Disasters

My mother would not approve. The bane of my childhood...which was essentially the story of Alexander Portnoy playing softball with Beaver Cleaver and Richie Cunningham in the land of "The Ice Storm"...was her insistence on a thank you note for every occasion. Get an embarrassing set of pajamas from Grandma? Immediately drop everything and send a thank you note. Get $10 from Uncle Max that could have been used to purchase a perfectly wonderful Revell model P-51 Mustang but which your parents hijack and use to buy a new pair of shoes from Tom McCann? Too bad, there will be no staying up late to watch "My Mother the Car" if you don't write a thank you note. Orthodontist slit your gums while installing a torture contraption in your mouth? Probably ought to send a thank you note, just in case.

There was a valuable lesson in this (for which, ironically, I have yet to send my mother a thank you note.) Gratitude makes a difference. Without it, the beneficence dries up and the giver no longer feels so good about giving and your brother and sister end up getting the better presents. (Or the orthodontist develops a grudge against you which is a very bad thing.)

I think it's time to send my mother to Pakistan. And then to Afghanistan. And then to Baghdad. And then perhaps on to a few other choice spots from Honduras to North Korea. This hardly seems like a reward for an exemplary life, but she could teach these folks a lesson or two about gratitude. And then, when she is done with the tour ... and she develops her own perspectives on just how little our efforts at generating gratitude in these places are actually benefitting the United States ... perhaps she ought to come back here and provide a lesson or two for the administration and for some folks on the Hill, perhaps starting with Senator Kerry. Because not only is the United States suffering from something that appears to be much like a global gratitude deficit...it may well be that the problem is with our expectations and our mechanisms for manifesting our (not so selfless) generosity to the less fortunate (or strategically significant) worldwide.

A prime illustration of the problems we face comes in the form of today's New York Times story "In Refugee Aid, Pakistan's War Has a New Front" by Jane Perlex and Pir Zubair Shah. The article describes how the United States is losing the bidding war for the hearts and minds of Pakistanis and how Islamists are edging us out. The authors observe: 

Although the United States is the largest contributor to a United Nations relief effort, Pakistani authorities have refused to allow American officials or planes to deliver the aid in camps for displaced people. The Pakistanis do not want to be associated with their unpopular ally.

At the same time, the article goes on to describe how hard-line givers from the Muslim world are using their donations to effectively promote anti-U.S. and anti-Western views. Meanwhile it notes, even American NGOs are saying we shouldn't advertise the U.S. origins of aid shipments because it is likely to inflame hostility. Seems to me like a lose-lose proposition for us there. I mean, I understand the humanitarian rationale behind giving for the sake of giving but really, isn't the purpose of government aid to advance a government objective? Isn't it clear that's precisely what we are not successfully doing in Pakistan?

But the Pakistani government and the Pakistani people are not the only ones who don't seem to appreciate our aid (or who are happy to take it but would like to continue hating us just the same). In Afghanistan, the Karzai administration would not exist without the United States. Is it showing its gratitude by combating the corruption via which our aid is wasted? Is it showing it by making even the slightest effort to embrace the most fundamental universal values of respect for groups like women or journalists? Read the reports out of Kabul. They just don't seem to appreciate all we have done for them.

Neither, it seems does the al-Maliki government in Baghdad. Now, I can see plenty of reasons why the Iraqi people would be pissed off at America. The illegal invasion of their country, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their people and the devastation of their economy come to mind. But I'm not talking about the Iraqi people here. I'm talking about a government that knows full well that even after the pullback of U.S. troops from the cities, it depends on the continuing presence of U.S. forces in the country to ensure national stability and its grip on power. Couldn't they have toned down the celebrations of "liberation" from the Americans just a trifle to reflect the fact that the United States is continuing to invest so much in their ability to hold on to power?

We spent much training the Honduran military that conducted that country's coup earlier this week. We have pumped serious aid money into North Korea to combat famine. We give the Egyptians, the Palestinians, and the Israelis plenty of cash and there seems to be a competition among them to see who can stall our objectives in the region most effectively or creatively.

Now, I realize we don't need to give aid money to people whose situations are stable. Aid tends to go to places where there are myriad challenges. But something is clearly not working here. The reflexive notion that we should write checks because it will generate goodwill seems not to be working. Clearly part of the problem here is with our expectations. And part of the problem here is with our history and perhaps we need to reconcile ourselves to unappreciated generosity for a while as a way of offsetting years of alienating people worldwide. But clearly another part of it is that we are a little ginger in our communications with our allies on these points...at the very least the governments who depend on us for survival ought to be nudged into a more constructive message with all due care to nuance the message to take into account local political realities.

