Valentina Pasquali

Originally published in Foreign Policy Magazine

NUNZIO MARI/AFP/Getty Images

Vincenzo Guida is the notorious crime boss of Naples, and in 2006, he and his Camorra clan were well on their way to infiltrating Milan, using a construction business as a front to launder more than $25 million of dirty money. By late fall, however, Italian authorities were on Guida’s trail, tapping the phones of his lawyer, Barbara Sabadini. That’s when Sabadini called Rep. Francesco De Luca, a member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s party, urging him to use his sway to help her criminal clients. De Luca seemed only too happy to oblige, alluding to a “friend,” a judge who was about to take over Guida’s trial. As Corriere della Sera reported last year, the Italian police were listening to all of this.

Investigators must have thought they hit the jackpot—that is, until they realized they were listening in on an elected representative’s conversation. At the time, Italy’s Boato Law conveniently required Parliament’s permission to intercept the phone calls of elected officials. So the wiretap was cut off. Before the police could get clearance to investigate, Parliament was dissolved and elections held. De Luca was reelected and only a few members of the Guida clan were arrested last year.

Stories like this are no exception in Italy. No doubt, the mafia has been powerful in Italy for a long time. But as a series of insightful books published there over the last year documents in vivid detail, Italy is now becoming a mafia-sponsored state. Its powerless judicial system, corrupt politics, and bloated but weak bureaucracy are enabling the mafia to take over the world’s sixth-largest economy—from construction to agriculture, waste management to manufacturing, small-time loan-sharking to high-end finance.

According to Confesercenti, the Italian association of small-business owners, the mafia’s activities account for nearly one tenth of Italy’s GDP. Corruption is finally starting to repel foreign direct investment, which in 2008 plunged more than three times as much in Italy as in the rest of the European Union. Indeed, in the World Bank’s 2008 “Doing Business” report, the efficiency of Italy’s justice system ranked 156 out of 181 countries—below Iraq and Pakistan, and just above Afghanistan.

This troubling picture is one that Italians don’t like to confront. But the recent publication of no fewer than six books—from insider accounts of mafia investigators to the sober investigations of intrepid journalists—has rejuvenated a decades-long national debate about the health and future of Italian democracy. At the heart of this debate, and running throughout these new books, are devastating questions: Is Italy becoming the failed state of Western Europe? Is the mafia running the show? And do Italians even care?

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Roberto Scarpinato, a deputy district judge in Palermo’s anti-mafia division, and Saverio Lodato, a journalist, offer the most comprehensive account of the behind-the-scenes dealings between the mafia and politicians. Their Il Ritorno del Principe (The Prince’s Comeback) has the grand sweep appropriate to a social history of organized crime in Italy. The term “mafia”—likely from mafiusu, 19th-century Sicilian slang connoting swagger or a kind of fearless, bullying arrogance—has become a catchall term around the world. But the mafia actually comprises many organizations controlling separate territory, five of which are remarkably high profile: the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in and around Naples, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia, and the Basilischi in Basilicata. And as Scarpinato and Lodato show, Italy’s mafia cartels are not simply violent, drug-dealing gangs; they are 21st-century corporations with an integrated system of governance, blurring the line between licit and illicit activities.

Scarpinato and Lodato argue that there are two faces to the mafia: the more visible military component—the low-ranking foot soldiers who rob, kill, and deal drugs—and the white-collar mafia, or “mafia bourgeoisie.” These professionals, entrepreneurs, and academics are not necessarily involved in criminal activity directly, but they are tied up in it nonetheless, and they manage the mafia’s relationships with Italy’s political class, which have recently grown much closer. Politicians let the mafia go about its business in exchange for votes and a cut of the illicit multimillion-dollar action. In turn, the mafia relieves the state of its duty to provide public goods. Take pizzo, the money for protection from rival clans and petty criminals that mafia bosses extract from business owners. The annual pizzo take is now estimated at nearly $19 billion.

Despite thousands of high-profile arrests and legislative attempts to conquer the mafia’s influence, Italy’s crackdowns raise their own suspicions. As Scarpinato and Lodato document, these intermittent efforts often coincide with attempts by the mafia’s armed wing to override its bourgeois counterpart. Any real progress is conveniently stopped just short of exposing the role of the white-collar mafia. It is unclear who really works for whom. And as the bond between politicians and the mafia deepens, Italy’s democratic state is hollowed out even more.

Indeed, many Italian politicians are not only themselves compromised, but as Bruno Tinti charges in Toghe Rotte (Broken Robes), they actively work to undermine the few parts of the Italian state that still have some integrity. Italian politicians chronically underfund the country’s traditionally independent judiciary and enact reams of legislation to debilitate it, like the Boato Law on wiretapping. Tinti, a former deputy district judge in Turin, writes, “If one examines the activity of the Parliament and the majority of the ministers of justice over the course of the last 20 years, one will discover something incredible: Not only has nothing been done to increase the efficiency of the justice system, but serious efforts have been devoted to further weaken it.”

Toghe Rotte offers a crash course on Italy’s dysfunctional justice system, and many of its stories and anecdotes should be filed under “funny if it weren’t true.” For example, there is the case of a 2002 law that Italy’s Parliament passed to try to neuter the judiciary. The measure dealt with prescrizione, or statutes of limitations. It shortened the so-called “period of prescription” for crimes—an allotment of time, now either five or 7½ years, in which Italy’s police and judges must discover the crime, investigate it, try it, and complete three layers of sentencing and appeals before a final verdict can be reached. If they fail to do all of this in time, the crime is expunged, regardless of its nature, and the accused is acquitted of all charges. What this means, according to Tinti, is that the penal procedures for 95 percent of all crimes committed in Italy expire before justice runs its course.

One man who is smiling because of all this is Prime Minister Berlusconi, who has been tried on 12 occasions for various alleged crimes, but has been acquitted eight times on grounds other than his proven innocence. The reason? In most cases, an expired statute of limitations, which Berlusconi’s government reduced even further in 2002 while some of his verdicts were pending. And if you were wondering how deep this scandal goes, according to Se Li Conosci Li Eviti (If You Know Them You’ll Avoid Them), written by Peter Gomez and Marco Travaglio and published in 2008, 100 of Italy’s 945 currently serving parliamentarians have been indicted, tried, convicted, or are awaiting appeal for crimes that will likely disappear because of laws they wrote.

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As Italy’s democracy grows more corrupt, the mafia fills the void, operating more freely and in more places than ever. Two recent books document the mafia’s expansion well beyond its traditional stronghold in southern Italy and toward a growing penetration of northern Italy, where its presence was once minimal.

Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah tells the southern half of the story, providing a gripping picture of the magnitude of the Camorra empire in Campania. Saviano, a journalist who grew up in the Naples projects, recounts how the Camorra’s activities now encompass every sector of the economy, even Italy’s trademark fashion industry.

One of the book’s stories is that of a tailor named Pasquale, whose factory on the outskirts of Naples is one of the Camorra’s many phantom operations—front businesses that the mafia has taken over using generous loans and extortion. The workers, like Pasquale, toil for punishing hours and little reward. Saviano writes that Pasquale was watching television one day in his tiny apartment, and he saw Angelina Jolie at the Academy Awards wearing a white satin suit—that he had made. The mafia knew exactly where the suit was headed, but no one told Pasquale. Such is life in what are essentially the mafia-run sweatshops of Western Europe.

Similar stories are now unfolding in northern Italy, too. This comes to life in Polo Nord (North Pole), written by two young Italian journalists, Fabio Abati and Igor Greganti. They began covering crime around Milan and noticed an increasing number of violent murders in what were once peaceful suburban communities. This discovery led the authors into the dark new world that the mafia runs in northern Italian cities such as Milan, Turin, and Verona, which are becoming hubs for the global drug trade.

Here, too, the mafia is taking over once legitimate businesses and twisting them to their illicit ends, corrupting everyone in the process. The authors tell one such story of a construction entrepreneur from Lake Garda named Giuseppe. He got wrapped up with the mafia when they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse to use his construction businesses to launder money and invest it in local nightclubs. Before long, Giuseppe was helping the clan run a prostitution ring, shuttling Eastern European girls and their wealthy clients between the clubs and hotels. “In Garda’s nightclubs I saw society turn into sewage,” Giuseppe told Abati and Greganti, “and tons of people swim in its crap.”

Despite mounting evidence of Italy’s growing mafia problems, public outcry has been limited, or at least ineffective. To be fair, some have worked courageously, often under threats of violence, to expose the mafia’s penetration of Italy and pressure the state to do more about it. Still, they’re a minority. Many Italians comfortably tolerate the mafia’s presence. Others, because of their deep distrust of the corrupt and feckless Italian state, even support some mafia-wrought changes to their communities—so much so that, at times, they resent the efforts of crusading public servants to crack down.

One Italian who tasted this resentment firsthand is Raffaele Cantone, a former judge in the anti-mafia division of the Naples courts, who recounts his ordeal in Solo per Giustizia (Only for Justice). When Cantone first moved to Giugliano, a city just north of Naples, he received a chilly welcome. In addition to cracking down on the Camorra clan, which was seamlessly woven into the fabric of everyday life in Naples, Cantone supported police efforts to do small things such as regulate traffic and fine drivers who displayed fake insurance tags. Tensions really peaked when the police decided to check public licenses and discovered that most businesses were, in fact, illegal. The police promptly shut them down, and the locals became enraged, blaming Cantone for disrupting the peace. “I kept wondering,” he writes, “if a similar reception would have been thinkable had a Camorra boss moved to Giugliano instead of me.”

These truth-telling books are receiving a warmer reaction in Italy than Cantone did in Giugliano, but that’s not saying much. Saviano’s Gomorrah rose to international acclaim. It was made into a movie in 2008 and won lavish praise, including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. But soon thereafter the Camorra clan made death threats against Saviano. Polo Nord sparked real controversy by exposing the infiltration of northern Italy by southern criminal cartels. This is a development Italians don’t want to hear about.

Still, whatever debate is now stirring in Italy is mainly confined to a relatively small circle of intellectuals, activists, and avid readers. Italy’s democracy remains immobile when it comes to stemming the country’s corruption. These books have come nowhere close to rousing Italians to demand better governance and a rejection of illegality and organized crime. Instead, as the authors show, too many Italians have been settling for a mafia state for a long time now, and they appear content to continue doing so.

Washington D.C. – In an effort to identify the causes of, and possible solutions to the growing divide between public opinions in the United States and the Muslim world, Juan Cole discussed his most recent work, Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), at a book launch hosted by the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. Assessing the damage on Muslim perceptions of America inflicted by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq of 2003, Cole argued that a withdrawal, albeit slow, of U.S. troops will contribute significantly to improving relationships with the region at large.

