No More Super Power

The world has entered an era of unprecedented peace with virtually no prospect of war among major powers. There are a number of reasons for it but I think the single biggest factor is the remarkable surge of prosperity that came with globalization and the resulting interdependence of our respective economies. China can’t afford to attack Taiwan because any conflict around the straits would disrupt trade routes. Russians have grown rich selling oil to neighbors and that trumps any residual dreams of empire. The astounding economic benefits of the European Union have made war unimaginable among members that had been at each other’s throats since the advent of the nation state. Even small wars are less likely than in at any time in memory. I had better be right about this. The United States is no longer prepared to fight one. The days of America standing as the world’s policeman are over. Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are minor by any standard of history but they have stretched our military to its limits. As they wind down the demands for a peace dividend will place serious constraints on attempts to rebuild a spent Army and Marine Corps, let alone refresh aging fleets of ships and aircraft. Maintaining super power status is fiendishly expensive and the American public cannot be expected to pay for it absent major perceived threats. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991 he quickly found himself facing the finest fighting force the world had ever seen. President Bush had inherited from Ronald Reagan a 600 ship Navy along with air and ground forces better manned, trained, and equipped than at the outset of any war before or since. Today’s Navy has just 280 deployable battle force ships. Every combat or support unit in the Army or Marines is either deployed, preparing to deploy, or just back from deployment. The troop draw downs recently begun in Iraq will provide some breathing room but neither that nor current modest plans to increase the size of the force will do much to make them more able to sustain such commitments in the future. Should a conventional conflict again present itself we may find ourselves with a military that is unprepared for anything but so called asymmetric warfare. This isn’t necessarily all bad. The United States faces no serious conventional threat. Nobody is going to invade California any time soon. It is the nature of such threats that they do not spring up overnight. They must be constructed over a considerable period, giving ample warning of any danger. The European folly in the buildup to WWII lay in not responding to the warnings when they came. Some analysts think the existence of overwhelming American force can be as much provocation as deterrent. Ryan Carr argues in the September Issue of Small Wars Journal that it at least partly explains Iran’s motivations for meddling in Iraq. The presence of American troops next door represents a security threat. Iran might be next on Mr. Bush’s list of evil axis targets. Some in the US think that too. Iran’s response has been to promote instability in Iraq as a self defense measure. The trick is to make life miserable enough for Americans to force them to leave without giving them a pretext for retaliation. Fear of an American invasion may also partially explain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Carr cites as historical precedent China’s 1950 intervention in Korea and support of North Vietnam fifteen years later. China always thought she was America’s real target and to this day doesn’t fully trust Americans. None of this is to suggest that the US will or should unilaterally disarm and retreat into isolationism. We aren’t about to do that. But the time has come when the rest of the world is going to have to take on more responsibility for securing not only its own territory but growing prosperity too. Everybody needs reliable raw materials, markets, and trade routes. Nobody needs chaos on their borders. The United States will not continue indefinitely as the sole or principal guarantor of any of those things. We cannot do it with a 200 ship navy and that is almost certainly where we are headed. Others are going to have to step up including China, Russia, India and more as well as our traditional allies. The good news is that, prickly as our relationships sometimes are, our interests are more aligned than divergent and the world is beginning to realize it. The six party talks currently going on with North Korea are a case in point. Everybody at the table has a somewhat different agenda. The North Korean regime is worried about survival. The immediate neighbors are all worried about massive numbers of refugees spilling across borders. Japan is afraid the issue of kidnapped civilians will be swept under the rug. America’s primary concern is nuclear proliferation and another unenforceable agreement with continued North Korean cheating. Everybody needs regional security and stability and everybody will have to give something up to get it. They know it and that the United States isn’t going to take sole responsibility. Nor does anybody want that except maybe the North Koreans. That’s why we are at the table. We can expect to see a lot more of it. We can expect to see China’s emerging blue water navy put to productive use too.