Finally, the U.S. government aid apparatus remains one of its most dysfunctional. Early in the Obama transition there was talk of spinning out U.S. AID and related agencies into a Department of Development and Aid. I am generally anti-adding new departments to the government. But this was a pretty good idea. Economic peace-keeping and nation-building have been among our prime missions internationally over the past several decades whether we like it or not. But because we don't like it we have resisted building the kind of inter-disciplinary capacity to do it right...to recognize that provision of aid in post-conflict or conflict situations has completely different requirements (mostly political) than it does in development situations and that we need to more effectively blend pacification and economic missions. We need a civilian side Goldwater-Nichols to promote better collaboration and coordination among economic and political agencies in the fulfillment of this mission and better coordination with the military which still reluctantly does much of the heavy lifting in this area.

And beyond what we need, the world needs my mother. This is true on many levels. But in this instance it is because those who depend on our aid need to realize that regardless of who is president in Washington, all politics and history aside, the financial reality is that it is going to become harder and harder for the United States to continue providing aid as we have in the past and that average Americans (and even above-average Americans) are going to be soon looking even more energetically than in the past for excuses to shut the spigots. And that's saying something because aid has always been really unpopular in the United States, it's one of the reasons we give less as a percentage of GDP than most developed countries. Absent the thank you notes (which could be a nice card or possibly just making an effort to help the United States achieve our goals) the gratitude deficit could quickly translate into an aid deficit for those who are accustomed to receiving.

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Joe Biden wants to be alone. And after this morning's performance on the Today Show, it is quite likely that the Obama administration will be fulfilling that wish for him very soon. Where was that undisclosed location anyway?

Biden, when asked about how to mitigate the risks associated with the swine flu threat, said that people should avoid being in enclosed spaces with others. He specifically cited airplanes, subways, and classrooms. Which would mean, er, shutting down the entire economy. Actually, all social interaction. In fact, essentially what the Vice President was doing was sending all of us to our rooms.

Now admittedly, Mexico is shutting down much of its economy to contain the disease. But clearly, with the limited number of cases of the flu in the United States and its limited impact, he seemed to be over-reacting. Actually, he seemed to be exercising his unique gift for sticking his foot in his mouth. (Which is especially inadvisable in times like these. You just don't know where that foot has been.) But even for Biden, who truly has become the crazy old uncle in this administration, saying goofy things and considered to be having a good day when he doesn't actually set the White House on fire by leaving his oatmeal on the stove for too long, has really outdone himself today though directly pouring gasoline onto the flames of panic and over-reaction to the swine flu outbreak.

It is one thing for the WHO to ramp up warning levels to ensure the world can contain potential threats. It's another thing to suggest that people stay off airplanes (do it long enough and Steve Rattner will have another industry to rebuild), out of public transportation (guaranteed to produce more road-rage related traffic deaths in congested traffic than the swine flu will generate worldwide), and out of school (take that competitiveness). 

If the Vice President has become a Howard Hughes like germ-a-phobe, then perhaps he might want to consider going all the way and trying out reclusiveness for a while. We'll miss the light comedy but I'm not sure how many more gaffes of this nature an already weak economy can take.   Paging Dr. Gupta: If only Sanjay had been our surgeon general now, we would really be benefitting from his communications skills and the ability to have the administration turn to more qualified spokespeople than kooky old Uncle Joe.

Swine flu! World Health Organization at alert level 4! Markets rocked by sell-offs! Howie Mandel was right! Never shake hands! Bathe in Purell! See if you can borrow a face mask from Michael Jackson! Or hold your breath whenever you are near a ham sandwich! Armies of pigs in uniform marching on Washington! Orwell was right: the animals have turned on us, become more dangerous than us! Four legs bad, two legs good! Head for the hills!

Once again, the media is reacting to a potential threat with its usual calm, responsibly recognizing that sensational coverage of diseases can have far worse consequences than the diseases themselves. Or not.

Remember SARS? Fewer people died of SARS than choked to death in the United States on small objects that year. But estimates of global economic losses exceeded $40 billion. Back then, I wrote an article called "The Buzz Bites Back" for the Washington Post about this phenomenon dubbing it an "infodemic." And it was clear at the time that the progress of the information revolution was amplifying the impact of these information epidemics and accelerating their spread. Yet, still hysteria reigns again.

