hoover digest, 2015, no. 3, summer
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T H E H O O V E R I N S T I T U T I O N • S T A N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
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The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was established at Stanford Univer-
sity in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, a member of Stanford’s pioneer graduating class of 1895 and the
thirty-first president of the United States. Created as a library and repository of documents,
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T H E H O O V E R I N S T I T U T I O N
S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y
HOOVER DIGEST
RESEARCH + OPINION ON PUBLIC POLICY
SUMMER 2015 • HOOVERDIGEST.ORG
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The Hoover Digest explores politics, economics, and history, guided by the
scholars and researchers of the Hoover Institution, the public policy research
center at Stanford University.
The opinions expressed in the Hoover Digest are those of the authors and
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ON THE COVER
Many peoples and nations are known
by their symbols. This oak tree and the
colors red, green, and white symbolize the
Basques, a people without an independent
nation of their own. The Basques do,however, have a tree—not just a symbolic
one but an oak actually growing in the
town of Guernica, Spain, and celebrated in
poetry and song. The oak and its forebears
have seen centuries of war, revolution, and
peace, and only time will tell if the tree will
witness lasting peace in today’s Basque
Country. See story, page 186.
HOOVER DIGESTRESEARCH + OPINION ON PUBLIC POLICYSUMMER 2015 • HOOVERDIGEST.ORG
HOOVER
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Summer 2015 HOOVER DIGEST
TERRORISM
9 Sledgehammers of Ideology Jihadists are trying to destroy history—in the halls of Iraq’s
museums, quite literally. Standing in their way: a civilizationthat cherishes both political and artistic freedom. By Charles
Hill.
18 State of Terror Jessica Stern, a member of Hoover’s Task Force on National
Security and Law, shows how ISIS uses a slick, media-savvy
campaign to lure vulnerable youth to its end-times army. ByChristina Pazzanese.
26 Escape from GitmoThe legal path out of our long Guantánamo nightmare. By
Jane Harman and Jack Goldsmith.
FOREIGN POLICY
30 Weak, in Review When the Cold War ended, strategists became distracted by
the dangers of the “weak state.” Powerful adversaries used the
opportunity to grow even more powerful. By Amy B. Zegart .
37 Flip the Script Abandoned friends and defiant foes: what the president’s
foreign policy has wrought. By Kimberly Kagan.
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IRAN
41 No Sign of RestraintProperly understood, the Iran nuclear deal is at best only a
beginning, not an end—and regional stability may be fartheraway than ever. By George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger.
49 Digital DefianceThe Iranian people are challenging the theocracy that governs
them with a quiet revolution of their own, much of it online. By
Abbas Milani.
55 Memo to the “Great Satan”Iran isn’t reasonable—revolutionary states never are. The
United States should seek not to appease Iran but to contain
it. By Josef Joffe.
THE ECONOMY
58 Making the Poor RicherWhen the free market benefits people of all incomes,
“inequality” becomes a red herring. By Edward Paul Lazear .
61 Minimum Wages as Stealth TaxHigher minimum wages help almost nobody—but raise
prices for everybody. How is that a good idea? By Thomas E.
MaCurdy.
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65 The Wages of Stagnation Average pay has remained in the doldrums even as the
economy has grown. Here’s why. By Edward Paul Lazear .
68 Lyft Out A bad legal ruling in California could impede ride services, one
of the most promising offspring of the sharing economy. By
Richard A. Epstein.
SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
73 Green AlliesWhat would bring conservationists and conservatives
together? Environmental solutions that really work. By Terry
L. Anderson.
78 To Market, to MarketThe FDA finally admits genetically enhanced potatoes and
apples are safe. A sorry tale of bureaucratic timidity andinertia. By Henry I. Miller.
LAW
83 Law Schools Are FlunkingEnrollment is sagging and student debt climbing. Law schools
are a business—and in desperate need of a new businessmodel. By James Huffman.
CALIFORNIA
91 A (Dry) Winter’s TaleIn parched California, the well of political foresight ran dry
years ago. By Victor Davis Hanson.
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EDUCATION
104 Human Capital 101Why does college enrollment boom when the economy goes
bust? Hoover fellow Caroline M. Hoxby explains. By Clifton B. Parker .
107 A Degree of DifficultyNot every job requires a college degree. Employers are
shrinking the labor pool unfairly—and unwisely. By Michael J.
Petrilli.
DEMOCRACY
111 Trust Me, You FoolThat gibe about the “stupidity of the American voter” is as old
as Athens and as modern as a federal technocrat. By Bruce S.
Thornton.
116 Still Springing ForwardDespite terrorism in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab
Spring, the democracy movement in the Arab world lives on.
But its successes are fragile. By Larry Diamond .
WARFARE
121 The Drone AgeThe drone revolution will pose new threats—but also better
ways to counter them. By Amy B. Zegart .
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EUROPE
125 Medicine for What Ails EuropeFive steps toward restoring economic sanity in the eurozone.
By Michael J. Boskin.
RUSSIA
128 Autocrat for Life Vladimir Putin, with his genius for tapping the country’s
pathologies, has come to embody Russia itself. By Stephen
Kotkin.
141 Putin’s Recipe for PowerLarge parts aggression and calculation, a helping of insecurity,
and many dollops of resentment. By Victor Davis Hanson.
146 Sanctions Aren’t WorkingEconomic pressure is a slow, unpredictable weapon at best.
Sanctions not only have failed to deter Putin but might
prompt him to behave even worse. By Mark Harrison.
152 A New Economic WebRussia’s new Eurasian Economic Union is also an instrument
of Putin’s political power. By Sam Rebo and Norman M.
Naimark .
INTERVIEW
158 “Find Your Fit”Born creators, people are everywhere in creative chains:
David Kelley, founder of the Stanford design school, wants to
free your inner innovator. By Peter Robinson.
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VALUES
168 The Honesty GapThe clamor over male-female pay disparities persists not
because the clamor accomplishes anything but because it’spolitically useful. By Thomas Sowell .
HISTORY AND CULTURE
171 One of the Very Few A review of Shame , the new book by Hoover fellow Shelby
Steele, which presents a portrait of Steele himself. By Joseph
Epstein.
HOOVER ARCHIVES
178 Chiang’s Secret AdvisersDriven from the Chinese mainland, Chiang Kai-shek turned to
Japanese and German military officers, once his bitter foes, to
help him defend Taiwan. By Hsiao-ting Lin.
186 On the Cover
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TERRORISM
Sledgehammers of Ideology
Jihadists are trying to destroy history—in the halls
of Iraq’s museums, quite literally. Standing in theirway: a civilization that cherishes both political andartistic freedom.
By Charles Hill
Scenes of Islamic State smashing ancient statues—one a winged bull
from ninth-century BC Assyria—in a museum in Mosul and in the
ancient city of Nimrud reveal a profound new dimension in radical
Islam’s twenty-first-century war on world civilization. When the
slaughter, enslavement, and genocidal designs on other religious groups are
joined by culturally catastrophic destruction of non-Islamic arts and artifacts,
then the world faces a fully totalitarian enemy whose rationale is directly
declared: “Oh, Muslims, these artifacts that are behind me were idols and gods
who lived centuries ago [and were] worshipped instead of Allah,” the smasher
said to the camera. “Our Prophet,” he continued, “ordered us to remove all
these statues as his followers did when they conquered nations.”
