It’s just a blurb, but if Beijing is admitting it, that means the problem is getting near the boiling-over point:

Sexual frustration amongst migrant workers in China’s booming southern province of Guangdong is leading to a host of social problems and must be tackled, state media on Saturday cited a local official as saying.

Guangdong, China’s export powerhouse, is home to about 30 million migrant workers, the most in the country. Many leave wives, husbands or children in their native villages to seek the higher wages factories pay compared with agricultural work.

The guiding star of American policy toward China should be this simple axiom: No babies, no future. China’s one-child policy and its incredible cultural preference for boys has produced a self-reinforcing dynamic, so that those in their child-bearing years remember that their parents could provide more, and have more toys of their own, understand that there is a direct linkage between children and relative or absolute familial poverty. They understand it in their bones. Amazingly, the fascists in Beijing have done what would have seemed incredible a mere century ago: They’ve managed to take a culture that valued children above anything else, and turned it into a society inherently inimical to the production of babies. And wait, it gets better: That love of children is now focused on a single child, which means that you have spoiled, self-indulgent children who will themselves go on to have a single child or none at all.

After taking years to shed their deep affection for a government that hates babies as much as they do, the Western press has finally begun to notice that China’s one-child policy is already producing massive social upheaval. (Western philanthropists, university professors, and politicians are not quite as quick on the uptick, largely because the propensity is more deeply ingrained.) What’s happening in Guangdong is one part of a future China where there are too many young men, not enough women for sex and babies, aged parents for whom to care, and intergenerational bride-theft. For those of you following at home, that will mean a smaller, less productive, less stable, more aggressive China in a demographic spiral.

Sit back and wait. Rising China will be Bent and Snarling China soon enough.

God’s sweet and immaculate Mercy, if I have to read one more attempt to pigeonhole American foreign policy tendencies into another dead President (or Treasury Secretary! or poet!), I may go on a shooting spree. This is quite aside from the note that Jefferson was a huge exponent of the Revolution in France (but not of ending slavery…), which sort of undercuts the attempted dichotomy here.

The fundamental argument put forward here only leaves pablum and common wisdom behind at the words “Yet as Obama is already discovering.” Then it gets stupid again:

It is not only Americans who will challenge the new American foreign policy. Will Russia and Iran respond to Obama’s conciliatory approach with reciprocal concessions — or, emboldened by what they interpret as American weakness and faltering willpower, will they keep pushing forward? Will the president’s outreach to the moderate majority of Muslims around the world open an era of better understanding, or will the violent minority launch new attacks that undercut the president’s standing at home? Will the president’s inability to deliver all the Israeli concessions Arabs would like erode his credibility and contribute to even deeper levels of cynicism and alienation across the Middle East? Can the president execute an orderly reduction in the U.S. military stake in Iraq and Afghanistan without having hostile forces fill the power vacuum? Will Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez be so impressed with American restraint under Obama that he moderates his own course and ceases to make anti Yanquismo a pillar of his domestic and international policy? Will other countries heed the president’s call to assume more international responsibility as the United States reduces its commitments — or will they fail to fulfill their obligations as stakeholders in the international system?

I’m aware of no school of thought outside of Unicornia that holds that the answer to any of these questions could conceivably be “yes” when it benefits our current President. Then this:

The Jeffersonian concern with managing America’s foreign policy at the lowest possible level of risk has in the past helped presidents develop effective grand strategies, such as George Kennan’s early Cold War idea of containment and the early 19th-century Monroe Doctrine. If successful, Obama’s restructuring of American foreign policy would be as influential as these classic strategic designs.

Ok, I’ll bite: What is his restructuring? Seriously. Kennan’s morally abominable idea was at least a coherent doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine set not only an edict but also a foreign policy. What has Obama done other than offer pablum and adopt George H. W. Bush’s foreign policy (complete with shots at Israel!)? Criticize Reagan and Bush (W.), but they at least set out clear doctrines and clear imperatives so that you could predict what America would do, when, and how.

With great dignity and courage, Obama has embarked on a difficult and uncertain journey. The odds, I fear, are not in his favor, and it is not yet clear that his intuitions and instincts amount to the kind of grand design that statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Henry Kissinger produced in the past. But there can be no doubt that American foreign policy requires major rethinking.

You know, it’s a funny thing: That’s been true for over half of the Presidents we’ve had. The world doesn’t often enter the kind of stasis we saw with the Cold War or the Concert of Europe.

That piece was, really, a waste of a perfectly good opportunity to write something meaningful. Instead, it read like Foreign Policy by E.J. Dionne and David Broder.

Christmas time, as we all know, is the perfect time of year to lament the fact that there are new humans coming into the world. Who can help it? What with all the joy over the celebration of the Nativity, folks are bound to get swept away suggesting there would be more holly and ivy if only there were fewer humans. After all, one of the great philanthropists of literature once famously opined that Christmas is the perfect time to decrease the extra humans competing for scarce resources.

So, continuing in the tradition of Merry St. Malthus (patron of disgust at the lesser races), McClatchy’s sees millions HIV-free in (sub-Saharan) Africa thanks to the Bush Administration’s hard work, and dares to ask, “Why not millions fewer?” The problem in a nutshell:

The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.

However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa’s epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world’s poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.

You know level heads are at work when the word epidemic is used to describe the births of children.

Anyway, this being a “news” report that mentions George W. Bush, you have to expect some logical errors after the grudging admission that the Dread Cowboy may have done something right. The story opens with the heartbreaking tale of the 45-year old woman with 13 children who found out about contraception after child 13. Now, I’m no expert — more like an amateur with some experience in the field — but if she’s 45 (the story isn’t well-written, but it actually appears that she’s 47, and her 21-month old is her youngest, but let’s work with what we’ve got), and has 13 children, and she likely married between 16 and 20 as is common in that part of Africa, that basically fits with the idea that she’s had one child every 21 months or so (end of breastfeeding at one year plus nine months’ gestation) since she was around 21. 24 years have passed since she first began to upset McClatchy’s writers by having children. Presidents Reagan, Bush, William Jefferson Clinton Martyr, and the Dread Cowboy have held office during that time. Somehow, all of that surplus population is Bush’s fault.