Friends and Allies

When it became clear that Australia’s Labor Party had won yesterday’s election, one of the first things apparent prime minister-elect Kevin Rudd did was declare that he would withdraw most Australian troops from Iraq. But first he reassured George Bush that Labor would not leave “our American mates in the lurch.” A withdrawal will occur over time, not precipitously. Some troops will stay, and Australian warships will remain in the Persian Gulf. Australia will continue to maintain troops in Afghanistan and may even increase the number. Before any thing happens Mr. Rudd will travel to Washington to discuss his plans. He wants US officials and politicians to understand that the American alliance remains central to Australian security strategy. In fact our traditional alliances around the world look pretty solid. They should. For a number of our partners we have been the only substantive and reliable ally since WWII. Japan is a case in point. Recent elections forced a step backward when a law was not renewed allowing Japanese naval vessels to refuel American ships in the Indian Ocean. But that is more a sign of Japanese dependence on the US than of stress in the relationship. Japan’s constitutional self defense provision restricts military operations to just that, self defense. “Collective” defense is not allowed. The provision can be overridden but it takes a special law every time. The inherent pacifism has been very popular in Japan but with North Korea lobbing missiles over Japanese territory and China making incursions into Japanese waters the pressure is on to strengthen the military relationship with the US, not loosen it. New Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda was in Washington two weeks ago calling America Japan’s “one and only ally.” He also promised to renew the refueling act. And so it goes. French President Nicholas Sarkozy was at the White House earlier this month expressly to highlight warmer ties that had cooled under his predecessor. He then went down Pennsylvania Avenue and spoke to Congress for the same purpose. German Chancellor Angela Merkel spent that weekend at George Bush’s ranch outside Crawford, Texas. Turkey’s Recep Tayyen Erdogan was just here too. He has shown remarkable restraint as Kurdish nationalists stage raids into Turkey from Iraq. In no small measure he wants to avoid making things even more difficult for Americans. It’s been a busy month for allies. Not that any of them are about to fall in line with the US on every issue and we have our differences with all of them. The war in Iraq is one reason Australia has a new prime minister. Japan is a somewhat reluctant participant in six party talks with North Korea partly because of fears that the issue of civilian kidnappings by North Korea will be swept under the rug. France has always been a prickly pear for an ally and that isn’t likely to change. Things got really ugly with both France and Germany during the dust up over Iraq. Still, as the conventional wisdom has it, we do need allies. What many of the cognoscenti seem to miss however is that our allies need us even more. There just isn’t anybody else they can rely on in time of trouble. As the world becomes ever more integrated the importance of secure trade routes and oil supplies becomes more critical. Nuclear proliferation is a greater danger. A global pandemic is a looming threat. Any serious effort to deal with a warming climate will require a level of international cooperation we’ve never seen before and with some not so traditional allies. None of these issues can be effectively addressed without American participation and even leadership. Our tradition of military to military contact, joint exercises, and relationship building will be a tremendous asset as we deal with an emerging new order. The good news is we aren’t the only ones who recognize the importance. We have a lot of friends. We’re going to need some new ones. So is everybody else.

Final Campaign?

