David Warsh: Adam Smith just made me feel better

Portrait of Adam Smith (1723-1790), economist, philosopher and writer, in the Scottish National Gallery, in Edinburgh

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

I was at a loss to think of what I could possibly add to all the dreadful news this past week.

I always have a few columns in various stages of preparation.  None seemed appropriate amid all the disheartening developments. I experienced revulsion one day, schadenfreude the next, genuine pity the day after. In desperation, I tried to make something out of the decision last month by the German parliament to turn the inner border, between the old West Germany and Soviet satellite East Germany, that split the nation for 45 years into a narrow national park for hikers and cyclists – an 870-mile-long green zone. No luck. Then I remembered Our Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life, by Ryan Patrick Hanley, a book I had skimmed in the spring.

Hanley is a professor of political science at Boston College. According to Eric Schliesser, of the University of Amsterdam, he is one of the world’s leading experts on Smith.   Our Great Purpose is a 120-page book comprising 27 meditations on short passages from The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the book that Smith published in 1759, 17 years before An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations appeared. The Wealth of Nations founded the modern science of economics. The second book eclipsed the first.

But The Theory of Moral Sentiments is every bit as interesting as  The Wealth of Nations, because the first book is an exploration of human nature viewed through a much wider lens than the “trade, truck, and barter” of the second. Only now is technical economics catching up with it.  At 342 pages (in the Oxford edition, from Liberty Fund), it is challenging reading, even though Smith’s prose is still sprightly by 18th Century standards. That’s why Hanley augmented the snippets with his own reflections – plus pointers to the more elaborate passages in TMS. A welcome replacement for The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the text on which my generation was brought up.

I zeroed in on XII, the entry on Hatred and Anger. I was curious to know whether the joy we feel at the suffering of those whom we don’t like serves any useful purpose.  I suspect that it does, binding like-minded persons together.  Smith thought not:  “Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to a good mind,” he wrote. Or, as Hanley puts it, “Tranquility is threatened by anger and hatred, but promoted by gratitude and love.”

I skipped ahead to XX, “Choice.” Smith wrote, “To deserve, to acquire, and enjoy the respect and admiration of mankind, are the great objects of ambition and emulation. Two different roads are presented to us, equally leading to the attainments of this so much desired object, the one, by the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue; the other, by the acquisition of wealth and greatness.”  Or, as Hanley compresses it, “We need to choose between the road admired by the world and the road less traveled.”

I felt better immediately. Hanley’s little prism made it easier to think about the events of the week.  I turned to the keyboard, and, when I was done, I took Our Great Purpose home to put on the nightstand, next to Bad Monkey, by Carl Hiaassen.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

David Warsh: Why Russia invaded our 2016 election, and they're at it again

Vladimir Putin pushing hard to keep Donald Trump in power.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The Russian government meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in a variety of ways. Most consequential were the thefts of Democratic National Committee emails and their publication by WikiLeaks. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation documented the interference. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed it. No serious person doubts that the Russian campaign occurred, though few believe it tipped the election. And no serious person, except Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr., has attempted to dismiss it as a trivial matter.

“I was not shocked and still am not,” Jenkins wrote last month. “Since Czarist times, the Russian government has played such games, and was hardly going to adopt a self-denying ordinance now that the Internet was making them costless and effortless.”

A more knowledgeable account of the background to the Russian monkey business is to be found in The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal (Random House, 2019), by William Burns, former ambassador to  Russia (2005-08) and deputy secretary of state (2011-14).  Burns is currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and not to be confused with Nicholas Burns, a former ambassador to NATO (2001-05) and undersecretary of state for Political Affairs (2005-08), who is today a professor of practice at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

The formal end of the Cold War was engineered mainly by Secretary of State James Baker, who, in less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, negotiated Germany’s reunification as a member of NATO, in October 1990.  He convinced Soviet leaders that they would be safer with Germany inside the alliance than outside of it, free to acquire nuclear weapon. In talks with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Baker promised that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east” of Germany’s borders in the years ahead.