A professor of history at the University of Michigan, fluent in several Middle Eastern languages, and a frequent commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, Cole tried to extricate the causes of the growing disenchantment with the United States among the Muslim public, despite the many alliances the U.S. entertains in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. Take Indonesia for example, suggested Cole. According to a series of polls conducted over time by the Pew Charitable Trust and Gallup, in 2000 75% of Indonesians held a positive view of the United States. This figure fell to 15% in 2004 and has now regained some ground hitting 37% in 2009, still only half of what it was nine years earlier.

Cole believes that, alongside the languishing stalemate in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the occupation of Iraq devised by the Bush Administration is heavily responsible for this dramatic change in attitudes. In Cole’s most conservative estimate, 300,000 Iraqis have been killed during the war, as a result of fighting and infrastructure failures caused by military operations. Not to count the orphans, the widows and the millions of displaced citizens the war left behind. Additionally, scandals like that of the prison at Abu Grahib became major issues for Muslims around the world. “In an effort to curb the insurgency using harsh questioning techniques and torture, the Bush Administration ended up creating huge new numbers of insurgents,” Cole said at the Middle East Institute.

According to Cole, the U.S. needs to accept blame for a sort of idleness, the lack of a prompt and effective response to the deterioration of the situation on the ground (Cole reported that Sweden, for example, without having anything to do with the invasion, has already accepted 40,000 Iraqi immigrants.) Cole holds the American corporate media partially responsible for the some of the disinformation that kept the American people from understanding more about the tragedy that was unfolding. “We are not well served by our corporate media. I don’t think the U.S. public was ever aware of what the Iraq war really was for the Iraqi people,” lamented Cole. TV networks in particular had a tendency to sanitize the war, showing images of the craters that would be left by the bombs, but not of the blood and the corpses and the spare limbs that dominated the scene immediately following the explosion. This imagery, instead, made it regularly on outlets such as Al Jazeera. Because of the sanitization of the more gruesome aspects of the war, Cole believes that the human costs of the U.S. military engagement in Iraq were never fully recognized at home.

As all of this is on the minds of the Iraqis, and of people across the Muslim world, U.S. military presence in Iraq has, according to Cole, become utterly unacceptable. Yet, while polls show a certain amount of support among Muslims for violent retaliation against the U.S. armed forces based in the Middle East, even those who feel more strongly about the issue do not express any desire to ever hit the United States homeland. Mostly what people want is withdrawal, which is good news according to Cole, especially since President Obama seems determined to go through with it. To be fair, Cole did not argue that all Americans must necessarily disappear from Iraq at once, something that those he nicknamed “withdrawal extremists” are calling for. Cole simply claimed that Muslims would welcome a steady and consistent reduction of armed forces deployed in Iraq.

While being extremely critical of the policies of the Bush Administration, Cole also recognized that the situation in Iraq has improved and that U.S. forces exercise today far more command and control then ever before. However, he insisted that the relative stabilization of the country should not be understood as vindicating the invasion. “It would be like saying that, when the black plague began subsiding in medieval Europe, the Norwegian rat had been vindicated,” Call remarked ironically.

Overall, Cole’s present assessment is that Iraq has been building some fundamental capabilities and that there is increasing promise that it might come back together and at least provide for its own security. “I’m somewhat optimistic that Iraq might get its act together and that a U.S. withdrawal could actually be possible without ensuing disaster,” Cole suggested. The one issue that remains unresolved and that could create hurdles in the years ahead is the Arab-Kurd relationship, which is again showing signs of distress. The new American Administration should also be aware that, even in the best-case scenario of a fully recovering Iraq that maintains a positive relationship with Washington, relations between Baghdad and Teheran will continue to be warmer than the U.S. would like. “I think the U.S. will have to suck it up, because the Bush Administration created an Iran that is more powerful in the Middle East than it used to be,” argued Cole. What the U.S. can and should do, according to the University of Michigan’s professor, is to ensure a more hands-on leadership than the previous administration was able to practice. “I hope President Obama and Vice-President Biden will take more active control of what happens including in trying to tackle the case of the Kurds,” explained Cole.

Asked only in the Q&A session his opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Cole did not even try to hide the hopelessness he feels about the situation: “I’m very pessimistic about the conflict. I really don’t see an end to it,” he admitted. Describing the newly formed Israeli government as the “farthest right we have seen in history,” Cole predicted that it could be decades before a solution is reached. Cole foresees three possible scenarios. He finds it unlikely that an agreement will be found on a variation of the two-state solution. Also unlikely, but not as much as one might think, is the apocalyptic view that Israelis will proceed with the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine, which would trigger a conflict of enormous proportion throughout the region. Finally, and more likely, Cole believes that we are about to witness a long period of, what he described as “apartheid,” which could continue for two to three decades. This would not be a stable long term solution, and it would probably attract increasingly strict sanctions on Israel, maybe not from the U.S. but certainly from the Europeans. But, according to Cole, Israel is really not capable of surviving without trading with Europe and, at some point, the conflict would just end with a one-state solution, where Palestinians will be granted Israeli citizenship. Apparently, one-third of Palestinians already appear willing to accept it, showing that this third scenario might be the more likely, albeit in the very long run.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – A rapidly shrinking, aging and increasingly expensive American military, which is unequipped to carry out real-life combat missions, is the worrying scenario presented in “America’s Defense Meltdown,” a recently published book that contains the results of a survey of the U.S. armed forces conducted by thirteen Pentagon insiders. Winslow Wheeler, Thomas Christie and Pierre Sprey, three of the authors, discussed the decades-long, and continuing, deterioration of America’s defenses at a book launch organized in Washington D.C. by five not-for-profit organizations active in defense-related issues: The Fund for Constitutional Government, the Center for Defense Information (CDI), the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Institute for Policy Studies.

According to official data from the Department of Defense (DoD), the U.S. military budget

America's Defense Meltdown

(in inflation-adjusted dollars) is higher today than it was during the wars in Korea and Vietnam and during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which was heavy on defense spending. Today, the U.S. military budget approximates that of the rest of the world, noted Winslow Wheeler, and it is about three times as large as those of China, Russia, Cuba, Iran and North Korea combined – America’s potential short and long-term enemies. However, in terms of the size of forces, numbers are down from the past, even considering Iraq and Afghanistan. This is true for Army divisions, Navy combatant ships, and Air Force tactical wings; despite steady growth, figures suggest, the defense budget is capable of buying only a decreasing number of weapons systems. As a result, the forces are aging. While in the 1980s the average age of an American fighter aircraft was around 10 years, today it is between 15 and 20 years, and growing.

Thomas Christie, who has five decades of experience in defense acquisition, weapon testing and program evaluation, and who retired as the Pentagon’s most senior career civilian official in 2005, depicted a fouled DoD planning and budget process based on a series of flawed assumptions. For example, one assumption has been that future budgets will grow at a faster rate than the past or that weapon system procurement costs will decrease in the future. These constant misinterpretations of budget cycles lead, according to Christie, to the approval of programs that are unattainable in reality, with subsequent delays and ballooning costs. As a result, for example, the Air Force ended up with a dwindling fighter force because it banked on a higher modernization line than what it could have reasonably expected. According to Christie the problem is not in the acquisition process per se, but rather in the way defense managers have been using it. “We have had enough acquisition reform; we need no more acquisition reform. We need to take this process we have and make it work better,” Christie argued.

There could also be historic and philosophical roots to the failures in the DoD acquisition process. According to Pierre M. Sprey, who worked at the Pentagon and is known to have been part of a group that procured some of the most successful weapons in DoD history, the U.S. Air Force in particular still relies on a strategy devised in the early 1900s by an Italian General, Giulio Douhet. The driving idea of Douhet’s military philosophy was that one can win wars without the use of land force just by heavily bombing the enemy’s territory, population and economy. “This is an appallingly stupid idea,” said Sprey. He argued that this conceptualization of war has led the U.S. to develop the wrong military mission – with the attendant dominance of strategic bombing — and, subsequently, the wrong force, comprising ineffective and expensive bombers. In order to improve the state of things, the defense apparatus should review the last seventy years of military history, Sprey recommended, and should distill what really works in combat. DoD managers would discover that, through the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War and the war in Kosovo, what always worked best was a numerous, light and flexible force capable of providing efficient close air support to beleaguered ground troops. Such a force, Sprey argued, would be large, effective and much more affordable than the current shrinking pool of bomber aircrafts.

Not only was their analysis unforgiving but Wheeler, Christie and Sprey’ forecast for the future of the U.S. military was one might say, discouraging. Sprey admitted to be “extremely pessimistic,” while arguing that it is still important to speak out and try to create public outrage over the missed opportunities that the U.S. will incur if the Pentagon keeps going down the current path. “I’m very pessimistic about making the changes needed happen,” Thomas Christie echoed him, “for how concerning it is to see that we have lost most of the capabilities we had even only 20 years ago.” Winslow Wheeler even went so far as to express his disappointment over the early decisions of the Obama Administration as far as DoD appointments. “Obama has promised change, but so far we are getting none of that. They have brought in people from the past and, as a result, we are headed down the wrong path,” Wheeler said. Particular criticism came in for the selection of the newly confirmed Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn, who served as the Under Secretary of Defense/Comptroller in the Clinton Administration, and who was responsible, according to Wheeler, Christie and Sprey, of making the acquisition process even less transparent than it already had been. “I doubt anything can happen until the whole ethos of our military changes,” Thomas Christie concluded emphatically.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Iran and Russia have entertained a long and complex relationship for centuries, and one which goes well beyond the current contentious issues. Coexisting in the same delicate regional environment, spanning from the Caucasus to Central Asia and reaching all the way into the Middle East, Moscow and Teheran share a history of mutual engagement and have always tried to strike a difficult balance between their sometime overlapping and sometime conflicting interests.

Persian Dreams, a book by John W. Parker, unleashes an impressive wealth of details to unveil this story, thanks to first-hand interviews as well as in-depth research on primary and secondary sources. A self-described old school Sovietologist, Parker is the chief of the Division for Caucasus and Central Asia in the Office for Russian and Eurasian Analysis at the bureau of Intelligence and Research within the U.S. Department of State. Parker is also the author of the two-volume work Kremlin in Transition (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991.)

In 1992, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Parker was assigned to follow the civil war that swept through the newly established Central Asian Republic of Tajikistan. It was then, for the first time, that Parker encountered the bilateral dealings between Russia and Iran and was surprised to discover that Moscow and Teheran were able to support opposing sides in the Tajik civil war while cooperating on a host of other issues, such as Afghanistan and arms trade.

Enticed by the complexities that characterized the Russia-Iran relationship, Parker decided to delve into its past, to the time of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and even further back to territorial disputes dating to the 1800s, before following the relation’s many twist and turns through the Islamic Revolution and well into the 21st Century, as the nuclear issue acquired increasing prominence in the post-9/11 world.

In this interview with Washington Prism, John W. Parker discusses some of the findings of his book and explains why Russia-Iran dealings deserve to be taken into more account.

Washington Prism (WP): From a reading of Persian Dreams, the Russia-Iran relation emerges as one of opposing tensions, mutual mistrust, and yet a continuous desire for engagement. Is that an accurate characterization?

John W. Parker (JP): Russia and Iran do have a long history with each other, dating back millennia. And there is a historical mistrust between them. But, at least from the Russian point of view, out of this mistrust the feeling is generated that they have to remain engaged with Iran, if only to keep Iran from doing more things that Moscow doesn’t like.

Additionally, there have been issues, particularly regional issues, where they have agreed and collaborated. Tajikistan after 1992 is an example of this. Prior to 1992, the Russians and the Iranians supported opposite sides in the civil war, and my reading is that the Iranians actually helped set the civil war in motion but then had to back down.

In any case, after the peace process started in Tajikistan, Moscow and Teheran worked together on it, in large part because of what was happening in Afghanistan. In fact, they both opposed the Taliban. Iran traditionally has felt it has a sphere of influence in Afghanistan’s western border regions, in places such as Herat.

Similarly, Russia would like the northern border regions to be fairly stable and friendly. The Taliban threatened both their interests causing Iran and Russia to support the United Front in Afghanistan in an effort to prevent the Taliban from taking over all of Afghanistan.

Another example of collaboration would be Chechnya. Despite Chechnya’s Muslim population, and in part precisely because of engagement with Russia over Afghanistan, Iran never really supported the Chechen Liberation Movement. When the first Chechen war broke out, Iran had already gambled and lost in Tajikistan and had a more realistic view of whether people inside the former Soviet Republics would support an Iranian-type of revolution. Then, by the time the second Chechen war began, the Taliban had taken over Kabul giving Iran even less of an incentive to make troubles for Russia in Chechnya, since even greater threats to Iran and Russia’s common interests were now posed by the Taliban.

This is a long way of saying that, historically, Russia and Iran have not trusted each other. However, there are issues that come along on which they have common interests and on which they work together despite their mistrust.

WP: How do you think Moscow and Teheran view their bilateral relation?

JP: I think they both look at it in a very utilitarian way.

Russia wants to continue being engaged and tries to dosage this engagement in the hope that, over the years, it will wind up with a better position that it has so far in post-Shah Iran. In my opinion this is the key to why Russia doesn’t do more on the nuclear issue: it hopes to do just enough to moderate Iran without angering it.

The Islamic Republic also seizes the engagement with Russia in a very utilitarian way. For example, when relations between Moscow and Teheran started warming up after the end of the Iran-Iraq war, during which bilateral dealings had been nearly frozen, Iran looked to Russia as a way to breaking out of what seemed to be encirclement by the rest of the world.

Basically, at all junctures both countries find a reason to deal with each other.

WP: Influence over Central Asia has been a key and always difficult aspect of the relation between Moscow and Teheran. Is influence in Central Asia somewhat settled for Moscow and Teheran, or what’s in store?

JP: My impression is that, for the short-term, Iran is not going to try contest with Russia in Central Asia and the Caucasus. In the long-run, however, I think Iran will always compete over those areas and Russia knows it.

It must be said that the Central Asians themselves play a fundamental role and not in favor of Iran, the intentions of which they never trust. There is a long history to this, going back the 19th Century and Sunni-Shi’a differences, even if people might not remember what were the religious origin of their dislike for Iranians.

In any case, Iranians have always been despised by the Sunni populations of Central Asia. You can see for yourself in the travel literature from the 19th Century. For example, one of my favorite is a book by Eugene Schuyler, the American Consul in St. Petersburg, who took a nine-month trip to Central Asia after Moscow conquered Tashkent and what is now known as Uzbekistan. In those decades, the 1860s and 1870s, the Turkmen’s attitude towards Iranians was that these were people to be captured and sold in the slave market.

Even in Tajikistan, although they basically speak Farsi, they are Sunni, not Shi’a. And in spite of the common cultural roots with Iranians, it didn’t take long for good feelings to wear off during the civil war of 1992-1993. In the Caucasus, the Azerbaijani are also very distrustful of Iran. Armenia, of course, has a modus vivendi with Iran and so does Georgia.

Basically they all have their unpleasant memories. For the time being, I think Iranians learned a bitter lesson in Tajikistan and they have sort of pulled back, as far as their revolutionary aspirations in Central Asia and the Caucasus are concerned. As we’ve seen, they refrained from repeating the Tajik experience in Chechnya.

In any case, this is not to say that Iran has given up. Teheran maintains a relatively long-term view of that part of the world, and it hopes to exert more influence there as Iran becomes stronger and as Russia becomes weaker.

Russians are aware of this, and some have openly commented about trend lines for Russia and Iran going into different directions from now on. They see the Russian population decreasing and the Iranian population increasing. They realize that Iran might be getting nuclear weapons and missiles, which would neutralize Russia’s trump card of nuclear weapons and missiles.

In the Middle East itself, Moscow sees Iranian influence degrading whatever strength Russia might have. Moreover, the Russians also remember that it wasn’t so long ago that they pushed Iran out of the Caucasus and Central Asia and a few ascribe to Iran ambitions to get back the “lost” territories. Indeed, on the Iranian side there is still heavy resentment over the Gulistan Treaty of 1813 (which confirmed inclusion of modern day Azerbaijan, Daghestan and Eastern Georgia into the Russian Empire,) and the Turkmenchay Treaty (signed by the Persian Empire after its defeat in the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828, which recognized Russia’s control over the Erivan khanate, Nakhchivan khanate and the remainder of the Talysh khanate, today parts of Azerbaijan).

WP: The Caspian Sea and its energy resources have also represented a key point of confrontation between Russia and Iran. What is the road ahead, especially with regard to energy?

JP: In terms of Caspian delimitations and Caspian resources strictly speaking, things are at a standstill right now, but maybe not a standstill that Iran can’t live with.

Iran claims 20% of the Caspian Sea. By this current medium delimitation, Iran would only have 13 to 14%. During the Soviet period, Iran only worked south of the Astara/Hasanqoli line which gave it about 11%. In any case, wherever you draw the line, there isn’t that much gas in what would be Iranian waters. There isn’t much of it, it’s very deep, and it’s a lot harder and more expensive to get to it. So the question is, from an Iranian point of view, is this issue worth a war? Iran has been building a big deep sea drill, it was supposed to be a three-year project, but it hasn’t been deployed yet. However, whenever it is deployed, it could become a real challenge to what other countries believe is theirs portion of the Caspian. But, again, the question is whether Iran would really push it north of the Astara/Hasanqoli line and then, maybe, even outside of what would be the medium delimitations for boundaries. It could be sort of a shoe that falls on Iranian-Azerbaijani relations especially. So far the Iranians have chosen not to let it fall.

What will happen in the future I don’t know, but I believe the Iranians have come to realize how provocative would this action be.

As far as the Nabucco pipeline (a proposed natural gas pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkey to Europe, possibly originating in the Caucuses or Central Asia and bypassing Russia) I don’t think that you can rule out that Iran may sometime feed gas into it; who knows what’s going to happen in the next five to ten years. You have to build Nabucco first anyway. Even if they did, I don’t think it would be a cause of war with Russia or anything like that.

Nevertheless, Russian policy in terms of energy out of the Caspian Sea has been to do everything in its power to exclude Iran from the European market. If Iran began to feed into Nabucco, it would cut into the Russian market share in Europe.

Overall, whatever Iran does will be secondary to what Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan do anyway. Iran feeding into Nabucco would just be part of a larger challenge to Russian domination of the gas market. One should remember that Russia’s blue stream pipeline under the Black Sea was done as a response to Iranian plans to feed gas to Turkey. Russia just wanted to shut Iranian gas south and east and keep it from going to Europe and it has been fairly successful thus far.

WP: To remain in the energy sector, there have been talks about the creating of an OPEC-like consortium of natural gas producers, countries such as Russia, Iran and Qatar. Is this a reality?

JP: I think it’s kind of a scare crow, I’m not an expert in those matters but my impression is that it is unworkable and it is just something that people talk about. Iranians talk about when they want the West to believe that there is a lot more cooperation on energy matter with Russia than there is.

When the Iranians really push the issue hard, you start reading the Russian press and the Russians are saying that there is not much to work with. In any case, it wouldn’t be like OPEC or anything of that sort. As said, as far as the European energy market, Russia just doesn’t want Iran in there and will do everything that it can to cut it out.

WP: The nuclear issue, instead, seems to be one where Iran can play its cards in a very successful way. What might strike one as odd, for example, is that even when its relations with the United States peaked after September 11 2001, and while Russia partially conceded on the Iran nuclear issue, Moscow never gave up Iran and kept pushing ahead with the Bushehr project. Why do you think that is?

JP: I’d qualify what you said. Russia never gave up on Bushehr. It claimed, and it still claims, that Bushehr is a civilian nuclear power plant and doesn’t have anything to do with whatever Iran is doing on the enrichment front or about the nuclear weapons program.

Russia and Iran negotiated the contract to build Bushehr when Andrey Kozyrev was Foreign Minister in the early 1990s. It goes way back. So it’s true that Moscow hasn’t abandoned Bushehr.

But on other issues, and I have the details in the book, by then Russia was already much more cautious about what it was doing with Iran in terms of allowing proliferation of nuclear expertise and nuclear components. It began tightening up on its laws; on overseeing of exports; on Iran’s weapons shopping in Russia. This caution on the part of the Russians was immediately reflected in statements by Iranians leaders, including Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani. In 2002, he said that Russia just didn’t want a strong Iran and it was not going to sell to Iran the weapons that Iran really wanted. There was much bitterness on the arms-trade front from the Iranians toward the Russians. And even if the Russians have continued to sell weapons to the Iranians, it is never quite enough for Teheran.

WP: Do you think Iran ever looks to Russia when it thinks of developing nuclear weapons? Does Russia feel that it would be directly threatened?

JP: The reason why Iran started on his nuclear program certainly wasn’t the Soviet Union or Russia. It happened at the last stages of the Iran-Iraq war. You begin seeing then statements by people such as Rafsanjani, saying that Iran needed nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the Russians immediately recognized in 1998 the potential threat posed by an Iran with a Shahab-3 missile, which can reach the southern portions of Russia on either side of the Caspian. Those in Russia that want good relations with Iran emphasize that Iran never intends to fire these missiles in Russia’s direction. On the other hand, Putin made clear that the Russians knew how far those missiles could go and were very well aware of the danger. It is no coincidence that a real jolt hit security circles in Moscow right after Iran first tested the Shahab-3 in 1998, and that a lot came out in the press on how Iranians were circumventing all laws and stealing technology from the Russians. In short, nobody’s eyes are blind to this potential threat.

