2011: Trends and Observations

What will historians write about 2011?

In the U.S. and Europe the merger of globalization and the Information Technology revolution are putting a crunch on the middle-class while in the Middle East and Africa it’s reversing centuries of authoritarian rule. 

That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but it’s the best I could do to put it into one sentence.  

What’s Happened This Year?

1.  Activists protest and burn sections of London.

2. The Arab Spring produces popular rebellions against dictators across the Arab world. To varying degrees Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Algeria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman and Saudi Arabia have all experienced unusual amounts of protest.  Former Egyptian President Honsi Mubarak, former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi and former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia were all driven out of power.  Combined they had had ruled their countries for 96 years.

3.  The Israeli Summer brings 250,000 Israelis into the streets, protesting the lack of affordable housing and the way their country is now dominated by an oligopoly of crony capitalists.

4.  Cities in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Latvia are overrun by young people protesting against unemployment and increasing economic inequality.   

5.  The Tea Party continues to control the dynamic of American politics by using leverage on the debt ceiling debate, resulting in an unprecedented S&P downgrade of U.S. credit.   
The Eurozone nearly collapses amid worries that Greece and Italy will default.  There are talks of Germany bailing these countries out, but only if a significant fiscal union can be established to ensure this doesn’t happen again. 

That’s enough isn’t it?  I didn’t even mention all the drama with Lindsay Lohan…  Just kidding.

Clearly, it’s been a busy year.  After all, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was the “Protestor”.  That’s rather unusual.  So, how has the merger of globalization and the Information Technology revolution created the context for these events to occur?  Consider the recent advances in communications technology:  cloud computing, robotics, 4G wireless connectivity, Skype, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones.  Together these technologies have allowed more people around the world to get their hands on a piece of the pie. Therefore, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this technology and globalization are eliminating more and more “routine” work — the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles. This includes the famed manufacturing jobs that were once abundant in America.  Decades ago, you could secure one of these jobs with a high school diploma and they’d provide the means for the American Dream:  a house, wife that stayed home, a couple of kids, a dog, money to pay for your children’s education and a decent retirement.  Not the case anymore.  Even if these sorts of jobs did come back to our country, they wouldn’t pay enough to attain these desirables

Tom Friedman writes that the merger of globalization and I.T. is producing gargantuan profits, which is a bit ironic since we did just escape “The Great Recession” (have we really escaped though?) . He writes that “employers are finding it easier, cheaper and more necessary than ever to replace labor with machines, computers, robots and talented foreign workers. It used to be that only cheap foreign manual labor was easily available; now cheap foreign genius is easily available. This explains why corporations are getting richer and middle-skilled workers poorer. Good jobs do exist, but they require more education or technical skills. Unemployment today still remains relatively low for people with college degrees. But to get one of those degrees and to leverage it for a good job requires everyone to raise their game. It’s hard.”  He’s entirely correct.  The stakes have been raised. 

Take Grinnell College, a rural Iowa college with 1,600 students.  New York Times columnist Jacques Steinber writes that at little Grinnell College in rural Iowa, “nearly one of every 10 applicants being considered for the class of 2015 is from China.” The article noted that dozens of other American colleges and universities are seeing a similar surge as well. And the article added this fact: Half the “applicants from China this year have perfect scores of 800 on the math portion of the SAT.”  Read the full article here.

That’s remarkable. 

Friedman sums up this trend quite nicely:  “We are increasingly taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and fueling resentments even more.”

I can’t wait to see what “2012: A Year in Review” will look like.

On a personal note, I’d like to thank anyone who’s reading this post.  Writing this blog has been intellectually and even emotionally satisfying. It’s allowed to me put to paper (wait, that phrase probably won’t exist in 50 years…) what’s been running through my head.  Or should I say “going on in my little grey cells”.   Thanks-

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The Takeaway: There’s no arguing that 2011 wasn’t a historically significant year.  I’m fascinated to see what next year will bring. 

Was the Iraq War Worth It?

Is it too early to answer this question?

In my mind there are really only two logical and coherent answers to this question:  No and maybe.  Let me explain both.  Those who don’t believe that the Iraq War was worthwhile have several justifications.  They include:

• Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction
• Iraq had no significant link to the 9/11 attacks
• The overwhelming cost in human lives and dollars spent
• The irreparable damage to America’s standing in the world

First, the American citizens were sold a “false bill of goods”.  That is to say weapons of mass destruction were the selling point used by the Bush Administration to convince the American people of supporting the war.  As it turned out, there were absolutely no weapons of mass destruction.  There is some controversy as to how ignorant certain members of the Bush Administration were to this point to begin with.  It’s difficult to know.  Many liberals think that the Administration’s use of weapons of mass destruction was really a red herring; that it was a conspiracy to secure more oil.  I have a hard time completely believing that.  My guess is that most people in Bush’s cabinet believed that there were weapons of mass destruction, but that if American troops didn’t find them that would be alright because there were other justifications for the war.  Just my guess. 

