Every five years or so the National Intelligence Council releases a Global Trends report about what the world will look like a generation from today.  The Global Trends 2030 report is now out, and if my Twitter feed and Thom Shanker's New York Times story are any indication, well, there's gonna be some freaking out inside the Beltway: 

A new intelligence assessment of global trends projects that China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030, but that America will remain an indispensable world leader, bolstered in part by an era of energy independence....

“There will not be any hegemonic power,” the 166-page report states. “Power will shift to networks and coalitions in a multipolar world.”

It warns that at least 15 countries are “at high risk of state failure” by 2030, among them Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Yemen and Uganda.

The study acknowledges that the future “is malleable,” and lists important “game-changers” that will most influence the global scene to 2030: a crisis-prone world economy, shortcomings in governance, conflicts within states and between them, the impact of new technologies and whether the United States can “work with new partners to reinvent the international system.”

The best-case situation for global security to 2030, according to the study, would be a growing political partnership between the United States and China. But it could take a crisis to bring Washington and Beijing together — something like a nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan resolved only by bold cooperation between the United States and China.

The worst-case situation envisions a stalling of economic globalization that would preclude any advancement of financial well-being around the world. That would be a likely outcome following an outbreak of a health pandemic that, even if short-lived, would result in closed borders and economic isolationism.

The chief author and manager of the project, Mathew Burrows, who is counselor for the National Intelligence Council, said the findings had been presented in advance in more than 20 nations to groups of academic experts, business leaders and government officials, including local intelligence officers.

As one of those academic experts, let me say three things.  First, the NIC puts a lot of effort into these reports, and they're important because they're consumed globally and not just nationally.  Not a lot of other countries have either official or unofficial institutions trying to do this kind of long-range analysis, so they devour the NIC reports just as much as Americans. 

Second, as Michael Horowitz and Philip Tetlock pointed out in Foreign Policy just a few short months ago, these NIC reports are hardly a perfect crystal ball: 

The reports almost inevitably fall into the trap of treating the conventional wisdom of the present as the blueprint for the future 15 to 20 years down the road. Many things the early reports get right, such as the continued integration of Western Europe, were already unfolding in 1997. Similarly, predicting that "some states will fail to meet the basic requirements that bind citizens to their government" or that information technology will have a large impact on politics was hardly going out on a limb.

Looking carefully at the first two Global Trends reports reveals how the reports have struggled to make accurate non-obvious predictions of big-picture trends....

The reports also engage in extensive hedging. For every prediction, there is a caveat. The reports lean heavily on words such as "could," "possibly," and "maybe." The lead-in to Global Trends 2025 uses "could" nine times in two pages, and the report as a whole uses the word a whopping 220 times. The report also uses "maybe" 36 times.  Global Trends 2020 uses "could" 110 times. Add all of the caveats and conditionals, and a harsh critic might conclude that these reports are saying no more than that there is a possibility that something could happen at some point -- and it might have a big effect.

Third, that prediction of the end to U.S. hegmony will be an interesting litmus test of the maturity of America's foreign policy community.  Sure, other institutions have made this kind of prediction about rising Chinese power, but it's different when a U.S. government body does it.  Despite the wide variance contained within these kind of predictions, it's gonna be easy for threat-mongers to screech at the headline statements. 

Furthermore, whenever the topic of waning American hegemony comes up in public discourse... well, the conversation doesn't go well.  Admitting a relative decline in American power is not something American's political and policy elites like to do -- see 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney. 

So pay close attention to who freaks out and who doesn't from the NIC report, and feel free to discount the future statements of those who choose to freak out today. 

Your humble blogger is headed to the United Kingdom this week to give a few talks and generally escape the election and post-election frenzy.  Blogging will be light.  However, before departing for the land of scones and Devonshire cream, there's one last election-related issue that's worth some words. 

As I briefly discussed a few weeks ago, there's a brewing conflict about how to read the polls for the U.S. presidential election.  This has crystallized into some latent, not-so-latent, and pretty damn blatant hostility towards' FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver.  Now, some interpret this as simply a part of a larger War on Numbers.  As Brendan Nyhan notes, Silver's analysis lines up with all of the other analytic forecasters. 

But let's try to be fair here.  I think there are a couple of different criticisms going on here from different quarters of the public sphere, and it's worth evaluating them on their own terms. 