WP: What is the role of the U.S. in the Russia-Iran relation?

JP: In broad historical perspectives, the U.S. was dominant in Iran during the years of the Shah, and it has been absent from Iran in the last thirty-years. Russia has more of a relationship with Iran now than it had back at the time of the Shah and it would like to preserve it.

There is a kind of historical competition. I don’t think that Russia thinks that it can replace the U.S. in Iran but it certainly would like to improve its position there. At the same time it is fearful that there will be a deal between Iran and the U.S. and all of this effort Moscow has been putting in will be for nothing.

I think there is still a lingering memory in Moscow of the Iran-Contra episode. The Soviets realized then, all of a sudden, that there were people in the Islamic Republic willing to do a deal with Washington. As a result fears remain that in spite of Russia’s efforts to improve relations with Iran, in the end Iran prefers to deal with other countries over Russia.

WP: On a more personal level, as a U.S. Government official who has spent many years working on the USSR, Russia and Central Asia, what was the motivation behind your decision to write about Russia-Iran relations from the perspective of Moscow and Teheran, treating the U.S. only as an external player?

JP: The project simply began because, as a part of my briefing duties in the State Department, I kept running up against the issue of Moscow-Teheran relations and the charges that Russia was doing proliferation in Iran. The other part of it was that, in 1992, a great portion of my time was consumed with following what was going on in Tajikistan. I was watching Iranian interests and how Russia dealt with Iran and I found it so strange, as someone who didn’t know the deep history of the engagement between Russia and Iran, that they could be arming opposite sides in the Tajik civil war on one level yet simultaneously doing deals on Bushehr on another level. I wanted to try to get into the heads of decision makers on both sides to try to understand the relation better. That was the intellectual impetus for it. And I also think this is a different perspective on the matter of Russia-Iran relations that you would normally encounter in the U.S. Here we tend to look at them separately, wondering what we should do with Iran and how we should deal with Russia. In America there are certain assumptions and stereotypes as to how Russia and Iran are dealing with each other, but they are often very off.

WP: What was the most unexpected and important thing you learned about the Russia-Iran relation?

JP: That engagement above the table goes along with kicking each other under the table all the time. You have this tussling even while they are embraced. The fact is that they always deal with each other and they will always deal with each other. Because they are so close, they are never going to go away.

It’s not like a country in the Western Hemisphere dealing with a country in the Eastern Hemisphere where one can choose whether to deal with the other or not. Neither country has a choice in this case; they have to deal with each other.

Even now that they don’t have common borders, in their minds common borders remain and, actually, they do share the Caspian Sea. Russia and Iran have overlapping or conflicting interests in many areas: Central Asia, the Caucasus, South Asia, and the Middle East.

The other, more personal thing I had not really expected was that the title Persian Dreams attracted an audience that I hadn’t anticipated: the Iranian Diaspora and even people in Iran. This book was written by someone that had always studied Russia rather than Iran, but there’s probably less interest in the book from the Russian side than there has been from the Iranian side, at least so far.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Thomas Frank is the author of best selling “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” and recently became a weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his newly published book, “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule,” Mr. Frank describes what he believes to be the principles of conservative politics as a philosophy of laissez-faire.

He lays out how Republican Presidents and Congresses in the last twenty-eight years have, little by little, undermined the foundations of the liberal state and dismembered the U.S. Government, making it the inefficient and corrupt machine voters think it is today.

“The Wrecking Crew” begins with a witty portray of Washington DC in the new millennium. In Frank’s account, the national capital has become a city solely dominated by glass high-rises sprawling up in Rosslyn, across the Potomac in Virginia, inhabited by lobbyists in designer suits, and subjugated to the encompassing presence of private consulting firms and government contractors.

Mr. Frank wonders how metropolitan DC became one of the wealthiest regions in the country and the destination of choice for young ivy-leaguers seeking high paying jobs in the private sector, when it was once the place for passionate young men and women wanting to dedicate their lives to public service.

The answer, according to Frank, lies in the takeover of Washington DC by conservatives that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and went into full force with the Newt Gingrich’s Congress in 1994.

Despising the liberal state while worshipping the Market, the conservative revolution, slowly but methodically, proceeded to disrupt the government from within: “Believing effective government to be somewhere between impossible and undesirable, conservatism takes steps to ensure its impotence,” writes Frank. To achieve their goals, conservatives used a variety of means. They shrank the role of government agencies they deeply distrusted by appointing some of those agencies’ staunchest opponents to run them.

Instead of letting government attend to the tasks it had always been responsible for, conservatives preferred handing over many of those tasks to private companies. Conservatives also understood, before and better than anyone else, the business potential of politics and successfully turned it into a lucrative enterprise with the help of industries such as lobbying. They also pushed for unconstrained deregulation to favor big corporations, and reduced public oversight of the private sector. As a result, Frank believes that conservatives created a fertile ground for corruption, wasteful spending and inefficiencies, and that they weakened the state to the point it had to give in to the power of money.

Thomas Frank’s tale of the conservative self-fulfilling prophecy on the futility of government is carefully researched and offers a wealth of details. The line-up of interviews, the historical analysis and the data presented are impressive and provide depth to Mr.

Frank’s argument. The book is also audacious, sharply written and often amusing. Thomas Frank’s relentless attack on conservatives, however, appear at times too narrowly focused, merely depicting Washington DC as a city abandoned into the hands of a bunch of reckless cowboys.

It makes the reader wonder what liberal Americans in the national capital and across the country were doing while the GOP was taking the US Government apart. Do they bear any responsibility for the ballooning deficit and the uncontrolled growth of the budget? Have they also mistakenly relied on tools so damaging to transparency in politics, such as lobbying? And what can Americans do today to get their country back on track?

In this interview with Washington Prism, Thomas Frank talks about “The Wrecking Crew,” Conservatism, and what it all means for the ongoing Presidential campaign.

Washington Prism (WP): In your book you portray the take-over of Washington DC by conservatives and their distaste for the liberal state. How would you describe their mission with regard to reforming the role of government?

Thomas Frank (TF): Conservative tradition doesn’t have a problem with government per se; they just want to be able to control it. Think of John Jay, for example. He once said: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” What they really dislike is the liberal state. However, it’s hard even for conservatives to simply do away with all the agencies that that they dislike, such as the Department of Labor or the Environmental Protection Agency, because the public expects these agencies to exist. Conservatives can’t simply abolish them, and so they decided to capture them from the inside and then use them for goals different from those that they were originally set up with.

WP: Laying out the means that the Republicans used to fail the liberal state, you mention an excessive reliance on private contractors, deregulation, and the growth of lobbying. Where were the Democrats while all of this was taking place and why have they not been capable of preserving the liberal state?

TF: The reality is that there are plenty of Democrats that are conservatives. During the Reagan years Congress was in the hands of the Democrats but Ronald Reagan had his way because there were plenty of Democratic Congressmen that went along with him, supporting free-market ideals and a policy of laissez-fair.

The larger problem, however, is the ever-growing role of money in politics, which has pulled the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, to the right. When I was growing up, until the 1980s, I always had the feeling that Republicans would be able to win a Presidential Election here and there but would never be able to control Congress because the majority of the people were democrats because they were working-class. The Democrats used to appeal to these voters on the basis of economic issues, but the problem became that these issues are not popular with people who fund politics. The Democrats have been faced with this dilemma for years and they have not found a solution.

WP: As a response to the ongoing financial crisis, the Bush Administration is stepping in with government money to rescue private businesses gone badly. How would you explain this in the theoretical framework of small government, free market and laissez-faire that you describe as the conservative trademark?

TF: Nobody really believes in free market, it’s just an ideological slogan. What conservatives believe in is class power, and of course they’re going to rescue these big corporations. There is also another argument, that some of these institutions must be rescued or it’ll be the destruction of the financial system. This is definitely is the case of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. You wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage in the U.S. anymore, had the government not rescued them. In any case, the market has done this to itself and it’s a problem for conservatives. I think it’s embarrassing to them and that it will be embarrassing for McCain. This is a philosophy of government, based on deregulation, which was put on trial and is failing miserably. It has returned markets to what they were before the New Deal and it should not surprise anyone that the markets are behaving like they were behaving then, with these unexpected crashes.

WP: Watching the ongoing Presidential Campaign, one would think that all candidates read your book and are now running against broken Washington. Polls suggest that voters are accepting the claim on the part of both Obama and McCain. How do you explain a Republican running on a platform of change after eight years of GOP Administration? Is there something about John McCain and Sarah Palin that makes the claim legitimate?

TF: I don’t know, I don’t know. You people in the media seem to believe him. It’s ridiculous. This is the party that has ruled Washington on and off for twenty years. I agree that McCain has been on the off with his party on a few occasion, but he agrees with the philosophy of George W. Bush. Yes, he’s not personally corrupt, and in that sense he is o.k. And Sarah Palin is definitely not from DC.

They clearly went to find her as far as possible from DC. But they still believe in the same philosophy. I don’t honestly know why people believe him; it’s preposterous that he can talk about change. The truth is that these people live and breathe cynicism. They are cynic about government, about voters, about everything. That’s the nature of the beast.

WP: Do you have anything positive to say about conservatives and Republican politics?

TF: I was a Republican when I was young. Everyone in Kansas is a Republican, but we used to have very liberal Republicans. McCain talks a lot about Teddy Roosevelt. He was a great President. Unfortunately liberal Republicans are gone and they won’t come back. After the 1960s, the two parties sorted themselves out. Before, you would have very conservative Democrats from the South and very liberal Republicans, especially from the Northeast. But today, if you are going to be a liberal, you will become a Democrat.

WP: What should the Democrats do to appeal to voters in defense of the liberal state?

Democrats have to appeal to blue-collar workers by talking about economic issues. They must emphasize how the current government has not been able to respond to their needs. They need to fight hard for social security. It’s really important that they reach out to blue-collar voters. For example, and I don’t think they will do it, but if they said that they were going to renegotiate NAFTA, they would win the elections in a heartbeat.

WP: NAFTA is an international agreement. Don’t you think that the Democrats can only promise so much, because renegotiating it will depend on other countries and factors beyond the Democrats’ control?

TF: We can do whatever the heck we want; we are Americans (laughing). If we decided to renegotiate NAFTA, we could. Can you imagine if the Americans started pushing the whole world to the left? Instead of invading Iraq, renegotiated NAFTA? What would the rest of the world think (laughing)?