But Baker made the pledge before the breakup of the Soviet Union, in December 1991. Its leaders failed to get it in writing.  Bill Clinton won the 1992 election and, at the urging of Poland, Hungary and what was then Czechoslovakia began NATO enlargement soon thereafter.  Defense Secretary William Perry and strategist George Kennan warned of a fateful mistake in the offing; the Moscow embassy advised that “hostility to expansion is almost universally felt across the political spectrum.” Clinton waited until Russian President Boris Yeltsin and he had been re-elected, in 1996, then went ahead.

NATO’s intervention against Serbia in Kosovo, in 1999, left an especially bitter taste, with U.S. jets bombing Belgrade and a tense confrontation between Russian and NATO forces on the ground defused at the last moment.  Putin was appointed president of Russia in 1999 and elected the next year. George W. Bush was elected in 2000, and, for a little while, the mood was optimistic.  After 9/11, Putin’s hopes for a common front against terrorism, with Russian backing of the U.S. in Afghanistan and Washington supporting Moscow’s measures against Chechen rebels, were dashed (William Burns is especially good on why the U.S. declined), and Bush went ahead with plans to admit seven more Eastern European nations to NATO, including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, former parts of the USSR. He barely mentions the second wave of expansion, which took place during NATO Ambassador Nicholas Burns’s  watch.)

In 2003. Putin sought without success to persuade Bush not to invade Iraq, but it was the U.S. failure to share information about a pending Chechen hostage-taking at a Russia school, according to Burns, that was a turning point in Putin’s view of the possibilities,. The raid ended with 394 deaths and dramatically altered Russia’s internal politics. In a speech in Munich, in 2007, Putin denounced   the United States for “having overstepped its national borders in every way.”

In 2008 Putin  warned Bush, in no uncertain terms, via Ambassador Burns, against broaching NATO membership for Ukraine. “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard against any steps in the direction of membership” for either Georgia or Ukraine, Burns writes. In August, Russia undertook a walkover war against a secessionist province of Georgia. In the shadow of a growing financial crisis in the West, it was barely noticed. In 2014. U.S,. support for a 2014 Ukraine uprising aimed at joining the European Union instead of a Russian-backed economic alliance proved the breaking point.

Burns sums up his view of the history this way:

The expansion of NATO membership stayed on autopilot as a matter of U.S. policy long after its fundamental assumptions should have been reassessed. Commitments originally meant to reflect interests morphed into interests themselves and the door cracked open to membership for Georgia and Ukraine – the latter a bright red line for any Russian leadership. A Putin regime pumped up by years of high energy prices pushed back hard And even after Putin’s ruthless annexation of Crimea [in 2014] it proved difficult to imagine that he would stretch his score-settling into a systematic assault in the 2016 presidential election.

(I wrote a small book about all this, Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years (KDP, 2017). In The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Benn Steil explained Russian dismay as arising from history and geography, not ideology.)

Why did Putin authorize the campaign? In Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power (Random House, 2016), veteran New York Times correspondent Mark Landler documented the animosity between Hillary Clinton and the Russian leader. It grew after, as secretary of state, Clinton engineered NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya; deepened considerably when  Putin accused her of interfering in his 2012 campaign for re-election to a third presidential term; and achieved new heights after demonstrations caused Ukraine’s president, a loyal ally, (and hopeless crook, let it be said) to flee to Moscow. Clinton was running for president by then. Passing out cookies to demonstrators in Kiev’s central square (and phoning instructions to the American embassy) was Clinton’s former spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, by then serving as under secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs.

What did Putin expect to happen in the unlikely event that Trump won?  Clearly the former KGB officer, who served abroad only in Germany before the Soviet Union came apart, doesn’t understand American society or politics very well. In May 2017 he secretly proposed through embassy channels an elaborate reset of relations, including digital-warfare-limitations talks. John Hudson’s story of the overture didn’t receive the degree of attention and elaboration that it deserved, presumably because Hudson was working for BuzzFeed at the time. Today he covers national security and the State Department for The Washington Post.

