The Power and the Money

Economic growth is not weakening the North Korean dictatorship

The New York Times recently published an interesting article with a weird headline: “As Markets Spring Up, Leader’s Grip on North Korea Slackens.”

Apparently somebody noticed that the substance of the article showed no such slackening of the leader’s grip on the DPRK, since the on-line headline has been changed to “As Economy Grows, North Korea’s Grip on Society Is Tested.” 

The article shows an increase in market activity and corruption, but shows zero sign of less state power. In fact, most of its evidence comes from one person who had to flee, which undercuts the message in the print headline. 

It is (probably) true that high Stalinist totalitarianism cannot survive economic growth and the introduction of private markets.

But Italian fascist totalitarianism did just fine in a wealthy market society ... and one made up of Italians, not exactly a culture wedded to obediance to authority. Saudi totalitarianism does just fine today. And if we step back from totalitarianism to simple authoritarianism, it becomes even clearer that dictatorial societies have no problem surviving market forces, even in the age of the internet. There is the People’s Republic of China, but also the Russian Federation, its little Belarussian brother, the regime in Gabon. I do not know whether the Islamic Republic of Iran should be considered authoritarian or totalitarian, but either way it does not seem to be losing its grip on power. 

Here is a picture of modern totalitarianism, Jeddah circa 2007:

Looks pretty nice, no? Jeddah circa 2007 had markets, a large middle class, and a great deal of immigration. It also had the Internet. At the time, wireless service was better than in the United States. But it was thoroughly totalitarian, as the badge around my neck might indicate. The grip of the Saudi state was not to be challenged.

A prosperous but dictatorial DPRK will not look like Saudi Arabia. It might not even be totalitarian; something more like China or Russia is likely. But there is no reason to think that economic growth or modern communications will by themselves make it any more free. In fact, the modern panopticon, manned by artificial intelligences in addition to human surveillors and wedded to an elite enriched by its control over old-fashioned real estate could create a dictatorship of a power unimagined in the 20th century. 

So, please, cut it out with the Whiggian optimism. Especially an American newspaper in the age of President Trump. 

On Cuban immigration, escalators, and helicopter parents

OK, time for me to vent.

President Obama did wrong by suspending the wet-foot Cuba policy. The United States and the Cuban Republic have a special relationship. Seriously, we do. Our histories have been intertwined more than any random pair of neighboring countries since at least 1898, and maybe earlier. Our intervention created Cuba; our internal politics kept it from becoming part of the United States; our intervention propped up governments; and our 1959 divorce was contentious and angry and contentious on both sides in ways that make no sense from purely economic or strategic standpoints. 

It makes perfect sense for the U.S. to treat Cuban migration differently than migration from, say, the Dominican Republic or Mexico or anywhere else. Cuba is, to coin a phrase, “domestic in a foreign sense.”

Sure, yeah, I understand, it was a quid-pro-quo to get Castro on board with normalizing relations. Still was wrong.

FWIW, I am not of Cuban descent and have no family in Cuba.

The London Underground did wrong by forcing people to stand on escalators. It may speed things up for the standees, but their own study showed that it raised times for walkers by 28%. If you’re too goddamned lazy to walk up a bloody escalator, then the extra time is what you should pay.

How about making everybody walk, huh? 

Middle-class parents in the DMV are weird by refusing to let their kids walk around by themselves. Seriously, it is weird. Somehow they have convinced themselves that all of America (let alone the Western world) is like them. But no. Frex this photo of kids scooting with no adults in sight on the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn:

Or these kids playing handball in Long Island City:

Or this pic from a playground in the Fairmount section of Philly, ditto, at least for the two older kids in the pic, who (gasp) walked five blocks unsupervised to Roberto Clemente park to play with our bambini:

Seriously, you people. Do what you want with your kids, but don’t kid yourself. It’s weird, out-of-ordinary, strange to hover over a seven-year-old like they were four, let alone somebody nine. Let the kids walk, scoot and bike without you! And do not get me started on the proper age to ride the subway alone ...

Cuba without Fidel, a retrospective counterfactual

A few months ago, I complained about an article that asked what effect independence had on Ireland without addressing how the country would have done under continued Home Rule. Doug Muir stepped up to the plate with a simple counterfactual: imagine that the Irish civil war depressed GDP about 20% and that the country would have grown at U.K. rates as part of the U.K. 

Is there another way? Well, yes there is! For a research project, I’ve been learning about a technique called “synthetic controls.” Normally we can’t run an experiment in which we take a country just like Ireland but keep it inside the U.K. while comparing it to the one outside. We can look for countries that look like Ireland, but countries rarely have a convenient twin sitting around for comparison. So what to do?

Well, one is to do the best we can with the comparison’s available. This will often take you fairly far.

Another is to compare the country in question with itself before the event you’re interested in. This can also take you fairly far, but of course raises all sorts of problems. For example, it assumes that past performance predicts future results, which is not always true. It also assumes that the changes you’re interested in (in the Irish case, income levels) are not caused by the same underlying forces that caused the event you’re interested in (in the Irish case, independence). 

The final one is to use synthetic controls. When used for cross-country estimates, a synthetic control takes a bunch of countries that look more-or-less like the country that you’re interested in and calculated a weighted average of those countries that looks as close as possible like the country you’re interested in. You can then see how that mythical control country performed after a treatment compared to the real country. For example, if you wanted to see the effect of Irish independence, you could take a weighted average of British regions that looked very close to Ireland in 1914, and then compare real Ireland to the performance of that weighted average of British regions. In that case, the experiment would be with remaining fully in the U.K. rather than Home Rule, but it could still tell you quite a bit. (Hey! Anyone want to write that article with me?) 

It turns out that someone has run that study for Communist Cuba! In 2013, Felipe Ribeiro, Guilherme Stein, and Thomas Kang did just that. They created a synthetic Cuba that was 55% Mexico, 15% Honduras and 30% El Salvador. These were not the countries that I would have imagined, but they were what provided the best fit with the real existing Cuba between 1929 and 1959. They then compared the GDP per capita of synthetic Cuba with real existing Cuba and found this:

By 1970, the GDP per capital of real Cuba is half that of synthetic Cuba. (The right axis is logged.)

What are the problems with this analysis? Well, three. First, while they got a good match on GDP per capita and the terms of trade, they do not come as close on two other key indicators. Synthetic Cuba had a lot more people in agriculture than real Cuba (68% versus 41%) and much higher illiteracy (65% versus 35%). Second, Mexico in particular was subject to radically different trade shocks than non-Communist Cuba would have been, whereas the analysis assumes that all post-1959 external shocks are identical. Finally, it is not clear that a non-Communist Cuba would have followed the same mix of extreme protectionism and hostility-to-FDI that Mexico followed between 1964 and 1974. (Plus, once the Cubans begin receiving large-scale Soviet subsidies around 1968, then the whole analysis goes out the window.)

That said, most of the problems cited above point to a real non-Communist Cuba outperforming synthetic Cuba. They are not fatal. And the authors admit that their study measures only counterfactual GDP per capita; educational attainment grew faster in Cuba than anywhere else. (Although Costa Rica matched Cuba in terms of reducing illiteracy.)

In short, they find about what you would expect: the Revolution made Cuba poorer by a large amount. What that does not measure, however, is the well-being of poorer Cubans as opposed to the poorer residents of synthetic Cuba. That experiment remains for another day. 

P.S. I almost called this post a “tribute,” but Fidel was at the end of the day a bloody dictator and doesn’t deserve one. So I called it a “retrospective” instead. 

You say Cuba, I say Cuber, an if you disagree go f@$€ y'self

 So, we are in the hunt for South Bronx real estate. And what do you know? An advertisement declaring that the area is one of the most “sort after” in NYC! 

NYC stands for “Noo Yawk City,” obviously. Who says the accent is dead?

