East-West Expansion Made the United States a Great Power. By Robert Kaplan.

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, by Emanuel Leutze, 1862.  A classic allegory of Jacksonian America and one of the most ambitious statements of Jacksonian nationalism and empire building in the nineteenth century.  Architect of the Capitol.

Homage to the Lower 48. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, July 11, 2013.

Kaplan:

A half-century ago, I was a little boy on a trip with my parents from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio, to visit relatives. We crossed Pennsylvania on the recently completed Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pennsylvania from the New Jersey border to the Ohio border was vast, with the magnificent Alleghany range, a subset of the Appalachians, in the broad middle of the state, heralded by the Blue Mountain tunnel. The interstate highway system built under President Dwight Eisenhower was gleaming and exotic back then, with lovely rest stops with real restaurants where you were waited on at tables – not the slummy fast-food joints that disgrace rest stops today.

 

At one rest stop I picked up a collection of travel articles, written in easy Reader’s Digest style, suited for my age. There was a story about a family driving west and stopping for breakfast somewhere in Nebraska, anticipating the sight of the Rocky Mountains where they were headed. “You have to earn the Rockies,” the father said, “by driving through the flat Midwest.” Earn the Rockies is a phrase that has stayed with me my whole life: It sums up America’s continental geography – and by inference, why America is a world power. It summed up my yearning to travel and see mountains even higher than the Appalachians in Pennsylvania. Finally in 1970, when I was 18, I hitchhiked across America from New York to Oregon and spent a summer roaming the Rocky Mountains.

 

When my family made that trip a half-century ago, Alaska and Hawaii were new states admitted to the union only the year before. The United States now reached halfway across the Pacific, and yet in 1960 it still thought of itself as a continental nation, stretching from sea to shining sea. Nevertheless, if you were a Hawaiian, you thought of the continental United States as “the mainland.” And if you were an Alaskan, it was “the lower 48.” The term lower 48 always rang a bell for me, signifying as it did the contiguous 48 states that completed the temperate zone of North America between Canada and Mexico. Arizona was the 48th state, admitted to the union only in 1912. Until then, and throughout the 19th century, ever since the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, American presidents administered the West or parts of it as imperial overlords: governing places as territories that were not as yet states.

 

Indeed, the entire operating myth of American nationhood has had an east-to-west orientation. America’s continental geography was perfectly appointed for gradual westering settlement. The original 13 colonies huddled around many natural, deep-water Atlantic harbors, with the Appalachians as a western boundary. Passes through the Appalachians enabled the pioneers to enter the Midwest, where a flat panel of rich farmland – and the back-breaking labor required for it to bear crops, and to clear the forests on it – ground down the various North European immigrant communities into a distinctive American culture. By the time the water-starved Great Plains and the Rockies beckoned forth another generation of settlers, the Transcontinental Railroad was at hand to complete the story of nation-building unto the Pacific.

 

Of course, the Rockies emblemized this whole saga: their sheer beauty and majesty helped make Americans feel that they were a special people, ordained to do great things; the utter height of these mountains provided settlers with the supreme logistical challenge. The Rockies are a signal example of how a physical environment can mold a people's character.

 

In fact, had the United States been settled from west to east, from California directly into the water-starved tableland of Nevada and Arizona, it is possible that the country would have begun as an oligarchy or some such authoritarian regime, in order to strictly administer water rights. This is partly the background to such great books of sea to shining sea nationhood as Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert (1986). In a larger sense, the story of earning the Rockies is chronicled in such epics as Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains (1931) and Bernard DeVoto’s lyrical trilogy of westward expansion, The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri (1947) and The Course of Empire (1952). DeVoto wrote those books during World War II and some of the darkest days of the Cold War. Yet, by concentrating on the Rocky Mountains and all that they represented, he told Americans why they were great. DeVoto’s prose, like the music of Stephen Foster – of which DeVoto writes about so eloquently – catches at dead center the very energy of Manifest Destiny.

 

DeVoto, repeating Henry David Thoreau’s dictum, advised Americans that, metaphorically, they “must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.” DeVoto never left North America his whole life. He was not an isolationist but a geopolitical thinker who understood the continental basis of American power.

 

That continental basis is subtly shifting. I may be of the last generation that sees the United States in terms of its east-to-west historic geography of Manifest Destiny. Americans today do not take horses or trains, drive, ride buses or hitchhike across the continent. They fly. Our airports have been the new bus stations. Americans no longer experience the exhilaration of seeing the front range of the Rockies after crossing the flat prairie and Great Plains. They experience much less the regional diversity of the United States, as McDonald’s and Starbucks deface the urban landscape. Our towns and small cities with their refreshing provincial aura have been transformed into vast, suburban conurbations, each integrally connected to the global economy. Cosmopolitanism is no longer restricted to the coasts. That is a good thing, even as something special has been lost.

 

At the same time, our southern border beckons more importantly than ever. The combined populations of Mexico and Central America have risen to half that of the United States and will go higher, as the average person south of the border is almost a decade younger than the average American. While Mexican drug cartels partly dominate substantial territory in northern Mexico, Mexico may be on its way to becoming one of the world's top 10 economies, with plans by some in Mexico City to connect more ports on the Atlantic and Pacific with more efficient road and rail networks. Meanwhile, the widening of the Panama Canal within the next two years may put a new economic emphasis on the Greater Caribbean, from America’s Gulf Coast to northern South America. Latin history is certainly moving north, as the destiny of North America goes from being east-to-west to north-to-south.

 

The east-west, sea to shining sea world of my childhood and youth was a world of the Industrial Age nation-state, with all of its chill-up-your-spine myths. The north-south world will be one of globalization, as the United States dissolves into a larger planetary geography, where its epic pioneering past will be relevant only to the degree it helps America compete economically.

 

The lower 48 made Americans what they are – a people of the frontier, forever seeking to earn the Rockies. The degree to which Americans can spiritually hold on to that geography will help them cross the new frontiers ahead.

What Morsi’s Fall Means for Hamas. By Jonathan Schanzer.

What Morsy’s Fall Means for Hamas. By Jonathan Schanzer. Global Public Square. CNN, July 11, 2013.

Israel Is the Big Winner in the Arab Spring. By Walter Russell Mead.

And the Biggest Winner in the Arab Spring Is . . . Israel. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 12, 2013.

Mead:

Israel plans to restructure its military with an eye on new threats and fading risks from neighbors like Syria and Egypt, the WSJ reports:

Israel’s military plans to downsize its conventional firepower such as tanks and artillery to focus on countering threats from guerrilla warfare and to boost its technological prowess, in a recognition that the Middle East turmoil has virtually halted the ability of neighbors to invade for years to come. . . .

 

The army plans to cut thousands of career officers, shut ground-force units, eliminate air-force squadrons, and decommission naval ships over a period of five years, said an Israeli army spokesman who declined to provide more details….

 

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said in public remarks that the army plans to be less dependent on heavy armaments. “In another few years we will see a different” Israel Defense Forces, he said. “Wars of military versus military—in the format we last met 40 years ago, in the Yom Kippur War—are becoming less and less relevant.”

This “sea change” will increase Israel’s qualitative superiority. In the 21st century more than ever before, technology is becoming the most important element of military power, not how many 18 year olds can you deploy. That’s a big advantage for high-tech, low-population countries like Israel.

 

Here’s a related thought: Secretary Kerry’s peace mission to Israel and Palestine is in part based on the calculation that uncertainty and concerns about the consequences of the Arab Spring for regional security (especially the consequences of a more active Hezbollah) make Israel more amenable to US pressure and suggestions. But this WSJ piece suggests a different calculation: Israel’s defense establishment may actually feel that the effective destruction of the Syrian Army, the internal struggles in Iraq, and the preoccupation with domestic order in Egypt have neutralized the military power of Israel’s neighbors.

 

If so, Kerry may find it harder to trade US reassurances for Israeli concessions than he expected.

A Peace Process on Hold. By Michael Gerson.

A Peace Process on Hold. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, July 12, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Gerson:

The Green Line — across which generations of Israelis and Palestinians have fought and haggled — was given its name because U.N. mediator Ralph Bunche used a green pencil to draw the cease-fire boundary in 1949. In the Middle East, arbitrary markings can assume the geographic seriousness of mountain ranges.

 

The last Israeli prime minister to try drawing outside the lines was Ehud Olmert, who proposed a map in 2008 giving Palestinians control over 94 percent of the occupied territories and half of Jerusalem, along with a plan for joint custodianship of the holy places. “I thought it may bring an end to my political career,” Olmert told me, “but I was determined to do it.” Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed that another Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had been assassinated for less.

 

Olmert lived; the peace process didn’t. Olmert’s Palestinian negotiating partner, Mahmoud Abbas, never got to “yes.”

 

Now the Obama administration — or at least Secretary of State John Kerry — is trying to restart peace talks. So far, this has involved a process to produce a formulation that would allow both sides to sit at the same table. If there is a more substantive policy outcome in the works, it has been effectively hidden from everyone but Kerry.

 

Israelis of various political stripes admire Kerry’s dedication but wonder about this timing. Recent Israeli elections were almost exclusively focused on nation-building at home. Israel is in the midst of a tech-led economic boom. Tel Aviv is a cross between Miami Beach and Palo Alto — and feels very distant (though it isn’t by miles) from Gaza and the West Bank.

 

Israel is also protecting its “villa in the jungle” (former prime minister Ehud Barak’s description) more effectively than most thought possible. The vast security wall is ugly but effective. The Iron Dome and other missile defense systems have proved their worth. The result is the best security situation in Israel’s history. This is a tribute to Israel’s extraordinary talent for improvisation. But it has encouraged an Iron Dome mentality, in which every national problem appears to have a technical solution. Many Israelis seem content to manage conflict rather than resolve it through negotiations.

 

The arguments for Israel to define its borders through a two-state settlement remain strong. “Given the history and heritage of the Jewish people,” Olmert says, “we can’t occupy forever 3 or 4 or 5 million people without equal rights.” An agreement, he argues, would increase Israeli legitimacy, open global markets and make a Jewish state more demographically sustainable.

 

But these arguments seem abstract and long-term compared with the pleasures of life in the villa. The majority of Israelis vaguely support a two-state solution, but there is no critical mass of political support for concessions in that cause. And Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, doesn’t seem inclined to follow the Olmert model of leadership and unexpected generosity from a position of Israeli strength.

 

On the Palestinian side, the need for a two-state solution is acute because the current quasi-state, the Palestinian Authority (PA), is a shell, dependent on outside donations to function. (The day before I visited Ramallah, the Palestinian administrative center, gas stations began denying PA security vehicles fuel for lack of payment.) Given Israeli settlement activity and general Palestinian distrust for Netanyahu, confidence in a negotiated solution is low. But the alternative that is gaining some traction among some Palestinian leaders — a unilateral effort to gain recognition from the United Nations — would cause both the United States and Israel to (once again) cut the flow of outside donations to the PA, risking its total collapse.

 

Several Palestinian leaders have sufficient strength to undermine each other. The question is whether any Palestinian leader is strong enough to deliver on a peace agreement. Hamas, meanwhile, seems content to retain control of Gaza and hold out for a return to Israel’s 1948 borders — meaning no Israel at all. And surrounding Arab nations, which might be expected to lend a hand in the peace process, are either distracted by regional chaos or engulfed in it.

 

The result is the Middle East at its most frustrating. Majorities of Israelis and Palestinians support a two-state solution. The broad parameters of a deal have been clear since the Clinton administration (though the details are devil-filled). The American secretary of state is energetically on the job. But little is likely to change.

Why Conservatives Must Master the Art of Narrative. By Rod Dreher.