Since its annexation of Crimea and subsequent support for low-level war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has seemed to revert to its old ways.  An “imitation democracy” at home. Arrest or murder or attempted murder in Russia of Putin’s critics. State-sponsored assassinations of enemies abroad, in London, Berlin, Salisbury, England. Digital meddling in other nations’ affairs wherever it pleases, All of this blandly denied, and punctuated by regular claims of technological breakthroughs: hypersonic torpedoes and the first effective COVID-19 vaccine.

In Russia Without Putin: Money, Power, and the Myths of the New Cold War (Verso, 2018), journalist Tony Wood writes that such an account is unfair, ignoring the ways in which the West’s own actions have shaped Russia’s decisions.  After 1991, Wood writes, the Russian elite tended to see the country’s future as lying “either alongside or within” the G-8. Pro-Western sentiment started with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but continued with Putin and [one-term President Dimitry] Medvedev much longer than is assumed by most Western commentators. Only after Ukraine was it replaced by a more combative approach, a geopolitical watershed.

So what next?  President Trump and his defenders at the editorial page of the WSJ have had almost nothing to say about any of this for four years. In Survival, a journal of global politics and strategy, Thomas Graham and Dimitri Trenin  last month described a “New Model for U.S.- Russian Relations” that seemed likely to  take hold if Joe Biden wins the presidency. Graham is a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center (I saw their essay only because I continue to follow David Johnson’s indispensable survey of coverage  of U.S.-Russia relations Johnson’s Russia List.)  They write:

To date, Russian and American experts disturbed by the sorry state of U.S.-Russian relations have sought ways to repair them, embracing old and inadequate models of cooperation or balance. The task, however, is to rethink them. We need to move beyond the current adversarial relationship, which runs too great a risk of accidental collision escalating to nuclear catastrophe, to one that promotes global stability, restrains competition within safe parameters and encourages needed cooperation against transnational threats.

The hard truth is that the aspirations for partnership that the two sides harbored at the end of the Cold War have evaporated irretrievably. The future is going to feature a mixed relationship of competition and cooperation, with the balance heavily tilted towards competition and much of the cooperation aimed at managing it.

The challenge is to prevent the rivalry from devolving into acute confrontation with the associated risk of nuclear cataclysm. In other words, the United States and Russia need to cooperate not to become friends, but to make their competition safer: a compelling and realistic incentive. The methods of managing great-power rivalry in the past 200 years – through balance-of-power mechanisms and, for brief periods, détente – are inadequate for the complexity of today’s world and the reality of substantial asymmetry between the United States and Russia. What might work is what we could call responsible great-power rivalry, grounded in enlightened restraint, leavened with collaboration on a narrow range of issues, and moderated by trilateral and multilateral formats. That is the new model for U.S.-Russian relations.

Meanwhile, in 2020 the Russians are at it again, according to U.S. intelligence officials. State-backed actors are using a variety of measures, including recorded and leaked telephone calls, to denigrate former Vice President Joe Biden and a Washington elite it perceived as anti-Russian.  That’s a job for the next secretary of state.  Here’s hoping that it will be William Burns.

David Warsh is a veteran columnist and an economic historian. He’s proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay first ran.

Llewellyn King: Trump further weakens the West

HELSINKI

The love affairs between nations have some of the same dynamics as those between people: When they are sundered, they do not return to where they were before one of the partners betrayed the other. Trust, once lost, is not easily restored and when it is, it is changed; it is less complete, more suspicious.

That change, that loss of trust, was on display the week of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, and President Trump’s second trip to Europe. It was not restored, the doubts not assuaged by the clumsy speech Trump delivered in Poland. His speechwriter got Poland’s historical role in Europe right, but he did not get its controversial authoritarian role today right at all.