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

J. Peter Scoblic is the executive editor of The New Republic and the former editor of Arms Control Today. While a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, Scoblic wrote U.S. vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism has Undermined America’s Security. Scoblic traces back to the 1950s and to the Cold War the sources of the conservative worldview embraced today by President George W. Bush. A philosophy rooted in a Manichean understanding of the world based on the opposition of good vs. evil and us vs. them that does not allow for any compromised solution, conservatism explains the driving forces behind Bush’s foreign policy and the many controversial decisions that have been made in the last seven years, from the war in Iraq to the approach towards Iran, North Korea and non-proliferation. In this interview with Valentina Pasquali, J. Peter Scoblic talks about his book, conservatism and America’s future.

Valentina Pasquali: A lot has been said and written about George W. Bush’s foreign policy, the war in Iraq and his two-term presidency. What inspired you to research and write U.S. vs. Them? What gaps did you set out to fill?

J. Peter Scoblic: I wrote U.S. vs. Them because I felt there had not been an adequate explanation of the phenomenon that we have seen in the last seven years. It seemed to me that there had not been any comprehensive analysis of the Bush administration that went beyond its policies in Iraq but that also tried to account for how we dealt with North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and India, the way we did. It was confusion on my part on the sources of the Bush administration’s nuclear policy in particular, but also of the choices made in other realms.

What had been written appeared more descriptive than explanatory. We can accuse the administration of being unilateralist, but my question was: “Why were they being unilateralist?” Conventional wisdom is that neo-conservatism is the ideology behind the administration. I believe that there is truth to it, but I was convinced that there had to be a deeper explanation going further back into the history of this country. This is why I decided to start digging into the 1950s, which is when the modern American conservative movement was created. Looking back to the writings of the time, and how they affected U.S. nuclear policy and approach to negotiations during the Cold War, I saw a remarkable set of similarities between then and now and I found it very enlightening.

VP: In your book you talk about the conservative movement as centered on a worldview characterized by concepts such as good vs. evil. You also describe it as having a moralist foundation, but not necessarily moral or religious. Do you see any specific role of religion in conservative foreign policy making?

J.P.S.: When foreign policy makers divide the world into good and evil, they choose to use terms that normally refer to moral and immoral actions. However in the course of U.S. foreign policy, and as it was practiced by conservatives, good and evil often simply stood for the United States and our enemies. It did not always mean that the U.S. was conscious of acting in a moral way, or that for example it would be defending human rights above all other things. We saw ourselves as a righteous force facing an enemy that was dedicated to our destruction, or that of our friends and allies. In general, not many countries wage a moral foreign policy in the sense that they seek to maximize global good. They tend to be out for their own self-interest.

Religion comes into the picture in an interesting way. I think it can make it easier to frame the foreign policy discourse in terms of good vs. evil. A very religious president like George Bush may have an easier time thinking of the world as divided into good vs. evil because his own religious belief system sees it in a similar way. For someone like him, it may be a more natural tendency to see things in black and white and to have such an approach to foreign policy as well. At the same time, there are very religious people who don’t see the world in terms of good vs. evil. So there may be a correlation but there’s certainly not a completely clear causal connection.

VP: In U.S. vs. Them you refer to the Great Depression of 1929 and explain that the economic crisis of those years became a catalyst for a switch in American domestic politics. It created a needed opening for the policies of the New Deal to emerge and allowed the Democrats to regain the predominant political position. What impact, if any, do you think the current economic crisis could have on the two parties and their alignment?

J.P.S.: I don’t think we are looking at any major realignment such as that of the 20s and 30s. I think we are probably going to see increasing regulation. The major question that was being dealt with back then was, “Should the government really be involved in the economy?” And I think we have the answer, the answer is “Yes, the government should be involved to some extent.” Then we argue about the degree, but we are not arguing about the base question. Today we’re having a new version of that argument in terms of the degree of oversight of these exotic financial instruments and institutions that haven’t yet necessarily fallen under the government purview.

VP: There is a second historical parallel that could be drawn from the book. In the 1940s, as you write, “without a coherent creed or a patron, conservatives were defined principally by their discontent.” Is there any similarity with the Democrats since 2000? Finally, it was the opposition to communism that worked as a unifying force bringing the conservatives together in one political movement. What do you think could serve a similar function for the Democratic Party of today’s divisive primaries?

J.P.S.: I think the Democrats have coalesced quite a bit in the last four, eight years, even though there’s a bitter primary going on right now. I think they’re more unified than the Republicans, who have seen a fragmentation of the conservative movement that has animated the party for the last 25-30 years, or since the beginning of the Reagan era. During the Bush presidency, the War on Terror substituted communism in bringing the party together and there is a possibility that John McCain will continue to hold that coalition together. The one conservative credential that he undoubtedly has is support for the Iraq War. I think he sees the world in terms of good vs. evil as well. But with the many other apostasies that he has demonstrated with regard to other tenets of conservatism, I think the Republican Party faces a far greater challenge than the Democrats today.

VP: It can be argued, as you do in your book, that the Cold War ended partially thanks to the policies of containment and deterrence as they were pursued by the U.S., These policies contributed to bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and were for the most part harshly opposed by American conservatives. Nevertheless, during his presidency, George W. Bush decided to ignore that lesson and when it came to the challenges of terrorism, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, he chose instead to cling to the much more aggressive approach that had been advocated by conservatives during the Cold War and that, during Ronald Reagan’s first term in office, brought the world on the brink of a nuclear war. What are the reasons behind such choices and how do conservatives view the end of the Cold War?

J.P.S.: I think the reason is that conservatives interpret the causes of success in the Cold War differently from what you just lay out. They think that containment and deterrence were not working and what worked instead was Ronald Reagan’s vision of rollback and of an aggressive nuclear posture. The extent to which Reagan really pursued rollback is arguable. If you look back historically, there were very few instances in which the Reagan administration actually pursued rollback. And moreover, while Reagan chose an aggressive nuclear policy during the first three years in office, the administration clearly switched course in the last five.

Nevertheless, when the Cold War ended, conservatives that said “We don’t want to co-exist with communists” realized the U.S. had indeed defeated communism, and came to believe that therefore what they had argued for must have worked. Retrospectively they came to the conclusion that it was right to see the Cold War in terms of good vs. evil, to support a nuclear war fighting strategy, to pursue rollback instead of containment.

The eventual goal of containment, if you go back to what George Kennan among others wrote, was that the Soviet Union was going to collapse under its own weight if we prevented it from expanding. And we did that, and if you look at the data the Soviet Union did collapse under its own weight. It was an economically unviable state and it became unviable long before the Reagan administration came into office. But when we won the Cold War, the conservatives tried to establish that they had won the Cold War and not containment.

VP: You describe the neo-conservative view of peace as equal to a flat-out American victory. How much do you think this belief resonates with the American public at large? What should foreign nations make of this?

J.P.S.: I would want to look at public opinion polls to be certain of this, but my memory of the polling that I’ve seen is that if you ask Americans if they want to be more involved in the UN they say yes. Americans also think that we spend more on foreign aid than we do, and they support a negotiated settlement with Iran versus war with Iran. I think that the view of absolute American dominance is not one that is shared by the public at large. But it does depend on how you ask the question. Would it be nice if we could take care of our own security and not worry about what anybody else thought? It would be nice not to have to depend on anybody else. But Americans recognize that we’re a part of the world and we cannot completely divorce ourselves from it. They know that our security is in a sense intertwined with that of others and with the way others perceive their own security. I don’t think you should look at Americans and see a nation of imperialists. I think it is a minority view It’s been advanced by a group of hard-line policy-makers who received much of their support from the American public because the American public was very frightened in the wake of 9/11 and, frankly, it was not given correct information on the contours of the post-9/11 world and where the dangers lay.

VP: Throughout your book, as well as in most conservative writing, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona is described as the father of modern American conservatism. How has he managed to become so influential when, in 1964, his political career was marked by one of the most embarrassing defeats in the history of Presidential campaigns? How do you evaluate his legacy today?

J.P.S.: Barry Goldwater was the first and one of the purest embodiments of conservatism as it took shape in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was a guy that was talking about conservatism at a time when people didn’t think there really was anything such as conservatism. The liberal worldview both in terms of domestic and foreign policy was dominant. He became a kind of noble rebel figure. And a number of today’s conservatives got their start working under Barry Goldwater. (Interestingly, Hillary Clinton was also a Goldwater girl). We can say that he failed politically but he succeeded ideologically. Conservatives saw in him ideological bravery. He also embodied what they believed in, and before Goldwater there had not been a national figure that did.

The Goldwater’s legacy has become melted with a lot of other influences – it’s hard to say that there is a strict Goldwater school. John Bolton [former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations] very much sees himself as a Goldwater guy. But John Bolton is a rare figure in that he is very ideologically pure. Most conservatives still retain certain beliefs that don’t necessarily fall in the conservative worldview. In any case, if you talked to a serious conservative of any stripe at some point the names of Goldwater and Conscience of a Conservative will be brought up.

VP: What would Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan think of George W. Bush and his presidency?

J.P.S.: From a foreign policy standpoint, Goldwater would be very pleased. From an economic standpoint he would be a lot less pleased, since the Bush administration has done nothing to rein in government spending. Goldwater was also a social libertarian as well as an economic libertarian and he would probably have trouble seeing some of the blending of religion and politics that there has been under Bush.

I think Reagan would be horrified in many ways. If you think about the later Reagan years, he would probably be somewhat mystified by the refusal to talk to enemy states. Although it is true that there is nobody right now in North Korea that you could talk to that would be on the order of a Gorbachev, in Iran – and especially prior to Ahmadinejad – you had pragmatist/reformist politicians whom the Bush administration refused to engage with in 2002 and 2003. Reagan would also be horrified by the idea of more useable nuclear weapons. Reagan was horrified by nuclear weapons and I think the idea of developing more useable, low-yield, bunker-busting nuclear weapons would bother him deeply.

VP: What kind of a foreign policy should the world expect from John McCain if he were to become the next president? Will it be more similar to Reagan and Bush’s more aggressive first terms or to their more accommodating second-terms?

