Hatoyama shifts the blame

The DPJ is transitioning into power, and Hatoyama Yukio is doing burasagari press conferences again after not doing them during the campaign.

(For those wondering what burasagari means, it simply refers to impromptu press conferences given by politicians to reporters as the politicians walk to or from, say, a car. The term, which means "hanging" or "dangling," refers to the reporters' dangling on the politician.)

In his first post-election impromptu press conference, some intrepid reporter asked the prime minister-in-waiting what he thought of criticism from the US of his essay in VOICE.

In response, Hatoyama went into full damage control mode and shifted the blame. The New York Times, he said, had published the contribution as an excerpt from his original essay. [I had originally written VOICE, but it seems that Hatoyama was referring to the New York Times, even though the Christian Science Monitor released it first.] Hatoyama said that his views were distorted, that globalization has "negatives, but naturally it also has positives." (He provided no details about the positives.) He stressed that he is not anti-American, that the whole essay needs to be read to be understood, and that he was simply outlining his "dream" of an East Asian community, recognizing that it is not realistic for the time being but that reality begins in dreams.

I do not buy the idea that his original essay was distorted through translation — if anything the translated, abridged version was far superior to the original, which I found to be "a mishmash of pop-anti-globalizationism, mystical brotherhood-ism, and nostalgic conservatism," and distressed by the idea that it might be a serious guide to Hatoyama's thinking. And at no point in the original essay did Hatoyama give much thought to the positives of globalization. The original reads just like a longer, harsher version of the translation, with nearly a page of discussion of how capitalism treats people as means, not ends, and about how it destroys values, traditions, and communities. Perhaps the only "kind" words Hatoyama has for globalization is when he says that it is inevitable, meaning that the challenge for Japan is dealing with it through more Asian cooperation and greater subsidiarity to empower Japanese localities.

But at the same time, his willingness to write off the essay as his "dreams" provides Hatoyama with a convenient way to distance himself from its contents. I still think Hatoyama's "political philosophy" — by which I mean far more than his thinking on globalization, which is fairly pedestrian of late — is bizarre and does not make him look particularly serious, but it does not appear to be a guide to how Hatoyama will govern, per se.

But I do hope that Hatoyama and the DPJ have learned from this episode. First, do not publish essays in VOICE. VOICE and other conservative publications will be following the Rush Limbaugh approach in their treatment of the DPJ government: they want it to fail. Hatoyama's essay should be the last time a DPJ leader's thoughts appear in VOICE, which means that the cabinet should exercise tight control over how cabinet members (and backbenchers?) deal with the media, at least as far as long-form prose is concerned.

Second, what is said in Japan no longer stays in Japan. They better get used to it and learn to choose their words carefully. The village gossip no longer stays in the village. And if a DPJ leader wants to address a foreign audience directly, with, say, an op-ed in an American newspaper, ask an outside expert or three for their opinions of how it might be received.

Third, most of the world has little idea who Hatoyama is and what to think of this party that has just swept into power — and many of those who have some ideas about the DPJ have dated information. First impressions are being formed. The DPJ's leaders must choose their words carefully. (They should always choose their words carefully, but it is particularly imperative now.)

UPDATE: Ikeda Nobuo, perhaps Japan's leading economics blogger and my fellow Newsweek Japan contributor, has also been following this episode closely and notes in the comments that Hatoyama's office actually posted a full translation on Hatoyama's webpage. As Ikeda notes at his blog, this discovery suggests that Hatoyama's argument that the English translation was not the result of a deliberate contribution by Hatoyama is mistaken.

This discovery only leads to more questions. How did the translation get from Hatoyama's office into syndication? Why were people at the DPJ surprised to learn that the translation had appeared in foreign media? Who, ultimately, is responsible for this essay reaching English readers? Did someone in Hatoyama's office release it without authorization? Or did Hatoyama sign off on it without giving much thought to how it would be received?

I stand by my argument that DPJ leaders should be wary in their dealings with conservative publications, but it seems that in this case VOICE's role stopped with the publication of the Japanese version.

The more I learn about how this essay came to appear in American outlets, the more I am concerned about the DPJ's ability to manage its image in the media.