It was the wrong place for that speech; a wrong reading of the crisis in Europe today. It is not only a crisis about its survivability, but also a crisis about its relationship with the United States; what has happened to the United States, where is it going and can it be trusted?

We have lost much of the trust of our friends and allies and we have done so by our own hand. This has been greeted by those who wish us harm with a kind of diplomatic smirk.

American steadfastness in the world, once as solid as the Rockies, has crumbled; it has been traded away for a kind of desire to shock. We have abandoned friends tested by time not because we should but because we could.

The trashing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was the first act of infidelity in the steady betrayal of allies. To the 11 other potential signatories, it was a simple statement: America does not care anymore. Its abandonment also diminished U.S. leadership in Asia. The result: a distrust of our consistency that will not easily be restored, and a vacuum waiting for China to fill.

After the communist triumph, Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time Inc., bellowed, “Who lost China?” Today’s question: “Who is empowering China?”

In Europe, the Trump administration has strung together a series of small offenses and insults, calculated to exacerbate not to heal. Trump has chosen to be the enfant terrible of the West. Why, oh why?

Every U.S. administration since Eisenhower has supported the integration of Europe. Bit by bit, as Europe struggled to become something bigger than the sum of its parts, the United States has been its cheerleader — even when it was feared (wrongly) that a kind of Fortress Europe might result from integration.

Along comes Trump like a loud reveler in a funny hat, outdoing European fears about The Ugly American.

Trump has ruffled European feathers in all the ways imaginable, from his initial refusal to assert that the United States would honor NATO’s Article 5 and come to the aid of members if attacked.

Trump’s renunciation of the Paris climate accord stung Europe. But so too did his endorsement of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and his cozying up to Nigel Farage, the British nationalist, and Marine Le Pen, the French anti-EU politician. These things rankle, so why do them?

This week in Europe, I found a resignation about Trump. People who, when I last visited or spoke to them, were expressing deep concern are now shrugging and considering the president as a dancing bear, amusing and dangerous. Europe, they tell me, is looking at a new uncertain future, but one that depends less on U.S. leadership than it has at any time since 1945.

An inadvertent gift may be that Trump has forced Europe to look again to itself and to what is right about its union: Its dream of being a bulwark against future internecine wars, with or without U.S. backing. And, of course, the “shared values” that Trump trotted out de rigueur in Warsaw.

Europe is shrinking in size with Britain’s exit and the United States is shrinking in world influence with Trump’s ascent.

Dark shadows are passing over the Western alliance and the liberal values it has promoted like free trade, human rights and accessible justice — long the best hope of the world.

Trump’s Polish speech has not reassured.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail,com),  a frequent contributor to New England Diary, is a veteran publisher, editor and columnist and executive editor and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. This piece first ran on Inside Sources.

Germany said to plan big military buildup to counter Russian aggression

Diane Francis, a Canadian journalist, a member of the Hudson Institute and a former speaker at the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations, reports that Germany plans a huge increase in its military strength to be able to confront an expansionist Russia and terrorists.

She writes that Germany's  new "civil defense'' initiative would:

·      Give the government the right “to reintroduce military conscription (stopped in 2011) in case of a ‘national emergency,’  but with a major difference. Its armed forces (currently 178,000) could swell by another 600,000, and be deployed internally to help police for the first time since the Second World War, and, significantly, to guard NATO’s borders which extend to Turkey.

·      "{E}ncourage the public to stockpile 10 days’ supply of food and five days’ of water in case of national emergencies or “existential” (i.e. terrorist) attacks.

"This represents a potentially dramatic extension of German military presence with a mandate to be deployed as domestic police as well as beyond its borders.

"The initiative is due to three unstated reasons: Russia’s occupation of part of Ukraine and  {threats to} other countries on its eastern flank; America’s growing weariness of military costs; and terrorist threats to its other European and NATO members.’’