Such cultural devastation has been evident all across this new twenty-first
century, from the Taliban’s mortaring and dynamiting the giant sculpted
Buddhas carved into the rock face at Bamiyan on the ancient Silk Road
to the Islamist devastation of the mausoleum, shrines, and library of the
Charles Hill is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of Hoover’s
Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
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fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Muslim center of learning at Timbuktu,
a world cultural heritage site. The devastation is also apparent in Saudi
Arabia’s systematic destruction of the traditional surroundings of the Kaaba
and the Grand Mosque of Mecca. The government has obliterated significant
Ottoman-era structures to put up high-rise glass and steel hotels of indistin-
guishable modern facelessness, a demonstration that such cultural ravages
can be carried out by legitimate, internationally recognized Muslim state
regimes as well as by the radical jihadis who aim to overthrow those same
state regimes as abominations in the eyes of Islamism.
If these depredations of Islamism are an atavistic reawakening of the
seventh-century Islamic rise in order to command the future, it is necessary
to review the devastations generated by the modern age itself all through the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the Enlightenment, as Kant and
Hegel made clear, history replaced theology and religion as the arena where
the greatest challenges of the human condition would have to be played out.
With religion relegated to the sidelines, ideology was invented as its substi-
tute. Ideology became a totalistic, answer-all-questions compulsory atheistic
[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest ]
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faith. Like most religions, once inaugurated, the ideology begins the world
anew: the French Revolution as the year zero, or Mao’s Tiananmen architec-
turally declaring that nothing good happened before 1949. Thus history itself
was destroyed or transformed with a scientific certainty, a railroad along
which the ideology would inevitably ride.
THE TYRANNY O F IDEOLOGY
The zenith of ideology’s catastrophic destruction of culture came in Mao’s
Cultural Revolution, launched to eradicate traditional Chinese culture by
burning books, outlawing the Peking Opera and all theatrical productions,
suppressing academic and intellectual life, and tearing down pagodas and
temples. Any structure or creative-arts manifestation had to be destroyed.
All this was produced in accordance with Mao’s perception that Marxism
had to be turned upside down. Materialism, the economic base that, when
communized, was supposed to change the culture, had not worked. Mao saw
culture—and he was correct—as the determinative human factor, so China’s
great cultural past had to go. Confucius was reviled; Mao reveled in being
compared to China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, who burned books and
buried scholars alive.
What we are witnessing today in Islamism’s war on the world’s cultures isnot unconnected to this modern revolutionary upheaval. The “history” that
replaced religion in the
Enlightenment and which
was in turn comman-
deered by ideology has,
with the Islamic Republic
of Iran’s revolutionary
seizure of state powerin 1979 and the Islamic
State’s taking of extensive territorial power in 2014–15, amalgamated religion
and ideology as a new stage in the war against history. No wonder, therefore,
that the radical jihadists revel in their conviction that the ultimate apocalyp-
tic moment has been placed in their hands.
However grotesque and despicable is Islamist vandalism in the service
of imagined divine instructions, there is more at stake in this phenomenon.
Something of world-historical consequence is going on, because this jihadi
assault threatens a global development which may stand comparison with
the axial age, a transformation in human consciousness discerned by the
philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). In the middle centuries of the first
The museum met Edmund Burke’s
definition of the social contract: a
partnership among the dead, the living,
and those yet to be born—a gain for the
common good of humanity.
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millennium BC, a trans-civilizational shift in mentalities took place across a
great swath of the globe from the Eastern Mediterranean to Persia to South
Asia to China. Sharply contested, the axial theory nonetheless does provide
coherence to the emergence of cultural expressions that contain both indi-
vidualist and universalist characteristics at the same time. A new axial age,
which can at least hypothetically be tracked from the early modern age to
the present, is still in an emerging phase of development, one that centers on
cultural art and artifacts.
Start with the reality that the sixteenth-century Reformation, a key
moment in the history of modernity, produced religiously driven iconoclasm;
a smashing of the images, altars, and sculptures on the grounds that such
“idolatry” had caused humanity to be afflicted by the wrath of God.
The 1648 Westphalian settlement of the Thirty Years’ War—a war of
religions—would subdue this inclination to cultural mayhem by gaining an
informal international understand-
ing that religious convictions should
be sidelined when it came to dip-
lomatic negotiations among
states. The Treaty of
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Westphalia would lead to an international system based on procedural rather
than substantive requirements; it thus could, and did, evolve into a light
structural framework for interactive world affairs while leaving each nation’s
culture, religion, and politics legitimately its own business.
Countervailing events followed. Lord Elgin (the seventh earl) in the early 1800s
removed the marble sculptures from the Parthenon to England for safekeeping
in the British Museum—otherwise they certainly would have been destroyed.
Lord Elgin (the eighth Earl) invaded China and burned and plundered treasures
of the Summer Palace for the larger purpose of forcing the Qing court to accept
the procedures—resident ambassadors—of the Westphalian international state
system; this was certainly a cultural crime of great magnitude.
Yet a parallel and positive cultural course was also emerging. British
scholar-adventurer-archeologists discovered lost or discarded sites and
images of the Buddha in northern India; it is not too much to say that Bud-
dhism itself might have
vanished without this project
and subsequent British pres-
ervation and interpretation
of ancient Buddhist scrolls.
A similar story can be foundregarding Islam, as in Oxford
University’s study of the
Amiriya at Rada, a sixteenth-
century madrasah in Yemen, the archeological interpretation of which
revealed commercial-religious-civilizational contacts between India and the
Arabian Peninsula. And some cultural scholarship and preservation efforts
were cross-culturally collaborative, notably the use by Chinese scholars of
Western training and techniques gained at the University of Pennsylvania toinitiate the study and preservation of China’s architectural heritage, identify-
ing the T’ang dynasty era wooden Buddhist temple in the Wu Tai mountains,
later a victim of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Such measures were accompanied by the Western institutionalization of
the museum, an idea as old as fifth-century BC Delphi but emerging as a
globe-spanning phenomenon in the modern eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, places where an unlimited diversity of works of art would be gathered
and available to the public as the object of study and comparison for an ever-
greater understanding of mankind. Here was Edmund Burke’s definition of
the social contract: a partnership among the dead, the living, and those yet to
be born, a gain for the common good of all humanity.
The great civilizations of the world,
however remote to each other in
time and place, each expresses in
art, literature, philosophy, and spiri-tuality some foundational truths of
the human condition.
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AN EXPANDING MOSAIC
Notable figures in modern intellectual history caught the importance of this
expanding mosaic of the artworks of the world’s cultures. How could Burke be
for the American Revolution and against the French Revolution? The answer isthat each culture must be seen as its own intelligible field of study. In describ-
ing the American whaling ships and crew, Burke notes that while seemingly
indistinguishable from the English, the Americans had formed their own
unique culture. Like the ancient Athenians, “they
were born to take no rest and to give none to
others” and so were ungovernable from London.
In contrast, the French Revolution had torn off
“all the decent drapery” of French culture andreplaced it with blood running in the gutters,
hangings from lampposts, and, to come, a mil-
itary dictator on horseback.
