The development community’s uneasiness about entering into dialogue with foreign policy makers is warranted. Much of the foreign policy community is instinctively inclined to prioritise stability or short-term political advantage even if development priorities are put at stake. Examples of double standards still abound. Valerie Amos’s pre-Iraq tour of African members of the Security Council (Angola, Cameroon, Guinea) and the promises of aid that followed was rightly received with scepticism. Likewise, the introduction of security conditionalities into decisions regarding development aid should also be questioned, particularly in the case of countries with poor human rights records such as Pakistan and Mauritius.

Yet, while it is easy to stereotype foreign policy specialists as incurable pragmatists, it would be wrong to ignore the more progressive among them. They are not necessarily fringe figures, after Afghanistan and Iraq, many European foreign policy analysts are forming an agenda that emphasises the importance of sustainable, domestically-driven development with strong civil society components. They have more common ground with the development community than the latter might allow for.

Indeed, the language of development is creeping into security analysis. Sven Biscop, a Brussels-based expert on European security, has argued that “rather than terrorism or WMD, the most important threat emerging from the new security environment seems to be the growing gap between the haves and have-nots . . . a gap which can best be expressed in terms of access to the essential global public goods.” Carl Bildt, the former UN envoy to Bosnia and now a member of the High Level Panel on UN reform, has emphasised the importance of convergence between security and development policies.

The key question that this raises is whether security is a precondition for development or vice versa. Javier Solana’s European Security Strategy, approved by the European Council in December 2003, explicitly puts security first. This choice acts as the basis for a strong endorsement for conditionality – creating new rifts with the development community.

Yet, before we condemn “conditionality” outright, we should see that it has multiple meanings. The development community has recently moved towards, not away from, certain conditional policies, devising complicated contracts for the implementation of aid agreements. For example, most development practitioners would agree that one of the strengths of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) is the mutual accountability framework that they provide. Likewise, by seeking to work increasingly with local counterparts in the developing world, international NGOs are having to move towards models of engagement which allow their partners to work independently while still fulfilling funding requirements and ensuring that core values are respected.

This form of conditionality relies on transparency, unlike political conditionality, which tends to be entwined with the obscurities of diplomacy. If we are to forge a new relationship between development and foreign policy, it is necessary for us to think how we can include political issues in binding contracts. Transparency should be at the core of these, marking a step-change in how we do politics with poorer states. To overcome vested national interests, it might be easiest to do this through organisations such as the EU rather than at the state level.

In a recent report from The Foreign Policy Centre, Julian Braithwaite (a senior adviser to Lord Ashdown in Bosnia) advocates the formation of EU contracts with problem countries. The aim of this strategy would be two-fold: it would help pool everything that the EU has to offer, including not only aid budgets but benefits falling outside the remit of development agencies such as visa-free travel and access to trade, giving them a clear identity and focus. The second aim should be to promote greater openness on the part of EU member states, subjecting individual member governments to peer review and annual audits.

This would be a radical departure. It might not only create new trust between the development and foreign affairs communities but – rather more importantly – between donor and recipient states. Aid practitioners should note that, in the UK, links between the Foreign Office and DfID are widely held to be improving. A new dialogue on development is emerging – it should not be stifled by dogmatism.

Richard Gowan is The Foreign Policy Centre’s Europe Programme Researcher.
Phoebe Griffith manages The Foreign Policy Centre’s International Development Programme.

Even the term Energy policy seems as steeped in the 1970s as smoky boardrooms and the closed shop. Mrs Thatcher downgraded the Department of Energy into an adjunct of the DTI for ideological reasons. The title smacked of economic planning, she felt, whereas our energy needs should be decided by the market. When Labour came into power in 1997 it seemed that this trend would carry on. Apart from a moratorium on gas-fired power stations to give coal a breathing space during a period of low gas prices, there was little market interference. With the reform of electricity trading arrangements, Labour were able to promise that that households would see a 10% fall in the costs of energy prices.

But two trends have conspired to give energy policy an unexpected rebirth. The experience of California showed the dangers of Governments prioritising low cost energy above all else. In 1996, California began liberalising its market, legislation was poorly designed in that it forced utilities to buy gas at increasing prices, but didn’t allow them to pass on the costs to consumers. As gas prices increased, they began to trade at a loss, and so, since most were relatively small businesses, they went bankrupt rather than continue to accumulate losses In the summer of 2003, similar trends could be seen across Europe. In Britain, the “dash for gas”, when new generators piled into the market to win spoils under the previous electricity trading arrangements, led to overcapacity. The government’s changes to electricity trading arrangements made energy prices plummet, which in turn is removing suppliers from the market as generators closed or mothballed power stations. Like in California during the nineties, there is no incentive to invest in new generation, apart from subsidised renewable power. As the BBC dramatically illustrated in their prime-time docu-drama “If”, there are real dangers that the lights could go off here.

The structural problems with liberalisation have been matched by a greater reliance on more unstable regions for our energy. The near exhaustion of Europe’s indigenous gas supplies will leave all European states heavily dependent on imported gas from potentially unstable regions – including Russia, the Central Asian Republics and the Middle East. This has given governments added incentive to consider dusting off home-grown forms of energy that are not at the end of a very long and unstable pipe-line. In the doomsday scenario, we may end up with fundamentalist regimes that are unwilling to trade with us. As Dan Plesch from the Royal United Services Institute has written: “imagine an Islamic Pol Pot intent on winning the clash of the civilizations. He would have every incentive not to sell us oil”.

September 11 led to a reappraisal in the US of their reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Risks of instability aside, the price of relying on autocratic regimes for oil supply became apparent. The costs of the Faustian bargain– in which the west tolerated states that repressed their own people as long as the oil taps were kept open – seemed too high when that repression bred terrorism that was directed at the West. The neo-conservatives shared an agenda with human rights campaigners on the left in their determination to wean themselves off a reliance on the Middle East. The economic costs of deploying US troops in the region are also becoming politically significant. The US Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Study in 2000 estimated that the costs of oil dependency were three trillion. And in the Democratic primaries, John Kerry got the loudest cheer of the night when he promised to give America the security of energy independence because “our sons and daughters should never have to fight and die for Mid-east oil”.

But the biggest reason for a renewed interest in energy policy is, of course, climate change. Sir David King, the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, warned recently that global warming was a greater world threat than international terrorism. Britain has taken an international lead by promising to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. But these good intentions fail to match the reality of what is happening to our power stations. Over the next twenty years, Britain’s non-carbon generating nuclear power plans will reach the end of their useful life and close, removing at a stroke most of the energy that is produced by clean sources. Currently, nuclear power provides 23% of the UK’s electricity needs. If left to the market, this will all be replaced by cheap fossil fuels.

The Royal Society has called for a new generation of nuclear power stations. But the green movement remain staunchly opposed, as Stephen Tindale argues in this exchange. The Government, too, has been lukewarm, given the huge costs and public relations obstacles of any move to nuclear. The 2002 White Paper on Energy suggested that the skill base of the nuclear industry should be maintained, but stressed that they would not push this option. It would be up to the market to decide. Instead, they have placed their faith in a big expansion of renewable energy. This will require a revolution: currently only 2.5 per cent of the UK’s electricity comes from renewable sources – even though there is a target to increase this to 10% by 2010 and 20% by 2020. Though there has been a quickening of progress, it is almost impossible to find an expert who believes this first target can be reached. However, as Stephen Tindale points out, massive increases in renewable capacity are possible. Already in Denmark 18% of energy comes from wind power.