Veteran watchers of NGOs — and the people who staff them — that get their knickers in a twist over the thought of even more (black) children coming into the world can guess where the story is driving:

At a hospital in Busia, a sleepy town in the green hills of eastern Uganda, Agnes Lojjo, a matronly health worker, sat with a handful of pregnant women one recent morning and asked how many were practicing family planning.

Fewer than half the hands went up. One woman in her 30s, wearing a man’s oxford shirt and a colorful wrap around her head, said that a mother who used birth control would bear a deformed child.

Lojjo cocked her head and shot the woman a disapproving look.

“Everyone just has children without thinking,” she said afterward. “It’s adding poverty to poverty.”

…

Much of Uganda is starting to suffocate. Public school classrooms that were built for about 40 students often burst with 100 or more. Large families are dividing their farmland into smaller and smaller parcels for their children, running afoul of neighbors and triggering a growing number of land disputes in local courts.

“Population growth undermines everything we’re trying to do here, all our development efforts as well as political stability,” a senior American official in Uganda said. “The economy isn’t going to have enough jobs for all the people we’re saving through PEPFAR.”

(The traditional shot at the Catholic Church is in there, too.)

Let’s run through the continent of Africa’s major problems: Corruption; climate issues; corruption; numerous polygamous cultures that treat women as chattel; corruption; militant Islam on the rise; piracy; corruption; the legacy of the idiotic, slapdash way in which guilty Europeans hastily patched everything together in ending colonialism; corruption; cultural impediments to local governance; and, of course, corruption.

Now, for giggles – putting the root causes of those problems to the side (for surely, corruption must be caused by extra babies) – let’s examine the state of Africa back during, say, the 1990s, when President Clinton Martyr used to speak a great deal about the threat of AIDS on the continent, but somehow only found money for contraceptives and abortion services abroad. The Congo was the center of a human renaissance, as scholars, artisans, and philosophers gathered in its jungles to engage in heated debates over the future of humanity on the continent. Somalia was blessed with a religious revival and a hearty debate over the future of government, even going so far as to perform impromptu street theater that would later be memorialized in a major American film. And South Africa! South Africa led the world in pioneering, alternative medicine approaches to HIV and AIDS, offering not only provocative theories on its origins, but exciting new approaches to treatment.

The problem sub-Saharan Africa faces is not too many people. Even the stingiest humanist should rejoice in the idea of more people, because more people have more opportunities to solve not only local, but global problems. Anyone watching the state of Germany, or of Japan, or taking a reasonable guess at China fifteen years from now knows that a graying future – one with fewer babies – is a stark, terrible place. I mean, this isn’t even controversial any more.

Unless you’re upset about there being more children with extra melanin in their skin. Then all bets are off.

Even so, the speed at which the special relationship – an alliance that had endured for seven decades – has fallen apart in barely 11 months is both remarkable and deeply alarming.

One of the greatest forces for good, liberty and freedom – not to mention the defence of the free world – is in very real danger of being banished to the history books for ever.

Obama, however, seems to be a president with no real grasp of history, as one of his first major acts on gaining office showed.

By withdrawing plans for a missile shield to be located in Eastern Europe, he not only appeased the Russians, he also betrayed the Poles and the Czechs, people who have only just been released from the yoke of Soviet control and have since become enthusiastic and valuable Western allies.

What he did in Eastern Europe, he now seems to be doing to us. The Obama administration is far happier doing business with Brussels than it is with Britain.

Glorious. Who needs a capable military with anti-terrorism, anti-insurgency, and demonstrated combat ability? A financial bulwark? One of our oldest allies?

This is a glorious day indeed for American foreign policy. Perhaps next we can watch as some Tutsis get slaughtered?

I know that the Obama foreign policy/defense/Joe Biden team has a lot on its plate — after all, it’s still likely in a state of shock from finding out that the general given an order to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan actually thought he was supposed to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan — and I know that the President has another chance to be loved coming up in Denmark, but it may be worth noting that Pakistan isn’t doing so hot in its war on the Taliban (in Pakistan):

Two blasts devastated a busy market and engulfed it in flames killing at least 36 people in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, while in the northwest provincial capital of Peshawar a suicide bomber killed 10 people.

Attacks blamed on Islamist militants have surged this year as Pakistan presses military offensives against the Taliban across the northwest, under fierce US pressure to do more to destroy the extremists’ strongholds.

The popular Moon Market in the centre of eastern Lahore city was transformed into a scene of flames and rubble as night fell on Monday, when two bombs exploded 30 seconds apart outside a police station and a bank, officials said.

…

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for either attack, but a fierce Islamist insurgency has killed more than 2,600 people in attacks mostly blamed on the Taliban in the last two-and-a-half years.

The President famously blundered boldly announced his willingness to launch ground troops into Pakistan during the Primaries From Hell. Given the proven lethality of the Taliban in Pakistan; given the way in which Pakistan acts as a natural refuel-and-replenish zone for the Taliban; and given the President’s stated intention to deny the Taliban the opportunity to ever strike Americans stateside ever again, I presume a request for more troops will be forthcoming shortly.

I’m actually only slightly tongue-in-cheek. I trust every American President to bring unholy war to protect America and Americans, and this one is no different. He swore an oath, there were a lot of people holding handmade signs (and no puppets for a change!), it was cold, there was dancing afterward. Pakistan is a failed state constantly in danger of imploding. There will be no final defeat of the Taliban without resolving Pakistan; even the Administration agrees. Funding the Pakistani ruling clique won’t solve the problem.

So, putting Joe Biden to the side — everyone else does, anyway — when’s that solution to the Taliban in Pakistan coming?

“There is no question of India accepting a legally binding emission reduction cut,” he told parliament, laying out India’s negotiating position ahead of the December talks.

India would however accept international verification of reductions if supported by financing and technology transfers.

In American:

Dear President Obama:

Thank you for treating us like an afterthought after all but bowing to the Chinese. We’ve carefully considered your request to cripple our nascent advanced economic development in light of recent events, and have decided to agree to it if you bribe us well enough. Surely with all of the money you and the Europeans are flinging around these days, you can afford some — in the vernacular with which a community organizer is best familiar — walking around money.

Please don’t act surprised. After all, we discussed this when you phoned us right after your election.