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As for India, the historian Thomas Macaulay described Burke’s apprecia-
tion for Indian culture and the impact he made on the House of Commons:
India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen,
mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people.The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the coca
tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge trees, older than the Mogul
empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched
roof of the peasant’s hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the
imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and
gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden,
with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the river-
side, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect,the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces,
the elephants with canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the
prince, and the close litter of the noble lady, all these things were to
Burke as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield
and St. James’s Street. . . . Oppression in Bengal was to him the
same thing as oppression in the streets of London.
Here may be sensed the opening of a new axial age, a general elevation ofconsciousness that the great civilizations of the world, however remote to
each other in time and place, each expressed in its art, literature, philosophy,
and spirituality some foundational truths of the human condition of all.
Ralph Waldo Emerson explicitly caught this new age in his essay “His-
tory.” Emerson realized that it now was possible, for the first time ever, to
survey something close to the full range and corpus of history’s multiplicity
of civilizations across time and place. He and Henry David Thoreau already
had been sending away for boxes of the classic texts of India (for example,the Rig Veda) and China (Confucius’s Analects). These works made a power-
ful impact: “How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu,
of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity
in them. They are mine as much as theirs.” Here Emerson is conducting a
reconnaissance of the works of the first axial age to set forth a manifesto for
the new axial age:
There is ONE MIND common to all individual men. . . . Who hathaccess to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be
done. . . . Of the universal mind each individual man is one more
incarnation.
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The opportunity and responsibility presented by the new availability of the
world’s vast diversity of thought is to encounter these works as a whole and
remake, retell them of oneself; not to be guided by them but to write our own
annals broader and deeper: “I have no expectation that any man will read
history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose
names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.”
What Emerson understood as the incorporation and reworking of creative
thought in philosophy, literature, and metaphysics would be recognized in the
visual arts as well. Walter Benjamin analyzed it negatively in his 1936 essay
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The ubiquity of
reproductions of past works of great art, Benjamin wrote, deprives them of
their unique authenticity in time and space; deprived of context, they lost
their aura and authenticity too.
André Malraux, the French adventurer, novelist, and minister of culture
in the time of Charles de Gaulle, gave the phenomenon a positive turn, doing
for works of art what Emerson had done for written classics. In his “Museum
Without Walls,” he granted that the effect of the museum was “to divest
works of art of their function. . . . other than that of being a work of art.”
But “the assemblage of so many masterpieces—from which, nevertheless,
so many are missing—conjures up in the mind’s eye all the world’s master-pieces.” Malraux elaborates: “It is in terms of a worldwide order that we
are sorting out, tentatively as yet, the successive resuscitations of the whole
world’s pas. . . . with the result that a large share of our art heritage is now
derived from peoples whose idea of art was quite other than ours, and even
from people to whom the very idea of art meant nothing.”
The next phase of recognition comes serendipitously in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s bulletin depicting a selection of recent acquisitions. A ran-
dom selection makes the point that a new realm of consciousness has openedand calls for new interpretations:
Lakshmi, Goddess of Prosperity, India, Late 7th century;
Wall Painting, Mexico, 650–750;
Appliqued Quilt, Illinois, ca. 1875
Shia Processional Standard for the martyrdom of Husain, ca.
1700;
Head of Demosthenes, Roman, 2nd century A.D.:Photograph: Sojourner Truth, 1864
To move back and forth across these images is to encounter the world’s
cultures at a new level and scale for study by the humanities. The selection
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amassed has a meaning of its own, yet the real object, its museum context, its
provenance, originating story, and particular civilizational significance draws
us in. The destruction of any one of these objects is an attack not only on its
own unique meaning but also on the newly emerging potential for a deepened
understanding of humanity through comparative art.
There is a democratic
dimension as well. Democ-
racy within a state is essen-
tial for human freedom
and cultural flourishing;
the more democracies the
better. A consensus holds,
however, that the interna-
tional system, with its organizations and processes, cannot and should not be
democratic; “global governance” would suffocate a nation’s cultural expres-
sions. But the international heritage in artworks is otherwise, because the
artist is individual and aesthetic assessments cannot be confined or dictated;
Stalinist, Nazi, and Maoist attempts to do so were risible and rejected. Thus
the “new axial” possibilities are democratic in an international way that
government cannot commandeer. Artistic and political freedoms go together;their deadly, dark ages–bringing enemy is the sledgehammer.
Reprinted from Defining Ideas(www.hoover.org/publications/defining-
ideas), a Hoover Institution journal. © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of
the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
The destruction of any of these
objects is an attack not only on its
own unique meaning but also on the
emerging potential for a deepened
understanding of humanity.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The Weaver’s Lost Art, by Charles Hill. To order, call (800) 888-4741
or visit www.hooverpress.org.
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TERRORISM
State of TerrorJessica Stern, a member of Hoover’s Task Force onNational Security and Law, shows how ISIS uses
a slick, media-savvy campaign to lure vulnerableyouth to its end-times army.
By Christina Pazzanese
F
amily and friends describe them not as radicals but as well-
behaved, diligent students at a private high school in London.
So it came as a shock when the three British girls slipped their
passports into handbags, casually walked out of their homes, and
boarded a flight to Istanbul to join the Islamic State, or ISIS, in Syria.
British authorities believe that the teenagers, who disappeared in Febru-
ary, were probably aided by Aqsa Mahmood, a young woman originally from
Scotland who recruits for the extremist group.
The young women’s highly publicized defection to Syria, as well as the
arrest of three young British men in Istanbul as they headed to join ISIS
in March, are among the latest cases of teenagers and young adults from
middle-class, educated, often suburban backgrounds in Britain, the United
States, Canada, and various European nations who have been enticed to
abandon their comfortable lives and join the Islamic State. In late February,
the Washington Post identified “Jihadi John,” the masked man seen in several
ISIS videos beheading hostages, as a college-educated computer program-
mer from a well-off family in West London. James Clapper, director of US
Jessica Stern is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Jean Perkins Task Force on
National Security and Law. She is the co-author, with J. M. Berger, of ISIS: The
State of Terror (Ecco, 2015). Christina Pazzanese is a staff writer for the Har-
vard Gazette.
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national intelligence, told Congress earlier this year that an estimated 3,400
citizens from Western countries have traveled to Iraq and Syria, presumably
to join ISIS.
Jessica Stern serves on the Hoover Institution’s Jean Perkins Task Force on
National Security and Law and was a member of the National Security Council
staff during the Clinton administration. She is also fellow at the FXB Center for
Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
and a lecturer in government at Harvard. Stern has written extensively about
terrorism and violent extremists. Her latest book is ISIS: The State of Terror ,
co-written with J. M. Berger. Stern spoke with the Gazette about how and why
ISIS has succeeded at luring young Westerners to its side.
Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette: We know that the so-called IslamicState is extraordinarily media-savvy. What social media platforms have been
most effective in reaching Western recruits?
Jessica Stern: There’s been a lot of activity on Twitter. Aqsa Mahmood is a
good example. She’s been accused of enticing the three young women from
London who apparently left their homes to join the Islamic State. She’s also
known as Umm Layth, which means “mother of the lion.” She spoke to them
on Twitter, and then theyended up moving to an
encrypted platform to con-
tinue their discussion, which
is a common recruitment
tactic. [Mahmood] also
answers questions on ask.fm. Somehow her postings are attracting young
women, some of them very high-achieving, to leave home to join the jihad.