Debates on energy often fail to consider what is happening in the rest of the world. Though nuclear power has an uncertain future in the UK, it is being actively considered in Finland, Brazil, Sweden and Japan and the US. Nuclear energy was the fastest growing source of electricity in the 1990s. But the immediate cost implications, together with the unresolved issue of how to permanently dispose of nuclear waste, means that few British politicians have been vocal in its support. This may change when Britain decides on a permanent waste facility, as the US has already done in New Mexico. But the question of whether Britain can afford to close its nuclear capacity if it is to reach its environmental targets cannot be ducked forever.

Rob Blackhurst, Editorial Director, Foreign Policy Centre.

The burning of Bush The US president was once known for his ability to unite factions but, with his foreign policy in tatters around him, he is dubbed the Great Polariser. What went wrong for George W. Bush and his advisers? And will he now focus on homeland defence, not overseas threats?

Washington had been preparing for their airborne invasion for months. Every 17 years, the cicadas descend on the nation’s capital like a biblical plague. They hatch, crawl out of the ground, mate, lay eggs – and then disappear for another 17 years. The Darwinian theorist, Stephen Jay Gould, says their evolutionary strategy of appearing periodically with overwhelming force and then retreating has allowed them to outwit their predators.

Observing them, a European in the imperial capital, I have come to regard their lurch from activism to retrenchment as a metaphor for American foreign policy. The French writer Raymond Aron – a rare intellectual of the right – described American policy as a series of “swings between the crusading spirit and a withdrawal into isolation far from a corrupt world that refused to heed the American Gospel”. Well, we’ve seen the orgy of activism: an increase in military spending to match all of the rest of the world; the bonfire of international treaties (Kyoto Accord, International Criminal Court, Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The trinity of American military supremacy, unilateralism and pre- emptive war was heralded as a “Bush Revolution” that would define an assertive foreign policy for a generation. But now, just four years after the man was elected, an insistent beat of comment says that America could be on the verge of retrenchment, leaving its dream of an imperial foreign policy on the streets of Falluja.

A few blocks from the White House, 150 people gather to mark the first anniversary of the end of fighting in Iraq. It is a warm and sunny day in May. The speaker is a thin-lipped, grey man, an unlikely revolutionary – more John Major than Che Guevara. Douglas Feith, under-secretary of state for policy (number three) at the Pentagon, is one of the key architects of the Bush Revolution, a dogged, dependable ally of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and vice-president Richard Cheney. The gathering is taking place at 1150 17th Street, a Silicon Valley for rightwing thinkers and home to the American Enterprise Institute, the Weekly Standard and the Project for the New American Century. Only a year ago the big joke making its way around the building was, “Baghdad is for wimps, real men go to Tehran”. But Feith isn’t here to lay out the next wave of intervention in the Middle East. Instead, he sounds defensive: “I think no one can properly assert that the failure so far to find Iraqi WMD stockpiles undermines the reasons for the war,” he says. He finds himself fielding questions about the need for United Nations involvement, strategies to get allies on board, the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and the lack of planning for the aftermath of war.

Outside, in the political whirlpool of Washington and in the world over which he wishes to strengthen American hegemony, Feith knows that events are not going his way. On Iraq, the administration has turned to the UN, with President Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice both doing the rounds of European capitals asking for help. On Iran, it has tacitly supported the European engagement strategy. And on North Korea they are relying on multilateral six- party talks.

Part of the reason for this, says Joseph Nye, dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, is that the so-called Bush Revolution was based not on a single view of the world but a marriage of convenience between three schools of foreign policy, which for shorthand are linked to historical figures: the founding secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and presidents Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.

Nye, who coined the concept of “soft power” to describe the kind of culture, political and technological influence he thinks America should be projecting, says that the “revolutionary coalition” is unravelling: “There really isn’t a coherent Bush ideology but three strands of opinion competing with each other. That’s why the administration has been so divided. Look at Bush’s argument for intervening in Iraq. First there was WMD – which appeals to traditional security people. Then the connection with 9/11 – which appeals to assertive nationalists. And finally democratising the Middle East – which appeals to the Wilsonians (the right-wingers so-called after President Wilson).”

These groups, which stood together behind the invasion, are now falling apart and blaming each other as the situation in Iraq unravels and the Bush administration suffers in the polls. I decide to take an American journey, to observe the process close up.

Dallas, Texas. Downtown, the gleaming skyscrapers huddle together as if to draw strength from their numbers. All around this small copse of glass and marble (adorned with logos including AT&T, KPMG, Fannie Mae) is an endless sprawl of low-rise buildings that stretches as far as the eye can see – this is big-sky country. The journalist Robert Bryce tells me that Texas is the “front porch of the American psyche”, explaining that Texas was a nation before it was a state, and that “the Texas myth has become America’s myth. The Alamo, the Indian fighter, the cowboy, the oil man, the rough neck – all of these have become American archetypes.”

On a sleepy Sunday afternoon, I drive into a suburb not unlike the one that George and Laura Bush chose as their home when they settled here in 1989 to run the Texas Rangers baseball team. Making my way between the sprinklers, palm trees, neo-classical columns, manicured lawns, fountains, stone cladding and mock-Tudor thatched roofs, I realise that nothing is more than 10 years old – a symbol of growing Texan affluence and the demographic explosion. In this idyllic neighbourhood of McMansions or Faux Chateaux (as a non- Texan calls them) I find the stunning house of Jim Falk, the head of the Dallas World Affairs Council, who has organised a barbecue to introduce me to the pillars of the liberal and business establishment in the town that George W. Bush thinks of as home. Sitting by the pool eating chicken and chunky burgers laced with 15 different relishes, my fellow guests and I talk about how the Bush coalition was formed.

Lynn Minna, an attorney who is also head of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, explains that, “Dallas is the home of the Baptist church. A lot of business contacts are made in church. At the beginning of meetings of the chamber of commerce, you need to hold your hands and pray.” Bill McKenzie, a columnist on the Dallas Morning News, tells me how Bush has tapped into this seam of religiosity: “I remember interviewing Bush in 1997 about running for president and he said, ‘I don’t mean to sound too Presbyterian about this, but we are wrestling with whether this is what we are called to do. ‘ I don’t think he feels that God put him in the White House, but he does feel he has a purpose: to defeat terrorism.”

John Stephenson, who is the head of a Dallas law firm and an active member of the Dallas World Affairs Council, tells me I should remember that “foreign policy down here means Mexico”. Bush came to the office even less prepared on the world’s issues and problems than that other southern governor, Bill Clinton. But knowledge isn’t the point. The consensus among the guests is that it’s Bush’s way of doing business that’s important. If you know that, you can see the shape of his policies as president.

First, he’s willing to spend political capital. In February this year, journalist Paul Burka wrote in Texas Monthly that “once Bush decides to take a bite of the apple, it’s going to be the biggest chunk he can sink his teeth into. The argument that the status quo in the Islamic world would not change unless America did something to change it would have appealed to him. Of all the reasons to oust Saddam, the boldest was to change the paradigm.”

The second thing that everybody agrees on is his ability to focus on a single strategic priority to the exclusion of almost everything else. “As governor, Bush had an intense focus, he used to say ‘when everything is a priority nothing is a priority.’ When he zeroes in on something he does it to the exclusion of (almost everything),” says McKenzie. “I can only assume that he is focusing on stopping another 9/11 like a laser – and that includes pre- emptive strikes. And if the Europeans don’t get it,” he says, smiling sweetly at me, “that’s just too bad.”

The third poolside topic was Bush’s impatience with institutions and laws. Bush has a small-businessman’s attitude towards legislation and institutions: they are things to be worked around, and are rarely seen as the solution to any problem. “I think Bush is more entrepreneurial and the EU more statist, more process- driven. For better or worse Bush is intuitive, like a lot of entrepreneurs. He gets an idea and then it is: ‘Let’s go!’ You probably couldn’t find two more distinct approaches than Bush the wild catter and the European bureaucrat,” says McKenzie.