The first and simplest one is Matt K. Lewis, who points out why conservatives aren't keen on Silver's analysis:

Silver comes out of the baseball statistics world, and his defenders like cite sports and gambling analogies when defending him. But there is a key difference. If Silver says the Giants have only a 5 percent chance of winning the World Series again next year, it is highly unlikely that would impact the outcome of games. Umpires won’t begin making bad calls, the fans won’t stop attending games, etc.

But when the public sees that a prominent New York Times writer gives Barack Obama a 70 percent chance of winning, that can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. It has consequences. It drives media coverage. It dries up donations. Whether Silver likes it, or not, people do interpret his numbers as a “prediction.” They see this as election forecasting.

This sounds about right, in two ways.  First, it does highlight the ways in which forecasters can actually affect the outcome.  Second, it's actually a compliment to Silver and his peers, because it reflects the belief that their assessments carry weight with the money.  One does wonder whether it would have been liberal operatives pushing back if the forecasters were unanimous that Romney was the favorite at this point. 

The point is, however, that part of the criticism is simply raw politics.  That's fine, and can therefore be dismissed pretty quickly. 

The second critique is more substantive, and rests on the notion that the assumptions that pollsters and forecasters are using when they crunch their numbers are flawed.  Dan McLaughlin at Red State offers up a decent version of this critique: 

Nate Silver’s much-celebrated model is, like other poll averages, based simply on analyzing the toplines of public polls. This, more than any other factor, is where he and I part company....

My thesis, and that of a good many conservative skeptics of the 538 model, is that these internals are telling an entirely different story than some of the toplines: that Obama is getting clobbered with independent voters, traditionally the largest variable in any election and especially in a presidential election, where both sides will usually have sophisticated, well-funded turnout operations in the field. He’s on track to lose independents by double digits nationally, and the last three candidates to do that were Dukakis, Mondale and Carter in 1980. And he’s not balancing that with any particular crossover advantage (i.e., drawing more crossover Republican voters than Romney is drawing crossover Democratic voters). Similar trends are apparent throughout the state-by-state polls, not in every single poll but in enough of them to show a clear trend all over the battleground states.

If you averaged Obama’s standing in all the internals, you’d capture a profile of a candidate that looks an awful lot like a whole lot of people who have gone down to defeat in the past, and nearly nobody who has won. Under such circumstances, Obama can only win if the electorate features a historically decisive turnout advantage for Democrats – an advantage that none of the historically predictive turnout metrics are seeing, with the sole exception of the poll samples used by some (but not all) pollsters. Thus, Obama’s position in the toplines depends entirely on whether those pollsters are correctly sampling the partisan turnout....

Let me use an analogy from baseball statistics, which I think is appropriate here because it’s where both I and Nate Silver first learned to read statistics critically and first got an audience on the internet; in terms of their predictive power, poll toplines are like pitcher win-loss records or batter RBI.

Oh, snap.  I've read enough sabermetrics to know a diss when I see it. 

Now I don't think Silver and his ilk would agree with McLaughlin's reasoning -- see Nick Gourevitch for a useful counter.  But I do I think Silver agrees with McLaughlin's on the source of their disagreement.  As Silver's latest post title suggests:  "For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased": 

The pollsters are making a leap of faith that the 10 percent of voters they can get on the phone and get to agree to participate are representative of the entire population. The polling was largely quite accurate in 2004, 2008 and 2010, but there is no guarantee that this streak will continue. Most of the "house effects" that you see introduced in the polls — the tendency of certain polling firms to show results that are consistently more favorable for either the Democrat or the Republican — reflect the different assumptions that pollsters make about how to get a truly representative sample and how to separate out the people who will really vote from ones who say they will, but won’t.

But many of the pollsters are likely to make similar assumptions about how to measure the voter universe accurately. This introduces the possibility that most of the pollsters could err on one or another side — whether in Mr. Obama’s direction, or Mr. Romney’s. In a statistical sense, we would call this bias: that the polls are not taking an accurate sample of the voter population. If there is such a bias, furthermore, it is likely to be correlated across different states, especially if they are demographically similar. If either of the candidates beats his polls in Wisconsin, he is also likely to do so in Minnesota....

My argument... is this: we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Here we have a pretty simple and honest disagreement.  Silver thinks the pollster's models for what the electorate and turnout will look like are pretty accurate; McLaughlin doesn't.  They agree that if Romney wins it will be because practically all of the state polls are biased against him.  