There’s a big debate about what should be taken off Twitter and whetherTwitter is inadvertently facilitating terrorist recruitment. Twitter’s auto-
mated list of “who to follow” makes it easy for a person interested in ISIS
to rapidly find additional ISIS supporters. Sometimes, ISIS accounts are
suspended, but often, shortly afterward, a new account with a new name
appears, which serious followers can find.
There’s a debate among those who think we should allow those accounts to
remain active and those who think that Twitter should be suspending terror-
ist accounts. Those who say that the accounts should be left alone argue that
they’re a good way to gather intelligence, and that removing them would only
result in recruiters moving to a less-transparent platform. Those who want
the accounts shut down say that private companies should not allow ISIS
“I think there’s got to be an element
of thrill-seeking as well, perhaps
even an attraction to violence.”
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and other groups to use social media to recruit followers, and that terrorists’
use of social media to promote violence does not constitute protected speech.
Twitter recently suspended over two thousand ISIS-related accounts. ISIS
has now declared war against Twitter, threatening the lives of its staff.
Pazzanese: What is the pitch to male and female potential recruits?
Stern: For the men, it’s “Come and fight if you can fight; if you can’t fight we
also need doctors, we need social-media experts, engineers. . . . We’re running
a state, and so if you feel you can’t handle fighting, we can still use you.” The
women are often recruited to marry jihadists: “You can participate in the jihad
by marrying. You can
be the mother of the
next generation.” It
is a fairly traditional
female role.
There are tremen-
dous social benefits
for recruits: you’re
making the world a
better place, or sothe group claims,
which provides a kind
of spiritual reward.
There’s financial
reward for the fight-
ers. ISIS actually pays
the fighters, gives
them free housing,offers to provide them
wives. Hence, the
need to recruit young
women. There’s also
the tremendous lure
of extreme fundamen-
talism. I think we can
all understand the
appeal: wouldn’t it
be nice to have easy
answers to every [Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest ]
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morally complex question? Inside a group like ISIS, life becomes morally
simple. The rules are clear. Good and evil come out in stark relief.
IN SEARCH OF LOST YOUTH
Pazzanese: What’s the psychological profile of those people most susceptible
to their message?
Stern: We don’t have a profile of the Westerners joining ISIS yet because there
haven’t been large studies. But I can tell you that [British intelligence agency]
MI5 did a study of Westerners who were involved in or closely associated with
extremist activity, prior to
ISIS’s recent recruitmentdrive. They found that a
surprisingly high number
of them were converts to
Islam. Many in the MI5
study were relatively
ignorant of Islam, even if they were Muslim. Umm Layth is a good example.
She grew up in a secular Muslim family and went from relative ignorance
about Islam to recruiting for ISIS.
An important factor seems to be the desire to forge a new identity, an iden-
tity with dignity. I interviewed terrorists for many years and I can tell you
that identity is often absolutely key. We also know that there is a higher rate
of mental illness among so-called lone wolves, people who are inspired (often
online) to commit terrorist actions without physically joining an extremist
group. Studies of Westerners joining jihadi organizations, prior to ISIS’s
recruitment drive, have shown that foreign fighters tend to be alienated or
marginalized within their own societies; they may have had a bad encounter
with police or distrust local authorities. They tend to disapprove of their
nation’s foreign policies. If they’re living in an ethnic enclave, they’re likely
to be alienated from people living alongside them, as well as the country as a
whole, whether it’s the United States or the UK or elsewhere in the West.
For those who join ISIS, I think that there’s got to be an element of thrill-
seeking as well, perhaps even an attraction to violence. It’s hard for me to
imagine that anybody who gets recruited today doesn’t know about ISIS’sextreme brutality.
Pazzanese: Is the impulse to join the Islamic State very different from,
say, the idealistic impulse of young people to join the Peace Corps or a
“Twitter recently suspended over two
thousand ISIS-related accounts. ISIS
has now declared war against Twitter,
threatening the lives of its staff.”
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nongovernmental organization, or any global organization they believe is
doing important and uplifting work?
Stern: Many of the people who join terrorist organizations believe they
are making the world a better place. They see pictures of [Syrian leaderBashar] al-Assad’s brutality against his own people and they feel the desire
to help. That sense of righteousness is a very appealing aspect of joining a
terrorist group, for some. But I would say in some ways it’s more like joining
the Weather Underground than the Peace Corps. At this point, it’s hard to
imagine anyone joining without knowing that they’re going to be involved in
real atrocities.
Pazzanese: But in their minds, those actions are righteous.
Stern: Absolutely.
Pazzanese: How effec-
tive is Mahmood as
a recruiter, and what
makes these Western
recruiters so success-
ful? Do they tend to betrue believers or mere
cynical mercenaries?
Stern: She is very
effective. My guess is
that it’s partly because
she knows how to
relate to young women
like herself. She knows
their lives. ISIS is
using Westerners to
run the social media
campaign to recruit
Westerners.
Pazzanese: The State
Department has
recently announced
that it has stepped up
its countermessaging
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efforts. What are they doing, and is that likely to be sufficient, given the
sophisticated and prolific nature of the Islamic State?
Stern: They have a program called “Think Again Turn Away,” and if you look
at what they’ve been doing and compare it with what ISIS has been doing, it’sso boring. ISIS has professional cameramen . . .
Pazzanese: The ISIS production values are quite high. It’s not like the old Al-
Qaeda training videos we used to see.
Stern: No, it’s not. If you look at what the State Department puts out, sadly,
you can tell that they didn’t have a lot of money. But the guy who ran that
program told me, “Look, I know we can’t compete with the video imagery
showing, ‘Here’s your chance to create this very pure state, and you’re goingto get to kill infidels and Shiites.’ ”
Pazzanese: They can’t compete on the messaging or on the production
values?
Stern: Both. ISIS has made an enemy of the entire world, other than those
who join it. I hope that we’re going to get much more serious—we outside
the government—to find ways to respond. There is a program that I’d like to
bring to Harvard. I’ve been advocating for years to have young people design
countermessaging programs, rather than State Department employees or
Madison Avenue. There is an organization, EdVenture Partners, that cre-
ated a curriculum for students around the world to compete to create the
most effective coun-
termessaging. The
students will create
digital platforms to
amplify the messages
of clerics who can
argue against ISIS’s interpretation of Islam, or of former members of ISIS
who turned against the organization. Those are just two examples; there are
all kinds of things that can be done. The initiative is called “P2P: Challenging
Extremism.” I would love to get students from across the university, students
in engineering, students in political science, students who speak languages,
or who are very good at communication. . . . ideally we want a completelyinterdisciplinary group. I’m just so excited about this.
Pazzanese: Besides better coordinating the State Department’s fragmented
messaging efforts, I wonder if that’s ever going to be sufficient compared to
“We can all understand the appeal:
wouldn’t it be nice to have easy answersto every morally complex question?”
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the prolific nature of ISIS. I understand they’re sending out as many as two
hundred thousand social media messages per day.
Stern: No. It’s never going to be enough. I think the private sector has to get
involved.
ISIS’S END GAME—LITERALLY
Pazzanese: What is the Islamic State’s endgame? Is it to provoke global
Armageddon, or does it want to control the world and have everyone live
under its terms?
Stern: They want to establish a worldwide caliphate. The dream is to take
over the world. They are also obsessed with the Apocalypse. Although ISISclaims to justify its actions by referring to religious texts, ordinary Muslims
have no idea what ISIS
is talking about. The
Quran is not an apoca-
lyptic book, so ISIS has
to borrow from different
apocalyptic narratives.
Their online English-
language magazine is called Dabiq , which is the name of the town where ISIS
believes the final battle of the Apocalypse will take place.
They believe that sexually enslaving women who are from religious minori-
ties is a good thing; it’s a sign that the end times are coming. They also justify
sexual slavery as a way of avoiding the sin of adultery or premarital sex,
because if you have sex with a slave, it’s not really sex, or so they claim. They
can be pedophiles.
Pazzanese: Why is religion such a useful framework or pretext for terrorism,
subjugation, and genocide?
Stern: ISIS is a millenarian movement. They want to create a new human
being the same way the Soviets wanted to create a new human being. They
want to re-create humanity and they want to create a purified world. It’s a
cosmic battle to them. It’s not totally different from communism or other
ideologies, but God is a pretty compelling citation.
Pazzanese: Does religion give it a patina of righteousness or defuse any accu-
sations that this is a mere power grab?
“I’ve been advocating for years to have
young people design countermessaging
programs, rather than State Department
employees or Madison Avenue.”
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Stern: I think religion is often a patina or marketing strategy for terrorists to
accomplish more worldly goals. In the case of ISIS, many of the leaders are
former Baathists, the secular political party that ruled Iraq prior to the 2003
invasion. [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, the “caliph” of the Islamic State, recruited
former military and intelligence personnel from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
They have important, useful skills. ISIS’s religious agenda is clearly inter-
mingled with its more secular goals. ISIS is capitalizing on the feeling among
Sunni Muslims that they are under threat in the new Iraq, and that ISIS is
the only protection they have from the Iraqi leadership’s anti-Sunni, sectar-
ian policies.
Pazzanese: In human history, where does ISIS rank in terms of what they’ve
been able to accomplish—their lethality and their organizational strength—in such a brief amount of time?
Stern: Compared with modern terrorist organizations that we know, they
rank very high. However, compared with the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the
communists, they rank pretty low both in terms of their accomplishments
and even in terms of their brutality. We’ve seen much worse. ISIS is not just
a terrorist group; it is also an insurgent army. While it’s shocking to see how
much territory ISIS acquired so quickly, we’re comparing it with terroristgroups that weren’t necessarily trying to acquire large amounts of territory.
The ideology, the brutality of this group—I have to think they’re going to self-
destruct before they manage to spread as far as, say, the communists or the
Nazis. The Nazis weren’t advertising their atrocities; ISIS is publicizing its
atrocities, flaunting its brutality. It’s part of the end-times narrative that ISIS
hopes to spin.
Reprinted by permission of the Harvard Gazette (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette). © 2015 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. All
rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The Struggle
for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent, by Fouad Ajami. To
order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.
org.
HOOVER DIGEST • SUMMER 2015 25
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TERRORISM
Escape fromGitmoThe legal path out of our long Guantánamo
nightmare.
By Jane Harman and Jack Goldsmith
In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama
reiterated his determination to shut down the detention facility at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Some in Congress are resolved to stop him.
Even Senator John McCain, who has supported closing the prison in
the past, joined a recent congressional effort to slow releases from Guantá-
namo on the grounds that the president has never presented Congress with a
“concrete or coherent plan.”
Both sides are right. Guantánamo should be closed, but not until the presi-
dent presents a realistic plan and makes his case to Congress and the nation.
Any blueprint must address very real issues related to the island facility’s 122
remaining detainees.
The easiest question is whether to release the 54 who the administration
has determined aren’t dangerous. Many in Congress worry that these prison-
ers will return to the fight. Since 2009, Congress has restricted transfers
from Guantánamo, and in recent years has required the defense secretary to
certify that they are “no longer a threat to the national security of the United
Jane Harman is president and chief executive of the Woodrow Wilson Interna-
tional Center for Scholars. Jack Goldsmith is a senior fellow at the Hoover In-
stitution and a member of Hoover’s Jean Perkins Task Force on National Security
and Law. He is the Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School.
26 HOOVER DIGEST • SUMMER 2015
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States” or, at a minimum, to craft a plan to “substantially mitigate the risk”
of a return to the battlefield. This insistence on individualized, security-pro-
tective releases has significantly reduced the recidivism rate that resulted
from bulk releases before 2009. But as the exchange last year of five Taliban
members for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl showed, this standard might need
tightening to limit releases to only those persons who pose no threat.
A tougher issue is where to send the remaining non-dangerous detainees.
Many come from Yemen, a cauldron of instability. The administration has
already persuaded third-party countries to take a hundred or so of these
detainees. Still, finding a place to send the remaining non-dangerous detain-
ees will be hard; options have narrowed.
The biggest problem is a group of up to 68 higher-risk detainees. Seven are
being tried in military commissions. But as Obama noted six years ago, the
others “pose a clear danger to the American people.” The men in this cat-
egory, the president explained, “received extensive explosives training at Al-
Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed
their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they
want to kill Americans.”
Guantánamo cannot and should not be closed until there is a concrete plan
to prosecute these men, or, if necessary, detain them in a lawful way thatensures they can never inflict grievous harm again.
Federal courts have ruled that these detainees can be lawfully held until
the end of the relevant conflict, whenever that might be. But many cannot be
criminally pros-
ecuted because of
evidence tainted by
abusive interroga-
tions, limitationsin federal criminal
law, and other
problems of fitting
the demanding standards of criminal justice to the messiness of the terrorist
battlefield. Scores of lawyers in two administrations have scoured the case
files and case law and (reluctantly) agree.
What to do? Closing Guantánamo must not mean ending detention of these
dangerous men, though the two are often confused. The main question is,
where will they be incarcerated—in Cuba or in the United States?
The case for sending them to a secure but humane prison in the United
States is that keeping them in Cuba, on balance, hurts US interests.
Legislation to bring Guantánamo detain-
ees to the United States could create a form
of administrative detention akin to civil
commitment, one that could apply even
after the end of hostilities.
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[Taylor Jones—for the Hoover Digest ]
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Guantánamo was established to be beyond the reach of US law, a premise the
Supreme Court rejected in Rasul v. Bush and Boumediene v. Bush. The facility
is “a propaganda tool for our enemies and a distraction for our allies,” as for-
mer president George W.
Bush said in a memoir in
the course of explaining
why his administration
“worked to find a way
to close the prison.” For
similar reasons, closing Guantánamo remains high on Obama’s agenda.
There are no appealing solutions, but members of Congress who dispute
the national security assessment of two commanders in chief should consider
this: Transferring the detainees to the United States is an opportunity to
strengthen the legal basis for their long-term detention, which becomes more
fraught as the armed conflicts in Afghanistan and against some components
of Al-Qaeda wind down.
