If you forced me to bet today, I would probably wager that Dubya will win the election in November, despite some interesting observations from Will Saletan at Slate.com suggesting that the president is more vulnerable than he seems to be. However, in his speech Thursday before the National Guard Association in Las Vegas, Democrat John Kerry began to hit some notes that just might give him a chance to make up some ground and perhaps even pass the incumbent.
As the New York Times reported it, "Mr. Kerry said Mr. Bush’s address to the Guard Association . . . had an unreal quality." Kerry then went on to say:
"He did not tell you that with each passing day, we’re seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings. He did not tell you that with each passing week, our enemies are getting bolder – that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists. He did not tell you that with each passing month, stability and security seem farther and farther away."
Especially considering that leaks from a classified National Intelligence Estimate that made the news yesterday offer a generally pessimistic assessment of how things are likely to go in the next year or so, and that the scrupulously establishment Center for Security and International Studies has just issued a fairly pessimistic assessment [.pdf] of how things are going now, this kind of talk should begin to resonate increasingly in the next few weeks. Whether Kerry can or will keep up the drumbeat enough to affect the way people in a few "battleground" states choose to vote is something I have no way of knowing.
Peacebuilding
I‘ll leave more detailed analysis of the horse race to others, however. My major purpose today is to acknowledge and discuss a possible ally in the larger effort to create a society that respects and works toward a more peaceful world. I talked yesterday with John Graham, who teaches in the Graduate School of Management at UC Irvine. Mr. Graham is the Democratic candidate running for Congress against Republican Chris Cox of Newport Beach, who is chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and the Republican Policy Committee.
Given the makeup of the district, Graham has about as much chance of winning as I have of getting next year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. But running gives him a chance to publicize his ideas about making peace a bit more possible and violence marginally less commonplace. They’re not the typical Democratic line, which in my view makes them all the more worthy of wider consideration. We need all the ways of thinking about promoting peace we can get.
The complaints Prof. Graham has about Chris Cox are generally those most people would have with a standard-issue Republican who as a member of party leadership sometimes has to go along with what other party leaders or the White House push. Chris Cox, with whom I have had a number of cordial conversations, is smarter than your average Republican and somewhat more principled in a conservative fashion, but he would admit that he sometimes has to trim his ideological sails to remain a player in Washington.
So Cox has voted for most military spending bills, even though, Prof. Graham argues, they generally contain useless systems (like more nuclear subs) and plenty of pork. Like most Washington politicians, he was hardly attuned to terrorism as a challenge before 9/11. One of his contributions to the debate before then was the 1999 Cox Report, which argued that mainland China was a growing military threat because of the way its military was sometimes clandestinely acquiring rocket technology from the U.S. (which it was, so far as I can tell). The report dovetailed nicely with one of the expressed concerns of neoconservatives then casting about for a proper enemy about which to be alarmed with the Soviet Union gone. You may remember that in addition to the occasional call to invade Iraq, the Weekly Standard was full of alarums about China in those days as well.
But Prof. Graham argued that China was not then a military threat to the United States or Taiwan, largely because of the increasing ties of trade and other kinds of exchanges (60,000 Chinese in American universities). As he put it in a paper he presented at Cambridge University in May 2003, "Despite the bully-pulpit background music blaring out of Beijing, Taipei, and Washington before September 11th the interdependence of trade kept the peace quite well. . . . All this trade makes war in that neighborhood simply impractical."
Trade Causes Peace
This illustrates the central insight John Graham is trying to promote – that trade is good for peace, perhaps even that trade causes peace. Remember, he teaches business management, not political science or economics or history. He acknowledges that anti-globalist activists might disagree, but he argues that the evidence supporting his way of looking at things is simply too strong to be dismissed or ignored.
He’s hardly the first to make the case. The 19th century French economist and politician Frederic Bastiat famously argued that "where goods do not cross borders, armies will." And Graham quotes the famous 19th-century English laissez-faire pamphleteer Richard Cobden: "I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe, drawing men together, thrusting aside this antagonism of race, creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace."
It’s worth remembering that 19th-century liberals were sure an era of peace and brotherhood was about to dawn, and the 20th century turned out to be one of the bloodiest and most bellicose in world history. Expanding trade does not necessarily make peace inevitable, especially given the capacity of politicians and ambitious dynasts to stir up hatreds and hostilities to promote wars that do end up benefiting a select few and the State itself as an institution. Certainly there have been and are merchants of death and war profiteers who haul in the money during most wars.