The United States has always been at war

 The New York Times had an article today about Obama’s “war presidency.” It isn’t a bad article, but it makes much of the idea that there is something new in the idea of a U.S. fighting foreign enemies in less than “an all-consuming national campaign, in the tradition of World War II or, to a lesser degree, Vietnam.” 

The article went on to say, “The longevity of his war record, military historians say, also reflects the changing definition of war.”

Except, as I wrote in 2012 in response to the debate around Rachel Maddow’s Drift, the definition of war hasn’t changed! I was disappointed that none of the people engaged in that debate recognized that history didn’t begin in 1945. So, it has lurched up again the idea that there is something new about having the U.S. continuously engaged in small-scale low-casualty low-footprint military actions, let me repeat what I said in 2012:

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. Between 1898 and 1902, American troops battled Philippine insurgents. Peace came to Luzon in 1901-02, but fighting continued on Mindanao until 1912. In 1904, the U.S. navy bombarded rebel positions in the Dominican Republic; eventually U.S. Marines wound up (with the permission of the local government) occupying the customhouses. In 1906-09, we occupied Cuba, although there was (to be fair) not much fighting. In 1907 and 1911, we deployed to Honduras to halt Nicaraguan invasions. Between 1912 and 1925, U.S. Marines actively hunted insurgents (the original Sandinistas) in Nicaragua. In 1914, we once again bombarded Dominican rebels; we also occupied Veracruz to prevent arms from getting to the government. Between 1914 and 1934, we occupied Haiti: unlike Cuba in 1906-09, that one did involve quite a bit of fighting. We did the same on the other side of Hispaniola in 1916-24. In 1916-17, we invaded northern Mexico after Pancho Villa attacked Columbus.

Then there was World War 1. After which ... 

In 1917-19, U.S. troops again garrisoned Cuba. In 1919, we landed in Honduras to protect a neutral zone during a civil war. Between 1918 and 1920, American forces blundered pointlessly around Siberia doing something or other, and sustaining a lot of casualties. For a few days in Guatemala, Marines saw combat during a civil war in that country. In 1925, we invaded both Honduras and Panama during periods of unrest.  In 1933 and 1934, we waved gunboats around Cuba, but no war was necessary, since we succeeded in overthrowing the government by what would today be called covert action.

And then, peace until 1941.

Counting ... between 1898 and 1934, the United States was at peace for all of ... well, never, actually.

It is true that with the exceptions of Mexico, Siberia, and Cuba, most of the American interventions were not sold as protecting what we would today call the Homeland. But those are three large exceptions! 

In short, President Obama’s experience as a “president at war” rather than a “war president” is nothing new. McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover would find it very familiar. 

Misleading headline award: American business do not face a “culture gap” with Cuba

 Despite the criticism, the New York Times is better than it has ever been. And it is still the best newspaper on the planet in any language that I read. (Which would, if you insist, cover English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. I do not understand spoken French.) But its headline writers have been falling down on the job lately.

First they suggest that Nicaragua is fighting an insurgency. But when you read the article, it becomes immediately clear that is not what’s going on. 

Now we learn that “Culture Gap Impedes U.S. Business Efforts for Trade With Cuba.” Fascinating! I would have imagined that the U.S. would have had the smallest possible culture gap in the world with Cuba. After all, we have Florida! And they have baseball. Perhaps they are talking about some Communist mentality? Fascinating! After all, Cuba experienced one the few genuine Communist revolutions not imposed by the Red Army. It might have altered the mindset deeply! In fact, it almost certainly did. So I started to read with fascination.

Only to learn that the problem is that “threading the needle between Cuba’s rigid rules and the restrictions that the United States continues to impose is tricky.” They do toss in one paragraph about Americans baffled by slow Cuban official decision-making.

Uh ... legal problems and a slow bureaucracy do not a culture gap make, fellows. 

Pulling “The Interview” is bullshit

 I will add my own small voice to those decrying Sony’s decision to pull The Interview in the face of North Korean threats. The threats were bullshit. Had North Korea followed through, they would have been at war with the United States the next day. Better the bluff be called than we cave in to thuggery. 

For those of you who don’t know, Sony won’t even be releasing the movie electronically. They’re trying to bury it.

I want to call out the theater chains that folded up in the face of an anonymous threat.

I also want to call out Larry O’Donnell for abetting the forces of fear when he bullied the man on his show who had the temerity to point out that the threats were bullshit. I has kept it up; watch him try to defend himself at minute 5:35. His interviewees are deferential but refuse to engage with his fears that movie theaters might actually explode. 

The President of United States has said that people should go to movies.

You’re from Dorchester, Larry. You should be ashamed of yourself, but I bet you aren’t.

But in good news, the U.S. reopened relations with the Republic of Cuba!

Dumb and dumber as the U.S. tries to overthrow the Cuban government

 Remember that dumb USAID plan to create democracy in Cuba by bringing it “Twitter-like” social media? Well, it turns out that USAID managed to be even dumber: it decided to use an HIV-prevention workshop as a front to recruit young Cubans for anti-government activities.

Yeah, you read that right. USAID, in another attempt to imitate the CIA at its silliest, decided to use an anti-HIV campaign to work against the Castro government. It is like something out of one of Vladimir Putin’s fever dreams. 

And it was carried out with typical competence. From the A.P.: 

In the HIV workshop effort, the AP’s investigation found the Latin American travelers’ efforts were fraught with incompetence and risk. The young workers nearly blew their mission to “identify potential social-change actors.” One said he got a paltry, 30-minute seminar on how to evade Cuban intelligence, and there appeared to be no safety net for the inexperienced workers if they were caught. In all, nearly a dozen Latin Americans served in the program in Cuba, for pay as low as $5.41 an hour ...

Drawing on documents and interviews worldwide, the AP found the travelers program went to extensive lengths to hide the workers’ activities. They were to communicate in code: “I have a headache” meant they suspected they were being monitored by Cuban authorities; “Your sister is ill” was an order to cut their trip short. 

To evade Cuban authorities, travelers installed innocent-looking content on their laptops to mask sensitive information. They used encrypted memory sticks to hide their files and sent obviously encrypted emails using a system that might have drawn suspicion. 

“These programs are in desperate need of adult supervision,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican.

Yes, quite. I will add that there seems to have been the same sort of contractor-capture as in the weird social-media-for-revolution case: Creative Associates International kept sending underpaid agents to Cuba even when the U.S. told them to stop after the Cubans arrested Alan Gross. 

So what have we accomplished? We have given Castro and Putin talking points, put innocent people at risk of arrest, recruited zero Cuban rebels, and discredited USAID health operations. The next time Pakistani militants go on a rampage against vaccinations, it is going to be that much harder to convince people that they are making things up.

Can we fire Rajiv Shah now?

The beginning of the end of Venecuba was in 2007

Venezuela has a special relationship with Cuba. The number of Cuban officials who can be found throughout the Bolivarian government is quite astounding, as is the volume of financial aid that Venezuela grants its Cuban partner. Moisés Naím has a good piece on it at the Financial Times, although it relies too much on a qualitative picture for my taste.

There are two things to note about “Venecuba,” as Hugo Chávez once called the alliance.

The first is that the two countries reached the current level of integration fairly early, around 2008. Evidence? One estimate for 2008 is that transfers to Cuba came to $5.6 billion in payments for Cuban officials working inVenezuela and $2.5 billion in subsidies for oil sold at $27 per barrel. (See page 109.) For 2010, the same source estimated the value of the same two transfers at $5.4 billion for personnel and $2.8 billion for oil. (See also here.) That is not a big change.

Ernesto Hernández-Catás (using a different methodology) gets the same result: not a whole lot of change in net Venezuelan transfers (in billions of current US$) after 2008:

The more qualitative reports of Cuban officials operating inside the Venezuelan state are harder to measure. But it should be noted that the U.S. was worried about Cuban influence in the foreign ministry and the Cuban presence in Venezuelan ports in 2008. Juan José Rabilero, the coordinator of Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, boasted, “We have over 30,000 members of Cuba’s Committees for the Defence of the Revolution in Venezuela” ... in 2007.