The legislation needed to bring Guantánamo detainees to the United
States could supplement the military rationale for holding non-prosecut-
able—but very dangerous—terrorists with a form of administrative deten-
tion akin to civil commitment, one that could apply after the end of therelevant hostilities. Such a statute could prescribe the definition of danger-
ousness that warrants detention, the processes for determining a continued
threat to public safety over time, and the standards for judicial review.
This approach is, in our view, the least bad option for dealing with detain-
ees. Keeping hardened terrorists incarcerated is essential; keeping them
detained at Guantánamo Bay is untenable. The president and Congress must
be partners in finding a secure solution.
Reprinted by permission of the Washington Post. © 2015 Washington Post
Co. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is In Retreat:
America’s Withdrawal from the Middle East, by
Russell A. Berman. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or
visit www.hooverpress.org.
The remaining high-risk detainees
“made it clear that they want to kill
Americans,” the president pointed out.
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FOREIGN POLICY
Weak, in ReviewWhen the Cold War ended, strategists becamedistracted by the dangers of the “weak state.”
Powerful adversaries used the opportunity to groweven more powerful.
By Amy B. Zegart
F
or twenty-five years now, a weak-state fixa-
tion has transfixed US foreign policy. It all
started with the humanitarian interventions
of the 1990s, which advanced the idea that
American power in a post–Cold War world could and
should bring justice, peace, and prosperity to places
like Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo. Freed from the
security constraints of superpower conflict, US foreign
policy assumed a more muscular moralism during
Bill Clinton’s years. After the 9/11 attacks, shoring up
weak states became a vital security interest, not just
a humanitarian ideal. The Freedom Agenda of George
W. Bush’s administration sought not only to strengthen
states but to transform them, spreading democracy
abroad to protect democracy and security at home.
Amy B. Zegart is a Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, co-
chair of Hoover’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, and amember of the Hoover task forces focusing on national security and law, Arctic
security, military history, and intellectual property and innovation. She is also the
co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford
University.
Key points
» Weak states
aren’t the hotbedsof transnational
terrorism they
once seemed.
» The worst cy-
berthreats come
from strong states
behaving badly.
» Clashes
between strongstates can spread
harm far beyond
their borders.
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The world’s weakest states have
not produced the world’s worst
international terrorists.
Today, this focus on weak states looks increasingly—what’s the word?—
weak. Sure, some weak states (Pakistan, Pakistan, and Pakistan) loom
large, posing serious challenges to US interests. But the vast majority of
weak states don’t. Instead, the most serious threats to American interests
stem, as they always have, from states with sufficient capacity and power
to do bad things in the world, not from states so weak that bad things hap-
pen within them.
WHERE IS THE DANGER?
It is worth stepping back and asking: How exactly do weak states threaten
the global order or the United States’ vital interests? The weak-state crowd
has offered three related but distinct arguments.
» Fragile states can become terrorist strongholds that pose existential
threats to Western ways of life. This is the most compelling argument. If
Al-Qaeda could carry out the worst attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor by
setting up shop in the lawless rubble of Afghanistan, the thinking goes, other
lawless spaces could, similarly, devolve into sanctuaries for the recruitment,
training, and deployment of terrorists. Most frightening of all: the specter of
terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons.
» Poorly governed spaces function as incubators for other global“bads.” This less-convincing argument focuses on disease, conflict, human
rights violations, drug and human trafficking, and criminal networks. In
this view, weak states generate unwanted outcomes, not existential threats.
That’s a big difference. The central purpose of US foreign policy is not to
eliminate global suffering, however horrible. It is to protect vital national
interests from grave dangers.
» Globalization connects citizens throughout the world in unprec-
edented ways, binding the fates of strong states to weak states. Thisfuzziest argument of the weak-state crowd is more aspirational than real.
Although it is certainly true
that ideas, goods, and people
can cross borders faster and
more densely than at any
time in history, we are still a
long way from a world where
the well-being and security of Nashville hinges on the stability of Ngozi. Yet
Barack Obama’s administration has been making this argument for years.
As candidate Obama wrote in a signature 2007 Foreign Affairs article, “the
security and well-being of each and every American depend on the security
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and well-being of those who live beyond our borders. . . . We have a signifi-
cant stake in ensuring that those who live in fear and want today can live
with dignity and opportunity tomorrow.” The administration’s 2015 National
Security Strategy proclaimed yet again that weak states are one of the “top
strategic risks to our interests,” putting transnational organized crime right
alongside the use of nuclear weapons. Incredibly, the strategy proclaims that
it “establishes. . . . a diversified and balanced set of priorities appropriate for
the world’s leading global power with interests in every part of an increas-
ingly interconnected world.”
But a “diversified and balanced set of priorities” is no priority list at all.
The United States does not have interests in every part of an increasingly
interconnected world. It does not risk American lives and spend American
political capital everywhere. Nor should it. Global leadership is about identi-
fying what matters most and deploying resources to succeed. And evidence
increasingly suggests that weak states should not be so high on the list.
WAS 9/11 AN OUTLIER?
Even the strongest weak-state claims don’t look so strong anymore.
Nearly fourteen years after 9/11, Islamist terrorism has yet to morph
into anything close to an existential threat. That’s not to say it couldn’tgrow into one—catastrophic terrorist attacks may be black swan events
that defy easy prediction. And it is impossible to know whether we have
successfully countered terrorism thanks to the war on terror or because
terrorists were never such a big danger in the first place. Yet it is hard
to dismiss the gnawing, emerging evidence that 9/11 may have been more
outlier than harbinger.
In 2012, John Mueller, senior research scientist at the Mershon Center
for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, and Mark Stew-art, director at the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability
at the University of Newcastle, noted that Islamist terrorism was respon-
sible for two hundred to four hundred deaths worldwide each year, outside
of war zones. That’s roughly the same number of Americans who die from
drowning in bathtubs annually. Harvard University’s Graham Allison darkly
warned in 2004 that there was at least a 50 percent chance the world would
suffer a nuclear terrorist attack in the next ten years. It has now been
eleven years and counting. The string of failed and foiled attacks on US soil
since 9/11, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, “underwear bomber”
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad,
more closely resembles the work of knuckleheads than masterminds.
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The connection between weak states and transnational terrorism
appears more tenuous too. Terrorism experts have found that the vast
majority of terrorist attacks strike local targets, not foreign ones. What’s
more, the world’s weakest states have not produced the world’s most or
worst international terrorists. The 2014 Fragile States Index from For-eign Policy listed five countries in its worst-of-the-worst category: South
Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Repub-
lic of the Congo, and Sudan. None is a major inspiration base, training
center, breeding ground, or exporter of terrorism directed at Western
cities. Indeed, the January attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo—France’s deadliest terrorist attack in fifty years—was perpetrated
by two brothers born, raised, and radicalized almost entirely in the terror-
ist safe haven of France, which came in at number 160 of 178 countries on
the Fragile State Index.
Consider interstate war. Between weak states, wars can be destructive
and destabilizing for local populations. Between strong states, wars can be
“PEACEFUL RISE”: Chinese sailors aboard the destroyer Qingdao arrive for a port visit at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 2006. Long-standing US security com- mitments to Japan and Taiwan make China’s assertive military modernization
and posturing in regional waters a potential flash point. [US Navy / Mass Commu-nication Specialist Joe Kane]
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destructive and destabilizing for the world. The war between Ethiopia and
Eritrea was one thing; World War II was quite another. Even in a twenty-
first-century interconnected world, conflict between powerful countries
with large economies poses far greater direct threats to the global economy,
international order, and American interests than wars between fragile states.