The final critique is the one that fascinates me -- the notion that traditional pundits can look beyond the polls at more ineffable factors like "momentum" and "crowd sizes" and "closing arguments" and "energy" and "early voting" other  kinds of secret sauces to deternmine who will win.  These guys rely on numbers but also the political instincts they've hones for decades as pundits.  This is basically what Michael Barone has done, for example, in his prediction of a Romney blowout.  

In some ways this mirrors the "scouts vs. stats" divide that ostensibly existed in baseball as Silver was developing PECOTA and Michael Lewis was writing Moneyball.   And a lot of commentators are setting it up that way. 

I'd tend to agree that this is the most bogus line of criticism... but a few things prevent me from rejecting this analysis entirely.  First, there is the crazy possibility that pundits really do possess "local knowledge," as Hayek would put it, that forecasters lack.  I'm not sure I really buy this hypothesis, but it's possible.   

Second, as Silver himself observed in The Signal and the Noise, scouts get a bum rap.  Over time, the evidence suggests that the scouts who worked at Baseball America actually outperformed the sabermetricians at Baseball Prospectus.  As Silver acknowledges, just because something can't be quantified doesn't mean it's unimportant.  Maybe pundits like Barone have picked up on these "intangibles."  Or maybe they have an implicit theory of the election that turns out to be superior to what is, at this point, a strictly poll-driven model.  To put it another way:  polls at this point are merely the intervening variable between the causal factors that the pundits like to talk about (the economy, the candidate's narrative) and the outcome (the election). 

To be honest, I doubt that any of this is true.  But the great thing is that come Wednesday, we'll know which group is more right.  And then let the taunting commence!!

In a futile determined effort to expand his public intellectual brand, your humble blogger was on the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC for about an hour this AM.  It was a veeeeery interesting experience.  Now, I know that some readers of this blog aspire to poison me and take my place on the FP masthead punditry themselves.  So, as a public service, this is what happens when you go on a Sunday morning talk show:  imagine the Law & Order chunk-CHUNK! going after each paragraph:

WEDNESDAY:  I receive a polite email from one of Melissa's segment/booking producers, who we'll call "M", asking if I want to be on the show this Sunday.  Having never done this kind of punditry before, and having my previous obligation for the weekend cancelled, I accept. 

Immediately after accepting, I experience two contradictory emotions.  First, the fear builds that they will email back the same day and say, "uh, we just re-checked our Rolodex, and.. [laughs] we have no idea who thought you merited being on television."  At the same time, I realize I'm going to have to watch the rest of the prime-time Republican National Convention speeches.  At which point I let loose a strong of profanities [What if had been the DNC instead?--ed.  The same number of profanities would have been released.]

THURSDAY:  I talk with M again, who runs down the planned topics with me -- the RNC, the DNC, the state of the election, and gun violence.  Immediately I have a slight quandry -- my expertise is in international relations, not electoral politics.  Do I dare to think I can play in the sandbox for a Sunday morning talk show?  At which point my inner media whore screams, Gollum-like, "YES!!  WE WANTS TO BE ON THE TV!!!  IT'S OUR PRECIOUS!!" 

This is, as near as I can determine, the First Commandment of Televsion Punditry -- you have to be secure enough in your abilities to chat with authority about issues outside your intellectual wheelhouse. 

FRIDAY:  To make my inner media whore proud, I start reading up on gun violence statistics.  I also read as much commentary as I can about the Republican National Convention.  Whatever intelligence I gain from the former I lose by reading the latter.   

SATURDAY:  Full disclosure:  Melissa and I were political science colleagues at the University of Chicago back in the day, so I'm familiar with her style and her politics.  That said, I haven't been a regular watcher of her MSNBC show, so I tune for the first half-hour in to get a sense of the roundtable.  Clearly MHP leans juuuuust a little to the left.  This raises an identity issue -- am I supposed to be  wearing the hat of "defender of conservatism"?  It's not a role I've been comfortable with as of late.  Or am I gonna wear the "dispassionate, snarky observer of the political scene"?  I feel much more comfortable with that hat on.  In all likelihood, it's going to be a little from column A and a little from column B.

LATER ON SATURDAY:  If you're going to be on roundtable for radio/television, there's a 98% chance you will need to do a "pre-interview" with a producer so they have a sense of what you're going to say during the conversation.  So I have that conversation with M, during which I learn that the topics have been jiggled around a bit and all those minutes hours of sketchy detailed online research into gun violence stats won't be worth much.  Instead, we'll be talking gay marriage.  Which is fine, I will rally with yet more Wikipedia-surfing intense study of primary texts.  And, of course, that segment will be moved as well.  So, the Second Commandment of Television Punditry is that the schedule will always change.