Hatoyama in the New York Times

There isn't much I can add to MTC's comments on the New York Times's publication of the translation of Hatoyama Yukio's essay in Voice (which originally appeared in the Christian Science Monitor). I am stunned that no one at DPJ HQ thought better of having Hatoyama's provocative essay appear — again — in an American publication, indeed the American publication where it is guaranteed to be read by the American establishment, such as it is.

Hatoyama will now make it difficult for even potentially sympathetic Americans to view him with anything but distrust.

I have no problem with a DPJ government saying no to the US from time to time. I have no problem with the idea of more distance from the US, which might make for a healthier alliance in the long run. But to an audience not steeped in Japanese debates about capitalism and globalization — to an audience not aware, for example, that the incumbent prime minister has also railed about "market fundamentalism" — Hatoyama looks less like the leader in waiting of one of the world's second largest economy and more like, say, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad (who, incidentally, has long looked to Japan for leadership in standing up to the west).

Earlier this week, Hatoyama said that he wanted to meet with President Barack Obama while in the US for the opening of the UN General Assembly. He expressed his confidence that if he were to sit down with Obama and talk frankly about two issues of concern — the matter of Futenma and the matter of the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan by the US — the president would see things Hatoyama's way. While this scenario was far-fetched before, what kind of reception will Hatoyama get now? What kind of reception should he get now?

Does the DPJ not realize how much it has lucked out in the transition from the Bush administration to the Obama administration? The latter has exhibited an openness to the possibility of a DPJ government and not overreacted at, say, Ozawa Ichiro's remarks on the US military presence even as most of the Japan policy community piled on Ozawa for his alleged anti-Americanism. Does the DPJ not realize just how skeptical many Americans are of the DPJ, and that there is a difference between being Washington's lackey and showing a degree of courtesy by, say, not having the party leader's incoherent opinions about "fraternity" and US-led globalization splashed across the pages of the New York Times?

Earlier this week I suggested that the DPJ's leaders should not talk so much about a sensitive matter like the alliance before the party actually takes power and forms a government. This episode, I think, qualifies as talking too much.

I hope that someone senior in the DPJ will be meeting as soon as possible with newly arrived Ambassador John Roos to put Hatoyama's remarks in proper context.

Meanwhile, I am no less convinced that Hatoyama as prime minister will be the single greatest weakness of a DPJ government.

Hatoyama is a problem for the DPJ

In the current issue of the Economist, the news magazine calls particular attention to comments by Hatoyama Yukio in an article in the September issue of Voice called "My Political Philosophy." (I've gotten so accustomed to Japanese magazines not putting content online that I did not even bother to check whether it was.) Hatoyama, the Economist notes, "railed against American-led 'market fundamentalism' that, he said, the LDP had embraced since Mr Koizumi’s leadership. But his alternative is a mushy-sounding concept, yuai, that mixes up the Chinese characters for friendship and love." The magazine also notes that Aso too has spoken of market fundamentalism.

Hatoyama's emphasis on the supposed impact of market fundamentalism originating from America (naturally the complement of the "once-in-a-century financial crisis emanating from America") does not particularly bother me, because I've come to expect this sort of rhetoric from Japanese politicians. Politicians of both parties have long looked to "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism as responsible for two decades of decline. Recall what Ozawa Ichiro said at the DPJ's convention in January (discussed in this post). In January Ozawa spoke of creating an economy "of human beings, by human beings, and for human beings," which he contrasted with "a market economy of capital, by capital, and for capital." Hatoyama's rhetoric in Voice is comparatively tame. No one seems to have bothered to define "market fundamentalism." And the idea that Japan's problems can be blamed on excessive neo-liberalism — politically convenient for both parties, as it allows the DPJ to blame problems on Koizumi and the LDP, and the LDP to blame problems on the retired Koizumi — would not stand up to serious scrutiny.

My problem with Hatoyama's is more holistic: namely, reading this essay filled me with a sense of horror that this man is poised to be the prime minister of Japan, potentially governing on the basis of an enormous mandate. This essay confirms my preexisting impression of Hatoyama as something of a lightweight, convinced that his ideas about governing are serious when in fact they are so vague as to be meaningless. Like many Japanese politicians, Hatoyama seems to think that a vision must be vague — the difference is that his vision is vaguer than most, which is really saying something.