As Congressional Democrats continue their disgraceful efforts to sabotage success in Iraq, I find myself coming around to the view that the world may be a safer place today than it has been before in my lifetime. Prospects for a peaceful world may be the best they have ever been. Consider this. The odds that the major powers of the 21st century would go to war with each other are remote at worst. The two most dangerous regimes remaining on the planet are or soon will be surrounded by strong stable neighbors committed to containing them. We may yet face a generational conflict in the War on Terror but Al Qaeda’s recruits are demonstrating conclusively that God has not taken the field to lead them. We may even be seeing a clear path to peace in the Middle East. We just might never again have to go to war. Bush haters are accusing him of trying to start a war with Iran but that’s just silly. He’s begun drawing American forces down in the region, not building them up. Refusing to take military options off the table doesn’t start wars. It is often the best means of preventing them. Frightening as the Mutually Assured Destruction strategy was in the Cold War, it worked. Frankly I don’t see much chance of another war in the Middle East or anywhere else. With the examples of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar at hand no petty tyrant in his right mind is going to provoke the United States or allow others to use his territory to launch terrorist attacks here. When the next attack comes it isn’t likely to have a state sponsor. Syria and Iran are both going to have some serious bills to pay for their meddling in Iraq as she gets back on her feet. Between that and their increasing regional isolation I expect them to be too busy looking over their shoulders to conduct much of the sort of mischief we’ve come to expect from them. Libya’s Mohammar Qaddafi has already begun cleaning up his act. If Iraq, Iran, and Syria really are on the sidelines, even Israeli and Palestinian animosities look manageable. If not the Middle East then where? East Asia? Not likely. China is building military power but economic issues will carry the day there. Another incident like the mid-air collision that forced a US Navy spy plane to land at a Chinese airfield early in the Bush administration looks pretty remote these days. China is preoccupied with growing prosperity and that means integrating with the global economy. That is a powerful brake on clashes with export markets. Taiwan is still a potential flash point but China’s primary security concerns involve energy and trade. Korea? Some very close watchers like former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage think we could see a unified and stable peninsula as early as 2020. It could happen. It would be in China’s best interest, and Russia’s, and Japan’s, and ours, and both Korea’s. If the Berlin wall could fall peacefully so could the DMZ. Nobody in North East Asia wants war. If the six-party talks are successful in defusing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and they appear to be, it will be one of the most remarkable international political developments since the fall of the Soviet Union. Central Asia? No, things are messy but they are sorting them themselves out and governments are more interested in making the kind of economic progress they see in Eastern Europe than in military adventurism. Russia has had a remarkable economic rebound in recent years due principally to high oil prices. Some Russians may still have imperial ambitions but secure oil and gas pipelines are critical sources of revenue. Stability in the region is probably as important to Russia as it is to anyone. South Asia? Pakistan may not have a history of stable democracy but they have been policing themselves for six decades and, nuclear or not, they aren’t crazy. They have an Indian economic powerhouse emerging on their doorstep that also happens to have nuclear weapons. The incredibly backward extremists from the Pakistani badlands have over reached in taking on the military. Any new Pakistani regime will likely be focused on getting them under control. Fears of Muslim fanatics taking over are overwrought. One election after another in Pakistan has demonstrated minimal support for Islamist parties. That really leaves only Africa, and really only the failed states of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. We could do some special operations style military interventions there from time to time, as we did in Somalia in cooperation with Ethiopia last year. I doubt we will become heavily involved in anything remotely approaching war. Of course all this depends on an unchallengeable American military. It isn’t reasonable to expect Americans to continue paying disproportionately for that. We’ve got some rebuilding to do over the next few years, especially with the Army and Marines, and there will probably be strong public support for that for a while, but not indefinitely. We would be wise to be exploring new and stronger means of collective security with countries like Russia, China, Japan, India, and Turkey. Those six party talks in Korea are looking pretty good. That kind of cooperative exercise could also help build mechanism for dealing with catastrophes like the global pandemic some experts think is only a matter of time in coming. There are still lots of things that could go wrong in this new world order that seems to be emerging. When it became apparent that George Bush intended to invade Iraq I thought it meant he had decided to reform the entire Arab world. If he pulled it off he would go down as one of America’s great presidents. If he failed he would go into the proverbial dust bin of history, right down there with Jimmy Carter. I’m beginning to think historians will treat Mr. Bush a lot more kindly than his contemporaries do. He may leave his successors a world with reforms that go far beyond Arabs. WWI was supposed to be the War to End All Wars. Won’t it be ironic if it turns out that Iraq finally does the trick?