Story Lines, Not Party Lines. By Rod Dreher. The American Conservative, July 10, 2013.

Why conservatives must master the narrative art.

What Impedes Conservative Efforts to Shape the Culture? By Jim Geraghty. National Review Online, July 12, 2013.

Egypt’s Missing Precondition. By Iain Murray.

Egypt’s Missing Precondition. By Iain Murray. The American Spectator, July 12, 2013.

Murray:

It is commonplace today to regard liberty and democracy as inextricably correlated — if you have one, you must have the other. Yet as Egypt and other failed democracies are showing, that is not the case. Indeed, we are rediscovering some fundamental truths that the American Founders knew — that liberty is an essential precondition for sustainable democracy and that there is more to democracy than majority rule.

 

We often forget that the Arab Spring was brought about not by an unquenchable thirst for democracy, but by restraints on trade. The self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in front of the Tunisian parliament that set off the Arab Spring was caused not by a desire for a vote in who should rule that country, but because of the repeated confiscation of his wares by local police, culminating in the confiscation of his scales. His last words were, “How is a man to make a living?”

 

As Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network notes, this basic plea for human dignity reverberated around the Arab world. The Egyptian wing of the protests blew up particularly over police brutality.

A little over two years on, the autocratic Hosni Mubarak has been overthrown, but the solution of “democracy” appears to have solved none of Egypt’s problems. Farida Makar of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies told Deutsche Welle in February, “[T]orture still happens in police stations… excessive violence is still used against demonstrators and… everything is decided according to a security mentality.”

 

Now many are asking, “What went wrong?” A more apt query is, “What hasn’t gone on?” In the case of Egypt, plenty.

Magna Carta, the foundation of English rights, tackled these problems long before democracy was established in England. In 1215, King John promised that if a man were to be fined, the tools of his trade would not be taken away. He also promised not to imprison anyone save by the judgment of 12 of his peers. These two provisions laid the foundation for the law’s respect of the dignity of England’s common man — what we now call the “institutions of liberty.”

 

Other institutions of liberty of liberty followed, some springing from Magna Carta, others won by a distinctly undemocratic Parliament. These included the rule of law, an independent judiciary, enforceable contracts, free markets, property rights, and many others.

 

The recognition of these institutions was essential in the growth of England’s economy. A similar phenomenon occurred in Holland, and these two countries led the way in the creation of a modern economy based around what economic historian Deirdre McCluskey calls “bourgeois dignity.”

 

These are the institutions that the American Founders inherited. Indeed, the American Revolution was fought not to remake society, but to preserve these rights from a King who seemed determined to abrogate them. One of the complaints articulated in the Declaration of Independence was a condemnation of arbitrary bureaucracy: “He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.” In other words, “How is a man to make a living?”

 

The Founders, however, were wary of democracy. In Federalist Number 10, Alexander Hamilton warned against it:

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

This phenomenon, which the great classical liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of the majority,” is what has been at issue in Egypt. A new, democratically elected government without a foundation in the institutions of liberty showed no inclination to obtain or rule according to them.

 

Democracy as we know it took centuries to establish not only in Britain, but also in the relatively young United States, where such illiberal institutions as slavery and the denial of the vote to the unpropertied and women took a long time to overcome. However, it was the institutions of liberty that provided the foundation on which democracy and equal rights for all could be built.

 

Egypt has underlined this lesson. It has shown us one undeniable truth: The institutions of liberty are more important than the trappings of democracy.

Two Males, No Men. By Daniel J. Flynn.

Two Males, No Men. By Daniel J. Flynn. The American Spectator, July 12, 2013.

Zimmerman, Trayvon, and Manliness. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 12, 2013.

Flynn:

They don’t make men like they used to. One can consult a Danish study that shows plummeting testosterone levels for scientific confirmation of this. Or, one could more easily turn on any cable news network’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Zimmerman-Martin case, a tragedy involving two males fumbling in the dark on how to be men.

 

Whatever the protagonists may be guilty of they are surely innocent of being men. The six female jurors, not tasked to reach a verdict on the manhood of the central players, nevertheless know the truth of this more than other trial observers. The Venusians know the Martians better than they know themselves. And vice versa — what do they know of x chromosomes who only x chromosomes know?

 

On the maturity count, Trayvon Martin might reasonably plead not guilty by reason of chronology. Seventeen-year-old boys quite often act like, in the vernacular of Zimmerman, “f—-ing punks.” Most grow out of it, but Mr. Martin unfortunately will not get that chance. Rarely, in spite of their exaggerated masculine posturing, do teenage boys behave as mature males.

 

Martin’s Twitter feed reads as a parody of poor grammar and an even more impoverished vocabulary. There, he’s a “No Limit N-gga,” girls he knows are “bitches” and “hoes,” and the primary extracurricular activity he immerses himself in is marijuana. The gold-teeth smile, the tattoos, the ten-day suspension from school, and all the rest appear as pathetic attempts to assert his virility. Yet, as his supporters point out, Trayvon also liked Skittles and Chuck E. Cheese’s. The presentation that Trayvon affected and the Trayvon that his supporters present are, like so many making the journey from adolescence to adulthood, at war internally.

 

George Zimmerman, in contrast, projects a courtroom image of a meek pudgeball who wouldn’t (couldn’t?) hurt a fly — and not in a Norman Bates way. Perhaps this is the effect that his lawyers intended. But it jibes with what we know. According to one unidentified witness, Zimmerman endured a domineering mother’s frequent beatings and a docile father who failed to stick up for his kids. His mixed-martial arts instructor described him as “physically soft,” a student who lacked athleticism and “didn’t know how to really effectively punch.”

 

One wonders if the cage-fighting classes, the pursuit of a career in law enforcement, and a firearm kept ready to fire were Zimmerman’s ways of discovering his elusive manhood in a manner akin to Trayvon’s tattoos, coarse language, and demonstrative drug use. With the teenager sans a father in the home to serve as guide, and the neighborhood-watch captain growing up watching the cowed captain of his home, the pair’s past altered their future as much as anything else did.