Oh, wait…

Sincerely,

Manhoman Singh, Prime Minister, the Republic of India

How’s that getting-the-world-to-love-you thing working out?

Amid all the hoo-ha over a declining America and a rising China, you’ll see repeated invocations of China’s miraculous growth rate and something silly about China being America’s biggest lender. Anyone who lived through the 1980s remembers Japan filling this role (remember that awful film, Rising Sun?), and the outcome is roughly along the same lines. Thankfully, following the lead of our astute Pejman Yousefzadeh, the world is starting to notice.

Tyler Cowen has a great, brief piece in the New York Times noting that China is a giant bubble and that the bubble’s burst is likely to cause severe problems in this country, and not in a “the bank will call all debts due” kind of way:

What will the consequences be for the United States if and when the Chinese economic miracle encounters a major stumble? A lot of Chinese business ventures will stop being profitable, and layoffs and unrest will most likely rise. The Chinese government may crack down further on dissent. The Chinese public may wonder whether its future lies with capitalism after all, and foreign investors in China will become more nervous.

In economic terms, the prices of Chinese exports will probably fall, as overextended businesses compete to justify their capital investments and recoup their losses. American businesses will find it harder to compete with Chinese companies, and there will be deflationary pressures in both countries. And even if the Chinese are selling more at lower prices, they may be taking in less money over all, so they may have less to lend to the United States government.

In any case, China may end up using more of its reserve funds to address domestic problems or placate domestic interest groups. The United States will face higher borrowing costs, and its fiscal position may very quickly become unsustainable.

I’m a tad blithe about Sino-American debt and trade imbalances — we send them green pieces of paper (really, 0s and 1s representing green pieces of paper) and they send us things that make our lives cheaper and allow Democratic politicians spend yet another group’s money to achieve debatably useful social ends. With that said, Chinese overcapacity — a very real, and very impending, thing — has terrible implications for the world at large as China becomes more and more the world’s manufacturing base.

Because the truth is very simple: The People’s Republic of China has no real domestic market of any consequence. Chinese “GDP” is a fiction, a convenient way to reflect overbuilding of infrastructure and production of export goods in sufficiently large sizes to keep the rural migrant hordes fed, to keep the urban dwellers from rioting by giving them more Western standards of living, and to keep current and former PLA generals in the lap of luxury. (There’s an old saw, that my failing Mandarin and memory can’t cover, that goes something like What’s the difference between a CEO and a general? The jacket he’s wearing that day. This hasn’t changed as much as many imagine.) China has boomed its way out of its recession, and out of the danger of hordes of millions of poor, angry rural dwellers, by overbuilding what it doesn’t need and never will. (As Mr. Cowen puts it, “China’s statistics on its gross domestic product are based more on recorded production activity than on what is actually sold. Chinese fiscal and credit policies are geared toward jobs and political stability, and thus the authorities shy away from revealing which projects are most troubled or should be canceled.”) This is not sustainable in the best of times, and these aren’t the best of times. The collapse of that structure means a word that rhymes with “meflation” is coming soon to an economy near you.

That leads to the baby thing.

George Magnus, writing in the Times of London, finally notes what the rest of us, granted with unusual perception and foresight, have been publicly saying for eons (ok, months): To conclude that China will overtake or even catch the United States any time soon requires pretending away a few salient facts, like (1) China is extremely poor, (2) China’s growth is built on unsustainable assumptions, and (3) China is dying at a rate that would be starkly terrifying if South Korea and Japan weren’t next door.

The US will not stand still and China’s economic path is likely to be punctured sooner or later by a credit or asset crisis.

Further, it cannot grow by 8 per cent a year for that much longer, not least for demographic reasons. China is the fastest-ageing nation on Earth, with an age structure rather like that of Germany.

Its labour force will begin to decline in 2010 or so and fall every year for the foreseeable future. For a while, the transfer of the 80 million rural migrant pool to higher-productivity urban jobs will mask much of this impact, but only for a few years.

By 2040-50, China will have more people aged over 65 than the entire predicted population of the US. In fact, on every demographic measure, China will be worse off than the US by the middle of the decade.

No babies, no future, just a very long present — a present that is rapidly approaching its end.

With President Obama having concluded his trip through one of the fastest-dying regions of the planet, complete with literal prostrations to a symbolic Emperor and metaphorical prostrations to an Emperor in all but name, this is as good a time as any to ask whether his Administration has developed a coherent foreign policy grand strategy yet. The evidence, to date, suggests that Obama foreign policy is like Obama campaign promises: destined to be realized in some shadowy future likely – but not certain – to come, yet already awarded rich accolades merely for promise.

The usual people who don’t understand foreign policy – which is to say, the sorts of people who are well-received, if not employed, by the State Department (which hasn’t understood foreign policy since Kissinger, or perhaps Dulles) – are of course charmed by the President’s playacting on the global stage. This is probably because the kabuki-dance of Metternichian diplomacy, though likely to allow untold millions to die of starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment, is more visually appealing than war and open conflict – not least because all of that starvation, rape, genocide, torture, ethnic cleansing, and imprisonment tends to happen in countries that don’t allow cameras near the atrocities.

This terrible conflation of form over substance elides the fact that Baron von Metternich developed the balance of power system he did to avoid a repeat of the devastation of Napoleon, and that ultimately, that very system of diplomatic communiqués, bows, negotiations, dinners, and playacting not only failed to avert the First World War, it positively accelerated and worsened the Second. In other words, the modern system is a shell of a remnant of a means of preventing a disaster that has long-since passed, and that failed miserably both times it was really well-tested. It is, in short, a system intended to devolve larger conflicts into smaller, more manageable ones, and is instead a method for preventing small conflicts by accumulating them into larger ones. Perversely, the whole, nominal point of the modern system of international diplomacy is to provide channels through which substantive foreign policy – that is, the real goals and desires of nations and nation-states – can flow without having more wars than necessary. Its loveliness should be secondary to its effectiveness. Applauding what President Obama has delivered – a foreign policy with better aesthetics than President Bush’s, without President Bush’s substance – is like wanting a faster car always stuck in the driveway: There’s no point if it’s not going anywhere.

This inability to separate substance and appearance – oddly appropriate for a President who has never shown much of an ability to do so since he began putting the finishing touch on his resume in 2004 – is nowhere better on display than in his dealings with China.