J.P.S.: This is an incredibly difficult question to answer. It’s impossible to predict what any future president will do before he/she enters office and before he/she appoints various people to various staff positions – staff lends an administration a lot of its character. There are many reasons to believe that John McCain would continue Reagan and Bush’s first-term approach to foreign policy. He talks about the world very much in terms of good vs. evil. And it doesn’t appear to be simply a rhetorical device for him. McCain seems to genuinely view the United States in a transcendental way. And he seems to be taking that worldview to a similar conclusion to that of the conservatives during the Cold War, similar to Reagan and similar to Bush, in the sense that he doesn’t want to engage with Iran or North Korea for example. Instead he’s been an advocate of what he calls “rogue states rollback,” which is very much a conservative position. He advances an idea of a “concert of democracies” which could sound like he is going to work with our allies more. But I think you can also interpret that as being a new version of the “coalition of the willing,” meaning that we are going to surround ourselves with people that think the same as we do, and we are not going to have to worry about the rest of them. Unfortunately the rest of them happen to be all of the states in the United Nations; not only the really hard cases like Iran and North Korea, but all of those that are now called “non-aligned states” which are all going to be essential if we are really going to fight proliferation and a number of other transnational issues such as climate change. Russia and China are not going to be part of the “concert of democracies,” but the U.S. can’t really have a foreign policy that not only advances its own national interests, but also global interests such as the environment, non-proliferation and terrorism, if Washington is unwilling to involve Russia and China. I guess I’m not incredibly optimistic right now about a McCain Presidency.

VP: What do you think are the lessons from the Cold War that should be applied to the dealings with Iran? Is containment a good option? Do we need an even stronger form of engagement? Can the U.S. ignore Teheran all together?

J.P.S.: I certainly don’t think we can ignore them all together. I think that ignoring them led to the unchecked continuation of Iran’s nuclear program and I’m convinced that Iran’s nuclear program does present a security threat to the United States and to the West. Since it also presents a threat to the non-proliferation regime, I believe that in general it presents a global threat. Some form of engagement with Iran is going to be necessary and is going to have to involve the United States directly. It will probably have to take place without pre-conditions and go from there. What a successful negotiation will require is the willingness of the Iranians to seriously engage. If that doesn’t exist than this is not going to go anywhere. And it’s also going to require a willingness on the part of the United States, its allies and Russia and China to present Iran with a series of benefits that will make clear to Teheran the advantages of giving up the enrichment of uranium and that will motivate them to close the possibility of any sort of nuclear weapons program. If Iran is not willing to halt enrichment, if it wants to keep its options open for a weapons program, then we’re going to have a serious problem. And even then I don’t think that ignoring the problem is going to be the answer. There is a lot that hasn’t been tried yet. The U.S. hasn’t been directly involved with Iran on the negotiations about the nuclear program and until that has taken place I’m not going to foreclose that option. With any luck, we will soon have a different Iranian president that we can deal with as well as a new American president.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Mickey Edwards is a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and the vice president of the Aspen Institute. Before Princeton he taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the John Quincy Adams Lecturer in Legislative Practice. Prior to his teaching career, Mr. Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years as the Representative for Oklahoma’s 5^th District. He was a member of the House Republican Leadership, a member of the Appropriations and Budget Committees, and the ranking member of the House subcommittee on foreign operations. A leading conservative, Mr. Edwards was also one of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation and national chairman of the American Conservative Union. Mr. Edwards has been a weekly political commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers. Mr. Edwards’ primary interest is in the field of constitutional studies. In his most recent book, Reclaiming Conservatism, Mickey Edwards offers a frank and provocative critique of George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Troubled by the concentration of power in the hands of the Executive that has taken place under the current administration, Mr. Edwards launches an attack on today’s GOP for having abandoned its original mission of defending the Constitution and protecting the individual rights of the people. Finally, Mickey Edwards lays down the principles that are at the roots of American conservatism in an attempt to revive the movement from the ground up.

Mr. Edwards spoke with Washington Prism about the crisis of Conservatism, the Bush Administration, the future of the Republican Party and the 2008 presidential campaign.

Valentina Pasquali (VP): When and why did you originally start thinking about writing this book?

Mickey Edwards (ME): There were many triggers overtime. I decided to write the book when I reached the breaking point, when there were so many things that had got me so upset about the direction of the Republican Party that I couldn’t just privately grumble about it anymore, I needed to do something about it. In 2004 I didn’t even vote for George W. Bush, even though I had been a foreign policy advisor to his campaign in 2000. But I still wasn’t being very publicly outspoken, only my family knew that I had not voted for him. As things began to pile up, more and more things that really bothered me, I really felt like I had to say something about it.

VP: How much do you think the conservative message still resonate with the American public at large? Do you think the take-over of the Republican Party by movements different from Conservatism was the result of intra-party power struggles, or it also reflected changes of ideology occurring at the level of public opinion?

ME: I think the views that were predominant in the party, and that were primarily the views of Ronald Reagan, are still very popular. But that’s not what the current Republican Party is presenting, what it stands for. But I don’t think what the public wants has changed, so I don’t think that the Party has changed in response to a public demand. I think what happened was that various narrower interests began to take over the party. It wasn’t a matter of a change in the feelings of grass-root people, registered Republicans, but of the people in the political class, those who were running for office, for example the religious right, to some extent the Neo-conservatives. I don’t think the great bulk of the American people, or even the bulk of the Republicans agree with that. But in a political context, a small political group can have a lot of influence. Because they turn out to vote in the primaries, and, in America, it’s not who the most people are for, but who the most people who go vote are for. To some extent the rise of the religious right and the neo-con came about because America stopped participating in elections, especially in primary elections.

I just visited my home district in Oklahoma and I was worried about people’s reaction to what I wrote. But I found overwhelming support for those ideas. I think there’s an important fault line; on one side it’s the people who worked in the Reagan Administration and supported the Reagan Campaign, and of course, before then, those that were a part of the Goldwater and Nixon times. These people very strongly agree with me. Then there are the people who came after Reagan, which is when the religious right and the neo-con actually reached their greatest strength; they hate what I’m saying. They are the tail wagging the dog.

VP: How much of the base of the Republican Party is comprised by the so-called religious right?

ME: Most of the numbers I’ve seen are in the range of 20-30%. I remember one poll from the Florida primary, which is considered to be a pretty hard-core conservative state, where less than 30% of the Republicans said that they considered themselves very conservative. And in today’s language very conservative means either religious right, or strong supporter of the Bush’s foreign policy. It was certainly less than a third of the Republican voters and in terms of the whole electorate a very small proportion. However, if a group represents the 25%-30% but it is made of people who work in the elections and show up to campaign, if they make phone calls and distribute literature, then they have an influence way beyond their number.

I think the better question, but I don’t know the answer, would be what percentage of the Republicans who actively participate in somebody’s congressional campaign, for example, are a part of the religious right or are neo-con. I haven’t seen any number but it’s has to be way higher than 30%, probably over 50%.

VP: What do you think Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan’s opinion would be of present-day Conservatives and the current Administration?

ME: I’ve said several times that if Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton had done the things that this President is doing, real conservatives would have marched on Washington to protest and I think Barry Goldwater would be leading that march. And I think he’d be leading it against this President too. All of that Goldwater stood for was opposed to this concentration of federal power, to presidents acting like kings, who believe that a President is above the law. Our complaint about government was that it was intruding in the freedom of the people. Well, Lyndon Johnson never intruded on the freedom of the American people the way George Bush does. So I think Goldwater would be just sick. In fact, Barry Goldwater Jr., his son, has been extremely outspoken about this President and how bad he is.

VP: What approach do you think a truly conservative President would take toward Iran and how do you evaluate George W. Bush’s stance toward Teheran?

So far George Bush is not doing anything about Iran except insisting that Iranians pose a threat to us. He worries about their nuclear ambitions; he is concerned about whether they are helping the terrorists in Iraq fighting American soldiers. I think any American president would have exactly the same position. But I think Ronald Reagan, for example, would not have a problem sitting down with the Iranian President. There would be a lot of groundwork laid first; we would have to see whether there was something we could talk about. But he sat down with the Soviet leaders when they had missiles aimed at the United States, and they had not renounced Khrushchev’s statement that they were going to bury us, when they still had the Eastern part of Europe locked up. Reagan went to talk to them. I don’t think he would say never ever talk to them. But neither Reagan nor Goldwater would just let the Iranians off, to continue with nuclear weapons or to do harm to American soldiers in Iran. On Iran, I think Bush’s policies are not very different from what any American president would do.

VP: Considering what we have been saying thus fur, how did George W. Bush win a second term?

ME: For two reasons: First, most of what he did, and is now disliked for, became much more visible in his second term. Remember that the elections for his second term came only about a year after we had gone into Iraq. There still wasn’t full information available about the fact that maybe we had been misled. I remember, in 2004, there were people still insisting that the weapons of mass destruction had to be there, but that we just had not found them yet. Secondly, Republicans don’t win so much as Democrats lose. The Democrats continued to put forth candidates who just don’t resonate with the American people. To some extent George W. Bush won and to some extent John Kerry lost. Even in 2000, when Gore won more of the popular vote, most surveys showed that the people didn’t like him. Maybe they agreed with his policies, but they didn’t really like him and when you have this kind of a society that is so driven by the media, whether or not you like someone versus just reading about his/her policies makes a huge different.

VP: What is your opinion of John McCain? Where do you think he would stand in relation to Conservatism if he was to become the new President?

ME: There’s wishful thinking here, but I want to believe that the real John McCain is the one who ran in 2000, the one who is now publicly distancing himself from George Bush, on the way to handle foreign policy, on the attitude toward war, the environment. I hope that that is the real John McCain. From time to time, he starts worrying about the hard-core conservatives, 30% is enough that you don’t want to lose them, even though they are a minority, and so he says things that bother me, that are too much like Bush. But I think the real John McCain is more like what I’ve been talking about a not a lot like George W. Bush. I hope that, if he were President, and given his age there are pretty good chances that he would choose not to run for a second term, that that would free him up to be the maverick that a lot of us think he really is.

VP: Who are, in today’s GOP, the political personalities that you think still embody American Conservatism and that should lead the reclamation of the movement that you advocate for?

ME: I don’t know. At the national level, those who are in Congress already, it’s hard to know which one believes what because they have so automatically rallied behind the President and supported the President, with almost everything he wants to do, that you don’t know what they would really do on their own. Ron Paul has some of the things that we talked about, but he’s also off in other directions especially on monetary issues, and he’s too old to be leading any kind of reclaiming of the party. I don’t see one right now. I see some people but they are people who are in state legislatures or who are holding some state office. I don’t see any on the federal level. I see people at the federal level who receive a lot of attention, but I don’t know enough where they really stand on issues. So far they’ve been casting outrageous votes supporting the President. I’m guessing this kind of new movement will have to come from people from the states that we don’t know about yet.

VP: Do you think these individuals could be hiding among those names that are being thrown around as potential running mates for McCain?

There are people like Bobby Jindal in Luisiana, Charlie Crist in Florida, Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota. There are a number being considered, plus people like Romney, who is a former governor. None of them really fits the same model. I’ve always liked Bobby Jindal, but when he ran for Governor he ran on a pretty hard-core conservative program. Mike Huckabee (Governor of Arkansas) remains a possibility. I don’t know if I see any of them in that light. Maybe Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota and Charlie Crist in Florida; I’d say those are probably the two closest.