Ethiopia and Eritrea posted a combined GDP of $51 billion in 2013—less than
the revenues of Google.
While the Cold War’s end led many to believe that wars between great
powers had been rendered to the dustbin of history, Russia’s recent invasion
of Ukraine and China’s ongoing provocations in the South and East China
seas should remind us that great powers can still behave badly. Conflicts
between powerful countries are not such distant possibilities after all.
Had NATO enlarge-
ment grown a little larger,
Ukraine would today be
a member of the alliance,
and the United States could
very well have found itself
locked in a European land
war with Russia. Similarly, America’s long-standing security commitments to Japan and Taiwan make
China’s aggressive military modernization and belligerent posturing in the
region a potential flash point for future conflict between the world’s largest
economies. Beijing’s naval maneuvering around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands
(also claimed by Japan), its aggressive claims to territory in the South China
Sea (contested by Taiwan, Brunei, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia),
its 2013 declaration of an air-defense identification zone, and its two decades
of double-digit defense spending increases all raise the odds of conflict withthe United States and its regional allies through deliberate action, miscalcu-
lation, accidental escalation, or some combination.
The specter of conflict between these powerful states may be unwanted,
but that doesn’t make it unlikely. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seemed
unimaginable until President Vladimir Putin imagined it. China’s “peaceful
rise” may also turn out to be more wishful thinking. And that’s to say noth-
ing of the risk and impact of interstate war between India and Pakistan,
two nuclear powers with deep grievances and a history of miscalculation.
The most serious cyberthreats also appear to require substantial state
capacity. Sure, Russian criminal networks and teenage hackers are busy
stealing and selling millions of credit card numbers, and the Target and
The most important nuclear bomb
ingredient, fissile material, can’t be
developed in remote terrorist hide-
outs in ungoverned spaces that lack
basic Internet or plumbing.
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Home Depot breaches were certainly serious threats to Target and Home
Depot customers. But not all cyberattacks are created equal.
Three types of cyberattacks most directly threaten US national interests:
large-scale theft of intellectual property, which can undermine national
economic competitiveness and sap the source of American power; disabling
attacks on military communications and operations that could impair the
country’s capacity to attack and defend itself; and attacks on critical infra-
structure that could disrupt the US economy and society on a massive scale.
Evidence suggests that all three types require state capacity far beyond what
Cheetos-eating kids or criminals can muster.
The massive theft of intellectual property from American companies is
directed, aided, and abetted principally by the Chinese government. The
recent Sony hack was attributed to the government of North Korea. The
most damaging cyberattacks abroad have also been sourced to organized
states, not ungoverned spaces. The 2012 Saudi Aramco attack, which erased
data from thirty thousand computers—three-quarters of the company’s
PCs—was traced back to Tehran. And the Stuxnet virus that disabled Iran’s
nuclear centrifuges is estimated to have taken months to create, required
fifteen thousand lines of code (120 times longer than your typical malware),
and demanded the dedicated efforts of the best cyberwarriors in the Israeliand US governments.
THE NUCLEAR DI STRACTION
Finally, even the most frightening weak-state scenario, nuclear terrorism,
isn’t even really about weak
states. For years, Islamist
terrorist groups have
declared their fervent desireto obtain and use nuclear
weapons. Why haven’t they
succeeded? Because the most important ingredient, fissile material, can-
not be developed in remote terrorist hideouts in ungoverned spaces that
lack basic Internet or plumbing. Instead, readily usable fissile material rests
in the hands of a small number of states with substantial governance and
scientific capacity. Of the world’s nine nuclear-armed states, five—the United
States, Britain, France, Israel, and India—are strong and stable democra-
cies. China and Russia may lack democracy, but not the capacity to govern.
Pakistan and North Korea are worryingly weak and rightly rise to the top of
the counterproliferation agenda.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seemed
unimaginable until Vladimir Putin imagined it.
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But the point is this: nuclear terrorism is not a “weak-states” problem.
It is a specific-states problem, where a handful of countries play an outsize
role in producing, spreading, and securing fissile material—whether it is
Iran’s development of a covert nuclear weapons program, Russia’s efforts
to secure its loose nukes, Pakistan’s command and control of its mobile
nuclear weapons, or North Korea’s nuclear recklessness. Some of the states
that we need to keep fissile material out of the hands of terrorists are weak.
Most are not.
Weak states pose a number of challenges, and Washington must do what
it can to address them. But the emphasis must be on “do what it can.” The
world is too dangerous a place to combat state weakness wherever it lives,
to conflate ideals with interests, or to make the analytical mistake of treat-
ing so many threats as “weak-state problems.” Increasingly, it appears that
the most serious threats to American national interests emanate from states
with capacity, not states without it.
Reprinted by permission of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com). ©
2015 Foreign Policy Group LLC. All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The War
that Must Never Be Fought: Dilemmas of Nuclear
Deterrence, edited by George P. Shultz and James E.
Goodby. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.
hooverpress.org.
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FOREIGN POLICY
Flip the ScriptAbandoned friends and defiant foes: what thepresident’s foreign policy has wrought.
By Kimberly Kagan
The United States does not have an image problem in the Middle
East. It has a reality problem. The United States has lost cred-
ibility in the Middle East by abandoning its friends and reaching
out to its enemies.
The United States has also lost sight of its core interests as well as its prin-
ciples. America’s interests in the Middle East include countering Al-Qaeda,
its affiliates, and its major splinters such as the Islamic State; ensuring the
preservation of sovereign states and the states system; preventing Iran from
achieving regional hegemony and nuclear capability; and ensuring the free
flow of oil and other resources essential to the global economy. Its principles
include opposing genocide and other mass atrocities, opposing and punishing
the use of weapons of mass destruction, supporting international law, and
standing by its allies. We have abandoned all of these, to our great detriment.
Recovering our stature in the region requires recommitting ourselves to
pursue our values and our needs.
Iraq is one former friend the United States abandoned. The withdrawal of
US forces from Iraq in 2011, followed by more than two years of American
neglect of the country, allowed the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)
to arise unchallenged. The United States took no action after ISIS captured
Kimberly Kagan is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Working Group on the
Role of Military History in Contemporary Conflict. She is founder and president of
the Institute for the Study of War.
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POWER BY PROXY: Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani is being hailed as the “savior of Iraq” for his role fighting ISIS. Iranian trainers and proxies are deeply interwoven within the Iraqi Security Forces, which has become a highly sectarian Shia force. [AY-Collection / SIPA / Newscom]
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Fallujah in January 2014, waited several months after the fall of Mosul to
assess the situation, and by August 2014 reactively targeted ISIS positions
in Iraq and Syria through airstrikes. These engagements have parried the
Islamic State’s offensive in Arbil, Iraq, and Kobani, Syria. But ISIS is still
fighting fiercely elsewhere.
The Syrian moderate opposition was another such potential friend.