The essay is structured around the ideas of Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, or, to give his full name, Count Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a half-Japanese Austro-Hungarian count who was an early advocate of Pan-Europeanism. Apparently Hatoyama Ichiro, Yukio's grandfather, read and translated Coudenhove-Kalergi's The Totalitarian State Against Man during his period of exile from Japanese politics. (I, for one, long for the day when Japanese political leaders can begin their political testaments without references to their prime minister grandfathers.) And as a result we have Hatoyama's notion of fraternity, which all we can say for certain is neither liberty nor equality, but essential for moderating both.

Without properly defining "fraternity," Hatoyama provides an example of the LDP's postwar pact with organized labor as an example of fraternal government. (Incidentally, this is another instance of the DPJ's consciously linking itself to the old LDP mainstream, after the link with Ohira Masayoshi that I saw over the weekend.) Hatoyama then proceeds to claim that in the post-cold war era the LDP, focused overwhelmingly on economic growth instead of the Japanese people's quality of life, decayed, prompting the emergence of the original DPJ, which in its founding document in 1996 said that it stood for the "spirit of 'fraternity,'" contrasting fraternity with excessive liberty in which the "strong devour the weak" and excessive equality in which "the nail that stands out gets hammered down." Fraternity, it seems, refers to politics centered on individual autonomy.

It is at this point that Hatoyama launches into his "critique" of American "market fundamentalism" and "globalism," which he argues that contrary to a fraternal society, treats individuals as means to ends. "How can brakes be applied on financial capitalism, which forfeits morals and moderation, and market-supremacy-ism so that the people's economy and the people's livelihoods are protected?" From where I stand, Japan has been doing precisely this. At what point in time has Japan not moderated its relationship with the global economy so to provide a politically desired level of protection? Didn't the LDP erect a political-economic system to provide precisely the economic protection desired by its constituents? And isn't the problem now that the there are simply too many people outside the system erected by the LDP, and maintaining that system has become too costly in fiscal terms for the government and in human terms for those who don't benefit from the protectionist system? But, as I said above, there is little to worry about in this critique because it is ultimately quite flimsy. As Aso discovered during the worst of the financial crisis, there is something gratifying about blaming America — especially when no one is asking for more details. "American market fundamentalism" of late is simply every Japanese politician's favorite straw man.

Before continuing his harangue against American market fundamentalism, Hatoyama suggests one more definition for the elusive concept fraternity, that zeitgeist that appropriate for this age of "self-reliance and co-existence." (The more Hatoyama explains the concept, the more it seems like everything and nothing at the same time. That's what he gets for lifting ideas from a leading interwar idealist: has there been an era as characterized by muddled, mushy thinking as the 1920s and 1930s, the era that gave us the Kellogg-Briand pact among other fantasies?)

At this point, he trots out the canard that globalization is Americanization, again, something that Japan's experiences, not to mention the experiences of various European countries that are globalized, egalitarian, and wealthy, belie. I might be more sympathetic to Hatoyama's argument if he was a contender for the premiership of a peripheral Latin American country dependent on external markets for its primary products. But Hatoyama believes that global capitalism has destroyed local values, local traditions, and local culture. Undoubtedly there are places where this is true, but global capitalism's impact has not been uniform. One example he cites for Japan is the privatization of Japan Post, seeing as how post offices have played a traditional role in Japanese life. (Yes, ensuring that the LDP could stay in power for a half-century.) Seriously, is this the best that Hatoyama can do? I think it is a mistaken to treat postal privatization as being primarily about economics when Koizumi's intended target was the "opposition forces" in the LDP. Having taken a whack at the Koizumian straw man, Hatoyama then laments the decline of civil society in Japan, organizations that provide mutual aid beyond the realm of the market. It is odd that Hatoyama speaks of the decline of civil society when the decade since the revision of the NPO law has seen the blossoming of civil society organizations.

Having bemoaned the problems of an unrestrained market economy and the ailments of civil society, Hatoyama turns his attention to the culprit, Japan's central government administration, and offers his solution of choice: decentralization.