One thing his Texas friends don’t understand is what happened to Governor Bush. My fellow barbecue guests say that the single distinguishing feature of Bush as governor was his capacity to reach out across political boundaries. Burka in Texas Monthly wrote that “he had all the qualities of a great governor. He was a uniter, not a divider – a centrist who fought the extremists in his own party. I would never have imagined that the person I knew would have been characterised in a Time cover story as the ‘Great Polariser.'” Many people were shocked to see that he has become such a polarising figure, and one apparently careless of some of his conservative base’s concerns. Chip Pitts, a corporate lawyer, said: “A lot of conservative Republicans do care about deficits. Then you add in the Gulf War. ”

Chicago, Illinois. The elite in the Windy City share the view of foreign policy proposed by Alexander Hamilton, the founding secretary of the Treasury under George Washington. A New Yorker, he saw the world as a marketplace, in which foreign policy’s main purpose was to enhance America’s share of it. The Chicagoan corporate leaders are conservatives – nothing neo about them – who do not believe that human nature is essentially benign (or can be improved). The mark of their foreign policy is stability, and their most senior representative in the current administration is secretary of state Colin Powell.

In the wake of 9/11, Powell was at the heart of attempts to build a coalition for the invasion of Afghanistan and he played a central role in attempts to get UN backing for the war on Iraq. But he was also careful to distance himself from the zeal of his more assertive colleagues. I spoke in Chicago to Edward Djerejian, a former US ambassador to Syria and Israel, who is very close to Powell. “The war in Iraq,” he said, “will be debated in terms of whether it is a war of choice or necessity. There is no doubt that the Pentagon has taken the leadership over the reconstruction of Iraq. The responsibility should have been shared with the state department which would have avoided some of the mistakes that were made. But these voices were not heard. I feel very strongly that these people (civilian leadership in the Pentagon) just did not understand the political, economic and cultural situation on the ground.”

Richard Lugar, the senator for the neighbouring state of Indiana, is one of the long-serving Republican foreign policy leaders and is acting chair of the Senate foreign relations committee. He spoke for many when he said in a recent speech: “To win the war against terrorism, the US must assign US economic and diplomatic capabilities the same strategic priority that we assign to military capabilities. We have relied heavily on military options and unilateral approaches that weakened our alliances.”

The head of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Marshall Bouton, tells me that “Midwesterners don’t care much for revolutions. The Midwest is like the fulcrum of the US body politic. The coasts go up and down but the Midwest tends towards centrist pragmatism.”

In the run-up to the election, Condoleezza Rice – at that stage a member of the Bush campaign team – wrote a famous piece for Foreign Affairs that captured the Chicagoan creed: “Foreign policy in a Republican administration will proceed from the firm ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community. America can exercise power without arrogance and pursue its interests without hectoring and bluster.” Few policy statements have been so comprehensively destroyed by their author.

And the about-face was not restricted to Rice. John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, explains: “If you look at Cheney’s statements about why the US didn’t invade Baghdad in 1991 he sounds exactly like those who opposed the recent war in Iraq. There is no question that he has undergone a profound change in world view since then.”

One of the differences between these conservatives and the neo-cons is a dramatically different evaluation of US power. Mearsheimer takes umbrage at the description of the US by neo-conservatives as an “empire”. He even says the term “hegemon” is an overstatement. “The US is a hegemon in the western hemisphere but when you get out of the western hemisphere it is a more complicated world.”

The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations says the tide of opinion among the business community is turning. “A lot of people went along for the ride because they trusted Bush,” says director of studies Christopher Whitney. “Some of that has been eroded. I think the revolution is over unless Bush is suicidal.” Bouton says some of the council’s most popular speakers have been anti-Bush: “We had the largest turn-out for a single event with George Soros – 1,600 people came to hear him attack Bush’s foreign policy.”

The allies of Colin Powell are certainly feeling emboldened. One of his closest friends, speaking off the record, is jubilant: “One of the things that is clear is that the sun has set on the neo- conservatives. The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Feith group no longer has any tailwind. The realists or pragmatists led by Powell are reasserting themselves.”

The Metropolitan Club, Washington DC. It is as if a piece of London’s clubland in Pall Mall – complete with shabby leather armchairs and a billiard room – has been implanted in the heart of America’s capital. This gentlemen’s club, a block away from the White House, is a favourite haunt for neo-conservatives. They will often be found in the bar drinking Martinis and comparing notes about political developments. Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute explained who they are in “The Neo- Conservative Cabal”, a 2003 article in Commentary magazine, by pointing to their heroes: Henry “Scoop” Jackson (a Washington state senator), Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill. “All three believed in confronting democracy’s enemies early and far from home shores; and all three were paragons of ideological warfare.”

Ironically, most of those who call themselves neo-conservative were opposed to Bush in the Republican primaries. They preferred John McCain, who remains their ideological soulmate. (As Craig Kennedy, president of the German Marshall Fund, points out, it is a further irony that the people most opposed to Bush’s neo-conservatism wanted Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to pick McCain as a running mate.) Their main difference with the traditional conservatives is their willingness to see American power used to advance political goals. They were, for example, in favour of action in Kosovo when President Clinton was under constant attack from traditional conservatives in Congress. Second, they believe in the pro-active promotion of democracy and want to bring about the political transformation of the Middle East. This is what has led them to be described as the Wilsonians of the right, after the president who believed in “making the world safe for democracy”.

They do not, though, share all of Wilson’s beliefs: “To the extent that neo-conservatives are Wilsonians,” says Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University, “it is Wilsonianism minus international institutions such as the UN. This is because of their belief in the fundamental illegitimacy of the UN and related bodies, due in the first instance to their undemocratic character, but based also on the way they have treated Israel and the Middle East conflict.”

Within the administration, deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz is usually identified as the key actor, together with under-secretaries of state Douglas Feith and John Bolton, National Security Council staff member Elliott Abrams and Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby. This is a very small proportion of the leading players, but the neo-conservative influence comes not from their position at the apex of the administration, but the power of their ideas, which offered an explanation for 9/11 and a bold prospectus for the future.

A senior administration official, speaking under the condition of anonymity, argues that the president’s embrace of Wilsonianism has increased the gulf between the US and Europe. “Europe is like America before world war one: an ‘it’s not our problem’ continent. They are a ‘status-quo, don’t change anything, so what if there is no freedom, so what if there is no human rights, so what if there is torture’ continent. So long as we can do a trade deal most Europeans are satisfied. Americans cannot accept this. That status quo is producing toxic threats. There is some short-term surgery we need to do, and then we can focus on the long-term.”

One evening at the Metropolitan Club, a couple of weeks after Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar was defeated in the elections, I met one of his senior advisers and a group of young neo-cons. Aznar’s adviser is still in a state of shock. His party has paid the ultimate price for its links with the Bush administration. He had been planning to come to Washington to discuss how Aznar, as the successful former prime minister of a victorious party, could come out to help in the Bush campaign. Now he fears that no one will want to be seen with a loser. But the discussion is practical and to the point. The neo-cons show their support; they are not fair-weather friends, they say, and offer their help – ideas for universities and think-tanks where Aznar could be based, speaking agencies, foundations. In a town where politics is a revolving door, they have plenty of experience in rehabilitating former politicians.

In many ways they are a deeply attractive group. They are highly intelligent, idealistic and loyal to each other and to those who take their side. They tend to be extremely well informed about the areas they are interested in and they use their knowledge to good effect. They are not creatures of fashion and will toil away on territorial disputes in countries such as Georgia or Moldova that have dipped out of the limelight. There is a studied modesty about their significance in the American political system that is married to a dogged devotion to the causes they espouse.

And, as the situation in Iraq lurches from crisis to crisis, they are quick to point the finger at other factions in the administration. Some, like the neo-con thinker Max Boot, have called for Rumsfeld to resign. Others have tried to pin the blame on Powell. At a recent seminar, former policy adviser and now columnist Robert Kagan said: “If the secretary of state had spent as much time speaking to allies as he did talking to (writer) Bob Woodward, we might have had some support on the ground.” In a stinging article in The Washington Post last month, Kagan hit out at the whole administration: “All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now. The Bush administration is evidently in a panic, and this panic is being conveyed to the American people.”

Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. On a cool, cloudy morning in the spring of 1998, Texas governor George W. Bush travelled through Silicon Valley to the Stanford campus for an introduction to foreign policy. The master of ceremonies was George Schultz, Reagan’s hawkish secretary of state, who had brought together half a dozen of his colleagues from the conservative Hoover Institution at the university (including Rice, then the Stanford provost). As he sat chewing the fat with these professors, Bush had still not formally announced his intention to run. The conversation meandered from one topic to another and, gradually, this group of foreign- policy hawks, who had been close to Reagan, discovered that they were growing to like the young Bush.

Many of these thinkers had as much belief in power as the neo-cons, but a less idealistic view of human nature. They have been labelled “assertive” or “Jacksonian” nationalists after Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the US. Jacksonians have consistently supported spending for defence and have never been reluctant to use weapons once purchased. Yet their aim is to enhance American power, not to save the world.

Robin West, an oil man and former assistant secretary of interior in the Reagan administration, explains: “Cheney and Rumsfeld are different from the neo-cons. They have a lot of experience. Their attitude is that these are problems that have to be dealt with. If not now, when? If not by us, then by whom?”

In the Ford administration in 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney led the offensive against secretary of state Henry Kissinger’s policy of detente towards the Soviet Union – which they believed undersold American power. Morton Abramowitz, who served in the Pentagon at the time, is quoted as saying “I remember vividly (Rumsfeld) beat the pants off Kissinger.”

This history of hawkishness is confirmed by a very senior former official who looks back to the debates in the first Bush administration. “I think Cheney in the first Bush administration was the odd man out on Iraq,” he says. “He wanted to go into Baghdad but was surrounded by George Bush Snr as president, General Powell as chairman of the joint chiefs, Brent Scowcroft as national security adviser and James Baker as secretary of state. I’m not as surprised by his subsequent behaviour as some.”

James Lindsay, an analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations who served on Clinton’s National Security Council, explains the difference between the Jacksonian and the Wilsonian strands of hawkish thinking: “If you want to understand what they believe in, look at what they do, not what they say. Within a year of the invasion of Afghanistan they introduced a budget with zero dollars for rebuilding Afghanistan. If they were interested in democracy they would have done it in Haiti.”

Although Jacksonians believe that international institutions can be more of a burden than a benefit, and that an America unbound will be better able to defend itself from terrorism, they are pragmatic enough to be willing to use institutions when it serves their purposes. “The administration does not say it will not work with others, but it has strong preferences about how to work with others,” says Lindsay. “First, it prefers coalitions of the willing to international institutions or permanent alliances. Second, it will go to international institutions, but it does so out of pragmatism to achieve a particular goal rather than out of principle – it is ‘multilateralism a la carte’.”

What distinguishes the Jacksonians is their belief in the extent of American power, and their optimism about its impact in securing US objectives. Stephen Krasner, a professor at the Hoover Institution and a close colleague of Rice, says the US has had the most successful foreign policy of any country ever. “Vietnam is the only major blip. The French have not won a war since Napoleon. The Germans have had a catastrophic foreign policy. This means that neither country is in a position to have great confidence in foreign-policy projects.” But, after the cold war, the Jacksonians have been concerned to maintain US power in the face of terrorism and rogue states. “What’s new is that there is a disconnect between underlying levels of power (gross domestic product, military power) and the ability to create massive disruption. A country such as North Korea with less than 1 per cent of the GDP of America, or a terrorist group, can create a strategic challenge killing hundreds of thousands or even millions with a conventional or dirty nuclear weapon,” says Krasner.

The Iraq war was a central plank of a new strategy of asserting American power in this unstable world. However, instead of broadcasting American power to the world, as the Jacksonians had hoped, the intervention has simply shown its limits by getting 130,000 US soldiers bogged down in a quagmire from which they cannot escape. The goal of this group was to keep the troop commitments down to the lowest level possible – which put them on a collision course with the Wilsonians, whose central goal was to build a democracy.

“Iraq looks extremely bad now and, unless the administration can make it look plausible, there will be very little appetite for military intervention,” says Krasner. “The single big question is, ‘will we be able to make Iraq work?’ and if that isn’t possible, then you will not see decisive interventions in areas where there is any ambiguity. You will only see intervention where there is a clear threat.”

Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, argues that because of the central tension between the Jacksonians and the Wilsonians the Bush coalition has unravelled. “The neo-conservative agenda was a policy which required a huge commitment of resources. The Jacksonian agenda was about going in and coming out. In an odd way you got transformation on the cheap. That meant that you got not an imperial foreign policy, but a failed imperial foreign policy.” Instead of concentrating their fire on their Democratic opponents, the different groups in the administration seem to be trying to pin the blame for Iraq on each other – and one of the keys to understanding the durability of the revolution will be found in the result of those arguments. But perhaps the real answer to whether the Bush Revolution will continue lies in how far it has influenced his opponent.

The Rialto Restaurant, Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Kerry country – on the fringes of the Harvard campus, this restaurant is a magnet for political thinkers and doers. A government-in-waiting is assembling. Dinner is hosted by Nick Mitropoulis, the veteran Democrat organiser who was a senior aide to presidential hopeful Michael Dukakis. The restaurant’s celebrity chef, Jody Adams, explains that her menu combines the best of local Boston food with European influences. Is this another metaphor, like the cicadas, for a future Kerry administration? Or does it signify that the pro- active, interventionist, pre-emptive stance that Bush took is now common currency between Republicans and Democrats?

It’s a question troubling many of these Democrats as they think through a return to power. Bill Antholis, director of studies at the German Marshall Fund who served on Clinton’s National Security Council, sets out the central dilemma: “The question that is really bubbling away among Democrats is, ‘just how different will we be able to be?'” Antholis’s conundrum has two components: the substance of policy and the style of diplomacy.

Kerry’s campaign has not challenged any of the fundamental principles behind the substance of US foreign policy. He has said frequently that he wants to make sure that America maintains its military superiority; he has echoed Bush’s boast that he will not ask for “a permission slip” from America’s allies to protect its security; and he has been forthright in his determination to carry on the war on terror. Graham Allison, professor of government at Harvard who served as assistant secretary of defence in the Clinton administration, agrees that a Kerry presidency coming in after 9/11 would necessarily share many of the features of Bush’s foreign policy. “Transatlantic tensions will get much worse whoever wins. The structural factors are negative: no common enemy; military competence on one side but not the other. Terrorism will divide more than it unites. Terrorists have discovered that telling people ‘stick with the Americans and you’ll be a target, keep your distance and you’ll be fine’ is powerfully persuasive.”

Strobe Talbott, president of The Brookings Institution and former deputy to Madeleine Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration, argues that after 9/11 Democrats shared the Republicans’ fears of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. “The Bush administration was right to identify Iraq as a major problem. A President Gore or McCain or Bradley would have ratcheted up the pressure, and sooner or later resorted to force.”