EVEN LATER ON SATURDAY:  The MHP show is classy -- they took care of all the flight/hotel/car service logistics.  So by Saturday night I found myself in a comfortable midtown hotel with a lovely view of Central Park.  Surfing the web furiously to research for Sunday AM, I see that some fireworks broke out on MHP's Saturday show after I switched off to pack.  Melissa was responding to the panel's most conservative participant making a point.  Ruh-roh. 

To prep, I take notes on each of the "blocks" or segments that I'm supposed to weigh in on.  I'm a professor and an academic, and therefore alwasys feel better with notes. 

SUNDAY MORNING PRE-SHOW:  I get to 30 Rock on time, which means I'm the first panelist there.... or so I think.  In actuality, the two female panelists -- NYU's Cristina Beltran and the Center for American Progress' Aisha Moodie-Mills -- are in makeup.  As they enter the green rom, I quickly comprehend that I am in deep trouble, because I am not nearly as pretty.  As the clock ticks towards 10 AM, and no one comes to get me, I am petrified that I have been typecast as the splotchy-faced redneck surrounded by urbane alluring panelists.  Before this scenario can play out in even weirder directions inside my head, however, M sends me to makeup.  They apply as enough powder to my face to fuel at least two Dunkin' Donuts franchies -- but it works .  My family later informs me that I looked good, so many, many thanks to those professionals at MSNBC. 

SUNDAY MORNING, 10 AM-11 AM:  OK, having done my first hour of Sunday morning chat -- which you can watch here, here, here and here -- I have learned the following effects on one's senses when three cameras and numerous klieg lights are pointed in your general direction:

A)  Time speeds up.  Seriously, that hour flew by.  Every time I was feeling like we were getting to a good part of the conversation, we hit a commercial break. 

B)  Almost all prep work is useless.  I knew exactly what I wanted to say in response to the first question asked, and I did that competently.  After that, whatever good punchy things were in my notes might as well have been left back at home for all the use they were to me.  Part of the issue is visual -- you don't want to be looking down at your notes.  Another part of the issue, which I've blogged about before, is the academic weakness of trying to directly answer the question. 

C)  Really, cameras can make you stupid.  If you mangle your words during an ordinary conversation, or even when giving a speech, you can take a moment and regroup.  If you mangle your words during a panel show, you become acutely aware that you're screwing up, which compounds the problem.  Another panelist will be happy to enter the breach.  On at least two occasioons, I had written down a better answer than the one that came out of my mouth during the program. 

SUNDAY MORNING, 11 AM:  I  need to get to the airport to come home, but I find two pieces of critical feedback from the experience worthwhile.  The first was the thumbs-up that Moodie-Mills and her partner give me as I exit the green room.  The second is an anonymous  email I soon find in my inbox: 

Drezner........Why are you such an idiot? Your appearance on MSLSD was laughable and embarrassing. It's really sad and embarrassing how you liberal bedwetters continue to be brainwashed by your worthless president. Why can't you clowns form a coherent thought on your own? Exactly, because you buffoons are mindless robots programmed by your worthless president. Barnum and Bailey have nothing on you clowns. What do you call a basement full of liberals? A whine cellar. Keep up the good work loser................

Why, it's... it's a troll!!  I've made it!!  I'M A REAL PUNDIT NOW!!!!!

Your humble blogger has fiercely resisted getting drawn into the scrum regarding Niall Ferguson's Newsweek jeremiad against Barack Obama.  I kinda already said my piece about Ferguson as a polemicist more than a year ago. The fact-check critical blowback and Ferguson's response and the response to Ferguson's response have been truly nasty.  And I'm supposed to be on vacation.  There are beaches very close to where I am typing this.  The Official Blog Wife will be unhappy -- and you do not want to see the Official Blog Wife unhappy on vacation. 

At the moment, however, I find myself alone next to a computer.  And I have noticed that most of the commentary has been directed at Ferguson's discussion of the U.S. economy.  The foreign policy section of the essay has been comparatively neglected (though see here), and I was curious to see how it held up to a fact-check.  So -- quickly, before the Official Blog Family returns from the beach -- let's dive in!  

The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States.

David Frum has already pointed out -- in a defense of Ferguson, mind you -- the ways in which Ferguson's calculatons of the Chinese economy are... er... geopolitically a bit off.  By using purchasing power parity rather than market exchange rates, Ferguson is magnifying China's economic power just a wee bit.  Or as Frum puts it, "things are not yet quite so dire as Ferguson fears."

Onward!

Meanwhile, the fiscal train wreck has already initiated a process of steep cuts in the defense budget, at a time when it is very far from clear that the world has become a safer place—least of all in the Middle East.

You know, it's a funny coincidence, cause I was just perusing the Institute for Economics and Peace's 2012 Global Peace Index, which measures "the extent to which countries are involved
in ongoing domestic and international conflicts."  A key conclusion they draw in the 2012 report?  "The average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007 (p. 37)."  So, actually, it is somewhat clear that the world -- and the United States -- remains comparatively safe and secure.  

Next!

For me the president’s greatest failure has been not to think through the implications of these challenges to American power. Far from developing a coherent strategy, he believed—perhaps encouraged by the premature award of the Nobel Peace Prize—that all he needed to do was to make touchy-feely speeches around the world explaining to foreigners that he was not George W. Bush.

I discussed whether the Obama administration had a grand strategy at length in Foreign Affairs last year.  I think Ferguson has half a point here on the "touchy-feely speeches" Obama delivered in his first year -- but his administration has clearly pivoted (get it?) away from that first-year approach

In Tokyo in November 2009, the president gave his boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech: “In an interconnected world, power does not need to be a zero-sum game, and nations need not fear the success of another ... The United States does not seek to contain China ... On the contrary, the rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations.” Yet by fall 2011, this approach had been jettisoned in favor of a “pivot” back to the Pacific, including risible deployments of troops to Australia and Singapore. From the vantage point of Beijing, neither approach had credibility.

What evidence is there that the rebalancing strategy hasn't worked and lacks credibility?  The initial response to the pivot was pretty positive, and it's safe to say that China noticed it.  I'm not saying that no evidence exists, mind you.  I'm saying that sheer assertion by Ferguson does not in and of itself constiute evidence. 

Believing it was his role to repudiate neoconservatism, Obama completely missed the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy—precisely the wave the neocons had hoped to trigger with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. When revolution broke out—first in Iran, then in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail.

In the case of Iran he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations.  Ditto Syria. In Libya he was cajoled into intervening. In Egypt he tried to have it both ways, exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, then drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.” The result was a foreign-policy debacle. Not only were Egypt’s elites appalled by what seemed to them a betrayal, but the victors—the Muslim Brotherhood—had nothing to be grateful for. America’s closest Middle Eastern allies—Israel and the Saudis—looked on in amazement.

"This is what happens when you get caught by surprise," an anonymous American official told the New York Times in February 2011. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.” 

Man, there's a lot to unpack here.  First, I'm calling bulls**t on the Iran claim.  Note to Niall:  it's never a good idea to use a Jennifer Rubin talking point.  Second, I'm pretty sure the administration has been active in Syria -- just not as active as Ferguson would like.  Third, it's waaaaay too soon and simplistic describe Egypt as a "foreign-policy debacle."

Regarding the strategic surprise, Ferguson is telling the truth but not the whole truth.  Sure, Obama was caught unawares.  So was everyone else.  I talked to a lot of high-ranking Israeli leaders/thinkers when I visited the country less than six months before the Arab Spring, and not a single person we talked to even hinted at any kind of pan-Arab uprising.  Ferguson attends Herzliya regularly, so I'm curious whether he knows any Israelis who picked up on this. 

My point here is that Israel has a powerful incentive to monitor everything going on in the Arab world -- and they didn't pick up on the Arab Spring.  Does Ferguson seriously believbe a President McCain would have detected it? 

Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security. Yet the public mistakes his administration’s astonishingly uninhibited use of political assassination for a coherent strategy. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, the civilian proportion of drone casualties was 16 percent last year. Ask yourself how the liberal media would have behaved if George W. Bush had used drones this way. Yet somehow it is only ever Republican secretaries of state who are accused of committing “war crimes.”

The real crime is that the assassination program destroys potentially crucial intelligence (as well as antagonizing locals) every time a drone strikes. It symbolizes the administration’s decision to abandon counterinsurgency in favor of a narrow counterterrorism. What that means in practice is the abandonment not only of Iraq but soon of Afghanistan too. Understandably, the men and women who have served there wonder what exactly their sacrifice was for, if any notion that we are nation building has been quietly dumped. Only when both countries sink back into civil war will we realize the real price of Obama’s foreign policy.