In short, the Cuban-Venezuelan relationship reached its peak around 2007-08. That is not to say that the relationship isn’t an astoundingly tight one. It is. It is to say that it hasn’t gotten much tighter since ‘08.

The second thing to note about Venecuba is that there was a lot of talk of deeper union in 2007. The State Department noted this in an internal cable. The political benefits of greater institutionalization were obvious. It would secure Cuba’s access to Venezuelan resources and make it easier for President Chávez to call on Cuban support to help him cement his control over Venezuela. Randy McDonald discussed the idea here.

So what happened? One possibility is that plans to institutionalize the Venecuban links were just hot air. That was true of a lot of Hugo Chávez’s initiatives.

But that isn’t what happened. What happened was that Chávez put the possibility of a federation before the Venezuelan people in 2007 and got beat at the ballot box. Here’s the story. Chávez proposed a series of constitutional amendments to the National Assembly in 2007. In the Assembly, his party added a series of additional amendments. (This almost certainly occured under the supervision of the executive branch.) Among them were reforms to Articles 152 and 153.

The original text of both articles read as follows:

Article 152: The international relations of the Republic serve the ends of the State as a function of the exercise of sovereignty and the interests of the people; they are governed by the principles of independence, equality between States, free self-determination and non-intervention in their internal affairs, the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, cooperation, respect of human rights and solidarity among peoples in the struggle for their liberation and the welfare of humanity. The Republic shall maintain the finest and most resolute defense of these principles and democratic practices in all international organs and institutions.

Article 153: The Republic shall promote and encourage Latin American and Caribbean integration, in the interest of advancing the creation of a community of nations, defending the region’s economic, social, cultural, political and environmental interests. The Republic shall have the power to sign international treaties that implement and coordinate efforts to promote the common development of our nations, and to ensure the welfare of their peoples and the collective security of their inhabitants. To these ends, the Republic may transfer to supranational organizations, through treaties, the exercise of the necessary authorities to carry out these integration processes. In its policies of integration and union with Latin America and the Caribbean, the Republic shall give privileged status to relations with Iberoamerican countries, striving to make this a common policy throughout our Latin America. Provisions adopted within the framework of integration agreements shall be regarded as an integral part of the legal order in force, and shall be applicable directly and with priority over internal legislation.

The new versions would have read:

Article 152: The international relations of the Republic are based on the full exercise of the sovereignty of the Venezuelan state and are governed by the principles of: political independence, equality of States, self-determination and non-intervention in internal affairs, the peaceful resolution of international conflicts, defense and respect of human rights and solidarity among peoples in the fight for their emancipation and the welfare of humanity. The Republic shall develop the finest and most resolute defense of these principles in international organs and institutions, fostering their permanent democratization for the construction of a just and balanced order. The foreign policy of the Republic shall be actively oriented towards the construction of a multipolar world, free from the hegemony of any imperialist, colonialist, or neocolonialist power center. In order to guarantee that this article be carried out, the Foreign Service is declared a strategic activity of the State. Its organization and functioning will be established by law.

 Article 153: The Republic shall promote the integration, Confederation, and Union of Latin America and the Caribbean with the aim of configuring a great regional political, economic, and social power bloc. In order to obtain this objective, the State will favor the construction of new models of integration and union across our continent, to permit the creation of a geopolitical space within which the peoples and governments of our America shall construct a single supranational project, which Simón Bolívar called “A Nation of Republics.” The Republic may sign treaties and international conventions based on the broadest political, social, economic and cultural cooperation, supranational productive complementarity, solidarity, and fair trade.

In practical terms I cannot make heads-or-tails of either article ... but as a statement of principle the reform is clear. The original version committed the Bolivarian Republic to defending motherhood in article 152 and enabled the construction of something like the European Union in Article 153. The new version changed that. Article 152 now committed the country to an effectively anti-American foreign policy. Article 153 declared the aim of uniting as much of Latin America as possible into an anti-American confederation.

At the time the reform of Articles 152 and 153 was seen as part of the Venecuba trial balloon.

Anyway, the Venezuelan electorate narrowly defeated the reform at the polls. These reforms were not the main reason for the loss, of course, but President Chávez decided that he had pushed de jure union with Cuba as far as it could go. He had also pushed the de facto alliance as far as possible. And that was the end of that.

But not of Cuban involvement in Venezuela, for better or for worse. To be perfectly frank, I believe that the Cuban presence is both very large and largely inconsequential.

The underpants business model as applied to democracy promotion in Cuba

For those who missed it, it appears as though USAID recently and clandestinely tried to establish a twitter-like service inside Cuba. Contractor documents reveal a CIA-like plan to start the program up with innocuous postings but later introduce political content in order to organize “smart mobs” and “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”

On the pro side, an admirable goal. The United States has long used USAID to help people self-organize against odious regimes. This happened during the Cold War, of course, and most notably the organization played a significant role in bringing down Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. But it also helped tip over Vladimir Voronin in Moldova, a role that was not at all secret even at the time.

I can’t blame USAID for wanting to give it a go in Cuba. The agency appears to have crossed the line from discreet into covert distinction, but the line is fuzzy. It is hard to operate openly in closed societies. A close personal friend has seen the torture scars on an Otpor member who was caught organized protests against Milosevic. The Castro brothers are no less oppressive. So even though the secrecy was ultimately counterproductive, I would cut the agency some slack in that respect.

But.

This plan was moronic.

You can sum it up as follows. (1) USAID money, (2) Twitter in Cuba, (3) ????, (4) Democracy!

The goal was unclear beyond “get young Cubans on social media.” There was no way to scale up. There was no exit strategy. USAID employed a sketchy contractor using an even sketchier subcontractor. There was little to no oversight within USAID or the State Department. (We appear to have trusted the contractors to stay quiet, but we did not trust our own internal watchdogs.) In the process, we managed to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to Cuba’s state telecoms operator.

You might think that USAID would have a strong bench of people who have carried out this sort of operation. But none of them seem to have been involved. My discussions with people connected to American aid work chalk this up to a series of systemic problems with the agency. First, it has a short institutional memory: salaries are low, so the best people tend to leave for the private sector. Often they leave to become contractors with the agency ... but the contractors don’t talk to each other. Second, there is regional stovepiping: the Latin American experts don’t talk to the Eastern European ones, etcetera. Finally, there is a lot of contractor capture, and that clearly happened here: the contractor tail wagged the USAID dog.

One sad possibility is that USAID kept this ridiculous operation alive longer than it should have in order to suck up to Congressperson Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), who chaired House Foreign Affairs in the last Congress. I could sympathize with that if I thought it would actually buy the agency any credit with the Republican house majority. Sadly, I don’t. And not telling Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) about the operation? That was probably USAID head Rajiv Shah trying to be cunning. Only it was not cunning. It was stupid.

The overall impression is very Amateur Hour.

I am not impressed with Director Shah’s vision of turning USAID into a stepped-up version of the Gates Foundation, where government money leverages private financing for private ventures. Contrary to the New York Times headline, Shah’s vision is not a “switch.” Rather, it’s just more of the same outsourcing, with all the loss of oversight and knowledge transfer that outsourcing involves. I saw the result of that up-close-and-personal in Afghanistan and it was not pretty.

I have to agree with my colleagues in the aid world that Secretary Kerry should ask Obama to wait a decent interval, say six months, and then fire Director Shah. I’m sure that Shah will make a great Congressman. Maybe he’ll even make a great executive someday. But right now he should not be running this nation’s premier aid agency.

Ecuador backs away from Snowden

 It looks like Ecuador is backing away from Snowden. Their position now boils down to the following: if he can get here (or at least to one of our embassies) then we will consider his petition.

The reason does not seem to be American pressure. The first arrow in the American quiver would be Ecuador’s preferences under the Andean Trade Preference Act. Only now Ecuador has unilaterally renounced its benefits! So it ain’t that.

Rather, it seems that the diplomatic staff in London was going off the reservation and giving the impression that Julian Assange ran Ecuadorean foreign policy. So President Correa cooled things off by stating that Ecuador would do nothing unless and until Snowden got to its territory. 

If I had to guess, I think that Ecuador would grant asylum if Snowden could get there. I think it is a risk that Mr. Snowden should be willing to take. The question really is whether the Russians (and Cubans, since no Ecuadorean jet can reach Moscow directly and the only commercial flights go through Cuba) will let him. I have no doubt that Raúl Castro would be fine with letting him change planes. The Ecuadoreans might be reluctant to let him board a TAME flight in Havana without a passport (although I would bet that Correa would let him) but that would mean only the need for a flight through Venezuela. And honestly, President Maduro would not have a problem.

So it is up to President Putin. Alas for Mr. Snowden. What does Putin want?

Ethiopia, North Korea, and Some Half-Formed Thoughts on Dictatorship

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il died late last year. He was promptly succeeded by his twentysomething son. Some observers questioned whether the son would be able to take over and impose effective personal rule, but nearly a year has passed and he seems to be doing just fine.

Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi died last month. He hasn’t been succeeded by anyone yet. (Formally, officially, the Deputy Prime Minister has stepped up. But nobody seems to be taking him too seriously. He’s a mild-mannered guy, not a member of the revolutionary generation, and the wrong ethnicity to boot.) Zenawi was a “slash the tallest flowers” kind of guy; years of life on the run as a guerrilla in the bush seem to have rendered him permanently paranoid. Anyone who seemed too popular or too competent got demoted. At best demoted. So there’s no obvious successor.

I think the odds of Ethiopia staying a dictatorship are pretty good. It’s a country that has never known democratic rule or any sort of pluralism. Since the Emperor Haile Selassie consolidated his rule in the late 1920s, Ethiopia has had exactly three rulers: Selassie himself, Stalinist dictator Haile Meriam Mengistu, and the recently deceased Mr. Zenawi. That’s just three guys in almost 90 years, all of them absolute rulers with little or no tolerance for dissent. The country has almost no liberal traditions. Civil society does exist — there are NGOs and labor unions and even a few lawyers who are willing to sue the government — but it’s young and small and weak. It won’t be too surprising if a new strongman emerges. But it may take a while, and Ethiopia may go through a period of oligarchic rule and jockeying for power before things sort out.

Regimes with clear lines of succession are generally stronger regimes. Part of the reason is that they’re slightly harder targets — you not only have to take out the top guy, you have to get rid of his designated successors as well. But I think the bigger reason is that everyone knows what’s coming next after the dictator. Even if the successor is a dubious character, he’s likely to seem better than chaos and uncertainty.

Traditional monarchs have known this for millenia. But the lesson applies to dictatorships as well. We currently have at least five extant examples of non-royal dictatorships that have been successfully transferred to a son or brother of the dictator: Azerbaijan, Congo, Cuba, Syria, and North Korea (twice). Gabon and Togo are authoritarian regimes run by sons of former dictators; if we include them, the club expands to seven.

Examples of transfer to a non-relative are much much rarer. There have been a couple in the past. (Ataturk hand-picked his successor; Mexico in 1934-94 had an extremely powerful president who chose his successor from the party leadership, but they did not meet the definition of dictator. After all, they had to leave after six years in office.) But not a single extant dictatorship fits this pattern! (Burma’s dictator chose a successor who is still in power, but the successor seems to prefer being primus inter pares to being a true lone ruler.)

Now, it’s a long established principle that old age is a dangerous time for a dictator. All three of the dictators picked off by the Arab Spring were in their golden years. (Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and Juan Velasco in Peru also went down in their dotage.) More generally, an old dictator with no clear successor is pretty clearly putting himself at risk. That said, some dictators do run the course and die, more or less peacefully, in office.

So what happens when a dictator manages to pull this off — grows old and dies without first being overthrown or losing an election or whatever? Well, we can sketch out a tentative typology.

1. A son or other close relative steps up. (Several extant examples, see above.)
2. A hand-picked successor takes over. (Rare; no extant examples.)
3. There is a party or other system independent of the dictator that chooses a new dictator. (Rare outside of the Communist world; Mexico in 1934-94 comes closest. No extant examples, though we might see one soon in Cuba.)
4. After a period of uncertainty, brief or prolonged, a new dictator takes over. (A couple of extant examples — Turkmenistan, South Sudan.)
5. There’s a shift to authoritarian but non-dictatorial rule, either by a single ruler, an oligarchy or junta, or a party system. (China, Vietnam, Ivory Coast.)  This seems to be the single most common outcome in the last decade or two.
6. There’s a relatively rapid shift to relatively liberal or democratic rule. (Portugal, Spain. In the former, it took six years and revolution to get democracy.) This happens, but it’s less common than we might like to think. A shift in the direction of liberalism is much more likely when the dictator has been overthrown, or has voluntarily stepped down (Indonesia, Tanzania, Singapore), or agreed to elections (Chile, Zambia, Senegal). A system that lets the dictator die in office seems less likely to produce democracy at first go.

Numbers 2 through 6 include the possibility of foreign intervention; the United States, France and the Soviet Union have all intervened in this manner at one time or another. We may call these 3a (party picks a new dictator, foreign approval makes the difference: the Eastern European model, 1945-1990), 4a (new dictator takes power subject to foreign approval) and so forth. There aren’t really any extant examples of these at the moment — the U.S. seems to have lost interest in installing dictators in Central America and the Caribbean — but I would not be surprised if Russia’s “near abroad” in Central Asia were to throw up a 4a or 5a in the next little while.

6a is damnably rare, actually nonexistant: Panama would be one of the rather few cases since WW2 in which foreign intervention replaced a dictatorship with a democracy. Iraq sort of maybe kinda if you squint really hard. The jury is out (to be charitable) in Libya. And all of those interventions happened when the dictator in question was very much still alive and in power.

Anyway. There are enough elderly dictators out there that we should expect to see some more examples in the next few years. I expect that (5) “a shift to authoritarian but non-dictatorial rule,” will continue be the most common outcome. Which means that some countries that are currently dictatorships will drop off the list! If the number of dictatorships is to remain constant, then new ones will have to emerge. How likely this is ... well, this post is long enough. In a bit.

America has been at war for a long long time

 Rachel Maddow has a new book, Drift. I’ve skimmed it; it isn’t bad. In it, her contention is that for a variety of institutional reasons, it has since the 1980s become far too easy for America to go to war. 

The book started a debate between Kevin Drum and Jonathan Bernstein. Bernstein suggested, “U.S.-sponsored interventions of one form or another are hardly unusual, even before Maddow’s apparent jumping off point in the Reagan Administration. Perhaps the idea is that there was a golden age of sorts after Vietnam, but if so it lasted less than a decade. I’m not really sure it’s become easier to deploy troops for controversial missions or to begin interventions in other nations.”

Bernstein was supported by Armando at TalkLeft, who wrote, “That is not historically accurate in my view. The times getting into war was not easy was after wars that had been very costly and not particularly successful from the US point of view. Think World War I and Vietnam. Otherwise, going to war has been one of the great American pasttimes. I’m all for making going to war hard, but the history does not demonstrate that, except for isolated periods, that was ever really the case in the United States.”

Drum conceded the point, but suggested that there was still a difference between then and now: “So what’s different? I’d say this: it’s one thing to periodically wage brief, smallish military actions. The Dominican Republic occupation of 1965 falls into that category. So do Grenada and Panama ... the last couple of decades seem quite different. The Gulf War, followed by Somalia, followed by Haiti, followed by Kosovo, followed by Afghanistan, followed by Iraq, followed by Libya and Yemen, and all against a background of drone warfare that now seems all but perpetual, feels very different. It feels like we’re simply in a constant state of military action. In the last 20 years, there have only been three or four in which the U.S. military wasn’t at war.” Matt Yglesias supported Drum, adding that there might be an economic element: technology has made it cheaper and easier to project conventional military force, and therefore we do it more.

