Dumpty together again. But final partition would be an even less acceptable option. For the Bosniaks to have a serious, viable state, you would need to give them at least part of the western half of the “Serb Republic.” That would almost certainly mean more bloodshed and tens of thousands more people driven from their homes. If, on the other hand, you allowed the Serb- and Croat-run parts to secede as they are, you would be left with a landlocked rump Bosniak state. Bosniaks warn that this could turn their people into muslim-fundamentalist nationalists. The result would be a “Gaza strip in the middle of Europe.”

In fact, the Bosniaks hold the conscience of the West in a powerful moral half nelson. In effect, they say, “We are the Jews of the Balkans and the Palestinians of the Balkans!” The Jews, because no people in Europe has suffered something as close to genocide since the Jews in the Holocaust. So how could we abandon them? The Palestinians, for the reasons already given. I very much doubt that a rump Bosnia would actually become a muslim-fundamentalist state. But in a sense this doesn’t matter. Earlier this autumn, the former German defense minister Volker Rühe told me that the deepest issue in Bosnia and Kosovo was “whether the West sees a place for Islam in Europe.” Powerful Islamic countries agree. Faced with these complementary perceptions of the powerful, the local truth is largely irrelevant.

So, in some parts of former Yugoslavia, violent separation has already happened. In Kosovo, there remains a difficult but still Humvee-navigable dirt road to peaceful separation. That road we should take. Elsewhere, in Bosnia, but in a different way also in Macedonia, I see no morally acceptable alternative to a direct Western involvement lasting many years, probably decades. Even if, intellectually, we will the end of separation, we cannot will the means.

But why on earth should Americans be the new Habsburgs ? Why should American diplomats enter the twenty-first century trying to solve problems left over from the dissolution of the Ottoman empire at the end of the nineteenth? Why should sons of Kansas and daughters of Ohio risk their lives in these perilous, snow-covered mountains (“What do you need? Plastic?”) to stop Europeans fighting over obscure patches of territory? After all, the great-grandparents of some of these Americans probably fled these very mountains to escape just these insoluble squabbles.

The vital national interest is indeed hard to see. The new catchall bogey of “regional instability” hardly compares with the old fear of the Soviet Union getting the upper hand in the cold war. But empires—especially informal, liberal empires—are like that. You muddle in; then somehow you can’t quite muddle out. Somalia could never apply the moral half nelson that Bosnia has. For the Balkans, this has been a decade of Western bluster. First, we had the Western bluster of intervention. Now we have the Western bluster of withdrawal. I don’t believe this bluster either. I think the sons of Kansas and the daughters of Ohio will be here for a good long time.

“Take up the White Man’s burden,” Rudyard Kipling wrote a hundred years ago, welcoming the United States’s willingness, in the Philippines, “To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild.” There, and elsewhere, he prophesied, Americans would reap only “The blame of those ye better, / The hate of those ye guard.” Today, some of the finest white men are, of course, black. And the local savages are Europeans.

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Filed under Europe, NGOs, U.N., U.S., Yugoslavia