But way too much attention has been paid to this. There is always an assumption now that the vice-president will be like Dick Cheney, real powerful input. But Cheney is very unusual; the history of the United States has been very different from that, with the vice-president that has virtually no influence. When Harry Truman became President, he wasn’t even aware that we had an atomic bomb. That was much more typical, that the vice-president is not a decision-maker. Charlie Crist, who’s very popular in Florida, could cause a few additional people in Florida to vote Republican and that could help carry Florida. So the choice of the vice-president does that. Like Lyndon Johnson helped carry Texas. But they are not important because they have any real impact on policies.

VP: Does the “reclamation of Conservatism” necessarily need to take place within the ranks of the Republican Party?

ME: If a democrat adopted those policies I’d be for a democrat. We thought we had taken over the Republican Party, instead the Republican Party took us over, and party dominance became the greatest goal. Well that’s not my goal; my goal is protecting the Constitution, a government that follows our Constitution. I care about America more than I care about the Republican Party. Bill Clinton, when he was President, said that it would be the end of welfare as we knew it, that he wouldn’t be the old fashion left wing liberal democrat anymore. And I said then, “don’t attack him, just claim victory.”

VP: What do you think instead of this year’s Democratic candidates?

ME: First of all I don’t know if there still are candidates in the plural. In any case, I think Hillary Clinton would make a decent President. I think she’s has sound judgment in foreign policy. There were a lot of things wrong with her husband but his policies weren’t all that bad. Unfortunately she’s run a terrible campaign. In the early stages she let Obama get ahead because she did a really poor job with grass-root organizing. She thought that because she was who she was, she could just cruise through. And instead Obama had organizers who killed her in the caucuses.

As far as Barack Obama; in one way I’m worried about him, because he does seem very naïve and inexperienced, and that’s a dangerous thing in foreign policy. I really like his approach to politics, his talking about getting beyond party divisions. I don’t know how real this is, because in his policies, he seems a pretty traditional liberal democrat, they are not middle-ground policies. And I also hope that we are not just being taken in by somebody who’s simply a really good public speaker. I wish I knew if that was real or smoke and mirrors. If he’d been in office for 10 years and he was talking this way, you could look back on his record and see if that’s the real him. But now we have no way of knowing. You either take his word or you worry that is all air.

VP: In conclusion, do you feel optimistic about the possibility of reclaiming Conservatism?

No. And I don’t feel optimistic because so few Americans really understand what our system is like. If you walk down the street and ask someone; “who’s the head of Government?” they won’t know. They’ll say; “it’s the President.” But he is not. “Who’s in charge of foreign policy?” “The President,” well, he is not. “Who’s supposed to decide on whether you go to war, or what you do with prisoners of war?” “The President,” well, he is not. We have been so unchallenged for over two hundred years that people have gotten lazy in remembering why our system of government is what it is. It is decentralized, with the powers being all separated. The thing that makes America different is that we’ve left the power in the hands of people through their representatives. That’s different from almost any country in the world and that what scares me today. Until people can’t understand what the President should be and what the job of Congress should be I don’t see how things can change.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Washington DC – In the last decade, and following the financial crisis that hit economies throughout the region in 1997, Asian countries have grown increasingly integrated into the global stage and, even more significantly, have engaged more closely among themselves. Asia’s New Regionalism is the title of a new book by Ellen Frost, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC and a former counsel to the United States Trade Representative under the first Clinton Administration.

“This is a very slow-moving but profoundly strategic development going on in Asia,” said Frost at the book launch co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and Asia Society.  In her latest study, the Peterson Institute’s fellow offers a broad overview of the continent’s history, politics and economy, and depicts the emergence of two Asias; maritime Asia and Asia Major.

Maritime Asia is “the vast sweep of coastline and water connecting central and southern India, Southeast Asia, China, the Korean peninsula, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.” Here integration is happening spontaneously, driven by individuals through mercantile exchanges, foreign investments and travel. Maritime Asia provides the ground for Regionalization, the process that is knitting the economies and societies of the region closer together. Asia Major instead “is a political construct. It is the locus of planned integration driven by national governments,” a top-down process that Frost calls Regionalism.

Regionalism has taken the form of a series of multilateral forums, such as ASEAN (the Association of East Asian Nations) and its most recent version ASEAN+3 which includes China, Japan and Korea. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is another example of a security-related intergovernmental organization that binds together China and the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia.

Meanwhile, levels of trade and financial exchanges are proof of the parallel process of Regionalization.  Data released by the Asian Development Bank shows that the share of intraregional trade as a percentage of total exports from Asia rose from 26.2% in 1985 to 37.3% in 2005. Similarly, according to a study by Rabin Hattari and Ramkishen S. Rajan, two research scholars at George Mason University in Virginia, intraregional Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) had grown to make up 40% of total FDIs to Asia by 2004.

These political and economic trends, although separate, are progressing hand in hand and could encourage some to believe that Asia is on its way to “European Union-style” integration.

In 2004, Norbert Walter, the Chief Economist of Deutsche Bank Group, wrote that “Asia is a logical candidate to take a leadership role in the reform of global currency markets- by creating a common Asian currency.” Dr. Walter set a potential deadline at the year 2025.

In 2007, the Asian Development Bank launched a two-year assessment project aimed at studying Asian emerging regionalism on the premises that “Despite their diverse economic structures, income levels, and resource endowments, Asian economies are starting to use closer regional ties to provide a new platform for their development process.”

In spite of the optimism, observers in Washington DC are inclined to warn against the overestimation of the state of integration in Asia. “The governments are happy with the status-quo,” Ellen Frost told Washington Prism in an interview. “Nation states are not going away any time soon,” she emphasized.

Mike Green, Chair of the Japan Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), in an interview with Washington Prism explained that “multilateral cooperation is good, but it should not be over-hyped.” Green pointed out that Asia still sends 80% of its investment out of its territory and relies on the outside world for about 80% of incoming portfolio investment. Furthermore, despite the fact that intraregional trade flows are growing, the production networks are still sending a large part of the final product out of the region to North America and Europe. Green’s assessment is that “the capital markets in Asia are not mature enough to be the financial engine for an EU-type common market and the high savings/low consumption patterns across the region also make it unlikely in the near term.”

Experts across the US capital have expressed similar understandings in interviews with Washington Prism.  Christopher Griffin, a Research Associate at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), said, “European-style integration is not in the cards for Asia, at least not for many years.” The fact is that many countries still treat regionalism as a form of rivalry. This is the case, for example, of the Sino-Japanese approach to multilateral forums as vehicles for competition over regional leadership. Zhongying Pang, an International Affairs Scholar at the Brookings Institution, added; “The ongoing process is not an EU-like regional cooperation.

Although Asia has made progress on regional cooperation, it is still in its nascent stage of regionalization and regionalism. There are no formal mutually binding regional institutions and mechanisms yet.” Teresita Schaffer, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia in the late 1980s and currently Director of the South Asia Program at CSIS echoed her colleagues. “I don’t see any demand for political union, and the countries of the region are too jealous of their sovereignty to want to move in that direction.”

“There are four areas of disagreement still that will keep the process very slow,” Mike Green explained to Washington Prism. First of all, there are extremely different understandings of integration. “At one end the Chinese say ‘non-interference in internal affairs.’  At the other end Japan says there should be ‘principled multilateralism’ that moves the region towards higher quality norms of good governance and democracy,” Green told us. Secondly, there is disagreement over the definition of Asia itself and which countries belong to it. “Japan, Singapore and Indonesia say India, Australia and New Zealand are in.  China says not in any ‘East Asia’ community. The USA says it must be in.  The rest of Asia agrees, but can’t decide on exactly what role beyond the US security presence that would be in the future,” Mike Green continued. Then there is the question of the provision of public goods. A great part of the region still looks to the USA and its allies to provide security, a trend that doesn’t seem likely to change in the future. Finally, an agreement has yet to be reached over what kind of economic union should be sought. “Japan is exploring currency cooperation and a common financial system, but others resist.  China and some Southeast Asian states want very low quality free trade agreements, but other countries insist that trade liberalization must be real.”

Basically, major players in the continent are now competing over the form integration should take as it progresses: should Asia maintain the ASEAN+3 formula, resurrect APEC or embrace the East Asia Summit (which includes ASEAN+3 and also India, Australia and New Zealand)? “ASEAN, Japan and China have their different understandings on the future of the three regional or trans-regional bodies,” Zhongying Pang told Washington Prism. As a result, “Asia will not have a full regional integration in the near future,” Pang continued, “but in sub-regional levels such as Southeast Asia, the regional integration will be deepened.”

However slow, an agreement exists on the fact that Asian integration will continue. Nevertheless, there remain issues that could hinder the process. Griffin of AEI notes that “integration in Asia is so fragile largely because of the fact that many Asian countries view the use of force as a legitimate mechanism to settle their myriad disputes, especially China and North Korea.” Even so, it is highly unlikely that integration will come to a sudden and complete halt. Pang, of Brookings, believes that “in the future, ASEAN will not abandon its pursuit of a Southeast Asia regional community and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will continue to be consolidated. Even the Six-Party Talks over DPRK nuclear issue is promoting a regional cooperation in Northeast Asia. So, there will be no such possibility of regional cooperation collapse.”
Despite their differences, “Asian nations have been willing to put many resources behind this community building exercise,” Ellen Frost highlights. Regionalism, in her opinion, “contributes to stability and provides a roof for cooperation.” Hence, the trend will almost certainly progress, although it might be decades before it takes a shape more similar to that of an economic, monetary and political union.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington DC – In November 2003 the USS Vandergrift docked at the port of Ho Chi Minh City completing the first port call by an American navy ship to Vietnam since the end of the war in 1975. Onboard the vessel was an old slim Vietnamese man, who had joined the parade at the invitation of both the United States ambassador to Vietnam Raymond Burghardt and United States consul general Emi Lynn Yamauchi. Nobody seemed to recognize him, other than a colonel that approached him and asked in Vietnamese, “Excuse me, are you General Pham Xuan An?”

The old smoke-consumed Vietnamese was no other than X6, the most famous Communist agent employed by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. Throughout the conflict, Mr. An also worked as Time Magazine correspondent – the only local to be assigned such role by a major American news organization. Journalism was Pham Xuan An’s cover, and as a reporter writing on American and South Vietnamese military and diplomatic events, he was granted access to off-the-record briefings by American authorities. This information made the reports Mr. An filed back to his North Vietnamese superiors invaluable.