One would be hard-pressed to identify anyone who is neither a member of the Administration, a member of the American press corps (insofar as that isn’t the same thing), one of the aforementioned lovers of Metternichian avoidance, or a member of the government of the People’s Republic of China who thinks President Obama’s strolling photo-shoot through Asia was a success. The heretofore-unbroken foreign policy consensus of three decades has been that America wants to control a rising China to bring it into the community of nations – as a free and open society, trading freely with the world and keeping its torture to the bare minimum a quasi-fascist regime can accept as it transitions into something vaguely resembling a democratic empire. Because this requires a delicate dance of threats, cajolings, ingratiations, brute shows of force, and speeches about strategic partnerships while everyone clenches their teeth; and because that sort of thing is beyond the ability of any elected American President since Reagan if not Washington; Sino-American relations tend to look like a bizarrely schizophrenic bumble that extends the length of an Administration.

This is why President Clinton – in that way that only Bubba could – alternated between overlooking Chinese espionage at Los Alamos and sending a carrier battle group to the Taiwan Straits; why President Bush thanked China for capturing an American plane in international airspace on the one hand and met early and often with the Dalai Lama and made clear that America’s future strategic partnership lay with India, as an explicit counterweight to China.

The critical feature to all of this, however ineptly done, is that the carrot and the stick are closely joined. American Presidents praise a free, prosperous China. They speak of strategic partnerships while directing carrier battle groups in the Pacific. They talk about One China while approving arms shipments to Taiwan and hugging the Dalai Lama. They let China know that it faces no threat from the United States, but that it could.

Yet President Obama is home today with nothing to show for it other than some non-committal statements on the importance of an uncensored internet (which statements were largely censored) and a great deal of commentary about a failed trip. He put off any meeting with the Dalai Lama before traveling to China; he spoke not a word about human rights; he let himself be used as a prop at a press conference in which no questions were allowed. In return, he got, perhaps, a lovely set of lacquered chopsticks.

President Obama has been called our first foreign President – a title in which he seems to bask abroad – and though there may be something to that (he came from a corrupt political machine, he seems incapable of connecting with most of his constituents and appears not to care, his wife benefited from targeted government funds, and so on), it is also insulting to any American President, including this one. It is more that he had so little grounding in everyday America before coming to the mainland to attend college that he acquired only half of an American personality: He got that inordinate desire to please others without the attendant refusal to budge when pushed that even Midwesterners display when lectured. The one, without the other, is simply incapable of using the Metternichian system for more than symbolism, because there must always be the threat of force to go with the tea service. The absence of that complete, American personality was fully on display from ASEAN through Korea: Amid all of the ultimately pointless genuflection, there was no demand for anything, of any kind, or even substantive movement, on any goal to advance American interests abroad.

The Asia trip is merely indicative of the norm. I defy anyone reading this to tell me what goals the Obama Administration actually has. An end to the Israeli-Arab conflict? Surely not, for if there is anywhere this team has truly failed, it is in that tiny corner of the world: Israel has told America to pound sand more thoroughly than in decades, and there’s no sign of sanity breaking out in the Palestinians or indeed, any of the neighboring Arab countries. Triumph in Afghanistan? As we sit here, President Obama has promised to move past his initial premise on Afghanistan – that we should focus our efforts on winning that war – and past his subsequent, slightly modified position – that we should focus our efforts on that war – to some indeterminate position (complete with “exit ramps”), to be disclosed soon, though when is a bit up in the air at the moment. Win concessions from Iran to avoid nuclearization? I believe the current status of that effort is pending resolution, although Iran has informed us that if we turn our backs on Israel and side with Iran, it may hold the football still for us to kick, this time. (Doubtless, abandoning Israel to cozy up with Iran will poll well in the heartland.) Get Russia to side with us on anything at all? Concededly, months of reassuring a country dying faster than Japan, South Korea, or China – no mean feat – that it still counts for something hasn’t accomplished much, but surely that’s coming along any day now. Convince Kim Jong Il to … do something, presumably? While I yield to my colleague Josh Stanton on the Hermit Kingdom and its schizophrenic, baby-free neighbor to the South, I’m not certain as we sit here that the President has even identified what he wants from the DPRK, let alone accomplished a first step. Convince China to keep buying our currency so we can run even bigger deficits and debts? What are they going to do, stop?

Perhaps, some might say, President Obama is banking goodwill for future foreign policy endeavors. Certainly, one would only have had to pay attention to Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush on the campaign trail to have some idea about their preferred foreign policy outcomes, while President Obama remains a cipher; but I’m game: What are they? Perhaps something from the American Left’s hobbyhorse closet: Ending carbon dioxide emissions? I’m sure all of the self-important folks gathering in Copenhagen next month will laugh at that. Get China to lower its greenhouse emissions? More laughter. End a genocide? The President has been very clear since before he took office that he embodies the New Left’s strange, unwavering belief in the inviolability of post-Westphalian borders; or if you prefer, how is the Administration dealing with the Sudan? Ending nuclear proliferation? While doubtless on the President’s agenda – he has said as much in yet another well-received speech – the actual work of ending nuclear proliferation appears to be less important to the President than whether he’s given a well-received speech this week. (Ask Pakistan. Or Venezuela. Or North Korea. Or…) Reform the international economic system? In fairness, President Obama has shown a greater willingness to re-enact Smoot-Hawley than any President in decades, though whether this is desirable is a different question. Whether the rest of the world is on board is, thankfully, not yet known.

The Obama Administration’s foreign policy appears premised on the idea that the Carter Administration was not inherently wrong on anything, just well ahead of its time. A left-wing, Latin American dictator is ousted by every other branch of government, following from an attempt to seize power in defiance of his country’s written constitution? Back the status quo ante. The Soviets – pardon, the Russians – are flexing their muscles in Eastern Europe? Give them breathing room. China is asserting its hegemony in Southeast Asia (concededly without invading Vietnam this time)? Let all of the region know that we don’t even understand what that means, and we certainly don’t intend to get in the way. India? At best, a neutral party, and never an ally.