This is not to say that the WHO response has not been appropriate. It has. It is not to say that there isn't a vital public health role to be played by the media. It is critical that the media offer information about symptoms, precautions, and the spread of potential epidemics. But whereas health officials practice how to manage these crises, not only do the vast majority of media never think such matters through, newer "viral" media are all emotion all the time. 

One particularly fascinating element of the infodemic phenomenon is that the spread of rumors or news throughout society looks exactly like the spread of diseases; they are communicated in the same ways and patterns. (You'll note that in both the SARS case and the current instance, it was the infection of Americans that kicked mainstream media into gear and elevated the story into a code-one frenzy.)

The nature of the spread of such infodemics also, by the way, offers useful tools to epidemiologists trying to use modern media to identify potential medical risks and contain them. I know this was discussed in the Net Effects blog here at FP the other day and I would just like to offer one anecdotal insight that suggests to me that perhaps the skepticism about the value of using such tools expressed in the post has been overtaken by events. Back in the months before the SARS outbreak became public, I ran a company called Intellibridge which tracked "open source" intelligence for a variety of clients. In other words, we looked at what was available on the Net in many languages to see what it might offer government or business clients in the way of insights. 

One of our analysts spotted a small item in a newspaper in Guangdong province stating roughly that people should not panic due to rumors of an outbreak of a disease. When the Chinese government says do not panic, our analysts were trained to be skeptical and indeed, when we dug into the issue we found that word was spreading throughout southern China, largely by means of cell phone messaging, concerning this new outbreak of disease. In fact, we became so concerned that we called the Center for Disease Control...who proceeded to brush us off saying that they did not accept information of this source from the public. Ten weeks or so later the World Health Organization acknowledged the outbreak of the disease. 

The punch line: modern information technologies offer important tools for both containing and amplifying threats such as those posed by the global spread of epidemics. Considerable work remains to be done however, in understanding how to use these tools and to limit their abuse...and new media like Twitter and social networking sites do not make this task any easier. (Although figuring out how to manage this in the context of a free society is an especially important challenge for governments worldwide, arguably much more important than popular media-policy intersections like "public diplomacy.")      

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There is a generally held view that when you get a group of Washington insiders together that what you'll get is conventional wisdom. But, when I ended yesterday's meeting of The Carnegie Economic Strategy Roundtable -- a group I chair comprised of a bipartisan folks of top policy-thinkers -- despite that fact that the shared outlook was rather dour (well, veering between dour and how-many-of-these-pills-do-I-have-to-take-before-I-lose-consciousness), there was much said that was actually far from the conventional wisdom you'll get in the paper.

At the core of the discussion was the general belief that in addition to an economic crisis and a series of brewing political crises, the world faces a profound crisis of confidence in many of its most important institutions. One participant quoted a friend who said, "I have seen two things in life I thought I would never see...the fall of two walls...the Berlin Wall and of Wall Street." (While the details of these discussions are off the record until our conclusions are made public later in the year, I can reveal a couple of general themes to yesterday's conversation, which I found quite disturbing.)   

Not only have people lost faith in the institutions of Wall Street and the financial community, but they're now wary of international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, and the once seemingly indestructible pillars of the business community like the auto industry, and in governments around the world that have failed to cope with the crisis. (How do you think they feel about their governments right now in Iceland, Latvia, Hungary...or Britain, Pakistan, or Mexico right now?) Indeed, while the U.S. government is enjoying a brief resurgence from very low approval ratings, there was a strong sense that was a fragile rebound and one that would soon be reversed if the stimulus and the financial rescues don't soon produce results. As a consequence, the group felt that there was a not inconsiderable likelihood that the resurgence of "big government" or neo-socialism that is a central theme of the chattering classes may actually be short-lived, a temporary reversal of historical trends that contains the seeds of its own undoing. (Personally, I believe the role of government was due for a recalibration, but also believe that governments like markets overshoot and that we shall over-inflate the government's role in some areas before getting it right...or closer to right.)

For the past four or five years this group at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has been meeting to discuss issues at the intersection of America's top economic and national security interests. This year, all the sessions are around the theme "Present at the Creation 2.0: How Remaking the International System Can Become One of the Top Legacies of the Obama Administration." Yesterday, we had roughly equal numbers of folks who had served in Democratic or Republican administrations, roughly an equal balance between economic, political and security thinkers, even some balance provided with leading thinkers from outside the United States. Virtually all the participants in the group have served in cabinet-level or senior sub-cabinet level jobs in their respective governments. 