 

Zimmerman’s screams and Trayvon slamming Zimmerman’s head into the concrete weren’t the acts of men. A man is neither a woman nor an animal. The proper response to an assault by a 158-pound teenager isn’t to scream for help or grab for a gun. It is to punch back or better yet subdue and issue a spanking. And a sucker punch, the repeated hitting of a downed opponent, and the bashing of a skull against the concrete doesn’t pass muster with the Marquess of Queensberry. Perhaps the “No Holds Barred Fighting” dojo that Zimmerman had signed up for would approve.

 

Their households lacked strong male role models; their society, even more so. Four in ten American kids enter the world without their father married to their mother. When schoolboys begin to exhibit traits natural to their sex, the energetic fellows earn the wrath of detention and Ritalin. Any game that highlights contact — from dodgeball to football — comes under attack. Primetime television celebrates the fop and makes a buffoon out of fathers (see Simpson, Homer; Everybody Loves, Raymond). Jobs relying on the physical characteristics favored in males have been outsourced to robots and foreigners. When a pundit asked “Are Men Necessary?” a few years back it reflected the scarcity rather than the superfluity of the genuine article.

 

Civilizing men out of existence has come at great cost to civilization. Instead of men, we get feminine imitations lacking beauty. We get lost boys compensating by becoming barbarians. We get Sanford, Florida, February 26, 2012.

The Five Republican Parties. By Norm Ornstein.

There’s No Republican Party—There Are 5 of Them. By Norm Ornstein. The Atlantic, July 11, 2013.

The Muslim Brotherhood After Morsi. By Carrie Rosefsky Wickham.

The Muslim Brotherhood After Morsi. By Carrie Rosefsky Wickham. Foreign Affairs, July 11, 2013.

Can the Brothers reboot?



Members of the Muslim Brotherhood sit on a barrier they erected near the Rabaa Adawiya Square, July 11, 2013. (Amr Abdallah Dalsh / Courtesy Reuters.)



Honor and Compromise in Middle East Leadership. By Harold Rhode.

Honor and Compromise in Middle East Leadership. By Harold Rhode. Gatestone Institute, July 10, 2013.

Rhode:

Why the U.S. administration believes it can persuade Mahmoud Abbas to sign an agreement guaranteeing Israel’s right to exist is astonishing. It is pointless for Western leaders to provide Middle Eastern leaders with incentives to reach compromises where, in Western eyes, all sides win, but in Middle Eastern eyes, their side loses. There, the winner takes all and the loser loses all.

 

Why couldn’t Egypt’s deposed President Morsi admit mistakes? Why couldn’t he “compromise” with the military and stay in power? And what can one learn from Morsi’s behavior about the concept of leadership in the Middle East?

 

In the Middle East, leaders almost never admit that they made mistakes: doing so would bring shame (in Arabic/Turkish/ and Persian – ‘Ayib/Ayyip/Ayb) on them. Shame in the Middle East is about what others say about you – not what you think of yourself. While to some extent this is true in Western culture, in general Westerners are more susceptible to feelings of guilt, rather than shame. The Western concept of compromise – each side conceding certain points to the other side in order to come to an agreement – does not exist in the Middle East. What is paramount is preserving one’s honor (in Arabic: sharaf or karama). People will go to any lengths to avoid shame; they are prepared to go to jail, risk death, and even kill family members (usually females) to uphold what they perceive as their honor and that of their family. The consequences of dishonor are always permanent and always collective, often extending to the entire family and even the entire clan.

 

This battle to avoid shame at all costs indicates why Morsi, Erdoğan, Saddam, Assad, Arafat, and Abu Mazen – when they either have painted themselves into a corner – or have been painted into one – can never back down.

 

If our policy-makers could understand this cultural imperative, they might better be able to understand why we constantly fail to achieve our policy goals, and how better to achieve them.

 

* * *

 

One of the reasons that leadership in the Middle East is so different from leadership in the West, is that in Western democracies, political parties are usually based on ideas or world views; in the Middle East, however, political parties are formed around strong leaders – usually strong men (and occasionally women), whose supporters are either extended family members or supplicants of some sort.

 

Westerners often succumb to “mirror-imaging” – assuming that “all people are alike, so whatever they say resembles what we say” – and assume that, as in the West, names of political parties in the Middle East reflect some sort of ideology. In reality, the ideologies for which parties supposedly stand are apparently mostly nothing more than words that the leader presumably hopes will enable him to justify his control over his people. Prime Minister Erdoğan and his clique, for example, belong to the AKP Party – Turkish initials for the “Justice and Development Party,” a name he may have chosen because it sounded positive, but which has little, if anything, to do with Erdoğan's subsequent actions: re-Islamizing the Turkish government and Turkish society. Egypt’s deposed President Morsi’s political party, the “Freedom and Justice Party,” also seems to have a name chosen simply because it sounded good. How can anyone oppose “freedom” and “justice?” But millions of Egyptians, as we are now witnessing, evidently thought it insufficiently concerned with either freedom or justice.

 

It is the leaders who, in the Middle East, grant protection and even citizenship at will to foreigners who do them favors, and they can take away that citizenship at will. Syria’s previous dictator Hafez Assad, for instance, took away Syrian citizenship from countless Syrian Kurds whom he decided opposed him. Western ideas of citizenship – people either born in a certain country or fulfill certain legal requirements to be able to belong to it – are mostly alien to the Middle East, and are among the reasons that, for instance, many Arabs who have lived in Kuwait for generations do not have Kuwaiti citizenship: they lack the appropriate connections with the leaders in the Kuwaiti government. Lebanese and Palestinian individuals, however, who have performed desired services for the Kuwaiti or Saudi rulers are often given citizenship as a reward. They remain, nonetheless, totally dependent on these rulers, who can and often do revoke those citizenships, if they think anyone is running afoul of them.

