Amitai Etzioni Notes

Accommodate Beijing?

Before I left for a meeting in Beijing, the leading China hand at George Washington University, David Shambaugh, advised me to read Huge White’s The China Choice. Shortly after I landed in China, the renowned Harvard scholar Weiming Tu (who now makes his home at the Peking University) asked me if I had read the Australian professor’s book.

The recommendation was well-taken and gladly heeded. White holds that the United States has not made up its mind as to whether it will seek to engage or contain China, but in the meantime there are forces in both societies that push the United States and China down a slippery slope—a dynamic that may end very badly for both sides.

Like many other authors, White’s analysis is much keener than his prescriptions. His main recommendation is that the United States should join with China, India, and Japan to form a “concert of powers” comparable to the power-sharing arrangement that emerged in post-Napoleonic Europe. This would create “a new order in which China’s authority and influence grow enough to satisfy the Chinese, and America’s role remains large enough to ensure that China’s power is not misused.” But White is rather unclear on what this would entail. Allow China exclusive rights on the South China Sea? Give up on the U.S.-Japan military treaty? And would China agree to join a body that has two U.S. allies as the main players, nations it does not considers its equals?

White raises all the right questions, and eloquently so. But he leaves it to others to spell out ways to accommodate China—if this is a course the United States can be persuaded to follow.

Read the entire post at the National Interest.

The Conservatives Are Coming!

The ink on the reports of the election results has barely dried and conservatives have already rolled out the first big post-election victory–by enacting a so called “right to work” law in, of all places, Michigan. Previously, the labor unions that were defeated–in the 23 states with right to work laws, in addition to the defeats in Ohio and Wisconsin–included mainly select public sector employees. In Michigan, the labor unions of private sector employees, including the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and Teamsters, were also set back. And this is in the state in which the UAW was born, a state long known as one in which the labor movement is particularly strong. In Ohio and Wisconsin, the defeats came after huge and prolonged demonstrations. In Michigan, the labor unions were unable to mount a similarly prolonged protest.

Labor unions are a key component of the Democratic coalition. Their members, volunteers, and donations have played a significant role in many elections, including President Obama’s win Michigan this November. The President has not always reciprocated. Thus, he did not join the campaign to protect labor unions from similar laws in Wisconsin, even though he was campaigning in neighboring states. And he kept his distance from the recall campaign in Wisconsin, in which the labor unions tried–it turns out in vain–to punish the governor who launched and signed the legislation which severely curtailed collective bargaining rights.

Unless liberals find new ways to reach more voters and above all expand their coalition, the fact that there is a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in the Senate will not carry the day for most liberal ideas.

Read the entire article at the Huffington Post.

Gun-Free Homes and Communities

We should not wait for our elected officials, in President Obama’s good words, “to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” We should do our share. One way to proceed is to mark our homes, apartments and condos, with a “gun free” sign. Parents should notify their friends that they would be reluctant to send their child over for a play date unless the home was safe from guns. Residential communities should pass rules that ban bringing guns onto their premises, clearly marking them as gun free.

Anyone who puts up such signs will become an ambassador for gun control, because they are sure to be challenged by gun advocates to explain their anti-gun positions. Here are some pointers they may wish to use against the typical pro-gun talking points…

Read the entire article at the Huffington Post.

Syrian WMD May Soon Slip Away

The Pakistani moment of truth is coming all too soon—in Syria. For more than a decade, security experts agreed that the greatest threat to the security of the United States is the combination of terrorists and WMD. Pakistan was widely considered the place this is most likely to happen. Now we must expect that shortly jihadists will acquire WMD in Syria as the Assad regime collapses. True, chemical arms are less lethal than nukes, but in Syria they make up in the number and vicious variety what each lacks in relative killing power.

The United States, its allies and the UN did well to warn Assad that there would be “consequences” if he employed these weapons, after intelligence sources reported that his troops were mixing and transporting chemical agents. Why these warnings stated that these consequences will follow if he uses these arms “against his own people” is far from obvious, because this wording makes it sound as if it would be acceptable if Assad used these agents against anybody else. In any case, Assad seems to have desisted.

There are some reports that the United States is training Jordanian Special Forces and some others to grab these arms. And one must assume that the U.S. Navy SEALs and a bunch of others are racing toward Syria. However, this is the place the so-called Obama doctrine—a light footprint, not involving boots on the ground—is reaching its limits. However high a regard one has for Special Forces, CIA agents and drones—which I do—the task is simply too big for them to be able to carry it out on their own. Even adding in some bombings against those sites that can be safely destroyed that way will not do. The Pentagon estimates that it would need some 75,000 troops to do the job. The trouble is that U.S. rapid-deployment forces are underdeveloped and not well-located.