Bernstein is right. Everyone else, including Armando, is wrong. And none of it relevant to the argument in Drift.

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain. Between 1898 and 1902, American troops battled Philippine insurgents. Peace came to Luzon in 1901-02, but fighting continued on Mindanao until 1912. In 1904, the U.S. navy bombarded rebel positions in the Dominican Republic; eventually U.S. Marines wound up (with the permission of the local government) occupying the customhouses. In 1906-09, we occupied Cuba, although there was (to be fair) not much fighting. In 1907 and 1911, we deployed to Honduras to halt Nicaraguan invasions. Between 1912 and 1925, U.S. Marines actively hunted insurgents (the original Sandinistas) in Nicaragua. In 1914, we once again bombarded Dominican rebels; we also occupied Veracruz to prevent arms from getting to the government. Between 1914 and 1934, we occupied Haiti: unlike Cuba in 1906-09, that one did involve quite a bit of fighting. We did the same on the other side of Hispaniola in 1916-24. In 1916-17, we invaded northern Mexico after Pancho Villa attacked Columbus.

Then there was World War 1. After which ... 

In 1917-19, U.S. troops again garrisoned Cuba. In 1919, we landed in Honduras to protect a neutral zone during a civil war. Between 1918 and 1920, American forces blundered pointlessly around Siberia doing something or other, and sustaining a lot of casualties. For a few days in Guatemala, Marines saw combat during a civil war in that country. In 1925, we invaded both Honduras and Panama during periods of unrest.  In 1933 and 1934, we waved gunboats around Cuba, but no war was necessary, since we succeeded in overthrowing the government by what would today be called covert action.

And then, peace until 1941.

Counting ... between 1898 and 1934, the United States was at peace for all of ... well, never, actually.

It is true that only the Philippine War rivalled the Iraq conflict in terms of intensity. (World War One, obviously, was hugely worse.) U.S. force levels rapidly grew from 12,000 in 1899 to 70,000 in 1900, by which point U.S. combat deaths approached two soldiers every day. By most metrics, the war (fought by a small all-volunteer army) was as intense as the Iraq War — proportional to the U.S. population, the peak force of 70,000 represented a per-capita commitment twice as large as the peak Iraq deployments in 2008. 

Because the Philippine War lasted 28 months, as opposed to the 102 months of the Iraq War, the total proportion of Americans who served in the conflict was about a third of the recent level. The 126,000 soldiers who served in  the Philippines over the entire course of combat operations amounted to 0.2% of the U.S. population, compared to the roughly 0.6% of the U.S. population who served at least one tour of duty in Iraq between March 20, 2003, and the official end of combat operations on August 31, 2010. The combat casualty rate, meanwhile (excluding deaths from disease) ran at 596 per 100,000 troops in 1900, almost exactly matching the 2004-07 rate of 608 in Iraq. (Iraq casualty rates per 100,000 ran at 718 in 2003, 650 in 2004, 588 in 2005, 583 in 2006, and 610 in 2007. They then plunged to 199 in 2008, 135 in 2009, and 121 in 2010.)

But ... that is fine. The Drum argument does not hinge on the big wars of the past decade; rather it hinges on the continual small wars since 1989. In that respect, 1989-2012 looks pretty much the same as 1898-34: lots of small wars punctuated by two big ones. Nor does Armando’s argument hold up. World War 1 had little effect on the American government’s propensity for military intervention. It is true that the U.S. avoided a potential big war during the Mexican Revolution, but that decision was made before we entered WW1; before, in fact, it was clear that we would.

The history is both worse and better for Matt Yglesias’s argument, depending on how you interpret it. In the Dominican Republic, for example, early insurgencies depended upon the seizure of customshouses to gain resources: naval bombardment, therefore, presented a cheap means of intervention. In general, I would venture to say that Yglesias’s hypothesis is correct: cheaper war probably means more war. (Someone should test that!) What the history does not support, however, is the rather specifc hypothesis that military intervention is cheaper today than it was in 1898-1934.

Let me add that this has little bearing on Rachel Maddow’s overall argument. She wants to explain why the post-Vietnam reforms designed to make intervention difficult failed. She does not claim that 1989-2012 (actually, 1983-2012 for her purposes) is unprecedented or novel. Other readers in the blogosphere have extended her argument, however, and I think it is probably worth adding a little historical corrective.

Policy of attraction, part 4

 Americans don’t spend enough time thinking about the Philippines. America behaved as a deucedly strange colonial power. One of the strangest things was the way the U.S. prevented Americans from investing in the new territories.

Worst empire ever? What was that all about? Well, in May 1901 1902, the Americans signed a peace agreement with Emilio Aguinaldo, the leader of the insurgency. The advent of a negotiated peace meant that the McKinley administration needed Congress to establish a civil government in the Philippines. Without a civil government, the U.S. would be unable to sell public land, issue mining concessions, or otherwise alter Spanish law.

Problem is, Democrats were inalterably opposed to allowing American investment into the islands. Not in agriculture, not in mining, and certainly not in manufacturing. Now, some of the worry was straight protectionism ... but less than you would think. In the early 20th century, the GOP was the party of protection; the Democrats were the party of free trade.

So why the opposition to allowing Americans to invest in the Philippines? Simply put, the Democrats hated the idea of America as a colonial power. They feared that sizeable U.S. investment would create a domestic interest group with an interest in the permanent retention of the archipelago. That would make annexation much harder to reverse. (Democratic opposition to permanent retention of the Philippines, it should be noted, had much of its roots in racial anxieties over the addition of 7 million “Malays” to the United States. If the Philippines had possessed the racial makeup of Cuba, the Democrats would have set it on the road to statehood; the loudest opponents of Philippine annexation also decried the decision to make Cuba a protectorate. Cuba, you see, had enough white people to imagine it as a state.)

But don’t take my word for it! Senator Fred Dubois (D-Idaho):

I have tried, in what I have said, to be temperate in language. I have endeavored to argue the question presented by this majority bill fairly, with good temper, and honestly. I do not think it will be easy to get out of the Philippine Islands, should future events demonstrate the wisdom and necessity of doing so, after American capital has gone there and is being employed under the tempting opportunities presented by this bill.

Do they not know, if this bill passes, the difficulties in our path will be multiplied many times, provided in the future it is deemed patriotic and wise to allow the Filipinos their own independent government? The granting of these extra privileges and unusual inducements which are offered to corporations and syndicates, it seems to me, contemplates a fixed purpose on the part of the advocates of this bill to retain the islands for all time to come as a colony, as a dependency of the United, States.

Representative John Robinson (D-Nebraska):

The bill which is now before the House provides for the organization of corporations to carry on all branches of business. It provides for the issuance of bonds by the Philippine government and certain of the cities of those islands. It invites the investment of capital, and in the future capital so invested in the Philippines, held by our own and citizens of other countries, will urge their claims to our protection with a stronger voice, and clamor more loudly than ever, that in honor we must not leave their interests unprotected in these islands: but that we must continue to hold down these people by force of arms. We must continue to spend millions of dollars annually to maintain an army there. We must continue to send the flower of our youth to these tropical islands, in order that foreign investors, seeking only worldly gain. may continue to exploit this unfortunate people.
  
An argument such as this, Mr. Chairman, would mean that the time will never come when we can withdraw our forces from these islands. It would mean that the reasons which prevent us now from granting these people their independence would become stronger with each passing year, and that at no time could we hope to withdraw our jurisdiction and leave these people in liberty and peace.

Representative John Williams (D-Mississippi):

Nor do we give away, or prepare to give away, their franchises. It would be contrary to the Democratic theory if we made the slightest preparation for that, because every vested interest which we plant in the Philippine Islands is one more strong voice enlisted in favor of their permanent retention — a vested interest pleading not to be left.