 

* * *

 

Morsi was actually doomed from the start. He was faced with an impossible economic situation: an Egypt totally dependent on foreign subsidies, and having to import 55% of its food and much of its fuel. The military, who have in some way been ruling Egypt for almost 5,000 years, understood that if they had they taken over, they would have been blamed for Egypt’s economic and political failures during the past year and a half. Instead, they allowed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood [MB] to rule and thereby take the blame for Egypt’s impossible situation. Moreover, the Egyptian people also saw for themselves that the MB’s view of the world could not work. The organization's motto, “Islam is the Solution,” proved wanting, to say the least – exactly as the military assumed would happen.

 

The politically sophisticated military knew that Morsi and his MB could not solve Egypt’s problems. So the military engineered a “two-for-one” deal: The MB, finally in power, was shamed, and the military would avoid being blamed. As Morsi must avoid shame, he cannot compromise with the military, so his political career is probably over. The same is true for the MB – at least for now, even though its many supporters cannot be expected to accept defeat without a serious fight. The question is really how the military will react to the MB trying to stay in power? For now, it looks as if the military has the will to prevent the MB and Morsi from returning to power. Qatar, as part of its traditional anti-Saudi stance, also strongly backs the MB – as does the current Turkish government. Both Qatar and the current Turkish government are the big losers here, because the events of the past few days in Egypt demonstrate that the traditional Egyptian-Saudi (and anti-Qatar) alliance has re-emerged.

 

Whatever happens in Egypt, we should be careful not to see the defeat of the MB as a vote against all Islamists. Egypt’s Salafists are also Islamists but at the same time are anti-MB, and have, until yesterday, have backed the military, because the Salafists and the military are both backed by Saudi Arabia – most definitely not a force for democracy, freedom, and tolerance for non-Sunni Muslims – or any other non-Muslims, for that matter – in the Middle East.

 

* * *

 

Other Middle Eastern leaders find or have found themselves in the same position as Morsi. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for instance, faced with American orders, also could not back down either during the Kuwait war or the US liberation of Iraq. Unable, culturally, to compromise, Saddam had no choice other than to back himself into a corner and suffer defeat. An honorable defeat evidently seemed preferable to a dishonorable “success” – one in which Saddam’s honor might have appeared, to his citizens and fellow Arabs and Muslims, compromised.

 

Turkey: Lately, large numbers of Turkish citizens throughout the nation have been demonstrating against Erdoğan. Erdoğan, however, a classic Middle Eastern leader, cannot be seen to be compromising with the protestors, and thereby be seen as shamed. We see him and his people therefore belittling the demonstrators, and blaming others – most notably, foreign Jews – for his predicament. Of course it is not clear who will win this standoff; one outcome might be that his AKP party, which rules the country with an iron fist, might split into various factions, and Erdoğan fall from power. Potential rivals in his party are watching events like hawks, wondering when and how they might “move in for the kill.”

 

The Palestinians: Both Arafat and Abu Mazen, both of whom have led the Palestinian people, cannot sign any agreement with Israel to end the Israel-Palestinian conflict and recognize Israel as a Jewish state. When, at Camp David in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Arafat 97% of everything said he wanted, Arafat jumped up and said that he could not sign such an agreement: he “didn't want to have tea with Sadat” – a reference to the Egyptian leader who had been assassinated at least partially for having signed an agreement with Israel. Arafat knew that had he signed, he would have been regarded as having backed down from a confrontation and therefore shamed; been considered a traitor by his people, and most likely killed.

 

U.S. President Clinton, in a display of how little he really understood about leadership and the values of the Middle East, looked on at Arafat's reaction in amazement. But no compromise would have been possible. Egypt, during its negotiations with Israel for the peace treaty signed in 1981, held out for 100% of what it asked for – and got it. Had Arafat gotten 100% of what we wanted, Israel would no longer exist.

 

The same holds true for the Palestinian Authority’s current leader, Abu Mazen, to whom, later, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert offered an even better deal than had been offered to Arafat. Condolezza Rice, like President Clinton, also look on in amazement at Mahmoud Abbas’s reaction. (For more on Rice’s views on Abbas, see her book No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington)

 

The same condition continues to hold true today. Why Secretary of State Kerry and the Obama administration believe they can persuade Abbas sign an agreement guaranteeing Israel’s right to exist in any form is astonishing. These leaders can lead only so long as they are not perceived as a shamed sell-out and traitor.

 

It is pointless, therefore, for Western and Israeli political leaders to try to provide Middle Eastern leaders with incentives to reach compromises where, in Western eyes all sides win, but in Middle Eastern eyes – to their fellow Arabs and Muslims – their side loses. Sadly, in the Middle East, there are only win-lose/lose-win resolutions – with the winner talking all and the loser losing all. One can hope there might in the future be an Islamic reformation to overturn this cultural demand, but so long as the Islamic Middle East does not truly believe it needs to change, a shift that deeply revolutionary is highly unlikely.

Getting the Muslim Brotherhood Wrong. By Michael J. Totten.

Getting the Muslim Brotherhood Wrong. By Michael J. Totten. World Affairs, July 11, 2013.

Totten:

Everybody got the Muslim Brotherhood wrong, including me, and starting with the Egyptian people themselves.

 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi won Egypt’s first free and fair election for its head of state. Picking him seemed like a good idea at the time to the typical Egyptian voter, but clearly it wasn’t since Egypt just vomited him and his party up into everyone’s lap.

 

I figured that would happen eventually, but I’m still astonished that it happened so quickly.

 

Genuine political liberals are thin on the ground in Egypt, but they do exist. I know several. Some are my friends. Most of them were wrong about the Brotherhood, too. They were right, of course, when they warned the rest of us that the Brothers would transform Egypt into a theocratic dictatorship, but they were wrong when they estimated how much support the Brotherhood had. Hardly any expected the Islamists to win most of the votes, though that’s exactly what happened.