If its foreign policy approach is merely the revenge of the rabbit-stalked, its grand strategy appears to be providing President Obama chances to appear before cheering crowds composed of non-Americans. Concrete effects simply do not matter, because they are not the goal. The President is the message; the President is the medium; the President is the goal. It is not coincidence that the word “I” appears more often than the words “a,” “an,” and “the” combined in the President’s speeches abroad; it is not coincidence that the only things anyone noted of the President’s tour were his bow to a figurehead Emperor and his announcement that he is the first Pacific President.

Taking this in the most charitable way possible, this represents a complete failure of understanding by the President. I say the President and not his foreign policy team, as some of his partisans are wont to do because, as an internet commenter noted the other day, what the Unitary Executive really means is this: When someone in the Executive Branch screws up, there’s only one man to blame.

Whether that man even knows it is, like everything else about his foreign policy, an open question.

Christopher Badeaux is Senior Editor of The New Ledger.

First, China’s growth has an upper limit that comes about ten years from now because they’re not making babies like they used to, and everyone’s getting older. This is set in a hypothetical world where China has growth capacity to make up for the loss it will experience in the short term.

Second, following from that, China’s growth model is premised on there being a market outside of China for the sale of everything. In other words, there is no real domestic PRC market. American and other Western companies have longed for the massive Chinese market for two decades, and whaddaya know, they always get their rear ends handed to them, because (1) the market isn’t there and (2) China picks winners (Han) and losers (everyone else). The idea that American companies have any growth future there is a charming fantasy, nothing more.

But on the whole, by investing time and personal capital in getting to know foreign heads of state, Bush does seem to have helped ease, around the margins, some of the strains created by a stormy era in American foreign policy.

The margins count. Working them doesn’t take the place of the hard work of diplomacy — something for which President Bush gets too little credit — but it surely does better than just counting on everyone to love you to death.

How bad a place is the Administration inhabiting when Der Spiegel calls you a naif?

The practice of law must seem to most Americans, at a first, real-life glance, like being mugged in a public park by a group of blonde Menudo impersonators wielding dead mackerels with rusty nails pounded through their fins: You see a lot of familiar elements that don’t seem to go together very well, and you immediately try to make sense of the whole mess by fastening on the reconcilable elements and trying to bull through with your common sense and what you’ve seen on TV. This is almost invariably a recipe for profound errors, wasted opportunities, and, as any lawyer who has had to deal with a pro se plaintiff can attest, an experience that ranges wildly between a never-ending headache, a sense of pity at the poor fellow on the other side (who is frequently losing a good case because he doesn’t know the rules of the game), and often, but not always, a relatively easy kill at the end.

It doesn’t have to be that way: The practice of law isn’t rocket surgery. It’s simply the application of a series of liberal arts skills to a collection of social sciences events. It’s a good idea to hire a lawyer to handle the nuances and the things you either can’t or shouldn’t do on your own, but the law itself, and how it is practiced and works, are well within the grasp of anyone with a roughly 100 I.Q. and even a minimal attention span.

What this means is that John Yoo has singlehandedly either reduced a significant portion of America’s commentariat to sub-moron status, inflicted terminal laziness on it, or both.

Ordinarily, most readers of online political commentary would think I’m about to say something about Matt “I’ve Never Heard of Everglades National Park” Yglesias or Rod “Crunchy Donatism” Dreher. In fact, this is about one of the left blogosphere’s less dim bulbs, Brad DeLong — a professor of economics at Berkeley and allegedly a fairly clever fellow — who lacked either the brainpower or willpower to actually understand more or less anything associated with the practice of law before deciding to opine on it.

Professor DeLong is not, lest anyone who actually made it through that column without laughing be confused, entirely in good faith here. The matter at issue is the sequence of events that led the Bush Justice Department to opine on the sorts of activities American interrogators could undertake to extract information from captured terrorists and would-be terrorists. Those without a political axe to grind or a crystal ball would ordinarily be stuck with the version of events put forth by those there, and the manner in which these things are normally handled: When confronted with the question How far may we go? the White House asked for a legal opinion. Professor Yoo, then at Justice, helped author a memorandum (actually, a series of memoranda) outlining the law on the matter and rendering certain conclusions about the state of Executive power in a time of war or existential crisis, as we believed ourselves to be in 2001 and 2002.

Professor DeLong’s postcognitive vision differs, though he doesn’t bother to explain whether this is a result of the ingestion of special mushrooms, communication with the spirit world, a Walkabout, or some other supernatural or paranormal event:

It appears that what happened is this: The Bush White House directed the U.S. armed forces and the CIA to torture people we had captured, some of whom were terrorists, some of whom saw themselves as lawfully fighting a just war against invaders, and some of whom were innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time, people whose names had been screamed out by others on the rack or had been sold to the CIA by local enemies or opportunists.

When the CIA and armed forces interrogators and lawyers resisted this demand, Vice President Richard Cheney’s staff went to Yoo at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and asked him to write a memorandum stating that the tortures they envisioned were perfectly legal.

Despite the absence of a single fact in the historical record to support this series of characterizations and suppositions, it seems safe to assume that DeLong actually believes this. Bully for him: Some folks need to believe angels walk among us, some believe that chickens have feelings, some believe that President Bush brought down the World Trade Center, and some have to believe the Vice President of the United States of America undertook a deliberate campaign to torture innocents for giggles while conscripting a host of lawyers in the process.

I’m open to the possibility that Professor DeLong believes all of these. Insanity like this was a commonplace on the American political Left for roughly eight years, and based on his writings, Professor DeLong was not bright enough to resist its pull; it is no more remarkable that he would say such things than that his fellow travelers would have spent every day from what Mark Steyn famously described as the “eighteen month rush to war” with Iraq until the inauguration of Blessed President Obama crying that America was ignoring the real war in Afghanistan, only to seamlessly pivot once that cudgel was no longer politically useful and demand that the same group of murdering theocrats who helped stage the deadliest attacks on American soil in our history be allowed to overrun that country again. It comes with the insulated topography within the six walls, so to speak.

What’s noteworthy here is Professor DeLong’s attempts — in a facially dishonest cover discussion of golly-gosh-gee, what to do about my colleague at Berkeley? — to discuss the practice of law. I presume that, if he took notice of me, any attempts on my part to opine on neoclassical economics versus Keynesian theory would earn (well-deserved) derision; four semesters’ worth of economics classes, capping off with intermediate microecon and intermediate macroecon theory, are enough for me to know how much I don’t know. I don’t see “juris doctor” in Professor DeLong’s credentials, so I’ll assume he has four semesters of classes in law under his belt before noting that he’s basically wrong in almost every particular.

Again, it need not be so: Although specialized training and research tools aid the process enormously, a discussion of the practice and subject of law really is well within the grasp of even a tenured academic. DeLong’s catalog of errors is, charitably, a testament to his laziness and his desire to do as much damage to his colleague as possible for as little work as needed.

As an initial matter, in a preview of the sloppiness attendant with his entire analysis — and indeed, with similar lines of argument across the left side of the political aisle — there are two critical memoranda at issue, on two different topics, a point rather lost in DeLong’s diatribe. (Here and here.) The first is an analysis, issued exactly two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and God knows where Flight 93 was going, on the extent of the President’s War Powers in a time of apparent war. The second is a discussion of the domestic and international laws (to which the United States is a party) that apply to the interrogation of alien war criminals — unlawful combatants — held on foreign soil. While some of the underlying issues are the same, it is important during this discussion to remember that the two are actually different, and discuss very different problems. It is a discredit to DeLong that he either did not read the memos, or is too lazy to separate them out in his wandering discussion.

His piece starts badly.

The faculty at the University of California at Berkeley does not know what to think or say or do about our colleague, Berkeley law school professor John Yoo. Universities like ours pride themselves on a commitment to academic freedom. But we also stress our devotion to the rule of law and the primacy of human rights. And therein lies the conflict that roils the Berkeley campus.

We are not altogether certain of what Yoo did as a lawyer in the Bush Justice Department. We know that he wrote the now-infamous memos providing legal justification for torture. But some suspect that what actually transpired may have been even more disreputable; otherwise, Yoo would have spilled the beans by now in order to salvage his reputation. Or so the theory goes.

I understand that the faculty of Berkeley considers itself both very important and very moral, but if Professor DeLong is to be believed, it is also too busy to watch enough television or read enough potboiler novels to have heard of the attorney-client privilege. Again recognizing that the faculty of Berkeley has a moral authority to which even the Pope must yield, I’m not clear on why Professor Yoo should initiate his own disbarment proceedings by breaching the privilege — which is what he’d have to do to “spill the beans” about what was said to whom and when at the relevant times — to satisfy their curiosity.

As Professor DeLong doesn’t bother to explain why this should be so, it seems safe to move along to the next error.

Without John Yoo or his colleague Jay Bybee (or somebody else willing to write a similar memo) the torture would not have gone forward, and the United States would not have sustained the enormous damage that was inflicted on it.

I’ve noted before that the interrogation techniques at issue are torture like Rosie O’Donnell is a serious political analyst, but the real error here is one that if widespread could pose a threat to the practice of law: The belief that lawyers, as counselors, are somehow responsible for their clients’ acts. As I’ve said elsewhere:

Lawyers advise. Clients act. In other words, a lawyer’s advice can only be part of the act if the client wills it — that is, the attorney’s liability is entirely out of his own hands. A soldier must disobey an order to commit a war crime because he acts; a lawyer is under no obligation to throw aside his laptop for fear that his boss will decide to ignore, or, worse, follow the arguments made in his memorandum.

This is a critical error on DeLong’s part, and one not unique to him on the left, that colors his entire whine: The worst possible thing Professor Yoo could have done, under any plausible understanding of Planet Reality, was to provide bad legal advice. He did not issue orders, he did not take orders and perform acts Professor DeLong believes to be torture. He wrote memoranda analyzing the law for his client’s decision-making process. To suggest otherwise is to imagine lawyers have power which we, blessedly, lack.

Not content to completely misconstrue the nature of an attorney’s relationship to his client, Professor DeLong apparently felt the need to undertake a passive-aggressive attack on Professor Yoo’s professionalism:

Lawyer acquaintances have told me that Yoo’s torture memos contain clues that they were not intended as serious legal opinions. One such clue is the complete disregard of legal precedent.

Put to the side that if anyone wrote, Economist acquaintances of mine have told me that DeLong’s analysis of India’s economic growth since independence was not intended as a serious academic work, I’d be rightly laughed out of the building. Ignore the long-distance exercise in forensic hermeneutics. That last sentence is a direct assault on either Professor Yoo’s competence or professionalism, a charge of either malpractice or fraud on Yoo’s client. It demands an explicit enunciation of the precedent he “completely disregarded.”

Instead, we get gibbering lectures on IRAC:

You can say that the current circumstance is sufficiently like a previous case the Supreme Court has decided that that precedent rules. You can say that the present situation really has no precedent, so the court would reach an entirely new decision. Or you can say that, while there is a precedent for the situation, that precedent is wrong and should be overturned. There is no fourth option.

Actually, no. You can say precedent (which is actually more than “a previous case the Supreme Court has decided”) completely lines up with the facts here, and this is why; that the precedent is similar, but distinguishable, calling for a different but not opposite result; that the precedent is identical is persuasive, but not binding (meaning the court considering the matter can reach a different conclusion); that the precedent is wrong; that the precedent is completely inapplicable; or that there is no precedent. This is, again, more a marker of DeLong’s almost pathological refusal to even understand the topic on which he opines than anything else — except a marker for how much more inane this can become:

Yoo’s memos concern presidential powers in a time of war. One famous precedent with which any lawyer would have to grapple is the Supreme Court’s decision in Youngstown, concerning President Truman’s seizure of the country’s steel mills to keep them rolling during the Korean War. The Supreme Court ruled his action unconstitutional. The Youngstown case set out the Supreme Court’s judgment as to how far the president’s inherent powers go in a wartime emergency and to what degree those powers are subject to congressional authority.

Many a young litigator has had a memorandum, brief, or email posing a question returned with the acronym “RTFR,” which is shorthand for “Read the [Expletive] Rule.” It is advice that would have served DeLong well here.