However, as Kevin Phillips explains without necessarily understanding the implications in his surprisingly good new book, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, it was not free trade but crony capitalism and merchants of munitions with access to government contracts that promoted war and built sometimes obscene fortunes in the 20th century. The great-grandfather, Samuel Bush, made a decent fortune in steel castings for railroads, but the Bushes became a family to be reckoned with in a dynastic sort of way when they became involved in politics, energy and intelligence.
Graham quotes a paper by economist Solomon Polachek in a 1997 issue of the Review of International Economics, "Why Democracies Cooperate More and Fight Less: The Relationship Between International Trade and Cooperation." Polachek concludes, after sifting through a great deal of empirical data, "The results show that the fundamental factor in causing bilateral cooperation is trade. Countries seek to protect wealth gained through international trade, therefore trading partners are less combative than nontrading nations." Polachek also reviews a good deal of literature in political science that is at least consistent with the idea that trade brings about or is at least conducive to peace.
Ending Embargoes
Graham also has built a systematic critique of trade embargoes, the instrument preferred by politicians of both parties as a way of looking and sounding tough on countries of whom one disapproves but isn’t yet ready to go to war with. His argument, illustrated by history that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s 1807 trade embargoes against England and France, is that they don’t bring about the desired behavior and are more likely to end in war than in compliance. Trade is more effective when used as a carrot rather than as a stick.
"Consider the track record of trade sanctions in this last century," Graham writes. "In 1940 the U.S. told the Japanese to get out of China – the ensuing embargo of gasoline and scrap metal led directly to the aforementioned Pearl Harbor attack. Since 1948 Arab countries have boycotted Israel. Given that countries trade most with their closest neighbors, you have to wonder how much this lack of trade has promoted the continuing conflict in the area. Israel is still there. In 1959 Castro took over Cuba. For 40 years the U.S. has boycotted sugar and cigars, and Castro is still there. OPEC’s 1973 oil flow slowdown was intended to get America to stop supporting Israel. However, the dollars still flow fast to Israel and now Egypt as well."
Graham might concede that trade sanctions hastened the demise of apartheid in South Africa, but for reasons I might well explain in a future column, I dissent from that conventional wisdom, and even suspect there’s a case that sanctions delayed the end of apartheid. And we saw in the 1990s how the sanctions against Iraq, which killed thousands of innocent Iraqi children, made Saddam want to be cooperative with the UN, the U.S. and Britain. Like most embargoes, those (along with the ability to manipulate the Oil for Food program) reinforced the power of the dictatorial regime we were supposed to be "punishing" and only punished the people groaning under his yoke with whom the creators of embargoes claimed to be sympathizing.
Theory and Practice
John Graham has done more than run for office to put his ideas about smart ways to promote peace into practice. He has helped to organize a Citizen Peacebuilding Program at UC Irvine. It not only does continuing research on "best practices" in peacebuilding, but does speaker programs and concrete projects.
Right now, the program has an active collaboration going between faculty and students at UC Irvine and at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, with the idea of helping to make Northern Ireland a safer place now that there is at least a semblance of peace there. The idea is to send 30 UC Irvine MBA students to Northern Ireland to meet with Ulster students and some businesses in Northern Ireland and help them develop business plans. Then University of Ulster students and representatives of Northern Irish businesses would come to California to meet with potential investors and/or donors.
The Citizen Peacebuilding Program is having a conference Saturday, Oct. 9 at UC Irvine, to describe its program and discuss other areas where building international business relationships could help to reduce conflict and promote peace. Chris Hedges of the New York Times will be one of the speakers. If you’re interested in attending, you can reach Prof. Graham at jgraham@uci.edu.
Those of us who despise war and hope for peace may have allies we didn’t know about, and it would behoove us to make contact with them and work together if possible. Those who oppose the current war come from a variety of ideological persuasions, and some of us disagree about almost every other political and/or social issue. But trying to reduce the incidence of war strikes me as so important that we should be willing to make some efforts on all sides to cooperate when we can and reserve the right to disagree once we have actually done a thing or two to prevent or reduce some conflict.