Ferguson makes some interesting points here, but can we talk about the elephant in the room?  Why does Ferguson think Obama polls well on national security?  Killing bin Laden, the Libya war, the rebalancing strategy, and the withdrawal from Iraq are commonly cited.  Guess which one on that list Ferguson fails to mention. 

As for what veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq think, well, Pew polled vets on this very question in the fall of 2011.  The results?  "While post-9/11 veterans are more supportive than the general public, just one-third (34%) say that, given the costs and benefits to the U.S., the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have both been worth fighting."  Nevertheless, 96% of them felt proud of their military service.  So I'm guessing that they want the U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan too. 

[UPDATE:  Damn Pew's deceptive topline results!  Looking a bit deeper, I see support for the war in Afghanistan still commands 50% support among post-9/11 veterans.  On the other hand, these post-9/11 veterans also overwhelmingly (87%) support the increased use of unmanned drones that Ferguson dislikes so much.] 

America under this president is a superpower in retreat, if not retirement. Small wonder 46 percent of Americans—and 63 percent of Chinese—believe that China already has replaced the U.S. as the world’s leading superpower or eventually will.

I like using survey data to bolster my arguments just as much as the next guy -- but I'm also willing to say quite clearly when the public is wrong about something -- and they're wrong about this.  Furthermore, Ferguson knows this perception is wrong.  We know from the previous paragraph that he doesn't care for public attitudes when he disagrees with them, but he uses it here.  The reason?  This time it supports his argument. 

My verdict:  the foreign policy section isn't as bad as the domestic policy section of Ferguson's article, but it's still sloppy.  Ferguson makes a lot of lazy assertions without backing them up with facts.  Some of the facts he uses are a bad fit for the arguments he's trying to make.  And he values similar data points differently depending on whether they support his argument or not. 

There are some good critiques that can be made of the Obama administration's foreign policy, and Ferguson skirts close to some of them.  But Romney supporters can do better. 

Last Wednesday Thomas Friedman wrote a very silly column in which he called for Michael Bloomberg to enter the presidential race because he had an annoying experience at Union Station he thinks the United States needs a real leader: 

[W]ith Europe in peril, China and America wobbling, the Arab world in turmoil, energy prices spiraling and the climate changing, we are facing some real storms ahead. We need to weatherproof our American house — and fast — in order to ensure that America remains a rock of stability for the world. To do that, we’ll have to make some big, hard decisions soon — and to do that successfully will require presidential leadership in the next four years of the highest caliber.

This election has to be about those hard choices, smart investments and shared sacrifices — how we set our economy on a clear-cut path of near-term, job-growing improvements in infrastructure and education and on a long-term pathway to serious fiscal, tax and entitlement reform. The next president has to have a mandate to do all of this.

But, today, neither party is generating that mandate — talking seriously enough about the taxes that will have to be raised or the entitlement spending that will have to be cut to put us on sustainable footing, let alone offering an inspired vision of American renewal that might motivate such sacrifice. That’s why I still believe that the national debate would benefit from the entrance of a substantial independent candidate — like the straight-talking, socially moderate and fiscally conservative Bloomberg — who could challenge, and maybe even improve, both major-party presidential candidates by speaking honestly about what is needed to restore the foundations of America’s global leadership before we implode.

The Twitterati and blogosphere reaction to Friedman's argument tended towards the scathing, and now we're beginning to see the responses elaborated to op-ed length.  This smart essay, for example, makes the very trenchant point that in a political structure with so many veto points , so much political polarization and so many entrenched interests, the ability of any one leader to reform the system on the scale that Friedman proposes  is next to impossible: 

A system with as many checks and balances built into it as ours assumes — indeed requires — a certain minimum level of cooperation on major issues between the two parties, despite ideological differences. Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, which was a hugely powerful force compelling compromise between the parties, several factors are combining to paralyze our whole system.

For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes. Also, our political divisions have become more venomous than ever....

A system with as many checks and balances built into it as ours assumes — indeed requires — a certain minimum level of cooperation on major issues between the two parties, despite ideological differences. Unfortunately, since the end of the cold war, which was a hugely powerful force compelling compromise between the parties, several factors are combining to paralyze our whole system.

For starters, we’ve added more checks and balances to make decision-making even more difficult — such as senatorial holds now being used to block any appointments by the executive branch or the Senate filibuster rule, effectively requiring a 60-vote majority to pass any major piece of legislation, rather than 51 votes. Also, our political divisions have become more venomous than ever....

We can’t be great as long as we remain a vetocracy rather than a democracy. Our deformed political system — with a Congress that’s become a forum for legalized bribery — is now truly holding us back.

Congratulations to present Thomas Friedman -- for effectively refuting past Tom Friedman. 

Thomas Sowell has a new book out called Intellectuals and Society (here's a precis from his National Review essay on the topic from January). It sounds like a remix of Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, mixed with Hayek's "The Intellectuals and Socialism."  Those are pretty good source materials. And as someone who occasionally writes about this topic, I'm always intrigued by new arguments on this topic.

Sowell recently gave an interview to Investor's Business Daily that's worth excerpting, however:

IBD: How do you define intellectuals?

Sowell: I define intellectuals as persons whose occupations begin and end with ideas. I distinguish between intellectuals and other people who may have ideas but whose ideas end up producing some good or service, something that whether it's working or not working can be determined by third parties.

With intellectuals, one of the crucial factors is their work is largely judged by peer consensus, so it doesn't matter if their ideas work in the real world.

IBD: What incentives and constraints do intellectuals face?

Sowell: One of the incentives is that, to the extent that intellectuals stay in their specialty, they have little to gain in terms of either prestige or influence on events. Say, an authority in ancient Mayan civilization just writes about ancient Mayan civilization, then only other specialists in ancient Mayan civilization will know what he is talking about or even be aware of him.

So intellectuals have every incentive to go beyond their area of expertise and competence. But stepping beyond your area of competence is like stepping off a cliff — you may be a genius within that area, but an idiot outside it.

As far as the constraints, since their main constraint is peer consensus — that's a very weak constraint on the profession as a whole. Because what the peers believe as a group becomes the test of any new idea that comes along as to whether it's plausible or not.

I'm pretty sure that Sowell's answers contradict each other. If the primary means through which intellectuals assess their value is through peer assessment, then why is peer assessment such a weak constraint on intellectual activity?

Methinks Sowell is underestimating both the power of academic culture and the ways in which the marketplace of ideas has become more competitive. But this is certainly good fodder for debate.

What really caught my eye, however, was this section:

IBD: You say that intellectuals during Hitler's rise subordinated the mundane specifics of the nature of the German government to abstract principles about abstract nations, by which you meant the idea espoused at the time that "nations should be equal" and thus Germany had a right to rearm. Does that description apply to the Obama administration's approach to Iran?

Sowell: I hadn't thought of it, but it certainly does. In fact, there are other people who have said, "Some countries have nuclear weapons, why shouldn't other countries have nuclear weapons?" And they say it with an utter disregard for the nature of the countries and what those countries have been demonstrably doing for years and show every intention of doing in the future.

IBD: Do you think also that the Obama administration has abstract notions that you can negotiate with Iran the same way you can negotiate with, say, Australia?

Sowell: Oh, yes. And the question is not whether you should negotiate. We negotiate with all kinds of countries. The question is whether we think negotiations will be at all effective in carrying out what we want to do.

Give Sowell credit -- it's clear that he really hasn't thought about the question. Anyone who has paid any attention to the Obama administraion's Iran policy would be hard-pressed to characterize it as tolerant of Iran's right to arm itself with nuclear weapons. As Robert Kagan recently pointed out in FP:

Republicans may complain, along with many Democrats, that the administration has been too slow to support the Iranian opposition and took too long to pivot to sanctions. Yet some also realize that Obama's prolonged effort at engagement accomplished what George W. Bush never could: convincing most of the world, and most Democrats, that Iran is uninterested in any deal that threatens its nuclear weapons program. As a result, France, Britain, and even Germany appear more determined than at any time in the past decade to impose meaningful sanctions. A majority of Republicans, along with most Democrats, will support the administration as it toughens its approach to what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now calls the "military dictatorship" in Tehran.

In other words, the Obama administration's actual policy towards Iran bears no resemblance whatsoever to Sowell's characterization of it.

One should not be completely surprised by this; Sowell is an economist by training and should not be expected to know much about American foreign policy, as it's beyond his area of expertise. I do find it a little rich, however, that Sowell has written a book complaining about what happens when intellectuals leave their knowledge reservation to opine about events of the day -- and then proceeds to commit that precise sin during his book promotion.

There are two possibilities here. Either Sowell has no capacity for irony, or he's cleverly trying to add data points to support his argument.

Maureen Dowd has a column today entitled "Stung by the Perfect Sting."  We're going to run much of this column through a little MoDo translator, partially inspired by Josh Chafetz's still-relevant discussion of the Immutable Laws of Maureen Dowd, and helped by a few other bloggers. 

Here we go....

If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I’d never come to work. I’d scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you’re written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else. Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you’re the subject. Then, nobody’s skin is thick enough.

Translation:  "I read everything about me on the Interwebs.  Everything.  And despite my bravado act, it hurts me sometimes.  I'm brave for putting up with it, though.  Ah, the first graf and I've already checked off the Fourth Immutable Law of Dowd:  'The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths.' 

Say, the militia crack was pretty funny, right?  Right?"

“The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered,” says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”

Translation: "You know how, later on in this essay, I say that insulting individuals on the Internet is rude? That's only if you do it badly. If you insult broad swathes of people in a charming manner, that's just witty banter." 

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That’s why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Translation: "Hah!  Less than a third of the way through, and I've already checked off the First Immutable Law of Dowd: 'All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved.' Suck on that, Tom Friedman!!" 

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-year-old model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a “Skankiest in NYC” award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google’s blogger.com, calling Cohen a “skank,” a “ho” and an “old hag” who “may have been hot 10 years ago.”

Cohen says she’s “a lover, not a fighter.” But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole “the size of a quarter,” as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

Translation: "Did you like how I subtly compared the physical attacker to the blogger? That was pretty deft of me, right?" 

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face, filing a defamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger’s e-mail. And she won.

“The words ‘skank,’ ‘skanky’ and ‘ho’ carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity,” wrote Justice Joan Madden of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger’s assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet’s “virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication” with the masses means “the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Translation: "A judge is on my side!  I'm going to quote her at length!"

[Side note here:  will individuals also be able to sue those who write anonymously about them on bathroom walls soon?--DD]

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, “It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes.”

But on the Internet, it’s often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.

Translation:  "I bet no one knew about this phenomenon before I discovered it today.  God, my insights into this -- some anonymous blogging is good, some bad -- are really stunning." 

Dowd conveniently ignores a few important facts. First, there are power disparities going on here. If, say, the New York Times published a story calling Cohen a "skank," I can see the need for a lawsuit. Same thing if the Huffington Post had done it. But who the hell read this post before the lawsuit commanded everyon'es attention? As Laura McKenna puts it:

This just feels like a lot of whining to me. If you're on the opinion page of the New York Times, you have to be able to take the heat. It's part of the game. If you're not up for it, then I've got a waitress job for you.

Second, in Dowd's closing grafs she manages to conflate and tar all anonymous commentary because some act rudely on the Internet. This is the functional equivalent of me saying that because George Will is occasionally shoddy with his fact-checking, the entire op-ed profession is worthless and slanderous. Attacking an entire medium because of what some individuals are doing seems logically incoherent to me -- and yet far too many media commentators do this when talking about the blogosphere. 

In my experience, anonymous or not, the quality of one's insights and shrewdness of one's observations are the things that tend to push a blogger up through the ranks. 

If only that were still true of New York Times columnists. 

UPDATE: For more on the legal intricacies of the motivating case, see this Dan Solove post. 

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Thomas P.M. Barnett is a wee bit nervous about the impending release of his book: 

I am not feeling very optimistic about the book's reception. I just don't sense any buzz. Maybe that's because I'm living in Indiana under a foot and a half of snow, but it does haunt me. Far more than passing kidney stones, I feel like waiting on a book release is like a woman waiting for labor--mostly it's dread and regret and the inability to get a decent night's sleep.

I know that's being self-absorbed, but--again--that's why it's like heading toward labor: there is this all-consuming sense of an onrush of something either very good or very bad and you have a hard time sensing the possibility of anything in between those two extremes.

As someone who is also waiting on a book to come out, I sympathize with Barnett's pain.  I suspect, however, that his agita is actually worse than a garden-variety book author. 

This has to do with the nature of book publishing and the state of the world.  When publishing a book, all international relations authors not named Bob Woodward must endure a 3-12 month window during which the book is copyedited, typeset, and then published.  During this period, an author can make limited changes to the text -- but nothing significant. 

This gap doesn't matter all that much -- unless, of course, one is writing about world politics in a time of flux.  In that case, authors feel like a hostage to current events.  And because of the financial crisis, I've read an awful lot of first chapters recently that seemed out of date the moment they were published. 

These are all topics that Henry Farrell and I cover in our latest bloggingheads diavlog.  Go check it out!

The New York Times saw fit to excerpt the diavlog here.