The case he is attempting to cite is Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). Actually, that’s only sort of true: He’s trying to cite Justice Jackson’s famous concurrence (for those of you following at home, a concurrence is not “controlling precedent,” it’s a persuasive argument and nothing more) with its fatuous language about waxing and waning authority, twilights and zones and equilibria. The Supreme Court subsequently seemed to adopt Justice Jackson’s reasoning in cases involving Executive authority, except when it has rejected it, thus leaving its status as precedent apparent only to amateurs, academics, those with an axe to grind against a given President, and folks too lazy to actually read the thing and the cases that cite it. (Professor DeLong manages to be all four.)

At the very least, Professor DeLong could have had one of his acquaintances email him a synopsis on why Jackson’s concurrence controls here, where Yoo should have cited it, in which memo, and for what purpose, and whether its absence renders the opinion meaningless or not, and why. Although it may not seem so from reading this, I — or any other litigator worth his salt — could write that in 200 words or less. DeLong’s failure to provide even this much is simply more proof that he has no proof of Professor Yoo’s incompetence or malice.

Worse than that, though, is the sloppiness of his thought: The memo that deals with presidential power is not the memo that deals with the extent of enhanced interrogation techniques. They concern entirely different subjects. More importantly, there’s an underlying question the answer to which DeLong implicitly assumes, because he has clearly never thought about it: What gives the Supreme Court the power to unilaterally thwart the Executive? Grammar-school civics taught us about checks and balances, by which no one Branch could overwhelm the other two; why does the Judiciary alone have the power to command the Executive and the Legislative branches? Does the Judiciary have this power because Justice Marshall made a power grab in passing two centuries ago? Because of a tradition never really tested and honored more in the breach than the observance?

I could go on at length, but by now you’re likely as tired of this as I am. Picking on DeLong — who hopefully writes better economics papers than he does backhanded accusations of fraud or malpractice — is easy, and is useful only as a symbol of greater, and unfortunate, trends in a significant portion of American political life. Professor Yoo is currently being sued for writing these memoranda, not by his former client for malpractice, but by someone who claims he was tortured because of the memos Yoo wrote.

Let me rephrase that: A lawyer is being sued because he wrote a legal analysis and his client thereafter allegedly undertook acts in reliance on that analysis that allegedly harmed the plaintiff. The plaintiff’s legal bill is underwritten by Yale, which means that Yoo is facing deep pockets with lots of incentive to score political points, against which he has to defend with no real chance of recovering his fees. A court of law has become a method of politics by other means against a lawyer who did legal research and writing. And the left — including much of the legal left — cheers.

I’ve said before that this represents not only a sloppiness in our political thought, but a dangerous precedent well outside of the political wars to which we’re now accustomed, because any lawyer who provides legal advice is at risk. I’m not concerned with the tender feelings of members of my profession so much as I’m concerned that one of the unfortunately necessary pillars of our notion of the rule of law is in danger — the lawyers and judges who make the law function are now weapons and targets. Our judicial system — a branch of government like any other — is being used as a political weapon to settle scores that elections could not.

The wind may already be sown. We’ve seen the coming harvest before, and it never ends well.

Christopher Badeaux is Senior Editor of The New Ledger.

One of the more admirable category errors of American politics is to confuse the moral imperative or import of a policy decision with its practical effects. It is a good thing that despite three decades of effort to the contrary, abortion policy is still freighted with moral concerns; that war is not simply the health of the State, but raises questions of collateral damages; and that the social safety net’s effects, good and ill, on the moral health of the citizenry are living aspects of our policy discussions.

Merely because it is admirable, however, does not mean that it is always right. A case in point is the so-called “torture” debate, which all too often betrays the advocate’s moral preference in his opening statement, which is either “torture works,” or “torture doesn’t work.” (Much of the current debate involves waterboarding, which anyone with any familiarity with real torture would recognize is torture like I’m an NFL offensive lineman, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume waterboarding is indeed a kind of torture.) Former Vice President Dick Cheney is engaged in a campaign to show that his administration’s use of “torture” to extract useful, necessary information was not only successful, but appropriate. Ben Smith of the Politico — whose primary use is to provide a thermometer for current left-liberal whines — is peeved with the Washington Post for running a feature that, horror of horrors, suggests that Mr. Cheney is correct.

Let me put my moral perspective out there at the start of this: My faith teaches, as an infallible principle, that torture is always wrong. It degrades both the person torturing and the one tortured. It is gravely offensive, and is a mortal sin. Unlike Senators from Massachusetts, I understand that if I cannot profess that faith, I must take another. I can and I do. I can therefore say with no doubt that torture is always wrong, and is a grave sin, that places one’s soul in jeopardy of Hell. That is true for everyone, whether they believe it to be or not. I cannot say that if the difference between my family’s life and death was torturing another man, I would not do so. I recognize there would be a cost to it.

I tell you this because the truth is that torture works, for a certain value of “works.” Whenever you read about how torture is awful and ineffective, you’ll see something about how the tortured will say anything to make the pain stop, and that’s why confessions obtained by torture are useless. (As a side note, that assumes that you care whether the confession is true or not. If you don’t, it’s a great way to get confessions.)

But this is to confuse the point terribly, and is honestly usually done out of ignorance or bad faith. Human experience — in the last century alone, I count eight regimes (the British, the French, the Soviets, the Imperial Japanese, the Nazis, the People’s Republic of China, the North Koreans, and the North Vietnamese) that fit the bill — teaches us that torture is a highly effective way of extracting information from the tortured.

John McCain, for example, though a horrible Presidential candidate, has spoken movingly of how he — a brave, decent, patriotic man — gave up more than he wanted and more than required when broken by torture. (I note that Senator McCain’s story has changed somewhat in the telling over time, which I take not to be a sign of dishonesty, but rather of a man coming to grips with trauma the likes of which most of us can’t even visualize.) While most modern American journalists probably have no idea why Camus was writing about Algeria, France carries the legacy of its actions, including its highly effective use of techniques that make waterboarding look like being tickled with feathers, to this day. In fact, we learned waterboarding from the North Koreans and Chinese, who were quite adept at extracting useful information through pain. The Soviets, Nazis, Japanese, and Brits all believed the exigencies of World War II were great enough to justify the use of torture on prisoners (especially, in the case of Great Britain, if we expand torture to include lesser things like waterboarding), and the first two happily employed the practice in day-to-day intelligence, counterintelligence, and police work.