Tony Blinken, the Democratic director of foreign policy at the Senate, agrees: “There would be substantively very little difference between a Bush and Kerry administration. There would be stylistic differences. I don’t think Europeans should be under the illusion that there would be a substantive difference.”

Just how different will the style be? Larry Summers, president of Harvard University and former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, argues that the problems for the transatlantic relationship go beyond perceptions of threat to structural changes that started with the end of the cold war. “We have a problem of malign intent in Europe (a strategy of containing the US) and malign neglect in the US (a failure to consult),” he says.

Even under the Clinton administration, allies were not dealt with as equals. The model was to talk to everybody, make a decision on behalf of everybody – and then expect them to follow American leadership. Phil Gordon, who served on the National Security Council as director of European affairs under Clinton, says Clinton changed over time. “We came in talking about ‘assertive multilateralism’ and ended talking about the ‘indispensable nation’.”

This seems to suggest that the transatlantic tensions are like a Russian doll, with different layers of alienation piled on top of each other. Even if you remove the outer coating of the Bush Revolution, you will simply reveal another layer of tension caused by differing threat perceptions after 9/11. This in turn conceals the shift from a “great power” foreign policy to a “hegemonic one” that came with the end of the cold war. Finally, in the centre, you have the core difference between European and American societies on the role of government, religion and the use of force. These differences mean that a change of president will not change the underlying dynamics – even if the differences in style go a long way to removing the bad blood of the past year.

Although most people agree that the Bush Revolution has reached its high-water mark, they also agree that its central components could live on whoever wins the election in November. The grand strategist and historian, John Lewis Gaddis, argues that this is because the “Bush Revolution” was in fact no revolution at all. “Pre-emption, prevention and unilateralism are not new, but date back to the first homeland security attack on Washington in 1814.” Bush differed, and was revolutionary not because he was the first to have this vision but because he was the first man in the office who found himself with both the desire and the opportunity – after 9/11 – to implement this vision. And now he is finding that America lacks both the domestic will and the international support to pull it off. New research by the Texas-based political scientist, Richard Stoll, shows that Bush’s ratings on Iraq go down one point for every 30 American casualties.

This explains an emerging consensus that, having been through a period of Wilsonianism, America is about to retreat into isolationism. It will not be the isolationism of the past because America’s economy is too globalised and the country maintains troops in 130 countries around the world. Instead, it will see a less ambitious foreign policy, focused on homeland defence and dealing with threats rather than with spreading democracy.

The new multilateralism that is emerging is a sign of this. It is not a multilateralism of conviction, but a new strand of isolationism for an inter-dependent age. The new motto of the administration could be seen as a shift from “multilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary” under Clinton, to “unilateral if we care about it, multilateral if we don’t”. On Iraq, Iran and North Korea, multilateralism is not driven by a desire to get things done but by a desire to get out. It is seen as a geo- political pause button, a way for America to regroup its political authority and rebuild its military resources.

The Europeans may have the moral high ground for now, but they should be careful what they wish for: this new humility in Washington may not be what they really want. Stanley Hoffman, European studies professor at Harvard University and a tireless critic of Bush’s policies, is very worried about the lessons that will be drawn from the failure in Iraq. “What I am sometimes afraid of is that many people who supported him and are now disillusioned could become isolationist: we should stop nation building, stop fighting wars. We haven’t got much from our allies – let them clear up the mess.” Michael Ignatieff, Carr professor for human rights policy at Harvard University, goes even further: “This is not a country of fervent, crusading imperialists. The extraordinary thing is the self-sufficiency of the country. The big fact about liberal interventionism in the 1990s was that it depended on American power and on the assumption that we could do it with impunity. Now we are back to Black Hawk Down days. It’s so bad in Iraq that it has made the case for liberal interventionism impossible.”

If they are right, the future for transatlantic relations is bleak. The core feature of American foreign policy that Europeans dislike (hegemonic leadership rather than a partnership of equals) will continue, while the benefits they draw from the transatlantic relationship (engagement to solve global problems) may not.

As Andrew Moravcsik, professor of government at Harvard, argues: “While Europeans focus on avoiding the next Iraq, they might find it is a Kosovo and that they want America to intervene.” If the US gets a really bloody nose in Iraq, they might not want to step in. It is a strange thing to imagine now, but Europeans may yet long for the activism of the “Bush Revolution”.

Mark Leonard, the director of the UK Foreign Policy Centre, is on a fellowship at the German Marshall Fund of the US in Washington DC. He writes in a personal capacity.

For more than a century, the accents of immigrants have altered America’s international voice. American Germans lobbied the US to stay out of the First World War; Irish Americans pushed for a settlement in Northern Ireland; anti-Castro Cubans living in Florida have successfully resisted the lifting of the trade embargo on their home country since the 1960s; and no presidential candidate can write his foreign-policy manifesto without running it past the Jewish lobby.

In the early 1990s, Croatians residing in Germany bounced the government into recognising Croatia’s independence, with enormous consequences for the future of Yugoslavia. In Australia, the Greek population has stopped the government from accepting a Macedonian embassy.

In Europe now, it is Muslims who influence the foreign ministries. Jacques Chirac gave France’s Algerian population as a reason why he could not support the war in Iraq; the backing of Turkish Muslims propelled Gerhard Schroder to victory in Germany’s photo-finish 2002 election. Ariel Sharon’s warning this month that Jews should leave France because of the strength of Muslim groups is a mark of the power attributed to people seen until recently as politically marginal.

Are Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims also beginning to influence foreign policy? They have usually delivered sackfuls of Labour votes with few questions asked. At the 1997 election, more than 80 per cent of British Bangladeshis and Pakistanis voted Labour. Now, even allowing for the peculiarities of by-elections, this month’s results in Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill suggest that the party’s Muslim vote has collapsed.

Last year, according to the Muslim Association of Britain, a co-ordinated Muslim vote decided a British by-election for the first time, helping the Liberal Democrats to overturn a Labour majority of 13,000 in Brent East. MAB bussed in supporters. In Leicester South, which is 20 per cent Muslim, the Labour vote fell 70 per cent.

Muslims born in the UK (labelled Generation M by the pollsters) are rapidly changing political allegiance. In solidly Labour areas, the threat of deselection has hung over pro-war MPs. Oona King was saved by the union bloc vote in Bethnal Green and Bow, while Jack Straw faced a restive constituency party in Blackburn. As an Asian Labour peer told me: “If Labour thinks that Muslims support it as long as it visits mosques and the Prime Minister says that he reads the Koran, then they’ve got another thing coming.”

ICM polling last year showed that, unlike white Britons, Muslims list international issues as their highest priority. More than 79 per cent said they were “very concerned” about the dispute in Kashmir, a higher score than for either education or health. In Birmingham, home of the world’s biggest expatriate Kashmiri community, two city councillors were elected in 2003 from the single-issue People’s Justice Party, demanding that the government exert stronger pressure on India.

But the Labour MP Keith Vaz, who supported the war and whose constituency borders Leicester South, says: “Iraq was the first instance of Muslims voting along foreign-policy lines in my 18 years in parliament. Even the problems of Kashmir, or the Rushdie affair, or Palestine, never translated into significant domestic votes.”

General election turnouts have fallen, but Muslims are now more likely than average to vote. Ahmed Versi, the editor of Muslim News, says that “the Muslim young are more likely to vote than their elders”. So voters who were once invisible have become an electoral prize, and the parties have responded accordingly. The Lib Dems have rebranded themselves as the “natural party” for Asian Britain, and George Galloway’s Respect party has pitched for the Muslim vote.

Given that neither of these parties will form the next government, has this clout been noticed where it matters – in Downing Street and the Foreign Office? The Iraq war aside – on which Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain says ministers “listen but do not hear” – Muslim pressure has brought low-key successes over the past decade. Sacranie claims the UN intervention to protect Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990s as a success, and argues that Muslim pressure encouraged Tony Blair to push a solution to Palestine when the Bush administration had given up.

However, Muslims still lack formal structures. The new lobbying group Muslims for Labour, set up as an attempt to counter-balance Labour Friends of Israel, lacks the latter’s influence and its status as a favoured club for young Blairites.

Although a specifically Muslim party would have no chance in a first-past-the-post system, some Muslims favour a campaigning group on foreign-policy issues more willing to bare its teeth than the consensual Muslim Council of Britain. This could work, as foreign policy remains a low priority for most non-Muslim voters. A good analogy is with Cubans in Florida and New Jersey: though most Americans say they favour lifting the embargo, the Cubans prevail because they feel more strongly about it and are willing to switch their votes on the issue.

The difficulty here is to co-ordinate the demands: Britain has Muslims of 56 different original nationalities, and who speak more than 100 languages. The most effective route may be to lobby non-Muslims around limited aims. Just as the pro-Israeli lobby in the US remains influential because many non-Jews identify strongly with Israel, so many Britons share Muslim views about the recklessness of war in Iraq and the dangers of unilateralism.

Rob Blackhurst is editorial director of the Foreign Policy Centre.

Published in the New Statesman on Monday 26th July 2004 http://www.newstatesman.com

Lance Armstrong is poised to claim a unique sixth victory in the Tour de France. He shares his achievement of five wins with four other riders, and many Europeans find it galling that an American (from George Bush’s home state of Texas, no less) is set to surpass the European quartet of Merckx, Anquetil, Hinault and Indurain.
Transatlantic rivalry is only part of the story. Some cycling fans object to how Armstrong’s nine-man team operates with the sole purpose of ensuring their man will be wearing the winner’s yellow jersey as the riders enter the Champs Elysées tomorrow at the end of the three-week race. Europeans like the idea of the noble individual, striking out from the pack to ride heroically and alone over the mountains and through the vineyards to claim his prize. Merckx would attack, attack, attack, never content with second place. This year the colourful French rider and six times king of the mountains Richard Virenque chose Bastille Day for a daring 130-mile breakaway, to the delight of the home crowd.

By contrast, Armstrong’s rides are carefully calculated; he only unleashes his speed and endurance at key moments, to maximum tactical effect. On the fast, flat days he will shelter behind his teammates, in the mountains he will use them as pacemakers. In fairness, each of the teams in the tour has a hierarchy. But Armstrong’s team has taken things to a new level, reflecting the special American love affair with team sports.

The three most popular American spectator sports are baseball, basketball and American football. Big hitters like Babe Ruth, gravity-defying geniuses like Michael Jordan or quarterbacks like Joe Montana may have star status, but it’s the team that’s the thing. Teams practice drills and set-plays, each member has clearly defined roles.

Working cooperatively, sacrificing your own glory for the greater good, a whole greater than the sum of its parts doesn’t fit with the view of America as a nation of rugged individualism. De Tocqueville, to whom Europeans look for insights into the US character, remarked upon the abundance of voluntary “associations” (churches and unions) that performed many of the roles of the larger, more intrusive European state.

Sociologists like Robert Putnam have recorded the collapse of these civic institutions in recent decades. But even if Americans are going down to the mall and – as Putnam famously observed – “bowling alone”, on TV they still love team sports. Perhaps they find them comforting precisely because they reflect qualities of cooperation and social solidarity that are missing from the dog-eat-dog capitalist economy. There is something almost socialist in the way that recently graduated college players are allocated to the professional teams: the worst-performing teams get first choice of the best players, so as to even up the competition. And maybe it is because of our more uniform, egalitarian societies that we Europeans are attracted to the idea of the individual genius outshining the rest through natural ability (though not through hard work, that’s so American).

For Americans the team is about working together for a common aim, and that common aim remains distinctively American. It’s not playing beautiful football, or helping the lesser players rise up to the level of the best. The goal is winning – at all costs. Armstrong has a single-minded commitment to a single goal: winning the Tour de France. He is an outstanding athlete and his team has been built around him, their egos subjugated to the task at hand. They are drilled, disciplined and dedicated. Now, there’s something very American about that.

Published in The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk

What will the Presidents of Russia and China say to him when the three of them meet? To answer this question, you need to know about the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). This regional grouping, now only three years old officially, just opened its headquarters in Beijing at the beginning of this month. It brings together, China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The SCO Heads of State are meeting in Tashkent this week, and Karzai is attending as an observer.

The geographical centre of the SCO in Central Asia is an area of groaning economic dislocation, of human rights abuse and radical Islamist militancy. Nevertheless, the SCO mobilizes, potentially at least, the entire territory and national power of both Russia and China. This is nothing to snigger at, as most Western commentators do. No other regional grouping, except perhaps the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the EU, dispose of such great potential as a regional grouping. As Khalil Hasan wrote in a Pakistan newspaper in 2002, ‘The six countries that constitute the SCO cover 30 million square kilometres – 60 per cent of continental Europe and Asia – and have a combined population of 1.5 billion – about one quarter of the world population. From a strategic perspective, a Sino-Russian axis is a formidable combination. Central Asia added to it makes the alliance a serious contender for power and influence in the evolving global scenario.’ If Pakistan, in response to its expression of interest in joining the SCO, were invited to join, then the window presented by the SCO on global order will be even bigger because of Pakistan’s size, its military power (especially nuclear), and its geopolitical position relative to both India and the rest of the Muslim world.

Karzai is going to Tashkent because Afghanistan’s long term economic future may well hinge on its joining the SCO. There can be no security for Afghanistan’s borders, without peaceful economic development of the border regions in neighbouring countries. But Karzai may also be going to Tashkent because he knows that the US/UK/NATO political-military solution for his country is not working. The assessments of the current situation being offered by specialists who should and who do know are very bleak. The Western commitment is weakening in the face of competing pressures.

The promise made that the UK would never walk away from Afghanistan again is now proving hollow because the UK and its allies have no answers. They cannot find a way to deal effectively with the currently dominant political forces in the country: the Taliban and the regional military commanders. Russia and China have no answers right now either, but they have much more potential through the SCO, possibly expanded to include Pakistan, to support Afghanistan’s long term development than NATO, the EU or its member states. The SCO stands out considerably from other, earlier variants of regional cooperation in Central Asia for one main reason: the richer regions of Russia and China can act in combination as the locomotive of development the poorer regions of Central Asia plus and Afghanistan. The weakness of earlier forms of regional cooperation in Central Asia was that they lacked this one crucial ingredient for success: a powerful economy (or economies) around which the weaker states could ‘integrate’. It also needs to be borne in mind that the SCO is a very new organization having only been established in June 2001. So it should not be tarred with the same brush of failure that has been evident in other, earlier efforts at regional cooperation. The best contribution the EU and NATO can probably make to the future of Afghanistan is to promote the vigorous and effective development of the SCO, with Pakistan and Afghanistan in it. This would be a project of one to decades for sure, but there may be no other answer for the long term security and prosperity of Afghanistan.

Greg Austin is Research Director of the Foreign Policy Centre (www.fpc.org.uk)To view a full list of Dr Austin’s publication’s please click on the link below

Within moments of the news, the nation was submerged in a tide of sentimentality mushy enough to bring a smile to the face of a B movie actor in Hollywood. Still I felt it was better to view this event from American eyes simply because Ronald Reagan was so quintessentially an American character that the inevitably well balanced and somewhat jaded European perspective could never truly understand him. There is sadly very little space in the modern European sensibility for someone who was as sure of himself let alone his beliefs as Ronald Reagan. Yet I was also unsettled by the eerily reverential attitude of the American press who were busily lionizing Reagan in a fashion that would please most of the dictators Reagan had so passionately decried. Was he really that great I thought? Was he the right man in the right place in the right time or was he simply right? The answer to all three questions is yes but the curious thing despite all those who claim the lasting nature of his legacy is that we have already forgotten why that is the answer.

The first thing you should know in that I am unlikely advocate for the greatness of Ronald Reagan. I was born in Iran, a country which America ruthlessly manipulated for decades in order to secure the oil which lit up President Reagan’s ‘shining city on a hill.’ I spent my formative years in Canada, a country which struggles mightily to define itself as something other than America. During my university years in the US, I volunteered for a homeless support group which convinced me that America’s reality was closer to former NY Governor Mario Cuomo’s evocation, ‘a tale of two cities’, than President Reagan’s dreamy descriptions. And I have spent my professional career in Europe during a period in which Europeans have felt increasingly distant from their righteous cousins across the pond. I am an unabashed political liberal, a dirty word in post-Reagan America, who has always supported and worked for parties of the center left and believes in the importance of Government programs to a healthy society. So how on earth can I come to the conclusion that Ronald Reagan, America’s cheerleader in chief and an avowed if not actual enemy of big government, can be described as a great leader? The answer is disarmingly simple: because he believed in the intrinsic superiority of Liberty for everyone, not just his own people, had the boldness declare it loudly, and the courage to fight for it.

Now you might think that that is no great feat. After all not even Saddam Hussein would openly admit to not believing in Liberty. As Americans themselves might say, isn’t this like Mom and Apple Pie, something we are all for. Well not quite. One of the sad developments of the 20th Century was the extent to which liberals in the west allowed the universal ideal of liberal values to disintegrate into the murky haze of relativism under the guise of avoiding conflict at almost any cost. Liberal ideas, as conceived in the bright reflection of 17th century Enlightenment, derived their very meaning and force from the fact they were upheld as universal truths. The prospect of nuclear conflict, however, forced other considerations to the fore. Progressive thought in the West increasingly chose accommodation with the enemy to secure peace as a better alternative than the risks of defiantly declaring the supremacy of liberal values and paying the price to promote them. The messiness and ruthlessness of America’s long hard campaign in the Cold War, which reached its pinnacle in Vietnam, made an entire generation uneasy with the struggle it found itself in. Liberals became more interested in promoting détente than democracy.

Ronald Reagan’s unique political journey reflected his frustration with this trajectory of the political Left. He started his adult life as a Democrat but was alienated by what he felt was its debilitating weakness in facing the Soviet threat. When he finally emerged as a Republican president, Reagan boldly declared that liberal values were good and the totalitarian values epitomized by the Soviet Union were not. No one was more scandalized than the political grouping referred to as liberals. How could anyone, let alone the President of a superpower be so utterly simplistic? There was only one small problem: he was that simplistic and what’s more, he was right. Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War single-handedly but the clarity of his vision helped to shake the Soviet empire until it simply collapsed.

Sadly, the outpouring of praise and reverence that has marked President Reagan’s passing cannot disguise the reality that the lessons of this experience have had almost no impact on how much of the political left is facing the new challenges facing the world today. Communism may be a thing of the past but tyranny endures. Yet the comfortable confines of relativism once again offer more comfort than the prerogatives of a moralized view. Even apart from the war in Iraq, a convoluted adventure that is easy to criticize, the Left has taken upon itself to treat the entire project of actively promoting democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere with disdain. Apart from a besieged band of so called liberal internationalists, the chorus is back again to tell us that we should just accept that everyone is different rather than daring to think that everyone deserves to be free.

Ronald Reagan simply did not care what such people had to say. In fact, remarkably, he seemed to relish the prospect of confronting them. He was in the truest sense a non-elitist who believed that the privileges of liberty should be afforded to everybody. This stands in stark contrast to the abject elitism of those who claim that some people are more suited to democracy than others. An elitism that disguises itself in populist clothing by claiming its opponents are trying to impose their values on others as if anyone had bothered to ask the people in question whether they wanted to be free? Thankfully, whenever the question has been asked, the response has been resoundingly affirmative.

In office, President Reagan was an idealist rather than a realist but pragmatic rather than dogmatic. As a result, Reagan’s America exploited its greatest strength: the power of its example to the world. The Soviet Union collapsed not because it was defeated by the American military but because its leaders realized it could never defeat the American economy. This approach stands in marked contrast to that of the current President who has sadly wrecked America’s image abroad through the hubris of a superpower. Reagan, on the other hand, understood America’s authority came not from being seen as an empire but as the shining city of his dreams, however close or distant that was from reality.

Ronald Reagan was never fashionable among liberal intellectuals and I suspect his death will make little difference in this regard. In the age of W, America itself has become decidedly unpopular around the world. Just yesterday, I met an Arab Ambassador who launched into an hour long litany of America’s crimes and misdemeanours. Most of which were true. But so too is America’s long history as a free and vigorous democracy. With every new catastrophe in Iraq, the Relativists shout louder: we told you so, they say, the world is the way it is for a reason. Well Ronald Reagan never bought that line. He followed in the footsteps of Rousseau to see all mankind in the same light. The practices of his administration were often dodgy, sullied by the mindset of an unscrupulous combatant, but what endures was his vision. Countries, like people, are never as pure as their ideals. However the vision stood apart almost as a mesmerizing myth that changed the world as we knew it. Reagan understood that Liberty was a concept he could sell to them all including the hardened leaders of the Soviet Union as it turned out. And it was made possible by a single magical quality, optimism. In these dark days when anarchy reigns in Iraq and people feel America stands for power alone, that optimism is in short supply. It is at this moment when once again the meaning of being a liberal is so confused that Reagan, viewed by so many liberals as the enemy, would offer the best advice. First and foremost, he would say, have faith in Liberty.

Debate over trade barriers

LONDON The United States and Europe have long claimed that free-trade and poverty reduction are among their highest political priorities. But their recent record is hardly illustrious.

Ever since President Bill Clinton led the way to the creation of the World Trade Organization in the 1990’s, trade liberalization has floundered on the support of rich countries for their bloated farmers. At trade summits from Seattle to Doha over the last decade, Western politicians have pledged solidarity with the developing world, only to cave in to their domestic lobbies and leave the developing world mired in poverty.

This year, protectionist pressures seem to have become even stronger. The panic over the outsourcing of white-collar jobs led Senators John Kerry and John Edwards to vie in the Democratic primary race over who is most negative about free trade. In Europe, despite some minor reforms, both President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany have managed to block any cuts in the Common Agricultural Policy until at least 2013. Progress toward the UN Millennium Development Goals has been painfully slow.

On both trade and development, the common cry from politicians is that they are boxed in by public opinion. But new opinion data commissioned by the German Marshal Fund, based on 4,000 interviews in France, Germany, Britain and the United States, suggests that the public in both Europe and America is far more liberal than is often assumed, and also concerned about the damage that Western subsidies wreak on the developing world.

Support for free trade among the populations of Germany, France, Britain and the United States remains robust. In Britain, the highest proportion of respondents, nearly three-quarters, have a “favorable view” of free trade. Elsewhere, the figures are slightly lower, but they are still strong, given the vociferous campaigns of the antiglobalization movement. The principle of free trade remains firmly embedded in the public imagination.

Neither is the world neatly segmented into free-trading Anglo-Saxons and protectionist Europeans. Despite the recent French and German efforts to promote “national champions” in their industries, less than a third of the German and French populations want to subsidize manufacturers. The figures are higher in free-market Britain and the United States. There is more sympathy for agricultural subsidies in France and Germany, but even there, pork-barrel politics are beginning to lose support: 62 percent of Germans and half the French population want an end to subsidies.