Read the entire post at the National Interest.

We Are What We Celebrate

Amitai Etzioni discusses how what we celebrate reveals what we, as a society, value in this commentary on the holidays and the sociological lesson they contain. Click the link below to watch the discussion on The Agenda with Steve Paikin. 

Click here to view the discussion at Prof. Etzioni’s YouTube page.

Or go here to watch the discussion.

 

Cut Medicare? Cut Fraud!

There is reason to believe that if the GOP will agree to raise the taxes on the super rich, President Obama will agree to cuts in Medicare. It is morally abhorrent to cut benefits to any current or future seniors before much greater efforts are made to stop large scale raids on the Medicare coffers by nefarious corporations.

Take the revealing and far from atypical case of Health Management Associates (HMA). When a person visits an HMA Emergency Room, company software loaded onto the ER computer automatically orders a bunch of tests, whether they are needed or not, before the person is even seen by a doctor. When doctors try to discharge a patient from the ER, the computer intervenes, presenting them with a warning that the patient is a candidate for admission. If the doctors go ahead and override that warning, they must face the wrath of hospital administrators. Docs are continually evaluated on the basis of how many patients they admit and how many procedures they order. If not enough, they are warned–and if they still do not comply, they are fired.

A recent report by the prestigious and non-political Institute of Medicine found that the estimates for Medicare fraud and abuse fall between $75 and $98 billion. I say do not cut anyone’s benefits until the government triples its accounting staff, quadruples the number of corporate crooks in jail, and reduces Medicare shortfall by cutting fraud at least by half.

Read the entire article at the Huffington Post.

A Bad Plan for Obama

After the election, the New York Times editorial board laid out a foreign-policy agenda for President Obama to follow over the next four years. It combines wooly-headed idealism with half-baked thinking.

The leading suggestion—which is dedicated much more text than any other—is to aim for a world free of nuclear weapons. Yet zero is the wrong number, because if any one nation hides a few nukes, it would lord over those who do live up to their disarming commitments. One can surely dial down the numbers, but a low level of mutual deterrence is unavoidable—and history shows it works.

The Times correctly points out that Al-Qaeda is spreading in North Africa and in Pakistan. Ergo? “Dealing with that challenge will likely become harder, as will the choices Mr. Obama must make. For one thing, he will have to examine whether the expanding use of drones is the right approach.” To call for more examination is always a good idea, but—like appointing commissions, study groups and impact evaluations—most of the time it is nothing but a cop out for those who have no idea where to go next.

I am not saying that the Times agenda is without any merit. If the list it provides is turned on its head, the president may do well over the next four years: The Obama administration should focus in the near term on the Middle East. The first priority must be dealing with the nukes there rather than those of Russia. We must limit our ambition to protecting our security and that of our allies, and refrain from nation building overseas. Only then can we restore our economy and thus be able to discharge our international responsibilities.

Read the entire article at The National Interest.

Liberal Victory? Count Again

Liberals are making victory laps and scoffing at the GOP, which is having great difficulties drawing lessons from the 2012 election debacle. However, liberals also have much to learn from the election. They will need to find other groups to collaborate with if they hope to get President Obama — and, above all, Congress — to advance many programs dear to their heart.

Yet these celebrations are too soon.

If liberals are to carry the day, they will need to (a) continue to mobilize their troops, rather than assume that because “liberalism won,” Obama will follow even a semi-liberal course; (b) Find other groups to work with, although it will be a challenge to determine who these groups will be. I believe that the most promising demographic here is, oddly, senior citizens, especially the AARP, because the interests of this group are most threatened by the GOPs attack on social safety networks. Also, seniors as a group vote more than others, and donate and volunteer at much higher rates than others. Furthermore, this age group was quite anti-Obama in the past, and as such there is a lot of ground to be gained here.

Liberals may search for allies elsewhere, but without a new coalition, liberals are going to be much disappointed, although they may well continue to make some progress on the state level on cultural issues and above all — on the national level — on immigration issues. It is much too early to do victory laps, given the president’s natural tendencies to compromise in his dealings with an adamant conservative majority.

Read the entire article at the Huffington Post.