American inaction in Syria led to the marginalization of Syria’s moderate
opposition and its eclipse by
more effective and powerful
radical groups. The target-
ing of Islamic State and
the internationally focused
Al-Qaeda-backed Khorasan group in Syria, in particular, have seemed to
opposition elements to empower the Assad regime, which continues its bru-
tal targeting of its population.
The narrative throughout the region, indeed, is that the United States
is flipping its traditional alliance structure away from the Sunni and Arab
states and toward Iran and its Shia proxies. The Obama administration may
not have intended any such flip, but its policies in Iraq and Syria provide
ample evidence to prove to fearful allies that we have abandoned them.The Iranian regime is the chief backer of Bashar al-Assad and has provided
advising, assistance, and proxy militias to stabilize the Iraqi Security Forces
(ISF). Iranian media daily hail Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps–Qods Force, as the “savior of Iraq.” Iranian trainers
and proxies are deeply interwoven within the ISF, which has become a highly
sectarian Shia force since the United States abandoned it in 2011. The stated US
policy of supporting and partnering only with the ISF looks to many Sunnis in
Iraq and throughout the region like a de facto alliance with Iran.The integration of Iranian, Hezbollah, and other proxy elements in Assad’s
forces makes the American refusal to take any serious action against Assad
look like tacit support to Iran in that theater. One does not have to be a
conspiracy theorist to see in these policies a determination to back Tehran
against America’s traditional Arab partners.
The United States also has relaxed sanctions against the Iranian regime,
accepted the principle that Iran will have a significant indigenous uranium-
enrichment capability, and allowed Iran to conceal the history of its nuclear
program. In doing so, the United States has adopted a negotiating position
at odds with numerous UN Security Council resolutions, the requirements
of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (to which Iran is a signatory), and
Iraq is one former friend the United
States abandoned.
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many agreements with other members of the P5+1 about the red lines to be
drawn in negotiations.
Again, to the eyes of worried Sunni Arabs, it appears that the Obama
administration is more concerned with some kind of rapprochement with
Iran than it is with stand-
ing by its commitments
under international law and
treaty—to say nothing of
standing by its alliances.
The United States needs
to restore its credibility
by pursuing its interests with strength: actually defeating and destroying
Islamic State, supporting strongly the indigenous Iraqi and Syrian Sunni
resistance to this hateful ideology and militancy, targeting Assad’s capabili-
ties to attack his people, leveraging its military assistance in Iraq to remove
Iranian military advisers from that country, and strongly supporting its
national interests in opposing the Iranian nuclear program in accord with
international law and UN resolutions.
We must wrench ourselves away from the policy of drifting toward a
chimerical rapprochement with Iran and reorient ourselves in support of ourtraditional partners and allies.
Subscribe to the Hoover Institution’s online journal Strategika (www.
hoover.org/publications/strategika), where this essay first appeared. ©
2015 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
New from the Hoover Institution Press is The
Consequences of Syria, by Lee Smith. To order, call
(800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
The American refusal to take any
serious action against Syria’s Assad
looks like tacit support to Iran.
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IRAN
No Sign of Restraint
Properly understood, the Iran nuclear deal is at
best only a beginning, not an end—and regionalstability may be farther away than ever.
By George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger
The announced framework for an agree-
ment on Iran’s nuclear program has the
potential to generate a seminal national
debate. Advocates exult over the nuclear
constraints it would impose on Iran. Critics question
the verifiability of these constraints and their longer-
term impact on regional and world stability. The
historic significance of the agreement and indeed its
sustainability depend on whether these emotions, valid
by themselves, can be reconciled.
Debate regarding technical details of the deal has
thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regard-
ing its deeper implications. For twenty years, three
presidents of both major parties proclaimed that an
Iranian nuclear weapon was contrary to American and
George P. Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at
the Hoover Institution, the chair of Hoover’s Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on En-
ergy Policy, and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Economic Policy. Henry
A. Kissinger is chairman of Kissinger Associates.
Key points » A “prolifer-
ated” Middle East
would demand
new, and yet
unknown, forms
of deterrence.
» No one knows
if the deal will
foster Iranianmoderation or
cooperation.
» Ultimately, the
US must develop
a new strategic
doctrine for the
region.
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global interests—and that they were prepared to use force to prevent it. Yet
negotiations that began twelve years ago as an international effort to prevent
an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agree-
ment that concedes this very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in the
first ten years.Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of UN resolutions, Iran has
gradually turned the negotiation on its head. Iran’s centrifuges have mul-
tiplied from about a hundred at the beginning of the negotiation to almost
twenty thousand today. The threat of war now constrains the West more
than Iran. While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate
as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a
new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point offi-
cially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear
weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for ten years Iran will never be
further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be
significantly closer.
NO REST: Secretary of State John Kerry and other US officials leave a meet- ing with the Iranian delegation in Montreux, Switzerland, in March. Under a proposed agreement, Iran would permanently give up none of its equipment,
facilities, or fissile material. [EPA / Newscom / Jean-Christophe Bott]
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INSPECTIONS AND ENFORCEMENT
The president deserves respect for the commitment with which he has pur-
sued the objective of reducing nuclear peril, as does Secretary of State John
Kerry for the persistence, patience, and ingenuity with which he has striven
to impose significant constraints on Iran’s nuclear program.
Progress has been made on shrinking the size of Iran’s enriched stockpile,
confining the enrichment of uranium to one facility, and limiting aspects of
the enrichment process. Still, the ultimate significance of the framework will
depend on its verifiability and enforceability.
Negotiating the final agreement will be extremely challenging. The so-
called framework represents a unilateral American interpretation. Some of
its clauses have been dismissed by the principal Iranian negotiator as “spin.”
A joint EU-Iran statement differs in important respects, especially with
regard to the lifting of sanctions and permitted research and development.
Comparable ambiguities apply to the one-year window for a presumed
Iranian breakout. Emerging at a relatively late stage in the negotiation, this
concept replaced the previous baseline—that Iran might be permitted a
technical capacity compatible with a plausible civilian nuclear program. The
new approach complicates verification and makes it more political because of
the vagueness of the criteria.Under the new approach, Iran permanently gives up none of its equipment,
facilities, or fissile product to achieve the proposed constraints. It only places
them under temporary restriction and safeguard—amounting in many cases
to a seal at the door of a depot or periodic visits by inspectors to declared
sites. The physical magnitude of the effort is daunting. Is the International
Atomic Energy Agency technically, and in terms of human resources, up to
so complex and vast an assignment?
In a large country with multiple facilities and ample experience in nuclearconcealment, violations will be inherently difficult to detect. Devising
theoretical models of inspection is one thing. Enforcing compliance, week
after week, despite competing international crises and domestic distrac-
tions, is another. Any report of a violation is likely to prompt debate over its
significance—or even calls for new talks with Tehran to explore the issue.
The experience of Iran’s work on a heavy-water reactor during the “interim
agreement” period—when suspect activity was identified but played down in
the interest of a positive negotiating atmosphere—is not encouraging.
Compounding the difficulty is the unlikelihood that breakout will be a
clear-cut event. More likely it will occur, if it does, via the gradual accumula-
tion of ambiguous evasions.
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When inevitable disagreements arise over the scope and intrusiveness of
inspections, on what criteria are we prepared to insist and up to what point?
If evidence is imperfect, who bears the burden of