Journalism, combined with Pham Xuan An’s personality and warmth, was also what allowed him to knit a close network of true and intimate friendships with many renown Americans and to maintain them through the end of the war and beyond. Incredibly so, nobody ever felt betrayed by him, despite Mr. An’s life of deception.

“Pham Xuan An was a great conversationalist, he loved speaking,” Larry Berman, author of Mr. An’s first western biography, told Washington Prism in an interview. “He was a man of extraordinary self-control, very discipline mentally. And he had a talent for math, it had been his favorite subject at school,” Professor Berman continued. “An said that it helped him to compartmentalize things and to live these two lives without a crack.”

Professor Larry Berman, of the University of California Davis, is a historian specialized in the history of the Cold War. He met Pham Xuan An by coincidence, at a dinner he attended while traveling through Vietnam in 2000, at a time when he was conducting research for a book on the secret Paris negotiations between Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese Communist counterpart, Le Duc Tho. In the interview with Washington Prism, Mr. Berman explained; “I wasn’t in the Vietnam War, I never served. But I grew up during the War and so I was always really curious to understand this threshold event in my own life.”

After their first casual encounter, Professor Berman had to face stubborn resistance by Pham Xuan An before finally succeeding in convincing him to tell his story as agent X6. Mr. An was worried that the information he might have disclosed would put the lives of other people at risk. Finally Mr. An gave in and Larry Berman became his official biographer in the West, beginning a collaboration that lasted until Mr. An’s death in September 2006 and that gave birth to “The Perfect Spy”, which comes out in paper back this month.

Born outside Saigon on the 12 of September 1927, Pham Xuan An joined the Communist national liberation movement– the Vietminh – in 1944, when he was only 16. At the time, the organization was fighting the Japanese occupation of Vietnam. Mr. An later became a spy for the Communist government in the North, right after Vietnam was partitioned following the departure of the French in 1954. He was immediately selected to infiltrate the South Vietnamese Army, which in turn assigned him to the Central Intelligence Agency, unknowingly making Mr. An a double agent.

His work with the CIA offered Mr. An an invaluable opportunity to start studying the American mind and to nurture close ties with many powerful Americans. Among them, there was Colonel Edward Landsdale, director of the CIA Saigon Military Mission and one of the leading anti-communists of that time. Mr. Landsdale grew so fond of Mr. An as to become the sponsors of his U.S. visa when, in 1956, Mr. An received a State Department scholarship to attend Fullerton College in California.

It was in California that Pham Xuan An began his career as a journalist, a profession that he always passionately loved and wished he could practice exclusively. During two years that he described to Professor Berman as “the best of his life,” Mr. An worked on the school newspaper and held an internship at The Sacramento Bee, the daily newspaper of California’s capital.

Mr. An moved back to Vietnam in 1958, working in Saigon for The Associated Press and then Reuters, until he landed the job at Time Magazine, which he held from 1965 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Throughout the war, he became the most prominent source for all American journalists covering Vietnam, the only person who could explain to them the complexities of the country’s politics. At the same time, Mr. An was also the most valuable informer of the North Vietnamese.

The liberation of Saigon of April 30^th 1975, to which Pham Xuan An had dedicated his life, failed to fulfill many of the expectations that he had fostered during his years as a spy. Mr. An had hoped that, in a unified and independent Vietnam, he would have been able to practice journalism in that fair and objective manner that he had learned in America. The Communist regime crashed such dream and, not trusting Mr. An because of his close connections to the Americans, never even allowed him to leave the country to pay visit to his friends in the United States.

Nevertheless, Mr. An, who was named a national hero for the services rendered during the war, remained committed to the cause and accepted to live the rest of his life within the restrictions imposed on him and his family by the government. Until that November day in 2003, when gliding into the port of Ho Chi Minh City onboard a U.S. warship, Mr. An finally saw his two lives coming together; “I can die happy now. I served my country, my people, and reunification,” he later told Professor Larry Berman.

“If there was not Pham Xuan An, would the outcome of the war have been different?” Professor Berman wonders. In the interview with Washington Prism, he told us; “I think the answer is no, the outcome of the war would not have been different, the Americans would have never achieved their political objectives in Vietnam.” Nevertheless, Mr. Berman believes, Mr. An played “a major role in effecting the outcome of the war, just not a decisive one.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Washington D.C.- dawnofcoldwarWashington D.C.- On March 24th 1946, at 1:30 pm, a wire from the Kremlin arrives to the commander of the Soviet troops deployed in the Northwest region of Iran known as Iranian Azerbaijan. Joseph Stalin orders his soldiers to withdraw immediately. By 8:00 pm that same evening the Red Army is on its way back north, directed to Moscow.

“Normally,” says historian Jamil Hasanli, “it takes between two to four weeks for a withdrawal order to actually take place.” The directive sent by Stalin, that spring day of 1946, must have sounded of particular urgency to the troops on the ground.
Dr. Jamil Hasanli comes from Azerbaijan. He is a member of the country’s parliament and a well respected Professor of International Relations at the University of Baku in Azerbaijan.

In his latest book, At the Dawn of the Cold War, Dr. Hasanli addresses the crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan province as one of the first theaters of Soviet-American conflict, marking the beginning of the Cold War.

“As a rule, the beginning of the Cold War has been traced to Europe,” Dr. Hasanli explained recently at a conference in Washington D.C. For a long time the frontier that separated the Soviet Union and the United States ran across Europe.  Additionally, the majority of Universities and Research Centers that study the Cold War are based in Europe and the US. These factors have greatly contributed to the prevalence of a Eurocentric approach to studying the Cold War.

Dr. Hasanli, however, is convinced that the historiography on the Cold War has been missing a point. “With a degree of certainty” the Professor at Baku University says, “I can now state the Cold War originated in the East.”

The Azerbaijan province of Iran, which the Azerbaijanis prefer to call Southern Azerbaijan, is, in Dr. Hasanli’s opinion, one of the decisive grounds in the emergence of the conflict between the two superpowers. The border between Iran and Azerbaijan, which assigned this portion of territory to Teheran (or the Azerbaijan portion to the Tsarist Russian Empire,) was established in 1828 with the Treaty of Turkmanchay that put an end to the Russian – Persian War.

In the period between 1945 and1946 the delicate equilibrium of this area became threatened once again. The Soviets saw Iranian Azerbaijan province as a target with a dual potential; on one hand gaining control of the region would have helped secure better access to oil and protect Baku’s oil fields. On the other hand, and most importantly, Iranian Azerbaijan would have represented one important step in the expansionist policies pursued by Stalin.

The United States and Britain perceived such aggressive stance of the USSR as a threat of further communist expansion. For the Azeri population the possibility of reunification was a matter of national identity and common faith.

Events started unfolding in the summer of 1945. As Dr. Hasanli explains, “The Soviets Politburo made secret decisions about the Azerbaijani separatist movements in the Iranian province of Azerbaijan,” and started funding and supporting them. Such move proved to be a success, as the Soviets found an available nucleus of indigenous movements that wanted to separate from Iran and re-unite the Azeri population under one flag.

In late 1945, as tensions mounted, the United States Secretary of State James Byrnes talked to the Ambassador of Iran, trying to convince the Iranian leadership to grant more freedom to the Azeris, so as to calm down the unrest and to try discrediting the Soviet attempt at annexing the region. However, according to Dr. Hasanli the Shah did not follow through and dismissed the pressures from the Americans.

On March 2nd 1946, the USSR was to pull out of the Azerbaijan province, but failed to do so. “This had an explosive effect,” Dr. Hasanli says. In short, the Soviets’ interests in the oil fields of Baku were so significant and the border of Iran so close to that city, that Moscow was determined to make its presence felt by keeping its troops on the ground in Southern Azerbaijan.

In his book, the author asserts that after Soviet Union’s refusal to withdraw, Iranian Prime Minister Ahmad Ghavam visited Moscow and engaged in talks with Stalin and his Foreign Minister Molotov asking the Soviets to withdraw their troops from Iran. Stalin tried to convince him to overthrow the monarch instead, and declare a republic in Iran. At first Ghavam seemed intrigued by the suggestion, but soon after started backtracking and openly asked Molotov not to speak on the issue in the presence of the interpreter. He returned to Teheran empty-handed, not being able to obtain a troop withdrawal commitment from the Soviets.

The situation in Iran was growing increasingly tense. The American ambassador to Teheran had written to Washington saying that the Shah and the Prime Minister were very worried and were getting ready to flee. The United States government reacted with great concern. “They saw the situation as a realistic attempt by the Soviets to possibly gain control of the oil fields in Southern Iran, the Kurdistan region, Northern Iraq and Eastern Turkey,” Jamil Hasanli explains.

Charles Bohlen, an expert on Soviet Union and later US ambassador to Moscow in the 1950s, was still convinced that the White House had the power to block Soviet Union’s expansion plans. He advised President Truman to threat Moscow with the use of the atomic bomb.

Although currently no evidence exists in the American archives that this ever happened, but Dr. Hasanli insists that he has come into the possession of one important document from the USSR archive that proves his chronology of events.

According to him, the truth of the matter is; Soviet supplies were still pouring into the Iranian Azerbaijan province on March 24th, up until the point when the order of withdrawal was wired from Moscow. The troops started pulling out that very same night. Something major must have happened then, the Baku University historian believes.
Dr. Hasanli’s book At the Dawn of the Cold War is a thick manuscript with detailed accounts of those years, where he reviews the history of Iranian Azerbaijan’s independence movement, the Soviet struggle for oil in Iran, and the American and British reactions to these events. Hasanli delved deeply into Soviet and Azerbaijani archives as well as what he found analyzing declassified top-secret materials from American, British and Iranian sources.

The Soviets’ rigid bureaucratic organization has been Hasanli’s fortune. Because these documents dealt with Azerbaijan, as a rule the Soviets duplicated a copy for the Azerbaijan’s Communist Party leadership. Without those duplicates, most of the Scholars’ research would have probably been impossible, since most of the archives in Russia are inaccessible to this day. “This has allowed us to take a unique journey through the instances of this crisis,” Dr. Hasanli emphasizes.

Dr. Jamil Hasanli takes the Azerbaijani perspective on the issue and makes no secret of it. With his effort to re-direct the debate on the Cold War and its beginning to the East and specifically to the crisis over Iranian Azerbaijan, he attempts to bring back issues of nationality and minorities’ rights into the discourse on the confrontation between the two blocks.

“Because the Cold War has always been seen as dealing with greater policy issues, often the problems of national interest and nationalities have been overlooked,” the historians points out. The day that the Soviets retreated, marking the defeat of Iranian Azeri separatist movement, he says, “was the beginning of tragedy in the lives of many Azeris.”

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism