Posts Tagged ‘ Germany ’

Really? Ireland/Iceland/Greece Outperform Germany?

Friday, December 17th, 2010
Michael Mandel


Michael Mandel is the chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute and the founder of Visible Economy LLC, a New York-based news and education company.

by Michael Mandel

Is it true that the three basket-case countries of Europe–Greece, Ireland, and Iceland–have outperformed Germany on real GDP and productivity growth? Or do the implausible official numbers demonstrate the bankruptcy of the global economic statistical system?

I was nosing through the just-released OECD Economic Outlook (top secret project, don’t ask), and I noticed something very interesting.  The Outlook includes forecasts through 2012 for all sorts of macroeconomic variables,  so we can now look at a 15-year time period (1997-2012) which includes the ten years of  tech+housing boom (1997-2007) and the five years of the financial bust. Here are two charts comparing the strongest economy in Europe, Germany, with the three basket cases, Greece, Ireland, and Iceland. We’re looking at real GDP growth and total economy labor productivity growth:

and

These charts show that the three basket-case countries of Europe–Greece, Ireland, and Iceland–substantially outperform Germany during the boom years, which is to be expected (blue bars).  For example, Greece had productivity growth averaging 2.4% per year from 1997 to 2007, compared to only 1% per year for Germany.

What is more surprising is that  Greece, Ireland, and Iceland continue to outperform Germany, even when we factor in  the 5 years of the bust, including forecasts through 2012 (the red bar).  For  example, average real GDP growth in Iceland is projected to be 2.7% annually over the 1997-2012 time period, almost double the 1.4% growth rate of Germany.

What can we make of these disparities? After all, we economists have been trained to believe that productivity growth is an essential measure of the health of an economy. Here are four possible explanations:

  1. OECD forecasters have drunk too many bottles of wine, leading to overoptimistic forecasts
  2. Five years post-bust is too short: The basket-case countries will be suffering for many years.
  3. Boom-and-bust beats slow-and-steady in the long-run.
  4. The usual way of measuring Gross Domestic Product overestimates  both debt-fueled growth (Iceland, Greece) and growth fueled by supply chains (Ireland).

As anyone who has been reading me for a while knows, I lean towards #4.  I think there’s a first-order problem with the way we measure GDP growth, because trade–including flows of knowledge capital–is being incorrectly counted, or not counted at all.   That’s a big gotcha, since bad macro data have and will distort decision-making by policymakers,corporate leaders, and investors.

This piece is cross-posted at Mandel on Innovation and Growth

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

Discussing the Future of U.S.-China Relations

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010
Lee Drutman


Lee Drutman is a senior fellow and the managing editor for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Lee Drutman

Watch a video of the event on C-SPAN

Next month, Chinese President Hu Jintao will be visiting Washington and Defense Secretary Gates will be visiting Beijing. Though the U.S. and China have had their disagreements of late – over North Korea, over human rights, over currency valuations – both have much more to gain from cooperation than conflict.

Such was the general consensus at a PPI Event today entitled, “China’s Choice: Regional Bully or Global Stakeholder?” The event featured: The Honorable Chris Coons, U.S. Senator (D-Del.), Member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee; The Honorable Wallace “Chip” Gregson, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, Asian and Pacific Security Affairs; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Harvard University; James Fallows, The Atlantic Magazine; Michael Chase, Naval War College.

Sen. Coons kicked off the event by relating the experiences of a newly elected Senator who had spent the last several months on the campaign trail listening to the ordinary Americans’ trepidations about China.

“I’ve seen and heard the growing frustrations of average Americans, and their perceptions, or misperceptions, about the rise of China,” Coons said. “Americans are deeply concerned we’ve lost our economic and manufacturing edge and Washington has taken its eye off the ball.”

But Coons also registered an optimistic note: “I don’t view it as a zero-sum game. China’s rise does not have to mean the decline of America.” The Senator expressed hope that the U.S. and China could overcome the short-term impasses over such issues as trade and intellectual property and could have a “long-term harmonious relationship”

Assistant Secretary Gregson followed Coons with a similar hope. “Together,” he said, “the U.S. and China can build a new century of global prosperity, and the time to begin is now…both countries have a great deal to gain from cooperation.”

Gregson highlighted the importance of the Pacific region, which is home to 15 of the world’s 20 largest ports, including nine in China. Five of the world’s seven largest standing armies (China, North Korea, South Korea, India, and Pakistan) are there as well. “China sits at a fulcrum,” said Gregson.

The Assistant Secretary outlined the three pillars of the U.S. approach to China:

  1. An effort to sustain and strengthen bilateral cooperation;
  2. An effort to strengthen relations with other Asian allies;
  3. And that a rising China should abide by global norms and international laws.

He noted that China’s military build-up, which has often been less than transparent, has raised real concerns. “This type of military build-up far exceeds China’s defensive needs,” he said. “We call upon China to become more transparent. We are not asking for an unreasonable degree of disclosure. Just enough to allow all parties to avoid miscalculation.”

Professor Nye, author of a new book entitled The Future of Power (about how power is transitioning from the West to the East, and from state to non-state actors), spent a few minutes musing on a question he posed: “Can the rise of China be peaceful?”

Referencing Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War and the rise of Germany in the early 20th Century, Nye noted that the rise of a new power often provokes fear from rivals, and “if we fear too much it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Referencing FDR, Nye argued the more apt position to take with China was that “the greatest thing we should fear is fear itself.”

“There is a rise in Chinese power, but a mistake to over-estimate it,” said Nye. “The size of China’s economy and our economy may be equal in size by 2030, but they will not be equal in composition, and per capita income will only be 1/3 of our per capita income.”

Fallows, who spent four years living in China and has written about his experiences in Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (and is writing another book about China), argued that in most respects, the fundamental arrangement and consensus between the U.S. and China has been remarkably stable for the last 30 years: It’s better to work together than as enemies; China’s prosperity need not be at the direct expense of the United States; and there are going to be real disagreements.

As for America’s perceived sense of decline in the face of a rising China, “The central thing here is that the issues that matter to America’s viability have nothing to do with China,” said Fallows. “They would be identical if China did not exist. The greatest concerns are the functionality of the political system.”

Chase, who has written three memos on China’s military for PPI, noted that one of the challenging things about assessing China’s military prowess is that the military hasn’t been involved in a hot war since 1979 (Vietnam). Chase recommended a path of working with China as well as building up our military capacity to match China’s possible threats.

The event concluded with a question about climate change, which will probably be the most pressing challenge that the U.S. and China will have to solve. Nye noted that China has now surpassed the U.S. in greenhouse gas emissions. Fallows put it simply: “There is either a collaborative strategy of the U.S. and China, or no hope at all.”

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix, Issues | 4 Comments »

Obama’s Chance to Lead on Trade

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

President Obama is in Seoul today for what promises to be a contentious meeting of the world’s leading economic powers. He probably won’t mollify China, Germany and other critics of the Federal Reserve’s plan to pump more money into the U.S. economy. But the President does have a chance to further his goal of doubling U.S. exports by bringing home an improved trade agreement with South Korea.

In addition to attending the G-20 summit, Obama is slated to meet with South Korean officials to finalize a bilateral free trade pact negotiated by President Bush. Congress has not ratified the treaty, which is snagged by concerns about U.S. auto exports to South Korea, as well as lawmakers’ eroding faith in the benefits of free trade.  The president said in June that he had instructed the U.S. Trade Representative to have all the outstanding issues “lined up properly” before he arrived for this week’s visit, so he could close the deal with Korea and present the agreement to Congress again in the coming months.

South Korea isn’t just a major trade partner, it’s also a key strategic ally and a counterweight to China’s growing heft in the Asia-Pacific. Since its tariffs traditionally have been much higher than ours, there’s little doubt that the agreement would spur U.S. exports and help offset weak economic demand at home. It requires South Korea to lower its high taxes on U.S. farm goods and open markets for insurance and other services to American firms.  As the treaty has languished in Congress, however, Seoul has been busy on other fronts, deepening economic ties with China and finalizing an important trade pact with the EU last month.

Although President Obama sounded an ambivalent note at best on trade during the 2008 presidential campaign, he understands that expanding U.S. exports is crucial both to creating jobs and shrinking America’s outsized trade deficits.  Now that he’s made the Korean deal a top priority, we’ll find out if the newly Tea Party-infused GOP will be more amenable to passing the treaty than Congressional Democrats were.