Among the themes of our discussion I found most disturbing was generally a very downcast view of both the geoeconomic and geopolitical outlooks. Early on in our meeting the point was made that this period doesn't look or feel like the post-World War II environment in which much of the current international system was made. Back then we were dominant, the only surviving megapower, and there was a common threat around which to unite. Neither condition exists today. (It was also pointed out that even with those conditions, it took us almost four full years from the end of World War II until Marshall Plan money really started making its way into Europe. In other words, it took a depression, the Second World War and starting to lose the peace after that war to motivate real rather than symbolic actions concerning the creation of a functioning international community...at least the western branch of such a community.) Subsequently, the discussion then would periodically turn to trying to determine whether we were really in a time more analogous to 1929 or 1932 or 1933 and so on. But that was just a contextual subtext. And as one participant thoughtfully pointed out, these historical analogies are weak and can serve as a needless distraction from the business of understanding what is really going on right now.

The original rationale for convening the group was the recognition that in the year or years immediately ahead, like it or not, the Obama administration will be confronted with the need to reevaluate, renovate, or re-invent virtually every major existing international institution we have and, at the same time, will have to participate in the creation of a few others. This will include continuing with the transformation of the "steering committee" of the international system from a G8-like group to more of a G20-like group. It will include the top items on the agenda of the G20 when it meets early in April in London: restructuring and recapitalizing the IMF and the World Bank (and possibly regional multilateral financial institutions) and rethinking the global regulatory and market-oversight structures we've got. It'll include rethinking organizations that are widely considered to be flawed or faltering or due for a tune-up: the WTO, the UN Security Council, the non-proliferation regime and the UN system itself. It will also certainly include the need to create some kind of Global Environmental Organization (GEO) to administer and enforce any conclusions that may come out of the Copenhagen global climate talks or its successors. It's a sweeping landscape and the choice before the US government is whether to take these issues serially and approach them without core principles and a clear vision as to what kind of international system we want in the future or to take them serially, reactively and to focus on patching immediate issues and putting off the heavy lifting until tomorrow. 

My sense is that the group largely (though not universally) shares my view that the former approach clearly makes more sense and represents a big foreign policy opportunity for Obama & Co. But perhaps the most disturbing perception that spread through yesterday's conversation was the recognition that while this could be a moment for reinventing the international system, it might also be a moment that presents great peril for that system and could see the undoing of several major components of the system as a direct result of nation's turning inward to address the most immediate and politically pressing consequences of the global crisis.

Evidence that this was the case came from this week's headlines. The Economist talked about how urgent domestic concerns, financial weakness everywhere, and the deep problems in Eastern Europe could lead to the undoing of the EU. Hillary Clinton arrived in Europe for a NATO meeting at which it seemed unlikely she would get much support from our allies for their assuming great burdens and risks in Afghanistan thus calling into question NATO's relevance going forward. Gordon Brown sleep-walked into Washington to make a pitch for sweeping international financial reforms that met with a chilly reception from the Obama team. The IMF and the World Bank need major infusions of cash to play any kind of meaningful role in ameliorating the current international situation...certainly hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly as much as a trillion or more. Not only does it seem unlikely countries will pony up the dough, there is reluctance among Europeans to give up the voting shares and traditional role they have had in these institutions which will be essential if the Fund and the Bank are to draw in capital from emerging powers and truly reflect the new global reality. And there is a gradual undercutting of the world trading system that goes beyond the dead man walking progress of the Doha Round. Just take a look at the subsidies issues all these national stimulus packages are raising or at the provision in the Senate appropriations bill (cited on FP Passport yesterday) that kills the core NAFTA idea of Mexican trucks being allowed easier transit into the U.S. market. Some organizations, like the OAS or the UN General Assembly itself, are already little more than bureaucracies in search of a quiet place to sleep.

It is not hard to see all this and contemplate what a deepening of the economic crisis might do to attitudes everywhere toward assisting people in distant countries and conclude that we framed our discussion incorrectly. We don't just face a choice between the ad hoc reinvention of the international system or a strategic approach to remaking the global institutional architecture. We are at a fork in the road where one direction takes us to a period in which the international system suffers serious setbacks and is substantially weakened and the other leads to the strengthening that the massive roster of global challenges we face demands.

The group of leading experts with whom I met yesterday were uncertain which direction we were more likely to take.

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