 

American liberals made a different mistake. Despite warnings from secular Egyptians and former Islamists, the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate and democratic party became an article of faith here in the States, particularly among academics and journalists who should have known better. Even James Clapper—who, as the Director of National Intelligence, really should have known better—said the Muslim Brotherhood is “a largely secular organization.” Surely that ranks among the dumbest things ever said about the organization in all of its 85 years.

 

Look: the Muslim Brotherhood is not a mysterious new group that no one knows anything about. It was founded in 1928, for crying out loud, and its ideology has been documented exhaustively. Not for even five minutes has it been a democratic or moderate party. It has been struggling for theocracy since the day it was born, sometimes peaceably and sometimes by force. Every Sunni Islamist terrorist organization in the region is a spin-off of the Brotherhood or a spin-off of one of its spin-offs.

 

Western liberals should have spent a lot more time listening to their Egyptian counterparts and no time at all swallowing the lies of faith-based gangsters with a Pharaonic complex. This whole business quite frankly baffles me. An American Christian equivalent of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood would be denounced as fascist by every Western-born liberal on earth. We’d hear no end of comparisons to the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, General Franco’s Falangists, and the Crusades. And yet so many Westerners proved incapable of applying the same political analytical skills to Egypt that they use every day in the US and Europe. I’ll leave it to them to explain how that happened once they figure it out.

 

American conservatives always understood that the Muslim Brotherhood was bad news. Many also seemed to sense instinctively that the Muslim Brotherhood would win the election in Egypt. They were right on both counts.

 

But then the narrative among some parts of the American right went off the rails. Many argued that radical Islamists were bound to triumph everywhere in the Middle East since they had just triumphed in Egypt, as if nearly everyone who self-identifies as a Muslim yearns for political Islam as a matter of course. This point of view regularly appears in my comments section.

 

It didn’t seem to register that non-Islamists and anti-Islamists frequently do well in elections in Muslim countries, even in Arab countries and even in the wake of the Arab Spring. Tunisia’s Islamist party Ennahda won less than fifty percent of the vote and was forced into a coalition government with secular parties that block it routinely. Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated party lost big. In Lebanon, secular parties have won most of the votes since the nation’s founding, and, except for the Israelis, the Lebanese have held more elections in the region than anyone else.

 

More recently, the citizens of Mali cheered the French as liberators when they invaded and routed Al Qaeda in the north. Mali, by the way, is not even close to being a largely atheist nation like the nominally Muslim countries of the former communist bloc.

 

Islamist victories happen sometimes, but they aren’t inevitable. Karl Marx cobbled together psuedo-scientific arguments for why socialism was destined to triumph over capitalism. He claimed history was teleological, that its endpoint could be delayed but not forever resisted, but that’s not how it worked out for communism, nor is it working that way for radical Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood slogan “Islam is the solution” is but one point of view among many. Sometimes its adherents win and sometimes they lose, just like the proponents of ideas everywhere else.

 

I got a few things wrong, too. Like Egypt’s liberals and America’s conservatives, I understood all along that the Muslim Brotherhood was theocratic and authoritarian. But I did not think they would win. I knew they’d do well—Egypt is the most Islamicized place I’ve ever been, after all—but I assumed they’d have a hard time breaking fifty percent.

 

Not only did the Muslim Brotherhood win, a huge percentage of Egyptians who voted against them went for the Salafists, the ideological brethren of Osama bin Laden. Egypt turned out to be even more politically Islamicized than I realized, and I knew it was bad.

 

Yet in the long sweep of Egyptian history, it lasted about as long as a hiccup.

 

I think it’s safe to say everyone, regardless of their political orientation and what they got right and wrong a year ago, was surprised by how quickly Egypt rejected the Brotherhood. The United States government has sound reasons for not describing what happened as a military coup, but that’s what it was. The rest of us shouldn’t kid ourselves. Yet it’s clear that the coup was a popular one. Morsi ended up more hated than Hosni Mubarak, and he achieved that dubious honor in one year instead of in thirty.

 

That ought to make American liberals rethink the notion that the Brotherhood is democratic and moderate. And it ought to show American conservatives that Muslims are perfectly capable of rejecting political Islam whether or not they’re secular Jeffersonian democrats. The Muslim Brotherhood might recover somewhat if the next government fails as badly as Morsi’s, but then again it might not.

 

No one can predict the future anywhere in the world. It’s even harder in the Middle East than in other places. History doesn’t move in straight lines over there. Sometimes it goes in circles. Other times it veers off in wild directions. Keen observers can figure out what’s happening now, but when it comes to the future, nobody really knows anything.

Defend Hannah Arendt, Demonize the Tea Party. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Defend Arendt, Demonize the Tea Party. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 10, 2013.

Egypt’s Deep State Dilemma. By Walter Russell Mead.

Egypt’s Deep State Dilemma. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 11, 2013.

Mead:

With political frustration running high during the holy month of Ramadan, the situation in Egypt still looks more like a gathering storm than any kind of transition to democracy. Muslim Brotherhood politicians are again being accused by the army of deliberately inciting violence, and there are reports that members of Egypt’s Christian minority, many of whom vocally supported the ouster of Morsi, are being attacked and lynched by enraged Islamist mobs. A very potent and poisonous brew is simmering on the banks of the Nile.

 

Yet an article in today’s NY Times seems to suggest that, despite it all, a kind of normalcy is returning to Egypt:

The apparently miraculous end to the crippling energy shortages, and the re-emergence of the police, seems to show that the legions of personnel left in place after former President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011 played a significant role—intentionally or not—in undermining the overall quality of life under the Islamist administration of Mr. Morsi.

 

And as the interim government struggles to unite a divided nation, the Muslim Brotherhood and Mr. Morsi’s supporters say the sudden turnaround proves that their opponents conspired to make Mr. Morsi fail. Not only did police officers seem to disappear, but the state agencies responsible for providing electricity and ensuring gas supplies failed so fundamentally that gas lines and rolling blackouts fed widespread anger and frustration.