The agreement would lower tariffs on auto imports on both sides. South Korea’s are higher — 8 percent compared to 2.5 percent here. (The United States also would gradually lower a 25 percent tariff on imported pickup trucks.) Nonetheless, U.S. auto makers, especially Ford, have argued that the treaty would not bring down cultural and non-tariff barriers that have confined their sales to a sliver of South Korea’s lucrative auto market.

They have a point.  Seoul exports more than 400,000 vehicles (mostly Hyundais and Kias) to the United States each year, while manufacturing an additional 200,000 cars at U.S. plants. According the U.S. Commerce Department, U.S. auto makers sent a paltry 5,878 vehicles to South Korea in 2009. Ford’s Stephen Biegun notes that more than 70 percent of the cars made in South Korea are exported, while imports account for less than 10 percent of sales, well below the average of 40 percent in other economically advanced countries.

As an auto industry representative explained in testimony before Congress, Korea has an extensive web of non-tariff barriers that make it harder for foreign car makers to penetrate the Korean market.  Some of these are technical regulations like emissions standards and even license plate size. Establishing a clear link between such policies and the small U.S. market share in Korea isn’t always easy. But there’s no doubt that some of Korea’s policies reflect a well-entrenched hostility toward imports. For example, until recently anyone in Korea who bought a foreign car would automatically have their income taxes audited—a policy that chilled demand even after it was officially ended.

Ford, America’s healthiest car maker, sees itself as the chief victim of South Korea’s import-unfriendly policies. That’s because General Motors, through its Daewoo subsidy, makes cars in South Korea, selling more than 100,000 locally and exporting hundreds of thousands more elsewhere (including to the United States).

What can President Obama do to resolve the impasse over autos and get the U.S.-South Korea agreement through the Senate? He can’t reopen negotiations, but he can use the presidential jawbone to win binding side agreements with Seoul to remove non-tariff barriers to U.S. auto exports.  He could, in short, bring pressure on South Korea to fully liberalize its auto markets and embrace the reciprocal obligations that come with free trade.  Much like his powerful message in New Delhi that “India has emerged,” the president needs to make the case that South Korea has also fully emerged as a mature economy, and it can no longer justify the kind of protectionist and mercantilist trade policies that are more typical of poorer developing countries.

A more aggressive stance would show that the President is serious about doubling U.S. exports. But there’s a complicating factor: the global spread of auto production, design and supply chains. That makes it hard to say just how “American” any given car really is, or how many U.S. jobs are engaged in making cars.

Nonetheless, as long as the answer is “greater than zero,” the President has an obligation to ensure that major U.S. trade partners offer as much access to their domestic markets as we do to ours. And the Korean pact presents him with an opportunity both to restore U.S. global leadership on trade liberalization and to integrate America more deeply into the world’s fastest-growing markets in East Asia.

Photo credit: South Korea

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix, Issues | 2 Comments »

Government-Run Healthcare

Monday, October 11th, 2010
Chris Miller


Chris Miller is a Purple Heart and Combat Action Badge recipient and eight-year U.S. Army veteran, having served two tours in Baghdad, Iraq. He is currently a law student and a fellow with the Truman National Security Project.

by Chris Miller

This post is the third in a series about the Progressive Military

The wounds from the healthcare debate in America are still fresh.  There are many in the GOP Congressional minority that would see the healthcare bill repealed, and there has been much scare-mongering about a government-run healthcare system – that patients will be lost in the bureaucracy, they’ll lose control over their health decisions, the quality of care will suffer, and the costs will be tremendous.

If the Veterans Administration healthcare system is an example, those fears are overblown. The military’s government-run healthcare system is not just good in the field, it’s good at home as well and shows that government can do healthcare.

I was a customer of 100% government-run healthcare for eight years.  I visited the emergency room, received all my shots and checkups, got my wisdom teeth pulled, and received my prescribed medication all without being killed or turned away by some bureaucrat.  I received the same level of care everywhere, whether in Missouri, Washington, Germany, or Iraq.  And not just me, my family as well.  I’m not alone.  There are over 1.4 million Americans on active duty in the U.S. military.  If you include their family members, retirees, and those receiving Veterans Administration benefits, the number swells to over 9 million Americans already actively receiving government healthcare.

Active duty troops and their families use the 532 active military medical facilities nationwide and enroll in TRICARE, which is the military’s government-run healthcare system.  Reservists called to active duty over 30 days are covered as well.  For retirees, TRICARE fills the gap for what Medicare doesn’t cover.  CHAMPVA gives the same coverage to family members of disabled or deceased service members no longer serving and gives them access to Veterans Administration hospitals.  The Veterans Administration system (VA) coverage has changed from serving only troops with service-connected disabilities to serving all veterans based upon need.  There are over 24 million Americans eligible for VA medical benefits at over 1000 facilities nationwide, 9 million of which are over 65.

It’s a well-known fact that the traumas caused on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan lead, by necessity, to innovations in trauma care.  As an Iraq war veteran, I saw this in action personally with our combat medics, especially when they patched me up after suicide car-bomber hit my vehicle head-on.   The military health system also develops medical technology, techniques, and procedures that can be used in the civilian world.

The Army’s National Trauma Institute, in cooperation with several universities, collects data from wounded soldiers to identify what can be done to improve their first-response treatment and will help not only on the battlefield, but in civilian hospitals as well.  The military is making an exemplary push to digitize medical records in order to make them easier to search through and transfer between locations, not to mention saving money.  This idea was picked up in the new healthcare legislation.

The uniformity of the military medical system also pays dividends in health safety against epidemics and pandemics, as exhibited by the fast and nearly-comprehensive immunization rate of soldiers against H1N1.  Achieving such rates quickly among the civilian population would be improbable.  I and many other soldiers are also vaccinated against diseases many in the civilian population are not anymore, namely small pox and anthrax.  Our troops also get the flu shot at the beginning of every flu season.  The military was the first to test the effectiveness of flu nasal-spray vaccinations compared with shots to reduce the use and cost of needles.  This is done not just for their health, but also to save the system from having to pay more money for sick sailors and airmen later.

The military is devoted to preventing disease, illness, and injury not only because it they take troops off the field, but they also cost the system money.  The U.S. Army Public Health Command and similar organizations in the other services are devoted exclusively to this mission.

If you contrast a system that has an interest in seeing that you to stay healthy because it saves them (the government) money with a system that makes money when you are sick, (insurance companies, HMOs) one can see that a pinch of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  A similar government system implemented nationwide would save people money, improve their health, and save lives.  If universal government-run healthcare is good enough for the troops, it’s good enough for us all.

It’s true the system is not perfect. There have been scandals surrounding military healthcare, such as the living conditions for recovering troops at Walter Reed Medical Center and veterans groups (some of which I am a member of) constantly push for improvements to the VA system.  But in general the quality of military healthcare is very good, and proof that government-run healthcare can indeed work.

Photo credit: US Army Africa

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Another Top Taliban Bites The Dust… For Now

Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

The English language online version of Der Spiegel is reporting that Mullah Abdul Salam — a big-fish Taliban commander who has been responsible for recent attacks against German forces stationed in northern Afghanistan — has been arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Salam has been described by both Der Spiegel and the LA Times as the “shadow governor” of province of Kunduz. While Salam doesn’t appear to be the critical lynch-pin that Mullah Baradar was, the LAT explains:

In Kunduz, a once-quiet corner of Afghanistan, Salam presided over a major buildup of Taliban forces over the last 18 months. The insurgents took over entire districts, repeatedly attacked Afghan security posts, harried NATO troops in the province — who were mainly Germans — and menaced a NATO supply line running through Kunduz.

One of the worst civilian-casualty episodes of the war occurred in August after suspected Taliban fighters hijacked a fuel truck. The Germans, fearing the vehicle would be used for an attack on their main base in Kunduz, called in an airstrike that killed dozens of insurgents — and also dozens of civilians.

Late last year, a series of raids, carried out mainly by U.S. special forces, drove the insurgents underground in Kunduz, but their presence remained a threat.

What in the dickens is going on here? As is eloquently detailed in Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, the ISI essentially started and supported the Taliban throughout the ’90s, and has an institutional culture that has been loathe to crack down on its own project.

Why now? Why has the ISI suddenly decided to wrap-up two significant Taliban commanders in two days, a batting average that makes them look like Ted Williams compared to their standard impersonation of the 1987 Cleveland Indians’ Otis Nixon (I’ll spare you the click — .059 BA).

Consider this: By arresting these guys, the ISI is amassing credit and power. Sure, you could say that the Americans have finally convinced the Pakistanis that it’s in Islamabad’s interest to side with Washington. In the long-term, it definitely is.  But as the strategic landscape shifts and there may be some sort of negotiation with the Taliban (ill-advised though that may be, in my opinion), the ISI is simply collecting all the big cards in its own hand.

The bottom line is that nothing’s for certain just yet — the ISI could continue to cooperate with the Americans, or simply look the other way during an escape attempt, just like the Yemenis.

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State of the Union: Commander-in-Chief as Cheerleader

Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

In the most raucous and gutsy State of the Union I can remember — the president challenged Democrats to not run for the hills, thrust the onus of governance on Republicans, and stared down Chief Justice John Roberts — national security policy came and went with hardly a whimper. It’s not that the president didn’t spent a significant chunk of his speech on the topic (he did), but rather that what he said didn’t break new ground.

If there was a newsworthy tidbit of policy, it was the president’s call to secure all loose nuclear material within four years. It was a smart way to package the issue, tying nuclear terrorism to Obama’s repeated goal to eventually have a world without nuclear weapons. Republicans will no doubt jump at that line as the latest in a twisted attempt to paint Obama as naive and weak. It’s not true, of course — eliminating nuclear weapons is the right long-term goal, but their reduction will come in concert with other countries as part of a slow, negotiated, equitable drawdown over decades.

Otherwise, the president gave a set-piece rundown of the broad set of national security priorities. He vowed to continue the withdrawal in Iraq, even though the disturbing increase in violence over the last few weeks and barring of ex-Ba’athists from the March parliamentary elections are both cause for significant concern. He charted a path out of Afghanistan, framing the choice to send more troops there as one of the hard choices of governance that won’t make him popular. And he vowed to continue to take the fight to al Qaeda while acknowledging shortcomings within the intelligence community (that, if you’ve been buying what I’m selling, is a more nuanced problem than he’d have time to explain). On the AQ score, the administration actually deserves more credit than it has received — if the harshest critics examine the record, they’ll find that, for example, the White House was sending top officials to Yemen well before the Christmas attempt.

The policy implications aside, I thought the most impressive rhetorical flourish about American national security and foreign policy actually came in the first part of the speech that was dedicated to the economy. Extolling the virtues of American ingenuity and innovation, Obama compared America to China, India, and Germany — three countries the president said that weren’t waiting to revamp. He challenged Americans to beat those countries, saying he refused “to accept second-place for the United States of America.”

Bam. That’s what Americans need to hear from this president: that he’s ready to lead, that — just like we’re doing in Haiti — America acts internationally because “our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores,” and that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Now, if you’re reading this blog, chances are that you’re a progressive who might have some doubts about what America has done in Iraq, or questions about why we’re in Afghanistan. But regardless of any questionable past policies (and without getting into a debate about them here), Americans need to hear from this White House that America is a strong force for good in the world. I worry that the president hasn’t made that case strongly enough all the time. This was a good start.

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Why a Key NATO Ally Will Likely Sit Out the Surge

Friday, December 4th, 2009
Clay Risen


Clay Risen is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the author of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination. He was a 2009 Arthur F. Burns journalism fellow in Berlin.

by Clay Risen

You win some, you lose some: This morning NATO announced it would add 7,000 troops to the alliance’s Afghanistan deployment, a coup for Secretary Clinton and a much-needed boost to President Obama’s surge strategy. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Germany is unlikely to be part of that mix.

Berlin, which has the third-largest deployment in the country, is holding off from committing more troops until a multinational planning conference in January. A few weeks ago, during a swing through Washington, German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was still bullish, if vague, about the prospects for additional soldiers.

But what a difference a few weeks can make. Since then, the Kunduz truck-bombing scandal has claimed several heads, including those of the labor minister (formerly the defense minister) and the country’s top uniformed officer. It has also forced an embarrassing about-face from zu Guttenberg, who initially said the attack was justified but now says it was “militarily inappropriate.”

The scandal has sent public support for the war, already tenuous, into a tail spin. According to a new poll by ARD-Deutschlandtrend, 69 percent want Germany to withdraw immediately, a dramatic rise since the last survey, in September. The primary reason, according to 75 percent of respondents, is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to be “full and honest” about Afghanistan. The war is also fueling left-wing violence in Berlin and Hamburg, including a recent firebombing of a federal police station in the capital.

Merkel and zu Guttenberg remain steadfast behind the mission, but their coalition partners, the Free Democrats, are using the scandal to push for reduced combat roles and an accelerated withdrawal timetable. Their leader, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, has said the January conference is not a “donor conference for troops” and declared in “a clear statement from the government” that Berlin will begin moving its soldiers to training and civil-affairs operations, rather than combat.

Even in the news reports surrounding NATO’s additional commitment, analysts expressed hope that Germany would commit more than 1,000 additional troops to Afghanistan come January. Unless the political dynamic inside the country changes dramatically in the next few weeks, those hopes will be dashed.

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Germany’s Afghanistan Scandal

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
Clay Risen


Clay Risen is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the author of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination. He was a 2009 Arthur F. Burns journalism fellow in Berlin.

by Clay Risen

Berlin the city is bracing for its first winter snows, but Berlin the seat of government is in the middle of a storm of a very different type.

On Sept. 4, a German military commander near Kunduz, Afghanistan called in a NATO air strike against two stolen German tanker trucks, allegedly unaware that hundreds of civilians had gathered around them. The resulting attacks left as many as 150 dead, but the Merkel government, then in the thick of its reelection campaign, said the casualties were a tragic but unavoidable mistake, and the issue was largely irrelevant on election day.

Since then, the civilian leadership of the military has shifted — Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung moved to the labor ministry, while Economics Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg took over the defense post. Jung left the spotlight, and zu Guttenberg immediately called the attack “militarily appropriate.” Everything seemed calm, for a few weeks.

But new evidence shows that Jung may have known of at least some civilian casualties only hours after the attacks. Even worse, the leading daily paper in Cologne, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, reported that the Merkel government had internally determined before the election that the attack was not actually necessary, but had kept its assessment secret.

The new reports have led to Jung’s resignation, on Friday, as well as the sacking of two top defense ministry officials by zu Guttenberg. Merkel’s team now says it is “reassessing” the situation. But it’s unlikely to be enough: The parliamentary opposition, particularly the hard left, has been looking for an anti-war foothold for years, and the unfolding scandal is an excellent chance to step up its attacks on Merkel and zu Guttenberg, whom some see as a potential future chancellor candidate.

It’s important not to blow the scandal out of proportion. The German public response has been muted, in large part because no German soldiers died in the incident. For all its cultural differences, the public’s calculus for tolerating the violence of war is the same as in the U.S.: all death is tragic, but even civilian deaths overseas, at the hands of German troops, are unlikely to change the mood dramatically.

Indeed, one of the more salient aspects of the attacks is the discovery that German overseas aggression, long the bogeyman of German culture, is no longer such a big deal among the public. Germans are unlikely to accept, say, permanent bases or unilateral declarations of war anytime soon, but the Kunduz Affair shows that these days they are much less idiosyncratic in their attitudes toward war than the world has long believed.

Which isn’t to say that the scandal will have no effect. Given the conservatives’ hold on parliament, it is unlikely to disrupt their planned re-approval of the Afghan deployment next month. But it will make it harder to significantly increase troop deployments next year, something zu Guttenberg has hinted he will pursue in the coming months. Which is bad news for the United States and NATO, both of which are clamoring for more contributions from alliance members.

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In Germany, a Defense Minister to Watch

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Clay Risen


Clay Risen is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and the author of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination. He was a 2009 Arthur F. Burns journalism fellow in Berlin.

by Clay Risen

German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor Freiheer zu GuttenbergAngela Merkel may be the German chancellor, but the country’s most popular politician these days — and the man Americans should pay more attention to than they do—is Defense Minister Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg.

Despite his anachronistic pride in his family’s roots in the Bavarian nobility (“Freiherr” means “Baron”), zu Guttenberg dazzles the German public with his youth (he’s just 37), his oratorical flair (admittedly a low bar in a country used to snooze-fest speakers), and his non-political provenance (unlike most German elected officials, he didn’t enter politics until his 30s; before, he ran the family business).

Zu Guttenberg, a member of the center-right Christian Socialist Party Union (a regional sister party to the national Christian Democrats), was economics minister in the first Merkel cabinet for less than a year, and his selection as defense minister was something of a surprise. But despite his inexperience, he has come out punching: In just three weeks since his appointment, zu Guttenberg has reiterated Germany’s commitment in Afghanistan by deploying another 120 troops; paid a surprise visit to the country (where, dressed in a turtleneck sweater under a bulky bulletproof vest, he posed for cameras behind a helicopter door-gunner, weapon in hand); announced his support for the embattled German general whose decision to bomb a pair of hijacked tankers near Kunduz resulted in scores of civilian deaths; and — most notably — became the first German politician to call the Afghan conflict a “war.”

Normally, a German defense minister does not speak unless spoken to; fears of militarism still run deep there, across the political spectrum. Two-thirds of the German public opposes the Afghanistan deployment. There was talk during and after the campaign that the nearly inevitable ruling coalition between the center-right, relatively hawkish Christian Democrats (CDU) and the free-market, relatively dovish Free Democrats (FDP) could result in a drawdown, if not outright withdrawal, of German troops from Afghanistan. And tensions do seem to be emerging along those very lines—even as zu Guttenberg calls on the German public to support the troops, FDP Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has been telling reporters “we can’t stay in Afghanistan for eternity and three days.”

Which is the first reason why Americans need to be paying attention to zu Guttenberg. He is extremely pro-American (during his pre-political career in business, and ever since, he has cultivated close ties to both parties in D.C.) and a true believer in NATO’s Afghanistan mission. He won’t be afraid of checking Westerwelle on defense issues, and should Merkel sour on the mission, he’ll be an important backstop preventing a sudden drawdown.

In fact, don’t be surprised if zu Guttenberg tries to make a run around Westerwelle on other topics as well, from relations with other NATO members to climate change. At 37, he’s an almost-guaranteed candidate for the chancellorship once Merkel exits the stage, and a great way to solidify his position within his party would be to isolate the man most Christian Democrats can barely manage to tolerate. And that’s the second reason to watch zu Guttenberg: He is not just a growing force within German politics today, but he very well may represent the future of U.S. German relations.

Update: A couple of errors in the original post have been fixed. Thanks to commenter Robert Gerald Livingston for pointing them out.

Photo by Michael Panse, MdL / CC BY-ND 2.0

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Why the Wall Came Down

Monday, November 9th, 2009
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Twenty years ago today, I was a seventh grader at the American Community School in Surrey, England. My family had lived in the U.K. for two years (we’d stay for two more) because my father was the European sales manager for an American chemical company.

Even at such a young age, I liked to think that I was seeing the Cold War from the “front lines.” I was riveted the first time our family crossed into West Germany, and I felt pride when my middle school cross-country and baseball teams would compete on British-American military bases. I was particularly fascinated at the Moscow Music Peace Festival, though I’m sure as much for the appearances by Motley Crue and Skid Row as for its rather striking implications about freedom, openness, and globalization.

In truth, I led an obnoxiously comfortable life in a quite English town. But the broader experience of living abroad during a time of such sweeping change fueled my budding consciousness with an interest in geo-politics and foreign policy, and, of course, rock and roll.

Conservatives will crow today about Ronald Reagan’s role in the entire affair, drawing a straight line between the Gipper’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and the crumbling of 70 years of Communism. Of course, the Soviet Union’s demise was far more complex. George Packer’s column in The New Yorker sums it up far better than I could ever hope to:

The wall came down not because Ronald Reagan stood up and demanded it but because on the evening of November 9th, at a televised press conference in East Berlin, a Party hack named Günter Schabowski flubbed a question about the regime’s new, liberalized travel regulations. Asked when they took effect, Schabowski shrugged, scratched his head, checked some papers, and said, “Immediately,” sending thousands of East Berliners to the wall in a human tide that the German Democratic Republic could not control. Soldiers and Stasi agents didn’t shoot into the crowd, but things could easily have gone otherwise.

The revolutions of 1989 were made possible by a multiplicity of conditions: the courage of East Bloc dissidents and the hundreds of thousands of fellow-citizens who finally joined them; American support for the dissident movements and containment of the Soviet Union; the disastrous economies of the Communist countries; the loss of confidence among ruling-party élites; the crucial forbearance of Mikhail Gorbachev. For Europe’s Communist regimes to disappear so suddenly and bloodlessly (Romania was a different story), everything had to fall into place, above and below, within and without. Such circumstances are improbably rare, and they can’t be mechanically replicated by the laws of history or by divine design or by universal human aspiration. A false lesson drawn from 1989 involves a kind of shallow eschatology of totalitarianism: this is how it always happens—the people rise up, the regime withers and dies, peace and democracy reign. The chaos that followed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was in part a consequence of this thinking. In planning the postwar period in Iraq, George W. Bush and some of his advisers had 1989 in mind—“like Eastern Europe with Arabs,” as one official put it.

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