Week of August 23, 2010

Does China have any friends left at the top levels of the Obama administration?

Is there anyone on the Obama team who will take a personal interest in dealing with China, as one or another senior official (Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the two George Bushes, Brent Scowcroft, Sandy Berger) did in the past?

Or has China decided it no longer needs to worry about forging high-level personal relationships in Washington, a key element in its diplomacy since the Nixon opening

For all the inordinate amount of time that academic historians spend judging each other (book reviews, tenure committees, fellowship panels, etc. etc. etc.), they rarely step back to ask what actually makes a member of their profession good. To be sure, they will happily expound on the significance of a piece of scholarly work, going into detail on its evidence, argument and theoretical perspective. But how did the work get produced? Why does one scholar soar into the intellectual stratosphere while others, of essentially identical background and training, plod their weary way through one banal monograph after another? Most American historians—trained, for generations now, to give closer attention to aggregate social forces and impersonal cultural shifts than to individual psychology—barely even acknowledge this question, as if it is pointless to plumb the mysteries of talent and motivation.

The 1970s—with its flared jeans and dodgy haircuts, pallid disco music, absurdist trends (pet rocks!), and Khomeinist revolution—what a miserable, squalid decade it was. The idealism and irrational optimism of the 1960s, when throngs of teenagers declared the end of bourgeois society, gave way to Cambodia, Watergate, Jonestown, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Civil rights marchers and peaceniks made way for black power and Black September.

The truth, I think, is that the so-called Westphalian nation-state - the nation states that emerged at the start of the modern era, and that the founders of the EU thought would be the building blocks of their Union - is now little more than an empty shell, all over the European continent.

But there is something far more troubling at work: the rise of an angry, irrational extremism -- the sort that says Obama is a Muslim socialist who wasn't born in the United States -- that was not part of Ronald Reagan's buoyant conservative creed. Do Republican politicians believe in the elaborate conspiracy theories being spun by Glenn Beck and parts of the Tea Party? If not, why won't they say so? Liberals who refused to break with the far left in the 1950s and '60s were accused of being blinded by a view that saw"no enemies on the left." Are conservatives who should know better now falling into a"no enemies on the right" trap?