Month: February 2024

6. Kissinger, Leadership (12 February 2024)

by kurto

Portrays six postwar leaders whose statesmanship transformed the international (or at least regional balance of power) so as to promote stability and domestic order by establishing common purpose (not factional triumph). Framing the era as successor to the ‘second 30 Years War’, thereby sidelining the ‘ideological’ contest between Communism and liberalism, and establishing a typology of responsible and reckless politicians (i.e., statesmen and prophets), Kissinger asserts leaders must address tragedy – the nation’s history and limitations. Later chapters underline the importance of incrementalism – raison d’état trumps ideas – although why de Gaulle in particular is not a prophet (of grandeur) but only a self-appointed exponent of lost glory is unaddressed. Leadership requires analysis, strategy, courage, and character (possibly religious). The author disdains the views of Reagan, the hidden antagonist, which happened to sideline the author and his considerable sense of self-importance.

Adenauer: perhaps the best chapter, demonstrating his success in establishing Germany’s contrition, which certainly was to precede reunification and possibly not come until the USSR’s decline, and commitment to harmonious Europe. Christianity is the source of European civilization. Adenauer opposed Kurt Schumacher’s leftist populism, submissive to the ‘will of the people’, which raised the specter of interwar fanaticism. Suez showed America would not inevitably protect Europe, which therefore must unite; Cuba demonstrated further divergence.

De Gaulle: where Churchill saw his role as fulfilling English (British) history, de Gaulle his as resurrecting. attempting to recover historic grandeur, the failed quest for European preeminence (counterpoised by British commitment to the balance of power). He was very effective at persuading the public of a vision of independence with little connection to reality. However, the more pronounced the Cold War challenge, the more supportive of the Atlantic alliance (e.g., Cuba).

Nixon: governing at a time when (liberal) elites had lost faith in national interest as a legitimate or even moral end of policy, he sought to retore Theodore Roosevelt’s balance of power, and ‘never succumbed to the conceit of leadership’ as personal agency. Sometimes rambling in defense of his own role, Kissinger nonetheless makes a fair point that the US was excoriated for not interceding in Bangladesh even while condemned for warring in Vietnam. The liberal consensus arrived at the dubious view that ‘bad’ regimes will collapse if only pushed; friction results from ‘misunderstandings’; a Kantian rules-based order is inexorable. In this sense, Kissinger’s incrementalism is a middle ground. Nonetheless, his understanding of American exceptionalism is poor, overlooking liberalism as its basis in favor of identity and geography, with a dash of natural law.

Sadat: the Six Day War dramatized the danger of placing pan Arabism in front of the Egyptian national interest (for which he had been imprisoned) in the Mediterranean and world system. Breaking with Nasserite orthodoxy could only be sustained by continuing progress: Sadat was the closest of these half-dozen to a prophet. America isn’t the Middle East’s mediator but a benevolent power, given to republicanism as well as its economic interests (e.g., oil, shipping.) NB: the UN condemned Camp David for ignoring the resolution of Palestine, voting against 102-37, an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Lee: Singapore required growth to sustain its population, domestic (cultural) cohesion, and a nimble foreign policy balanced among Russia, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Civil services were famously scrutinized for corruption, with salaries pegged to 80 percent of the private sector; the army made small but professional (with all subject to reserve service); and racial classification abjured. ‘It is only when you offer a man – without distinctions based on ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and other differences – a chance of belonging to this great human community, that you offer him a peaceful way forward to progress and to a higher level of human life’ (p. 295). And: ‘Certain basics about human nature do not change. Man needs a certain sense of moral right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not a result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them’ (p. 304). Is technocracy not an ideology? Kissinger elides the question.

Thatcher: a ‘conviction’ leader who fought the battle of ideas but not to the ends of imposition, as did the Communists, and her achievement was to make the ‘middle ground’ see her view. She believed in international law up to the point where sovereign states cede their moral authority to the UN: the Falklands reasserted the validity of territorial sovereignty, as opposed to national interest (masquerading as ideology) and as an alternate to the post (anti) colonial quest for rules. Disraeli saw German unification as a greater political event than the French Revolution. Thatcher’s opposition to reunification stemmed from here personal experience of World War II, and her antagonism to the proto-European Union on grounds of its transformation from a trading community to socialist statism.

Western elites have moved from a public-minded aristocracy, embodying the virtues of their nation-states, to a meritocracy strayed into a vague internationalism, technocracy (Lee?), and class interest.

5. Hudson and Sharp, Australian Independence (29 January 2024)

by kurto

Australia’s independence ought to be dated to 11 December 1931, when the Statute of Westminster took effect, finally devolving legislative power to the country as well as the sister dominions of Canada, the Irish Free State, New Zealand, and South Africa. Diplomatic sovereignty had been granted in 1923, followed by the 1926 and 1930 release of executive powers (i.e., disallowance, reservation, annulment of the Colonial Laws Validity Act) and the assignment of governors-general as responsible to national ministries. Notwithstanding continuing anomalies, the substance of facts make 1930 sufficient.

1901’s federation established the potential for independence but not its lawful basis. Though newly united, Australia hadn’t fully separated from the United Kingdom; the states remained bound to the crown; and the governor general remained responsible to the king, in the tradition of English government as the sovereign’s government.