The statement that torture doesn’t work is simply at odds with centuries of human experience. It is like those people who insist, as my friend Dan McLaughlin has said, that Derek Jeter is a great defensive shortstop: “Statistical analysts regard the debate over Jeter’s glove not as a debate among analysts but a debate between analysts and people who simply refuse to look at the evidence.” The Washington Post’s piece on Khalid Shiekh Mohammed, and the recently released CIA memos, are merely grist for the mill.

On the other side of this debate, however, is the categorical assertion that “torture works.” This is only mostly true, and is the real reason why America does not condone real torture: You have to be willing to keep going.

Torture is an information vector. Our Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school (SERE) historically taught those service members who passed through it that under torture, you will talk, and you will tell your torturer what you know. This was not in fact a decades-long quest to prepare the armed services to bend to the will of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, but a reflection of American experience in war (where we observe the Geneva Conventions, and our enemies do not). The goal was to prepare the men and women who passed through the schools for the inevitable moment when they broke, so that they would retain the sense of dignity and self-worth needed to survive and escape; if they know they’ll break, they’re less likely to commit suicide over breaking.

The problem with the image of torture we see on TV — where someone holds out indefinitely against all odds, or simply breaks and begins sharing — is that it is stupid. No information vector is perfect. One cross-checks against other sources of information. Satellite imagery is checked against human intelligence on the ground. Information gleaned through torture is checked against known truths. This is true for any method of information extraction.

When you torture someone, or befriend him, or threaten his family, or give him a cigarette, you are not making him a perfect conduit for information. Instead, you are making him a conduit for signal and noise. Befriended targets slip lies in with the truth, because only in movies does true love bloom between the beautiful (but kindhearted!) interrogator and the handsome (but vulnerable!) detainee. Tortured detainees share everything and anything they know, which means you get a great deal of dross for the pure metal you’re getting. Men who lie when they are tortured will lie when they are not, and vice versa.

And so you must cross-check and be willing to torture again. A tortured target who lies must be punished with more pain until he’s willing to identify what’s true and what’s not. (A befriended one must be cross-checked again and again less directly.) Any source of information requires man-hours spent and, frankly, wasted. You can’t befriend your target into sharing the location of the nuclear suitcase by giving him a bucket of the Colonel’s best, and you can’t torture him into it with any certainty in ten minutes.

These are not groundbreaking assertions. They are the wisdom of centuries of human experience. Men have tried everything imaginable to get more information from other men, and have found that nothing is perfect, and very little is valueless.

Without understanding this dilemma — largely because the population does not torture and the commentariat is filled with historically obtuse men and women who think thumb screws and waterboarding (and opposition to legalized abortion!) are the outer limits of human depravity — our political discussion is skewed. We are left arguing about whether we “torture” as a matter of national policy, and whether torture “works.” This is like arguing about whether we nuke as a matter of national policy, and whether nuking works: We’ve done so, and it works, but only with enormous implications that we’re not willing to accept except in the darkest of days.

The subtle online humorist Conor Friedersdorf — whose delightful, gonzo schtick is that of a bewildered “conservative” with no conservative inclinations — made one of the best satirical expositions of this dilemma I’ve yet seen:

Though I cannot say definitively whether torture is or isn’t an effective utilitarian tool, I am mightily influenced [by] Jim Manzi’s observation that “we keep beating” torturing nations. “The regimes in the modern world that have used systematic torture and directly threatened the survival of the United States—Nazi Germany, WWII-era Japan, and the Soviet Union—have been annihilated, while we are the world’s leading nation,” he writes. “The list of other torturing nations… has won no competition worth winning. The classically liberal nations of Western Europe, North America, and the Pacific that led the move away from systematic government-sponsored torture are the world’s winners.”

Friedersdorf is satirizing the entire debate — not only those so historically dense as to think we “beat” Nazi Germany without the aid of the torturing Soviet Union, or that our defeat of the Soviet Union was in some sort of military conflict, or that China, North Vietnam, and North Korea are historical footnotes — but by a subtle twist, those who pretend that America is uniquely willing, among the West, to apply isolated bouts of pain to achieve limited ends, thereby excising British and French amoral steel in conflict.

In a rare moment of obliviousness, Friedersdorf misses the real problem here: Because of this inability to discuss the truth about torture in any meaningful way, the partisan warfare in which we have been engaged for my entire lifetime has found a new channel to course. Ordinary, milquetoast politicians find themselves incapable of acting like adults when the topic arises.

Thus, Attorney General Eric Holder is renewing a criminal probe of CIA officers accused of torture that was shut down last year by career prosecutors, which is to say, nominally non-partisan actors. Necessarily, this was President Obama’s decision by act or omission, because DoJ is an Executive department (any talk of prosecutorial independence is laughable for anyone who knows anything about DoJ). Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former United States Attorney, has been so taken with partisanship that he is accusing John Yoo of malpractice for failing to cite irrelevant cases, and suggesting that Washington, D.C. is in the Fifth Circuit.

A few months ago, at this point, it would have been trendy to say something along the lines of “we have too many important things going on to allow this to devolve into partisanship,” or words to that effect, and then explaining why it was a good idea to allow the Obama Administration to do whatever it wanted. This is to treat partisanship as a disease rather than as a useful way to highlight policy differences for Americans so we don’t have to pay too much attention to politics. The clash of parties and inclinations and ideologies and policies and programs is vital to a healthy Republic, if ultimately fatal to any kind of democracy.

The problem is that we are treating a series of vitally important questions and turning them into a live-action version of The West Wing. On matters that literally involve life and death, our political class is more concerned with one-upmanship.

We should not care that this distracts President Obama from his domestic agenda, or makes his wavering over Afghanistan more agonized, or whatever the concern of the day might be. We should encourage that result, because he campaigned on openness in government, and on the implicit assumption that his predecessor erred badly. We should demand the release of every last memorandum and paper on the extent, nature, and effectiveness of the former Administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques, because America is not the Vatican, and the American people are entitled to know not only what was done, but whether it was effective.

We are entitled to facts, and truth, and to gauge how we balance those acts and those results against the alternatives. If that embarrasses the Republican or Democratic Parties, so be it. The alternative is a politicized war over every last foreign policy action, and the last time we tried that gambit, it ended with smoking craters in the Northeastern United States.

Christopher Badeaux is a Senior Editor of The New Ledger.