Representative Allan McDermott (D-New Jersey) similarly worried that allowing the government of the Philippine Islands to sell bonds to American investors would indelibly link them to the U.S.:

This bill settles the policy of the Republic Party. It is to be continuing possession and occupancy with unlimited additions to our bonded debt.This bill means that we are to permanently hold the Philippine Islands, and I predict the holding will prove a plague to ourselves and our children.

Representative David De Armond (D-Missouri):

Civil government for the Filipinos! Civil government in which the Filipinos do not participate; civil government in which the Filipinos have no part; civil government which-the Filipinos do not desire; civil government, not for the benefit of the American citizen, but for the American promoter, the American syndicate organizer, the American capitalist, the American boss, the American contributor to campaign funds, used to corrupt the needy voter, to overcome the judgment of the honest element of American citizens, and win victories by false pretenses and more positive wrong. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

And so the Democrats held up the bill, using the filibuster in the Senate and capitalizing on Republican protectionists in the House. The resulting Philippine Organic Act of 1902 heavily restricted the rights of non-Filipinos and all corporations to own land or invest in mineral rights in the Philippines. It banned Americans and American companies from owning more than 1024 hectares (2500 acres) of land and limited mining claims to one claim of 1,000 × 1,000 feet per lode. It also limited the ability of Americans to invest in public franchises and utilities.

For a colonial power, this was weird.

Congressional Democrats did not completely prevent Americans from investing in the Philippines. A 1905 act allowed the insular government to issue railroad concessions, for example. In addition, Americans could invest in sugar mills (although not sugar lands) and they could physically move to the islands and invest as Filipinos in mining operations. Nor did the Democrats manage to keep the Philippines outside of the American customs area; free trade arrived in 1913.

But caveats aside, the restrictions worked. When the Commonwealth of the Philippines became autonomous in 1935, they received a country that was almost entirely owned by Filipinos. That might not have been the best thing for the country’s economic growth, but it was seriously bizarre for a country that had just spent 37 years as a dependency.

Weirdest ... empire ... ever.

The war that did not happen

 In an earlier post, I discussed the strategic nuclear balance on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The chief takeaway was that the Soviet Union possessed very little ability to threaten the United States in 1962. President John Kennedy was a hero not because he saved the United States, but because he took seriously the lives of the Russians and Europeans who would perish.

Here I want to draw attention to how lucky the world really was. A nuclear war that “spared” the United States (at least outside the southeastern cities within range of Cuba-based rockets) would nonetheless have been a horrifying event without parallel. Below is a BBC documentary from 1965 that gives a horrifyingly unvarnished view of what such a war (even had it occurred in 1962) would have entailed.

The movie has other virtues. The preacher around minute 27 explains why I strongly believe that conscription is a moral imperative for anyone who is not a pacifist. And it puts our modern fears in perspective. It is worth watching. (Credit to Charlie Stross.)

Thoughts?

Dictators

 In a recent thread over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin averred that with fall of Qaddafi, the world is running out of dictators. I sharply disagreed. I’d like to distill the ensuing discussion into a post, because it led to an interesting question: who are the world’s remaining dictators?

Let’s start by defining our terms. I define a dictator as (1) a solitary leader, who (2) wields tremendous personal power, and (3) rules in a generally illiberal manner, and (4) will not leave office or surrender power unless compelled by force majeure, and (5) is not a traditional monarch.

(1) “solitary leader” eliminates juntas and oligarchies. There are several borderline cases where a country is ruled by a group, but one member of the group is clearly primus inter pares. It also eliminates regimes that are repressive, but run by a party or oligarchy rather than one guy.

(2) “tremendous personal power” is obviously pretty slippery. But as the judge said, we know it when we see it. A dictator may have to deal with other power centers, and may face various and sharp constraints on his rule. But if the leader can do pretty much as he pleases, provided that he wants something badly enough, he qualifies. (Note that this one disqualifies rulers who are “merely” authoritarian.)

(3) “illiberal”: a leader who can and does ignore human rights, freedom of the press, inconvenient constitutional provisions, and so forth. Note that this does not disallow elections, as long as the dictator always wins them. A free-ish press is also possible, as long as it can be curbed or suppressed if it presents a serious problem.

(4) “will not leave”: this is close to the heart of the definition. A dictator is a guy you can’t get rid of, ever. Dictators may  — very rarely  — step down voluntarily, but they don’t lose elections and they can’t easily be compelled to leave otherwise. If you’re going to rule indefinitely absent a coup, revolution, civil war, or at least massive and sustained protests accompanied by major social and economic disruption, good chance you’re dictator.

(5) “not a traditional monarch”: this one is more for convenience than anything else. There are several traditional monarchs, all in the Arab world, who are very much like dictators. For now, I’m choosing to view them as their own category.

Obviously this is a fairly ad hoc definition that is going to scoop up a wide range of characters. The resulting group is likely to be, as the biologists say, paraphyletic. And it’s going to be a bit blurry around the edges, too. Nonetheless I think it’s an interesting exercise: if we apply these standards, who do we end up with? Well, I get the following list:

Angola: Dos Santos has been the President nonstop since 1979.  There are significant limits on his power, but IMO he qualifies.

Azerbaijan

Belarus

Cambodia: Hun Sen, a bland and retiring little man, has ruled unchallenged since the middle 1980s.

Cameroon: Paul Biya since 1982. The country has kept the trappings of a democratic republic, including opposition parties, but Biya is in charge and he’s not going anywhere.

Chad

Congo (Republic)

Congo (Democratic Republic):  President Kabila, son of the late President Kabila, is likely to stay in power for the foreseeable future. He’s in a tie with Aliyev of Azerbaijan for youngest dictator -- they’re both just 40.

Cuba: Raúl, not Fidel. (It’s surprising how many people think it’s still Fidel.)

Djibouti

Equatorial Guinea: this is a nasty one. Doesn’t get much attention, of course.

Eritrea: Afewerki is another nasty one. A shame, since his rule started with really high hopes.

Ethiopia

Kazakhstan

North Korea

Rwanda

South Sudan: I’m jumping the gun here, because the country of South Sudan is just a few months old. But President Mayardit has already made it pretty clear that he’s not going anywhere.

Sudan

Syria: At least for the nonce. (I think Assad has a decent chance of sticking around.)

Tajikistan

Turkmenistan

Uganda: to nobody’s surprise, President Museveni won a fourth term a few months ago.

Uzbekistan

Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, still hanging in there at age 87, has been the world’s oldest dictator for a while now.

There are some borderline cases:

Algeria: I’d put Algeria right on the border. M. Bouteflika is president for life, has built an immense personal and family fortune, is the subject of a personality cult, and rules illiberally. On the other hand, his power is relatively limited; in particular, he must deal with rival power centers, most notably the military and the security services.

Burma: Burma was run by a military junta until the middle 2000s. Then Than Shwe drove his last serious rival out of power. He then ruled — but from behind the scenes; he was a dour, withdrawn character who mostly shunned the limelight. Then Than Shwe stepped down last year, appointing a hand-picked successor. It’s a bit soon to say whether the new guy qualifies.

The Central African Republic: Francois Bozize took power in a coup a while back, but I’m not sure he qualifies; he came close to losing the last election, and might have accepted defeat if he had.

Fiji: the current leader came to power in a military coup and shows no sign of stepping down. However, to me he looks “authoritarian” rather than “dictator” — Fiji still has a somewhat-functioning constitutional framework that seems to place some real limits on his power.

Gabon: the current President Bongo is the son of the late President Bongo. Bongo pere was the real deal  — he ruled without serious opposition for decades. It’s not clear to me whether Bongo fils is in the same league.

Togo: It looks like Gnassingbe fils, after a tricky couple of years, is on track to fill his father’s shoes. Not sure if he’s there yet, though.

And some that don’t come close:

Afghanistan: even putting aside the fact that half the country is at war with him, Karzai just doesn’t seem to have that much power.

Iran: theocracy, very authoritarian, but also weirdly constitutional — the powers of both the President and the Supreme Leader are vast but constrained. Iran is sui generis, its own strange thing.

Nicaragua: Ortega has certainly played around the edges of standard democratic practice, but if he lost an election, then he would lose power.

Russia: Actually, I don’t think Russia is very close to the border at all. Authoritarian, yes, but not any kind of dictatorship. I’m only including it here because people are going to ask.

Venezuela: Oh, come on. Obnoxious narcissist with authoritarian tendencies, not a dictator. As with Russia, included only because someone’s going to bring it up.

That makes 24, plus six borderline cases.

So: is this list meaningful? useful or interesting in any way? or is this just a parlor game?

There are some patterns. There’s not a single dictatorship left in the New World other than Cuba. The complete disappearance of the classic Latin American strongman is an interesting historical development that my co-blogger is annoyed to learn doesn’t seem to have attracted much attention in the rest of the world. 14 of the 24 are in Africa, and six more (the four ‘Stans, Azerbaijan and Belarus) are from the former Soviet Union. In fact, if we include Cambodia, Cuba, and North Korea, then every single dictatorship except for Syria is either African or a relic of Communism.

I’ve excluded the Arab absolute monarchies. But if we included them, then you could argue with a straight face that every remaining dictatorship falls into one of just three groups: African, Arab, or Communist/ex-Communist.

Is there any meaning in that pattern?

Really bad war propaganda

  Look, I’ll cop to supporting the invasion of Grenada. It is true that the New Jewel Movement consisted of a bunch of authoritarian thugs. It is true that they became even more authoritarian when they ousted Maurice Bishop. It is true that they signed secret military agreements with the Soviet Union and Cuba and received $24 million in military equipment from Moscow, including 10,000 assault rifles, 4,500 submachine guns, 11.5 million rounds of ammunition, 294 portable rocket launchers, 16,000 rockets for said launchers, 84 mortars with 8,400 shells, twelve 75mm cannon with 600 shells, 60 crew-served AA weapons with 600,000 rounds of ammunition, 15,000 hand grenades, 7,000 land mines, thirty 76mm field guns with 10,000 rounds, fifty howitzers with 1,800 projectiles, sixty APCs, four coastal patrol boats, and 20,000 uniforms.

Moreover, the Barbadian prime minister, Grantley Adams, tried to persuade the U.S. to intervene on October 19, six days before the invasion. Military casualties ran to only 24 Cubans, 21 Grenadians, and 18 Americans, and the invasion killed only 24 civilians (21 of which in a tragic attack on what turned out to be a mental hospital). The intervention was and remains popular among Grenadians. Plus, it really honestly did restore democracy. Heck, considering the nature of the Gairy regime, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that it introduced democracy.

Would standing aside and letting Grenada collapse into civil war (or be intervened by Soviet-backed Cubans) have cost less in lives and resources? Probably not. Veterans of Operation Urgent Fury should hold their heads up high; you would have to go back to World War 2 to find a case of a more just war. 

That said, the CIA went on to distribute comic books across the island that would have turned me into a gibbering opponent of the intervention:

 
Clicking on the picture will take you to the full comic book. It only gets worse. Christ, man, I worked with psy ops production people ... this is just terrible.

Menos vegetariano que antes

  As some of you may remember, about a year ago I took part in an opposition rally in Caracas.  I left pessimistic that they would succeed in slowing Chávez down as he constructed a political machine.  The marchers seemed dispirited, and the hecklers very confident, while the police just watched, amused.

A few days ago, another opposition march ended with tear gas.  The story in English is here.

I think it is very easy to exaggerate Venezuela's slide towards authoritarianism.  The upper classes are too powerful, the middle class is too large (in absolute terms), and the government itself is too disorganized to pull off a full Cuba.  (In Mexico I met Cuban doctors who claimed to have worked in Venezuela; they had nothing but disdain for the Venezuelans they worked with.  Assuming, of course, that the stories are true; a few details didn't seem right.)  The PSUV will be lucky to cement as much control over the country as the PRI used to wield over Mexico. 

But there are worrying movements ... and as the popularity of the government's policies drops, one might see more incidents like the above.  Or worse. 

Anyway, as long as this website is up, Venezuela isn't a dictatorship.  Check it out; it's the Onion of Venezuela.  My favorite has to be “La Reelección indefinida llega al Miss Universo.”

Demography matters, and a music video

  There is an interesting (if rarely updated) blog called “Demography Matters.” It's hit a few interesting topics lately.  Randy McDonald is the driving force behind it.  For those of you who don't know him, he wrote the defining takedown of the whole “Eurabia” nonsense, aka the idea that immigration and differential birthrates will eventually give Europe a Muslim majority.  But the blog is a lot more than that.

Here is a discussion of Greenland.  Short version:  considering the country's dependence on Danish expats for skilled labor, even a non-independence independence of the sort negotiated by other microstates could lead to disaster.  The population is shrinking despite high birthrates.  Maybe they'll get lucky and find oil.  More likely they will remain a dependency of Denmark forever, most likely de jure but definitely de facto.

The blog also recently discussed Iran.  Short version:  looks like Europe!  Crashing birthrates could fuel an economic boom if only the place could get the policies right.  In comments there is an interesting discussion of the fact that American birthrates have stayed above replacement ... and that much of that difference is because urban birthrates in the U.S. aren't appreciably different from their suburban or rural equivalents.  The really weird fact?  Canadian birthrates are crazy lower than U.S. ones, even in such similar places as Washington and British Columbia. 

Finally, it presents a scary version of Cuba's future, in which the country enters a demographic death spiral.  All it lacks is a projection of the worst case scenario: what would Cuba's population and age pyramid look like in 2050 if it goes the way of Ukraine and stays there?

Below the fold is a music video.  It is for Randy, for reasons he understands.  Essentially, while not my cup of tea, it shows what can be accomplished in his preferred genre in both aural and visual terms when attempted by two rather accomplished artists.  Enjoy.

The fear of populism and populism to fear, or at least chuckle at

  I am at a bit of a loss to understand why the congressional Democrats are afraid of GOP populism on the Guantánamo issue.  We all know that the U.S. is perfectly capable of locking up dangerous individuals at no risk to the surrounding community.  We are, in fact, quite good at it.  Now, there are issues that can be demogogued, regardless of the facts, but the idea that there are any dangers in moving the detaineers in Cuba to the continental United States does not seem to be one of them.  Neither polls nor my general sense of the public atmosphere (judging from, well, crappy bars in Norfolk, Philly, and the greater Miami area) indicate that the demogoguery would have any tangible effect.  So why are the congressional Democrats running scared?  It makes no sense.

On the other hand, if you want some real populism, you go to Venezuela.  I'm telling you, a subsidized electric car called the “M----------r” would be a big hit in the United States, and get anybody re-elected.

Gotta be a marketing case in there somewhere.

Bolivarians and Bolivians

Another thing that I didn't quite realize until I got to Venezuela is just how important the international dimension of the Bolivarian Revolution is to President Chávez. 

The above photo is of a speeding red jeep, of the sort that Chávez has distributed to various functionaries, with “Viva Bolivia libre” painted on the back window.  We were up in the “Country Club” neighborhood, a wealthy part of town where the government planned to build public housing until Chavista supporters started buying homes in the area.  Those plans, mysteriously, now seem to be on hold.

It was a Saturday, the day before Bolivia's recall referendum.  Chávez is deeply vested in Evo's success, and so he organized mass demonstrations in support of Evo Morales here in Caracas.  Parts of the city were a sea of red, gold, and green, and Evo supporters could be seen everywhere.  It formed a decent counterpoint to the opposition demonstration held on the same day. 

Bolivia is a member of the Alternativa Bolivariana para las Américas (aka, ALBA), along with Nicaragua, Dominica, and Cuba.  Honduras is on the verge of joining.  It isn't entirely clear what ALBA does (there's not a lot of institutional heft to it) but the Venezuelan government has vested a lot of rhetoric.  It also seems to have invested no small amount of money.  A back-of-envelope calculation from data in this Miami Herald article implies that subsidies to Cuba alone are worth around one billion dollars a year.  Information in this Reuters piece implies an even higher cost:  34 million barrels a year, worth around $4 billion, in exchange for Cuban doctors.  Chávez has given aid to Bolivia and Nicaragua under ALBA, purchased billions and billions of Argentine debt in support of the Kirchners, and finances oil purchases in the circum-Caribbean.