The transition was driven by Canada, Ireland, and South Africa, running contrary to the Australian political will and transpiring with little public appreciation. Four elements fueled interest in imperial continuity: defense, race (culture), economy (loans from London), and status (British hegemony). Neither the Canadians nor the South Africans depended on British security; both the Canadians and the Irish (given the same status in the 1921 agreement) objected to their inability to amend their own constitutions; the Irish rejected personal union under the king. Whereas through the 1920s, Aussie leaders tended to be born in the UK. Only the New Zealanders sided with Australia on defense; but the British had been withdrawing from the ‘far East’ since before World War I, save for the 1923 construction of Singapore’s naval base. There was no practical means of international cooperation within the Commonwealth because there was no prior imperial body, only Whitehall.

At the 1923 imperial conference the UK determined to allow the dominions to make international treaties: paradoxically, external affairs preceded domestic matters. Executive independence emerged from the 1926 conference, as a political bargain between the ‘radical’ dominions which aimed to appease domestic nationalists and the UK’s wish for equivocation on the crown’s role and the continuing projection of imperial unity. The Balfour formulation established that: ‘[The Dominions] are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’. (p. 93) The radicals then focused on autonomy, the Australians on common allegiance. (Newfoundland was also a dominion but too small to wield influence.)

By 1929/30, disallowance and reservation of dominion legislation as well as Colonial Laws Validity Act were to be jettisoned; but the Canadians and the Irish technically had to ask the UK to revise their constitutions, so the Westminster statute was promulgated. The Australians insisted on proactively adopting the statute, and delayed doing so: opposition party leader John Latham provoked the states to protest to UK on the spurious grounds of Canberra’s intrusion into their matters. Then James Scullin’s Labor government fell, and though Robert Menzies proposed adopting Westminster in 1935 and 1936, it wasn’t established until 1942 under John Curtin, largely to facilitate the trans-shipment of war material, there being no public pressure nor motivation for politicians. The states didn’t sever from the UK until the 1986 Australia Act.

4. Bramston, Robert Menzies (28 January 2024)

by kurto

Australia’s longest-serving prime minister mastered the mechanics of politics such that he reached an artfulness and unparalleled command. Major accomplishments include the establishment of the Liberal Party, sustained prosperity and the demise of sectarianism, and reorienting Australia toward the Pacific region; while he stumbled on the Suez Canal and Vietnam and stayed too long in office, losing touch with his cabinet and eventually voters. Like de Gaulle, he should have left sooner, in 1963. His distinctive crafted entailed deep understanding of government institutions (e.g., the Westminster system and the common law), policy guided by conviction (e.g., the goodness of family, home, and community), party management and alliance with the Country Party, astute retail politics aimed at winning respect (not popularity), and persuasion by logic, reason, emotion.

Menzies, becoming at 25 a nationally regarded lawyer through defeating HV Evatt in the Engineers case, which applied federal law to state jurisdictions, turned to politics to erase family dishonor stemming from his not enlisting for World War I service. Flashing to Attorney General and then PM, he supported appeasement (as Curtin favored conciliating Japan) but snapped to Britain’s defense. He visited London four times in three years before losing control of the United Australia Party, giving rise to reputation for British obsequiousness: The

    Sydney Morning Herald

editorialized his brilliance tarnished by lack of public understanding. (Bramston dismisses David Day’s claim he wished to replace Churchill.)

Menzies learned from his first-term mistakes and modified his public persona. He opposed Labor selectively and did not insist on undoing Curtin and Chifley’s great innovations – though he profitably contested nationalizing banking – believing it a mistake to contest settled issues, and that a PM first gained stature in parliament before winning voters. Over 1942-44, he gave weekly radio broadcasts touting the virtue of liberalism and famously the ‘forgotten people’, foreshadowing Reagan’s General Electric touring. Having established the Liberal Party by painstaking campaign and then formal convention, he resigned as party leader in 1947 to invite rivals: by 1949 he was a credible alternate to the wartime’s statist socialism. As PM, he left ministers to run their portfolios, provided they were masters of their briefs, seeing himself as primes inter pares, albeit with a naturally commanding presence. LP’s statism governed by budget policy and managing credit rather than bureaucracy. Menzies continued Calwell’s postwar immigration program (which he thought the unions wouldn’t have accepted if originating on the right). Abroad, despite deep sympathies with Britain he pursued Australia’s national interests by building closer ties with the US. He knew virtually all the West’s key players; Nixon regarded him highly. Menzies’ political philosophy was interpreted differently by Fraser, Howard, Abbott, and others (p. 115).

See also Robert Menzies,

    Afternoon Light

On political participation

by kurto

In response to Niall Ferguson, ‘Biden Says Democracy Is Winning. It’s Not That Simple‘:

* Agree Ferguson’s view that democracy vs autocracy is silly of Biden. The case for the non-state actor, made in FT by Ganesh, is more compelling. I also concur Zakaria’s typology of illiberal democracies is more useful than Diamond’s democratic deficit

* Agree Ferguson’s view that prudent Western leaders (ie, USA) will necessarily ally w illiberals against the real bad guys, whomever they may be. The same was necessary during the Cold War (e.g., Chile, South Africa)

* Ferguson skips past domestic threats to ‘democracy’ – which as a civic characteristic is better understood as ‘political participation’. See WSJ essay ‘How our democracy became undermocratic‘, which usefully distinguishes between democracy and republicanism, meaning delegation by result of voting. More specifically, Swaim observes:

… In the ’90s and early 2000s, [democracy’s] most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy — a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes.

More specifically ‘democracy’ no longer means equality of opportunity, but equality of outcomes. See Sotomayor’s dissent in the Harvard-UNC college admissions case

Borne of Hegel, latter-day Progressives decry as ‘populists’ those who ignore what ‘everybody knows’. Much of the time, these are merely voters who dislike bureaucrats. Ferguson is vastly learned and surely knows this – perhaps he’s intentionally stepping past, since populist sympathies are verboten among policy elites