Second, Saddam Hussein and the country of Iraq had virtually no ties to the men the hijacked the planes on September 11^th.  The men, who were affiliated with Al-Qaeda were not from Iraq.  They were Saudi Arabian, Egyptian, Lebanese and United Arab Emirati.  In fact, Hussien’s link to Al-Qaeda was weak at best. 

Third, the cost in lives and dollars has been immense.  Nearly 4,500 Americans have died in the eight years of fighting in Iraq.  Thirty thousand Americans have been wounded.  The U.S. has spent nearly $1 trillion in Iraq since 2003.  That’s startling.  Moreover, as with many wars, senior Bush Administration officials undersold the cost of the war dramatically.  For example, in a March 16, 2003 Meet the Press interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, held less than a week before the Iraq War began, host Tim Russert reported that "every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement.”  History is filled with wars that have cost more than was originally thought. 

Fourth, by acting relatively unilaterally the U.S. damaged its reputation in the world.  Though much more difficult to quantify than deaths and dollars, the first decade of the twenty-first century was an extremely transformative one.  Unfortunately, many of these changes have been relative declines for the United States.  One of these is the collision of declining world opinion of the U.S. and globalization.  Now other countries don’t need to look to the U.S. for leadership (relatively speaking!) as they once did. 

With all of this being said, how could one argue that the Iraq War might be worth it?

Here’s how:  For centuries the Middle East has been relatively stable.  Don’t confuse stability with high quality of life, however.  Dictators have essentially ruled their countries without any problem from outside forces (there are obviously several exceptions) and certainly not from their own citizens.  This stability has destroyed human capital in the region and thus the conditions were right to produce terrorism.  So, the attacks on September 11^th happen, Saddam Hussein is overthrown and there are rudimentary elections in Iraq. 

Eight years after the U.S. invasion Iraq clearly has turmoil.  There’s no denying that, even if you’re the staunchest of supporters of the war.  This turmoil could lead to something worse, but possibly something better. Fifty years from now historians might see that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was one of the catalysts for positive change in the region.  Perhaps turmoil that was a result of overthrowing Saddam, the subsequent Iraqi elections, and getting rid of the Taliban will have helped lead to getting rid of Mubarak, Gadhafi and others.  As I mentioned earlier, this is the argument that one could make.  It’s necessary to note that the revolutions in Egypt and Libya that rid these countries of their dictators happened at a very specific point in history.  Globalization and the Information Revolution have collided to produce the perfect powder keg of conditions for these revolutions.  Those who make the argument that the Iraq might have been worth it would like to include Saddam’s overthrow as one of the ingredients that created the right historical conditions for the Arab Spring.  You can be the judge of that. 

In the end, history will have to judge if the Iraq War was worth its costs.  Right now, I think the evidence clearly shows that it wasn’t.  The lack of WMDs, Iraq’s tenuous link to Al-Qaeda, loss of American and Iraqi lives and the world’s declined opinion of the U.S. all point to this being a bad decision from the beginning.  I suppose there is the possibility that the messy and complicated turmoil that currently constitutes Iraq could resolve itself into something better than what existed prior to 2003. For our sake and the world’s I hope it does.

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The Takeaway:  No, the Iraq War probably wasn’t worth it, though I desperately hope history proves us wrong.

What We Can Learn From Kyrgyzstan

How Kyrgyzstan can save America at home…

Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked mountainous former Soviet state recently had a presidential election.  Don’t stop reading!!!  At this point you’re probably wondering, why the heck should I care?   Well, here’s why: 

Once the new president was elected, one of the first decisions he made was to announce that he would shut down the U.S. Manas Air Base once its lease expires in 2014. It's our only major base in Central Asia, and it's been a crucial conduit of arms and supplies to the war in Afghanistan.  Kyrgyzstan is essentially telling Americans thanks for everything, but that it’s time for us to leave.

While this might initially sound like another blow to America (everything in the news seems to be about American decline), I disagree.  Recently, President Obama announced that the Iraq War was “over”, announcing that all U.S. troops would be coming home by the first of the New Year.   These two developments should help Americans see that America has been spread too thinly throughout the past decade.  We’ve had too many commitments – both financial and with “boots on the ground” – with too many countries throughout the world. 

A reality of the twenty-first century:  The United States has to manage its foreign policy resources more carefully. That means we will likely do fewer massive military operations like Iraq. That's good though, isn’t it?  Those kinds of operations have proven to be incredibly expensive and rarely produced the benefits that justified the costs.

This is not to say that America will become isolationist.  We have, for example, achieved a good outcome in Libya with far fewer dollars and lives lost than we did in Iraq.  We've shared the responsibility with other stakeholders, the Europeans.

Geo-politically, this is all fine and dandy, but what about at home?   By spending trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we fell in areas at home like education, innovation and infrastructure.  Pundits disagree about what the Obama Doctrine is, or if one even exists.  For our country’s sake, let’s hope this doctrine begins and ends by first asking this question before invading any country or territory:

Could an intervention be successful while keeping costs under control - both human and financial? 

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The Takeaway: We need to invest more at home and more shrewdly abroad.