• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: Pakistan

How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

04 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Interview, Journalism, Politics

≈ Comments Off on How Thomas Friedman Gets China Wrong

Tags

Benito Mussolini, Capitalism, Charles Lindbergh, China, Chinese Politics, Communism, democracy, economics, Fascism, history, Hoover Institution, innovation, interview, Iran, Japan, Journalism, New York Times, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Peter Robinson, Russia, Taiwan, technology, Thomas Friedman, Uncommon Knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson

Peter Robinson: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes that,

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages… It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

What do you make of this “Beijing Consensus,” this view that maybe they are better suited for the future than our form of government.

Victor Davis Hanson: If you gave me ten minutes and the internet, I could give you an almost verbatim quote from what left-wing people said about Mussolini in the twenties, and what right-wing people like Charles Lindbergh said about Germany in the thirties. They make the trains run on time…

But China has a rendezvous with radical pollution problems and clean up; demographic problems, a shrinking population that will grow old before it grows rich; one male per family, imbalance between the sexes. Somehow their brilliant foreign policy cooked up a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Russia, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and maybe, in the future, a nuclear Taiwan and Japan — all right on their border.

So I don’t get this fascination that, just because you fly into the Shanghai airport and everything looks great in a way that Kennedy doesn’t, suddenly they’re the avatars of the future.

What Thomas Friedman would need to do is get on a bicycle, cross rural China, then compare that with biking across rural Nebraska to see which society is more resilient and stable.

Victor Davis Hanson

__________

A counterpoint made by VDH in his interview with the Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson several years ago. To read more, you can take a look at Hanson’s much praised study of nine of history’s most pivotal battles, Carnage and Culture.

Or you can read on:

  • VDH outlines how a Greek conception of human nature can shape your politics
  • Thomas Sowell discusses the “obvious problem with a ‘living wage'” in his interview with Robinson earlier this year
  • Martin Amis dissects how Britain, Germany, and France have each reconciled their 20th century legacies

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Bernard Baruch: We Need an International Law with Teeth

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches, War

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

9/11, A Choice between the Quick and the Dead, Bernard Baruch, Cold War, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Einstein's Monsters, Fear, foreign policy, India, international relations, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Muhammad Atta, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Nukes, Pakistan, Pashtun, peace, politics, Soviet Union, War

Bernard Baruch

“The basis of a sound foreign policy, in this new age, for all the nations here gathered, is that anything that happens, no matter where or how, which menaces the peace of the world, or the economic stability, concerns each and all of us…

Now, if ever, is the time to act for the common good. Public opinion supports a world movement toward security. If I read the signs aright, the peoples want a program not composed merely of pious thoughts but of enforceable sanctions — an international law with teeth in it…

Let this be anchored in our minds: Peace is never long preserved by weight of metal or by an armament race. Peace can be made tranquil and secure only by understanding and agreement fortified by sanctions. We must embrace international cooperation or international disintegration…

The solution will require apparent sacrifice in pride and in position, but better pain as the price of peace than death as the price of war.”

__________

From Bernard Baruch’s 1946 speech “A Choice between the Quick and the Dead”.

Though he would in the following year coin the term “Cold War”, Baruch concluded this speech with the ungrudging proposal that all nuclear weapons be placed — through a thirteen-step procedure — under some intergovernmental authority. You think that sounds idealistic? Yeah, me too. Or at least anachronistic, especially in a time when the international community flounders purposelessly, not only in its attempt to curb the annexation of Eastern Ukraine, but also in keeping track of a massive commercial airliner with 200 cell-phones on board. What would it possibly do with a couple thousand nuclear bombs?

Though the number of active nukes has shriveled to around 4,100 from a peak of 68,000 in 1985, Baruch’s point is a serious one, especially when our attention is drawn to the Korean Peninsula or the once-unified Pashtun region split between Pakistan and India. Neither of those two neighbors, nor the hermit kingdom of the Kim dynasty, is yet to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, even though they are armed with an estimated 200-plus total (though not all active) warheads.

As someone born in 1989, I’ve never felt the disquiet of a duck-and-cover drill. Nor did I spend geography week in Kindergarten as my mom did: ogling anxiously at the massive Soviet Union — a red Rorschach blot that provoked only ugly words. Fear. Danger. Enemy. Still, if we can form a post-9/11 position toward nuclear weapons, it must rest on the tension between the unfortunate fact and terrifying contingency which follow: The human animal’s technological progress is outpacing its moral progress; what happens when an apocalyptic ideology lays its hands on apocalypse-inducing weaponry? In other words: can there be any doubt that if Muhammad Atta had a nuclear bomb, he would have used it?

There are two additional paragraphs, supplied by Martin Amis in his suggestively titled Einstein’s Monsters (1987), which illuminate a critical generational difference in our attitudes towards the inevitability of living with nukes.

My father regards nuclear weapons as an unbudgeable given. They will always be necessary because the Soviets will always have them and the Soviets will always want to enslave the West. Arms agreements are no good because the Soviets will always cheat. Unilateral disarmament equals surrender. And anyway, it isn’t a case of “red or dead.” The communist world is itself nuclear-armed and deeply divided: so it’s a case of “red and dead.”

Well, dead, at any rate, is what this prescription seems to me to promise. Nuclear weapons, my father reminds me, have deterred war for forty years. I remind him that no global abattoir presided over the century-long peace that followed Napoleon’s discomfiture in 1815. And the trouble with deterrence is that it can’t last out the necessary time-span, which is roughly between now and the death of the sun.

Read on:

  • I describe how Baruch became the original “Wolf of Wall Street”
  • Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck riff on the evils of militarism
  • Andrew Bacevich connects the concept of ‘original sin’ to the prospect of future war

Bernard Baruch

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Top Pages

  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
    "Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost
  • Three Words Ben Franklin Crossed out of the Declaration of Independence
    Three Words Ben Franklin Crossed out of the Declaration of Independence
  • "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
    "Immortality Ode" by William Wordsworth
  • "Coming" by Philip Larkin
    "Coming" by Philip Larkin

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: