Diplomatic History Only Interesting If White Men in Charge

The NYT reports that traditional history is decreasing in importance at most universities. It says that while universities are giving decreasing importance to diplomatic or international history, they are giving increased importance to the history of things like women's studies, race, and cultural issues. The ironic thing is that just as history is getting away from a "great man" focus of history that until recently focused on white men, because they were at the top of the heap, women and other races are becoming more important. In tandem with the drop in diplomatic history, the leading diplomats in the US have been Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Hillary Clinton, none of them white men.

My own concern about this is that the loss of interest in diplomatic or international history is likely to result in a lack of the expertise needed to conduct diplomacy. My experience was that diplomacy really is directed by the man (or woman) at the top. As I move up in the State Department (not particularly high), I found that the higher I went, the more likely it was that senior people would take an interest in, and control over, the issues I was working on. In fact, often the issues would be decided by the White House, not just by the Secretary of State. Historians might resent that the system works this way, but denying that it does is likely to result in an unrealistic understanding of history.

I was just listening to Obama talk about health care, and he repeated a line I've heard before when people complain about all the things he is involved in, such as the auto industry, he said he would rather not be involved in these issues, because he already has so much on his plate, and then every issue he mentioned was a foreign policy issue -- North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Republicans Destroyed the CIA

Today's NYT front pages the conflict between Admiral Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, and Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA over who should be station chiefs at embassies around the world. In describing the dispute, the NYT simply says, "Mr. Blair took over an office born out of the intelligence failures before the Iraq war." In retrospect those intelligence "failures" were born out of the Bush administration's desire to have the CIA produce the intelligence that the White House wanted. Because the CIA was reluctant to produce politically motivated intelligence, the White House moved to reduce its clout by installing a new bureaucracy above it -- hence Blair vs. Panetta. But it's also the military versus the civilians. The NYT says one dispute is whether to make the head of London station an NSA officer rather than a CIA officer. Then it goes on to say the Defense Intelligence Agency might be more appropriate to head up the Iraq station, etc. However, NSA is primarily military; it's always headed by a military officer. DIA of course is military, as are most other intelligence operations. It's interesting that in the run up to the Iraq war the two small intelligence organizations that were least willing to buy Cheney's claims about Iraq's development of nuclear weapons were the State Department's and the Department of Energy's, two civilian organizations. The CIA is the other big civilian spy operation, and Bush/Cheney hated it and wanted to destroy or emasculate it. It looks like they succeeded to some extent. Hopefully the CIA will go down fighting.

Where's Volker

This article in yesterday's NYT chronicled the infighting among Obama's economic advisers, but it didn't mention Paul Volker. I find that disturbing, because Volker is the only one who has really gotten the US out of an economic mess. Greenspan looked like he did, but it turned out that he was only postponing trouble and making it worse. Larry Summers was Bob Rubin's deputy, when they looked great, but not it turns out that they led the changes that got us into this economic mess. We don't really know about Geithner, but suspicions are that at the New York Fed, he was in bed with the Wall Street wizards who got us into this mess. Bernanke gets points for taking unorthodox steps at the Fed that may have prevented the financial system from imploding, but he did it by making money easier and basically making everybody happier. I'd feel better if he had made somebody hurt. I'd prefer that the bankers hurt, but if it had to be the general population, so be it. Bernanke has done smart things, but he has not done difficult things. When you mess up by overcharging on your credit cards or by making a bad investment, it's unusual to have someone give you a billion or a trillion dollars to make it alright. Usually you have to cut back in some way. But that's because you can print money like Bernanke does. It's unlikely that zero interest rates are the answer to every problem.

So far, for the last several decades, nobody in government has inflicted pain on the US economy. Private citizens, of course, the leaders of our banking and investment establishment, have produced the savings and loan debacle, the tech stock bubble, the housing bubble, and then the financial system meltdown.

Volker actually got us out of the Nixon-Carter-Reagan stagflation quagmire by prescribing tough medicine for the US economy. Nobody else has had the foresight or the guts to do the same thing in response to our more recent problems.

Granted Volker is in his 80's, but these young whipper-snappers ought to be seeking out his advise and listening to it. The NYT article intimates that Summers doesn't have a very high opinion of anybody else's opinions. I hope Obama listens to Volker more and Summers less.

NYT Op-Eds

It may happen frequently or infrequently, but it looks like all the authors of op-eds in today's New York Times are Jewish. Actually, I'm not sure about the guy who did the cartoons of an old graduating class, but his name sounds Jewish -- for sure Krugman, Brooks, and Livni are. In theory there's nothing wrong with this, but I worry that it gives the reader a slanted perspective. The Times is owned by Jews; so, maybe it's on purpose, but the news usually seems pretty balanced, although there are probably lots of Jewish writers in the newsroom as well.

I am hoping that reading the Financial Times op-eds will give me some balance, although who knows, they may be Jewish, too. Certainly one of the most celebrated Financial Times columnists until he left to join the Obama administration was Larry Summers, who is Jewish. In addition, a lot of the bad business practices that led to the current financial debacle were carried out by Anglos, both in New York and London, (probably not WASPs, since the P for Protestant seems to be a dying breed).

I am somewhat heartened that Niall Ferguson, who I think is Scottish, has taken on Paul Krugman, at least on the issue of inflation, in the Financial Times. I think Jon Meachum, who may be Episcopalian, is also a fresh voice on these issues.

Meanwhile, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is in the news all the time because of his role in examining Sotomayor for the Surpreme Court. He comes from my background: Alabama, U of A Law School (about the same time I graduated there, although I don't remember him), now lives in Mobile, and presumably Protestant. But I don't agree with him on much of anything. I agree with Brooks and Krugman much more often, not to mention Tom Friedman, with whom I agree most of the time.