To read her essay, please hit this link.

John Kiriakou: Pride's big role in Greek crisis

Greece is in dire straits. As a Greek American, it hurts me to watch.

Without emergency loans from its European partners, Greece will default on its debts and likely be forced out of the Eurozone. That means tougher times ahead for Greece, Europe, and international financial markets.

In exchange for a short-term loan, European powers led by Germany want the Greek government to impose brutal new austerity measures on its people. So why won’t Greece take the deal?

First, some background: Past Greek governments are largely to blame for the country’s fiscal woes.

In 1981, Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou famously told his finance minister to “spend it all.” And that’s exactly what he did.

Greece became the first European country to allow all workers to retire with a full pension at the age of 55. A worker in a “dangerous industry” could retire even earlier. But “dangerous industries” ended up including everybody from hairdressers to radio disc jockeys.

In the meantime, the government hired everybody who wanted or needed a job. The public sector ballooned to unsustainable levels, and practically everybody was retiring early at full pension.

Later on, conservative governments jumped on the bandwagon too, handing fat government benefits to their supporters. Tax evasion ran rampant and the entire political system was corrupted.

The system was bound to collapse, and collapse it did. A few years ago, Greece’s neighbors and the International Monetary Fund loaned the country money to make ends meet.

But instead of eating the losses on their banks’ bad investments, the Europeans — and especially the Germans — demanded harsh austerity cuts that shredded Greece’s social-safety net, gutted the public sector, and plunged the country deeper into despair.

Fed up with the resulting poverty and unemployment, Greeks rejected their mainstream political parties in the last election and replaced them with the left-wing Syriza party. Led by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Syriza campaigned on protecting Greece’s now-huge underclass from Europe’s dictates.

Why would the Greeks risk losing everything by not continuing with a well-defined program of pension cuts and layoffs?

The answer isn’t hard to understand.

First, Syriza rejects balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. Over 40 percent of Greeks now live at or under the poverty level. Middle-class people who worked all their lives have been thrown out of their jobs and have no hopes of getting another. Unemployment for young Greeks hovers around a whopping 50 percent.

Tellingly, suicides in Greece are up over 35 percent since the economy fell apart in 2009, and a “brain drain” of educated professionals to other countries is running apace.

Second, Europeans are ignoring the concept of saving face. The European ultimatum to Greece doesn’t respect the country’s election results or allow the government to claim even a partial victory. Add in the Greeks’ lingering resentment toward the Germans over Nazi atrocities in World War II, and you get an even more difficult situation.

There’s still hope for a last-minute breakthrough. If that doesn’t happen, though, the money will dry up and the Greek economy will fall further apart. Yet compared to endless austerity, that might not be the end of the world.

It may be ugly for a while: Stock markets will slide, Greece will have to re-invent its currency, and the economic depression Greece has endured may last several years longer. But the Greeks will survive, and so will everybody else.

And despite their pain, the poor will know that their government did this for them. The Greek people will know that they weren’t beholden to the Germans or to the International Monetary Fund.

It’s not just about the money. It’s about pride.

John Kiriakou is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies,  former CIA counterterrorism officer and former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This piece originated at OtherWords.org.

Blame Russia for Russian aggression

By ROBERT WHITCOMB (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com)

Some denounce the United States for Russia’s reversion to brutal expansionism into its “Near Abroad” because we encouraged certain Central and Eastern European countries to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The argument is that NATO’s expansion led “Holy Russia” to fear that it was being “encircled.” (A brief look at a map of Eurasia would suggest the imprecision of that word.)

In other words, it’s all our fault. If we had just kept the aforementioned victims of past Russian and Soviet expansionism out of the Western Alliance, Russia wouldn’t have, for example, attacked Georgia and Ukraine. If only everyone had looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and decided to trust him.