There is little sign either of the much-discussed “compassion fatigue” in the West. Respondents overwhelmingly felt that fighting poverty in developing countries was a moral imperative for the West, and people expressed a strong preference for trade over aid to help developing economies grow. Most people responded well to arguments that poor countries should be allowed to maintain tariff barriers for a short period – a more sympathetic attitude than that displayed by international financial institutions.

These findings present political leaders with a way to galvanize support for trade agreements that will fight poverty. People reject closed economies, and they don’t buy the argument that trade results in a “race to the bottom” in standards. The majority of people appear to be realists and accept that there is no return to a pre-globalization age – though they have become suspicious about some of the messianic rhetoric from politicians on trade deals. The characterization of Nafta, the European internal market and the World Trade Organization as “opaque” and “undemocratic” by the antiglobalization movement over the last decade has created some public unease. Nearly half of the public expressed an unfavorable view of the WTO, despite the fact that it upholds principles with which they overwhelmingly agree.

Respondents felt strongly that multinational companies are the primary beneficiaries of trade liberalization. Until leaders are able to articulate the benefits for consumers and small businesses, support for future trade deals will be hard to achieve. In all the countries surveyed, there was a strong thirst for more training to help workers cope with the instabilities of the global labor market. Education, together with a new political language, may be the only way to see off the gathering forces of protectionism.

John J. Audley is senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Debate over trade barriers.

As the awkward neighbour straddled between East and West, Turkey is once again standing at the threshold of Europe. Can it face yet another humiliating retreat in its long and turbulent road to the gate of western civilisation? The stakes are higher than ever since the EEC Council of Ministers accepted Ankara’s application for associate membership in 1959. Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) swept into power to form the first single party government since 1987, they have determinedly pursued the reforms needed to meet the Copenhagen political criteria. These include the abolition of the death penalty, introduction of cultural rights for ethnic minorities (especially Kurds), expansion of democratic freedoms, introduction of laws to curb torture, institutional arrangements to reduce the influence of the military in politics, and the adoption of the Annan Plan in Cyprus to name but a few. Another rebuff would surely slow current reforms, both by sanctioning the more extreme but vocal groups, Islamist or nationalist, and bolstering Turkey’s sense of isolation.

The virtuous circle of positive negotiations encouraging reform will be broken and, in the eyes of many unequivocally pro-European Turks, membership will lose its status as a catalyst for change. Much to the bewilderment of sceptical European leaders, the European project has been more successful in exporting democratisation then any of them could have imagined. European ‘soft’ power alone has achieved more in Turkey than American might has ever done in the Middle East. The question now therefore is can Europe face the challenge?

In the lead up to the European Union decision in December, Philip Robins’ Suits and Uniforms, Turkish Foreign Policy Since the Cold War is required reading. There are three arguments. Firstly that ‘in the arena of foreign affairs, Turkey is a status quo power … wedded to the sanctity of borders, states, multilateral institutions and norms of conduct’ (p.6). Secondly, that Turkey is ‘firmly oriented westwards in terms of its foreign relations’ (p.7), seen in its earnest pursuit of the EU; and thirdly that it is an overly cautious actor (p.7). The author lays out his argument by initially examining the Turkish position within the international arena in the aftermath of the Cold War and pointing to its rise in prominence as a central actor. He then turns to the structural framework of foreign policy by arguing that the main players are comprised of the government, presidency, foreign ministry and the security establishment, with political parties, parliament, media, interest groups and public opinion as secondary players.

Given the shortage of studies which tackle the basis of the rationale behind Turkish foreign policy, the main strength of the book lies in Robins’ analysis of domestic motivators of foreign policy in terms of history, ideology, security and economics and how the relative importance of these factors have evolved over time. Robins rightly notes the pervasive influence of the experiences of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republican period within the collective psyche of the nation. ‘History is a key determinant of perception in that it helps to form an identikit picture as to the make-up of others’ (p.94). The foremost case of historical memory is the ‘Sevres syndrome’, rooted in the plan of the victors of WWI to carve up the Empire, which remains an important reference point for the key players. Similarly, the author observes that the minority issue is ‘combustible’ (p.124), particularly because it was repeatedly used by the Europeans in dismembering the Ottoman Empire by stoking ‘the enemy from within’ (p.172); manifested in the support of the Armenians by the Russians, the Maronites by the French and the Arabs in Hijaz by the British. Robins comments that the lessons of these past encounters have been re-emphasised in the eyes of Turks by recent experiences and perceptions, from Stalin’s expansionism; Syrian territorialism; American unreliability best exemplified during the Cuban missile crisis and by the Johnson letter; Greek and Syrian cooperation on defence; European insistence on minority rights particularly with regards to the Kurds; and the acceptance of the Armenian historical narrative. The author correctly points out therefore that security has been an overriding concern in foreign policy given this prevailing sense of insecurity and encirclement; ‘history tells Turks to be suspicious, especially of their neighbours, who covet their territory or seek to erode the greatness of the nation through devious means’. In fact, even the commitment to the EU is juxtaposed with a deep distrust, with most Turks doubtful of their neighbours’ sincerity in negotiations (and as Andrew Mango points out, this is succinctly expressed by the Turkish recourse to the saying ‘the Turk has no friends except for other Turks’).

Robins places much of the European consternation over Turkey on its failure to emulate ‘liberal norms’. It is questionable however, to what extent the West has internalised these values itself in the era of the War on Terrorism, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, and to the endorsement by liberal circles of violations of civil liberties in the name of national security, or rather accepting the ‘lesser evil’ (Michael Ignatieff). On the other hand, Ataturk remains its visionary father, in his abandonment of the ancien regime and embracing of democracy when many of its richer neighbours were in the throes of fascism. Ataturk is thus a key part of the common identity of the Turks; they are united by the fact that they are all the children of his revolution. In that sense, as Mango comments, ‘Turkey can no more repudiate Ataturk today than France can repudiate the French Revolution’. It is an ironic twist of history therefore that it has been the Islamist AKP government which has worked harder to consolidate Ataturk’s revolution and the process of westernisation in the face of liberal procrastination over fears of increasing Islamisation. Alienated by what they see as a degeneration of their cultural identity many are constructing their own modernity, a process that is not mutually exclusive with a secular order. Despite the worst civilizational fears in the EU, studies have consistently shown that although they are pious, most Turks nevertheless believe religion to be a solely private matter; while 92.2 percent of people fast during Ramadan and 46 percent pray five times a day, only 10.2 percent expressed a desire to change the present secular order, though many of them were unsure once they realised what an Islamic order would entail (see Professor Binnaz Toprak and Ali Carkoglu’s latest survey). Most Turks do embrace the secular order, wanting to wear the headscarf or fasting does not necessarily mean otherwise. The AKP’s persistence over imam-hatips (religious schools) is resolvable via open debate and compromise, without posing a challenge to the fundamentals of the secular order. A prominent AKP MP and previous advisor to Prime Minister Erdogan, Turhan Conmez, has been making the case for reforming imam-hatips, particularly by restricting their role to the training of imams, and also introducing optional as opposed to compulsory religious education in schools. The vehemently secularist Alevis, making up to twenty percent of the population, is also a factor often overlooked. It is one of those idiosyncrasies of Turkey that it is on the path of ‘its own Third Way, an accommodation between secularists and Islamists within the framework of a fully democratic system’ (Marvin Howe); a valuable lesson to its European neighbours then, that should not go unheeded. The consequences on democratisation of a rejection in December will be far more wide reaching than has been contemplated with reverberations beyond Turkey’s borders.