The Egyptian deep state was certainly working to undermine Morsi, and it will now try to make the new system work. We’ve actually written about this kind of sabotage in the past, and anyone thinking about Egypt’s future has to take these kinds of forces well into account. But the bigger question not explored in the Times piece is whether the passions unleashed over the past few months can be controlled by the army and the deep state, especially given that the lack of growth and the danger that instability will keep investment and tourists at bay.

 

The long term outlook is not pretty. The divisions between the Brotherhood and the rest of society will probably deepen, and Egyptian Islamism will curdle and sour while the army and its allies continue to make things work well enough to keep the peace…for a while. Polarization and authoritarianism, a “managed democracy”, Mubarakism without Mubarak—it’s what the army wanted all along. And the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates seem ready to grease the wheels with money for a while. They are rightly worried about what an Egyptian meltdown would do to the region.

 

However, it’s very important to remember that the old system that the deep staters want to restore was and is a profoundly dysfunctional one. It was crony capitalism for the rich and the high ranking, with large subsidies to keep the poor quiet and complacent—and thuggish torturers in jail for those who didn’t shut up. Public services were shambolic, the educational system was a disaster, and poorly paid make-work government jobs offered a pale imitation of middle class life for those lucky enough or connected enough to get them. For decades, this system hasn’t been able to prepare Egypt for anything better, and Egypt’s youth bulge has exacerbated all of these trends past the breaking point.

 

The danger facing the Egyptian deep state isn’t the kind of liberal revolution that the short sighted and uninformed once thought they spotted in Tahrir square. That’s the good kind of revolution, where a more advanced and developed society emerges from authoritarian rule like a butterfly hatching out of a cocoon. That’s Spain after Franco, Chile after Pinochet, Poland after Communism. That’s the crocuses bursting through the snowbanks as winter ends and spring begins. That’s not, by and large, what the Egyptian Revolution was about.

 

Egypt doesn’t face a Singapore-style tradeoff between a successful authoritarian order and the risks of democracy. (Would that it did.) Egypt must choose between an ineffective democracy and a dysfunctional authoritarianism. Probably right now most Egyptians prefer dysfunctional order to dysfunctional chaos, so the deep state has public opinion on its side. But unlike in Singapore or China, where an authoritarian regime is presiding over a period of massive growth, development, and rising living standards offering hope of profound social transformation for the better, Egyptian authoritarianism can at best promise to keep the lid on the mess for a while longer.

 

The military seems to be the only player that has gotten what it wanted out of the Egyptian Revolution so far: it wanted Mubarak gone, and it wanted military supremacy over civilian politicians reaffirmed. Check and check. Better still, the military top echelons probably think, some of the younger officers who used to sympathize with the Brotherhood have recognized the error of their ways. Those who don’t recoil from the Brotherhood will likely find promotions and plum assignments mysteriously delayed.

 

People worry whether Egypt will become another Algeria, with a long and bitter civil war between the military and the Islamists driven out of the political system. That’s conceivable but unlikely; the Brotherhood does not at this point seem to have what it takes to mount a national insurgency. Also, the Saudis are pumping money into an Islamist rival of the Brotherhood that will divide Egyptian Islamism and make it harder for a powerful armed resistance to emerge. Occasional acts of violence can’t be ruled out, but Egypt doesn’t seem headed for an Algerian style civil conflict, with 100,000 or more dead.

 

But in another sense, Egypt is already Algeria. In both countries the army is not just a powerful political force; it is a leading economic actor with tentacles extending throughout society. These are military republics, not to be confused with democratic ones. Turkey used to be a military republic; Pakistan still is one. They used to be common in Latin America.

 

In Iraq and Syria, military republics fell when a single individual mastered the state and transformed the military republic into a personal (and in the Syrian case, dynastic) dictatorship. That is what Mubarak tried and failed to do, and why the military allowed popular unrest to drive him from power. The Turkish military republic fell when a charismatic politician at the head of a majoritarian political movement was able to break its power. This is what Egyptian President Morsi thought he was doing until the guards ushered him out of his office.

 

The Egyptian military republic is stronger and better run than Pakistan’s, but it has never been as successful in modernizing Egypt as Atatürk and his successors were in Turkey. Without the oil that lubricates military rule in Algeria, Egypt’s rulers face stark social and economic problems, and the ossified, pharaonic bureaucracy that is Egypt’s curse and government today has no hope of solving these, ever.

 

What Egypt’s deep state has to worry about is what Pakistan’s deep state has to worry about: the progressive meltdown of the authoritarian structures on which the system depends. In Pakistan, society’s infrastructure is rusting away as society gradually degrades and order progressively gets less orderly—a social implosion rather than social explosion is what we see there.

 

The question is whether Egypt will slither down that slippery slope. Egypt’s government structures are probably more bureaucratic and less competently staffed than many offices in Pakistan, but Pakistan’s ethnic, religious and regional differences make it a harder country to govern minimally well. Also, one must note that Egypt’s military has succeeded at one big thing that the Pakistani army hasn’t done: Egypt made peace with Israel on a basis that satisfied its territorial claims; Pakistan hasn’t made peace with India on any terms and is far from resolving its claims.

 

Nevertheless, Egypt could start looking more like Pakistan. Unfortunately, Egypt gets harder to govern as its population grows and becomes more demanding. Implosion more than explosion is what we should worry about in the largest country in the Arab world. The danger is real, and it is growing.

Egypt at the Edge. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Egypt at the Edge. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, July 9, 2013.

Friedman:

In every civil war there is a moment before all hell breaks loose when there is still a chance to prevent a total descent into the abyss. Egypt is at that moment.