There are two mysteries to Chavista internationalism.  First, what's its extent?  How many resources has Caracas put into spreading Bolivarianism?  Second, what does President Chávez get out of it?  Neither one has a clear answer, but I'll take a very superficial stab at it.

First question:  how much does Venezuela devote to international affairs?  That's a surprisingly hard question to answer.  In fact, I can't answer it, except to say that it's both a lot of cash in absolute terms and probably not all that much in terms of Venezuela's nominal GDP.  ($236 billion in 2007.) 

The easiest program to pin down is Petrocaribe.  It offers cheap loans to circum-Caribbean nations to finance oil imports.  As the price of oil grows, the buying nations get to finance a larger percentage of their imports.  (60%, as long as oil stays above $100.)  The loans are made for 25 years at 1%. 

The actual value of these subsidies is hard to find.  The Venezuelan government announced that Petrocaribe members saved $14 per barrel on 59 million barrels over the last three years, for a total of $826 million, but God only knows how that was calculated.  If you assume that (1) Venezuela meets its Petrocaribe commitment of 185,000 bbd, (2) the average cost of oil is $110, and (3) Petrocaribe members can borrow on the open markets at 7%, then the value of the program comes to $223 million per year. 

What about direct financial aid from Venezuela?  That's even harder to find.  The Venezuelan budget website doesn't seem to be working.  Venezuela buys plenty of Argentine bonds (more on that in another post), and Caracas lends plenty of funds to various Latin American states through a panoply of aid and investment programs, but there's no central registry. 

Nor is it clear how such financial aid would be booked in the balances-of-payments published by the receiving nations.  I heard a lot of rumors that the Venezuelan embassy in Bolivia has a budget of $500 million per year.  That would be an astounding figure, considering that the entire Bolivian government barely manages to spend $1.5 billion, but it's impossible to verify.  The Bolivian balance-of-payments registered less than $300 million in official transfers in 2007.  Most forms of unbooked aid should eventually show up in the erros & omissions category of the balance-of-payments, but that category is small and shows no trend.  (Bolivia, unlike Venezuela, has very easy-to-use statistical websites.)  Bolivian officials admit to about $50 million in unofficial Venezuelan support, channeled directly to local officials.      

If the Bolivarian Republic provided services that aren't booked in the trade data, like, say, a small army of Cuban doctors, then that wouldn't show up in the receiving-country's statistics.  Venezuela could also, say, overpay for its imports from favored nations, or finance development projects, none of which would be booked.  In other words, estimating the value of Venezuelan aid would take a lot more time than I have available.

Amazingly, Venezuela also gives help to the U.S. and U.K., providing cheap heating oil to poor Americans in the northeast and subsidizing bus fares for poor Londoners, at least until recently.  The cost of those programs, however, isn't very high. 

And then, of course, there is the $300 million that Caracas may have provided the FARC.    Doug Muir, I should point out, predicted that Chávez would "meddle" in just this way.  (Can anyone find that link?)  The recent near-war combined with the FARC's troubles, however, seems to have the kibosh on that. 

An American intelligence official told Congress that Venezuela has spent $33 billion to influence his neighbors, but he gave few details.  I don't trust the number, but it is within the realm of possibility, if you include purchases of Argentine bonds. 

In short, it's clear that Venezuela spends a fairly substantial amount on aiding other Latin American governments.  (Or, in the case of Colombia, trying to subvert them.)  So what does Caracas get out of its involvement? 

The most concrete gain would be the effective annexation of most of the Caribbean.  Venezuela claims Aves Island, in the center of the basin, and if Caracas can persuade the rest of the world that Aves is both permanently inhabited and Venezuelan, then it could use it to establish an Exclusive Economic Zone across most of the seabed.  Here's a map taken from a Barbadian blog, Notes from the Margin:

On April 1st, 2007, the Stabroek News of Surinam reported that Dominica had finally caved in on the Aves Island issue.  Now, that sounds like a pretty concrete gain ... only a high-placed Trinidadian official in Caracas pointed out to me that the U.S. and France had already recognized Venezuela's claim.  (To be fair, both countries hold that possession of Aves Island would not allow Venezuela to claim a Caribbean EEZ.)  In point of fact, Dominica has not revoked its claim, and the Dominican opposition is fighting the construction of a Venezuelan-financed fuel refinery, fearing the expansion of Venezuelan influence.

Mr. Chávez has discussed building a pipeline across Nicaragua, in order to export oil to China.  After all, it currently takes four days to transport Venezuela crude to the United States, and four weeks to get it to the People's Republic.  On the other hand, it takes special refineries to process Venezuela crude, and it still wouldn't make sense to sell to China instead of America even with a Nicaraguan pipeline.  So nothing has happened there, and all Caracas seems to have gotten is Mr. Ortega's rhetorical support at Ibero-American summits.

What about Bolivia, whose referendum kicked off this post?  Venezuela has signed a defense accord, of sorts, and Bolivia is a full-on supporter of ALBA and Venezuela's other unity initiatives.  But the country isn't about to become a Venezuelan colony, and Chávez isn't going to get Bolivia (or any of the other beneficiaries of his largess) to subsume its sovereignty in some sort of great Bolivarian Federation.

At home, the benefits are equally hard to see.  On the margin, Chávez gets some props from his association with Fidel Castro, but is that worth one (or four) billion dollars?  His supporters don't vote for him because he helps keep exposure deaths down in the Bronx or prevent diarrhea in Bluefields.

In short, his initiatives aren't providing much concrete benefit to Chávez or his constituents.  Nor do they seem to be laying the groundwork for a serious attempt to unify parts of Latin America under Venezuelan leadership.  I'd understand either one.  But if I'm correct, and neither goal applies, then he must be spending all this money out of ... pure charity, pure ego, or both.   

That's a bit unsatisfying, of course.  I may be blinkered by my own realism.  I must be missing something.  Any ideas or better analysis out there?

Orgulloso de ser argentino 2

A long time ago, Doug and I had an interesting discussion about what it meant to say that a nation was in the "First World."  The exchange seems to have been lost in the interstices of the Internets, but a lot of our conclusion boiled down to, "Appearances are deceptive."

Which makes this very interesting:

Why would people think that Cuba is doing better than northern Mexico, when the opposite is true? And more broadly, why do rich countries like Iceland and Korea feel much poorer than they are, while the opposite is true in countries like the Czech Republic?

The general rule is that countries that are historically poor, but become richer in a short span still don't have much accumulated wealth, and thus look poor to our eyes.  In contrast, previously rich places that are struggling still have the lingering wealth accumulation. Cuba fits this pattern. As does much of Europe.

I'd add that this effect has very real repercussions, well beyond touristic attitudes. My favorite example is Argentina during the 1990s, which went on a debt-fuelled spending spree. Every week one investment banker or other would fly down to Buenos Aires, put his team up at the Alvear Palace hotel, eat great food, drink great wine, enjoy a lively and vibrant culture, and pitch the finance ministry on a new bond issue. BA felt so prosperous and European (and, it must be said, white) that people ended up believing the evidence of their own eyes rather than the numbers in front of them.

In fact, large swathes of Argentina - and even of Buenos Aires, outside the parts visited by foreigners - were desperately poor all along. And eventually Argentina ended up defaulting on a hundred billion dollars or so of foreign debt. If Buenos Aires had looked more like Sao Paulo or Manila, I doubt that Wall Street would have been willing or able to finance the unsustainable boom for as long as it did.

In other words, becaues Argentina used to be incredibly wealthy, back at the turn of the century, it still felt wealthy at the end of the century. Which sowed the seeds of the disastrous crash of 2001-2.

Thoughts?