Really? Russia has had authoritarian or totalitarian expansionist regimes for hundreds of years, with only a few years’ break. How could we have necessarily done anything to end this tradition for all time after the collapse of the Soviet iteration of Russian imperialism? And should we blame Russia’s closest European neighbors for trying to protect themselves from being menaced again by their gigantic and traditionally aggressive neighbor to the east? Russia, an oriental despotism, is the author of current Russian imperialism.

Some of the Blame America rhetoric in the U.S. in the Ukraine crisis can be attributed to U.S. narcissism: the idea that everything that happens in the world is because of us. But Earth is a big, messy place with nations and cultures whose actions stem from deep history and habits that have little or nothing to do with big, self-absorbed, inward-looking America and its 5 percent of the world population. Americans' ignorance about the rest of the planet -- even about Canada! -- is staggering, especially for a "developed nation''.

And we tend to think that “personal diplomacy” and American enthusiasm and friendliness can persuade foreign leaders to be nice. Thus Franklin Roosevelt thought that he could handle “Joe Stalin” and George W. Bush could be pals with another dictator (albeit much milder) Vladimir Putin. They would, our leaders thought, be brought around by our goodwill (real or feigned).

But as a friend used to say when friends told him to “have a nice day”: “I have other plans.”

With the fall of the Soviet Empire, there was wishful thinking that the Russian Empire (of which the Soviet Empire was a version with more globalist aims) would not reappear. But Russian xenophobia, autocracy, anger and aggressiveness never went away.

Other than occupying Russia, as we did Japan and Western Germany after World War II, there wasn’t much we could do to make Russia overcome its worst impulses. (And Germany, and even Japan, had far more experience with parliamentary democracy than Russia had.) The empire ruled from the Kremlin is too big, too old, too culturally reactionary and too insular to be changed quickly into a peaceable and permanent democracy. (Yes, America is insular, too, but in different ways.)

There’s also that old American “can-do” impatience — the idea that every problem is amenable to a quick solution. For some reason, I well remember that two days after Hurricane Andrew blew through Dade County, Fla., in 1992, complaints rose to a chorus that President George H.W. Bush had not yet cleaned up most of the mess. How American!

And of course, we’re all in the centers of our own universes. Consider public speaking, which terrifies many people. We can bring to it extreme self-consciousness. But as a TV colleague once reminded me, most of the people in the audience are not fixated on you the speaker but on their own thoughts, such as on what to have for dinner that night. “And the only thing they might remember about you is the color of the tie you’re wearing.”

We Americans could use a little more fatalism about other countries.

***

James V. Wyman, a retired executive editor of The Providence Journal, was, except for his relentless devotion to getting good stories into the newspaper, the opposite of the hard-bitten newspaper editor portrayed in movies, usually barking out orders to terrified young reporters. Rather he was a kindly, thoughtful and soft-spoken (except for a booming laugh) gentleman with a capacious work ethic and powerful memory.

He died Friday at 90, another loss for the "legacy news media.''

***

My friend and former colleague George Borts died last weekend. He was a model professor — intellectually rigorous, kindly and accessible. As an economist at Brown University for 63 years (!) and as managing editor of the American Economic Review, he brought memorable scholarship and an often entertaining skepticism to his work. And he was a droll expert on the law of unintended consequences.

George wasn’t a cosseted citizen of an ivory tower. He did a lot of consulting for businesses, especially using his huge knowledge of, among other things, transportation and regulatory economics, and wrote widely for a general audience through frequent op-ed pieces. He was the sort of (unpretentious) “public intellectual” that we could use a lot more of.

***

I just read Philip K. Howard’s “The Rule of Nobody: Saving America From Dead Laws and Broken Government.” I urge all citizens to read this mortifying, entertaining and prescriptive book about how our extreme legalism and bureaucracy imperil our future. I’ll write more about the book in this space.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former editor of The Providence Journal's editorial pages, is a Providence-based writer and editor, former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and a partner and senior adviser at Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com), a consultancy for health systems, and a fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

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