 

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan starts this week, and it can’t come too soon. One can only hope that the traditional time for getting family and friends together will provide a moment for all the actors in Egypt to reflect on how badly they’ve behaved — all sides — and opt for the only sensible pathway forward: national reconciliation. I was a student at the American University in Cairo in the early 1970s and have been a regular visitor since. I’ve never witnessed the depth of hatred that has infected Egypt in recent months: Muslim Brotherhood activists throwing a young opponent off a roof; anti-Islamist activists on Twitter praising the Egyptian army for mercilessly gunning down supporters of the Brotherhood in prayer. In the wake of all this violent turmoil, it is no longer who rules Egypt that it is at stake. It is Egypt that is at stake. This is an existential crisis.

 

Can Egypt hold together and move forward as a unified country or will it be torn asunder by its own people, like Syria? Nothing is more important in the Middle East today, because when the stability of modern Egypt is at stake — sitting as it does astride the Suez Canal, the linchpin of any Arab peace with Israel and knitting together North Africa, Africa and the Middle East — the stability of the whole region is at stake.

 

I appreciate the anger of non-Islamist, secular and liberal Egyptians with President Mohamed Morsi. He never would have become president without their votes, but, once in office, instead of being inclusive, at every turn he grabbed for more power. With Egypt’s economy in a tailspin, I also appreciate the impatience of many Egyptians with Morsi’s rule. But in the Arab world’s long transition to democracy, something valuable was lost when the military ousted Morsi’s government and did not wait for the Egyptian people to do it in October’s parliamentary elections or the presidential elections three years down the road. It gives the Muslim Brothers a perfect excuse not to reflect on their mistakes and change, which is an essential ingredient for Egypt to build a stable political center.

 

But Egypt’s non-Islamists, secular and liberal groups need to get their act together, too. The Egyptian opposition has been great at mobilizing protests but incapable of coalescing around a single leader’s agenda, while the Brotherhood has been great at winning elections but incapable of governing.

 

So now there is only one way for Egypt to avoid the abyss: the military, the only authority in Egypt today, has to make clear that it ousted the Muslim Brotherhood for the purpose of a “reset,” not for the purposes of “revenge” — for the purpose of starting over and getting the transition to democracy right this time, not for the purpose of eliminating the Brotherhood from politics. (It is not clear that the “interim constitution” issued Tuesday by Egypt’s transitional government will give the Brotherhood a fair shot at contesting power. It bans parties based on religion, but that ban was in place under Hosni Mubarak, and the Brotherhood got around it by running as independents.) Egypt will not be stable if the Brotherhood is excluded.

 

Dalia Mogahed, the C.E.O. of Mogahed Consulting and a longtime pollster in the Middle East, remarked to me that the original 2011 revolution that overthrew Mubarak was mounted by “young people, leftists, liberals, Islamists, united for a better future. The division was between those revolutionaries and the status quo. The revolution wasn’t owned by the secularists or the liberals or the Islamists. That’s why it worked.” Democracy in Egypt “only has a chance when revolutionaries again see the status quo as their enemy, not each other.”

 

She is right: Muslim Brothers can kill more secularists; the military can kill more Muslim Brothers; but another decade of the status quo in Egypt will kill them all. The country will be a human development disaster. With the absence of a true party of reform — that blends respect for religion with a strategy of modernization as the great 19th-century Egyptian reformers did — Egyptians today are being forced to choose not a better way, but between bad ideas.

 

The Brotherhood posits that “Islam is the answer.” The military favors a return to the deep state of old. But more religion alone is not the answer for Egypt today and while the military-dominated deep state may provide law and order and keep Islamists down, it can’t provide the kind of fresh thinking and educational, entrepreneurial, social and legal reforms needed to empower and unleash Egypt’s considerable human talent and brainpower. In truth, the 2002 U.N. Arab Human Development Report is the answer, which, by the way, was mostly written by Egyptian scholars. It called on Egyptians to focus on building a politics that can overcome their debilitating deficits of freedom, education and women’s empowerment. That is the pathway Egypt needs to pursue — not Mubarakism, Morsi-ism or military rule — and the job of Egypt’s friends now is not to cut off aid and censure, but to help it gradually but steadily find that moderate path.

The Cohabitation Expectation Divide. By Bradford Wilcox.

Men and Women Often Expect Different Things When They Move In Together. By Bradford Wilcox. The Atlantic, July 8, 2013.

Cohabitation and Marriage Intensity: Consolidation, Intimacy, and Commitment. By Michael Pollard and Kathleen Mullan Harris. RAND Working Paper, June 2013.

Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment. By Scott M. Stanley, Galena K. Rhoades, and Sarah W. Whitton. Journal of Family Theory and Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (December 2010).

The Role of Cohabitation in Family Formation: The United States in Comparative Perspective. By Patrick Heuveline and Jeffrey M. Timberlake. Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 66, No. 5 (December 2004).

Heterosexual Cohabitation in the United States: Motives for Living Together among Young Men and Women. By Pamela J. Smock, Penelope Huang, Wendy D. Manning, and Cara A. Bergstrom. Population Studies Center, August 2006.

Sliding Versus Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect. By Scott M. Stanley, Galena Kline Rhoades, and Howard J. Markman. Family Relations, Vol. 55, No. 4 (October 2006).

The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage. By Meg Jay. New York Times, April 14, 2012.

The Timing of Cohabitation and Engagement: The Impact on First and Second Marriages. By Scott M. Stanley, Galena K. Rhoades, Paul R. Amato, Howard J. Markman, and Christine A. Johnson. Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 72, No. 4 (August 2010).

The Pre-Engagement Cohabitation Effect: A Replication and Extension of Previous Findings. By Galena K. Rhoades, Scott M. Stanley, and Howard J. Markman. Journal of Family Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2009).

Of Untreated Sewage and Peace Talks. By Evelyn Gordon.

Of Untreated Sewage and Peace Talks. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, July 10, 2013.

Sarah Palin Should Make a Run for the Senate. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Run, Sarah, Run and Keep Running. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 10, 2013.

How Big Government Erodes Quality of Life. By Seth Mandel.

How Big Government Erodes Quality of Life. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, July 10, 2013.