ID v Darwinism

Trying to understand the cultural gulf between Muslims and the West has taken me in some unexpected directions. None are more surprising than into the never ending debate raging around Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, Creationism, and now Intelligent Design. Ever since I was old enough to think about such things I have accepted the idea that all species evolved from a common ancestor, but that the story of Genesis is also true. That seems to me not such a step for a Roman Catholic who believes in a mystical Trinity, transubstantiation, and an omnipotent God not bound by human logic or perception. Until recently I’ve been more or less ignoring this particular fight. Then a few weeks ago I came across an article by Mustafa Akyol claiming that atheism inherent in Darwinism has for two centuries been “the major source of Muslim contempt for the West.” He thinks “Intelligent Design could be a bridge between civilizations.” Now I have to say I didn’t know the first thing about ID so I decided to do some reading. I was surprised at the level of rationalist thought that has gone into it, and at the vehemence of the Darwinist rebuttal, refusing to accept even the possibility of design. I’m not surprised to find myself siding with ID. ID got its start a dozen or so years ago and was perhaps best articulated in a 1996 book by Lehigh Biology Professor Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box where he made the case that immense strides in biological science since Darwin’s day do indeed support the fact of evolution, but they also reveal an ever increasing and staggering complexity that make the odds of successful random mutation into new species wildly improbable and in fact at some point, not possible. Some sort of design had to be at work. Some not yet understood physical laws must have affected the outcome. Darwinism can account for much adaptation within species and maybe even new species but not the giant steps required for the evolution of the dizzying array of life we see around us. In his latest book, The Edge of Evolution, Behe attempts to put some boundaries around what Darwinism can account for and what it cannot. He concludes that it can explain the rapid growth of resistance to antibiotics seen in certain infectious diseases because the resistance is usually the result of a minute change in a single protein at a specific point in genetic makeup. These sorts of changes do occur as errors in copying the genes when organisms reproduce themselves. Usually they are harmful or indifferent and the changes don’t become common in the population at large but if they help the organism survive then natural selection causes the change to proliferate. But Behe also concludes that if resistance requires multiple simultaneous mutations or copying errors then the likelihood of resistance developing becomes a statistical near impossibility. He goes further to argue that at a number of points in evolutionary history the development of radically different species required too much complexity to have occurred in small gradual steps, each one involving the mutation of a single gene. The extant issue is called “irreducible complexity.” Darwin acknowledged that if it turned out some evolutionary steps had to occur in large jumps his theory would not hold. What he could not have imagined was the almost incomprehensible sophistication of molecular biology at the cellular level as scientists understand it today. To Darwin the steps from a wolf like land mammal to aquatic adaptations such as flippers instead of legs and eventually to whales were all small. To Behe the necessary changes to genetic coding are huge. Behe focuses on microscopic cellular life where populations are large and many generations can be observed in a short period of time, decades as opposed to eons. He acknowledges that extrapolating results to higher life forms is tenuous but then Darwinism suffers the same constraint. Behe’s Darwinist critics, and they include almost all mainstream scientists (not just biologists) don’t so much refute his proposals as rail against them. Behe isn’t just wrong. He is a heretic. A common theme is that ID is just creationism in disguise, an attempt to get God back into high school biology class. They mostly ignore Behe’s central contention, that some evolutionary steps are irreducibly complex. If they address it at all they just say it hasn’t been proven. They focus instead on evidence in the fossil record and in genetics to support the fact that life has evolved, and that random mutation followed by natural selection accounts for a lot of it. But of course Behe acknowledges all of that at the outset. It makes me think it says more about the state of political correctness in American science than it does about the merits of the argument. One of ID’s loudest critics is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago named Jerry Coyne who has been writing about it since it first came on the scene. Coyne doesn’t say so but he is apparently the sort of atheist that so bothers Akyol, lacing his writing with derisive references to God. He reviewed Edge of Evolution in a June issue of The New Republic with a piece called The Great Mutator. Coyne takes the position that only formal training in evolutionary science will equip one to spot the flaws in Behe’s logic. It’s probably beyond us members of The Great Unwashed. But Coyne’s sarcasm isn’t an argument. It’s just changing the subject. He also suggests that the development of quantum physics disproves the notion that God made the sun shine. I presume that’s another shot at Genesis and a gratuitous one. Scientists have proved one thing about genetic mutations. They don’t have to be random and they don’t have to occur naturally. They can be produced in the laboratory. They can be designed. Behe cites the example of experimenters producing mutant fruit flies with eyes where they shouldn’t be. (Thankfully they were standard multi-lens fruit fly eyes and not the sort found in mammals.) This is important because if Behe is right, researchers should be able to design beneficial drugs that diseases can’t easily develop resistance to. Now I’m not one to suggest we go back to teaching miracles in science class. I certainly don’t think we should be teaching atheism either. To return to my original point, I don’t see a conflict between belief in God and the idea that He might have used ways and means in creation that will eventually be understood by science. That’s the job of science, to explain the physical world. I wish theology were making as much progress in explaining the spiritual world. It won’t surprise me if science discovers a natural means of overcoming Behe’s irreducible complexity and it won’t bother me one whit if it turns out to be random mutation after all. Just because God used quantum physics to make the sun shine doesn’t mean it all just happened by accident. Just because He used chemical properties to create life and eventually to create me doesn’t mean that happened by accident either. As for Akyol’s contention that Darwinism (and by Coyne’s extension science in general) is inherently atheistic, I submit that’s an exercise in anthropomorphism. They are imposing human limits on an all powerful and all knowing God. Sure we have our atheists. So does the Muslim world. But I don’t feel particularly threatened by them and I don’t see why Muslims should. Maybe we can talk this out.