To explain his thinking on decentralization, Hatoyama returns to Coudenhove-Kalergi, who wrote of a mystical chain linking the individual to the cosmos: "The individual creates the family, the family creates the community, the community creates the canton, the canton creates the state, the state creates the continent, the continent creates the earth, the earth creates the solar system, and the earth brings forth the solar system." I'm not going to even try to dissect this mystical rubbish, but I will say that if Hatoyama's thinking is actually guided by Coudenhove-Kalergi's ideas, it's little wonder that it is so hard to pin down what he believes. But Hatoyama presses on, stressing the reality of "an era in which economic globalization is unavoidable." The result has to be a mix of globalization and localization. For localization he looks to the actual dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the de facto dissolution of Belgium. Never mind that Czechoslovakia broke due to long-standing differences between Czechs and Slovaks and did so before the country was fully integrated into the global economy. Never mind that divisions within Belgium similarly feature a mix of cultural, linguistic, and economic factors. How on earth are these countries models for what should happen in Japan? He goes further and discusses the EU's principle of subsidiarity, but subsidiarity is an evasion. Who is to determine at which level a particular function can be best exercised? But we're left with Hatoyama's updating of Coudenhove-Kalergi: "That which the individual can do should be solved by the individual. In matters which the individual cannot solve, the family helps. In matters which the family cannot solve, regional society and NPOs help. Adminstration is first applied when problems cannot be solved at this level."

Accompanying "localization" is globalization in the form of an East Asian community. Most of his analysis in this section is premised on the inevitable decline of American hegemony and the uncertain consequences of that decline. But Hatoyama does accurately describe what I think is Japan's position in the region, Japan as one of several regional middle powers: "How can Japan, caught between an America struggling to remain a hegemon and a China wanting to be and planning to be a hegemon, maintain its political and economic autonomy and defend its national interests? The international environment is which Japan will be placed from now on is not straightforward." His answer is a regional community that will sidestep the nationalism that plagues bilateral relationships. He sidesteps the obvious question of how the region will get from where it is today to a community like the European community by noting that it will take a long time and that it is a goal worth realizing. (It's going to take more than wishful thinking to replace the ASEAN-led model of soft cooperation with integrationist hard cooperation.)

The content of this essay, such as it can be said to have policy content, does not alarm me. No, I am alarmed because this essay confirms my worst fears about Hatoyama as a leader. His thinking is a mishmash of pop-anti-globalizationism, mystical brotherhood-ism, and nostalgic conservatism. Frankly Hatoyama as prime minister will be the DPJ's biggest problem if it wins on Sunday. The DPJ will need to build a strong cabinet filled with as many powerful politicians as possible simply to keep Hatoyama from doing more than serving as the quirky face of the DPJ-led government. It's going to take more than a good chief cabinet secretary to keep Hatoyama from saying something dumb enough to lead voters to wonder why they put the man in power in the first place. Replacing Ozawa with Hatoyama may have helped give the DPJ an insurmountable lead in the general election campaign — but the same change may make it harder for the DPJ to govern once the party actually wins.

The world's top public intellectual

Voting is open in Foreign Policy magazine and Prospect magazine's contest to choose the world's top public intellectual.

The magazines chose a list of the top 100, available here, on the basis of the following criteria: "Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country."

Sixty-six are from North America or Europe. Not one is from Japan. The last time FP/Prospect conducted this survey, Ohmae Kenichi and Ishihara Shintaro were included in the top 100, at 97 and 100 respectively. Is Japan really so far removed from global intellectual currents that not one Japanese merits inclusion on this list? I suppose that English ability might have something to do with it: how else does a public intellectual "influence wider debate...beyond the borders of their own country" today than by being a proficient or fluent English speaker?

Beyond that, another point that many on the list have in common is an interest in regional, transnational, and global problems. Japanese public discourse, however, tends to be inward focused, meaning that Japanese public intellectuals make their names discussing Japan's problems, often looking at international problems solely in terms of how they affect Japan.

Part of it too may be selection bias on the part of FP and Prospect. India and China combined for ten of the 100, reflecting the focus of global media on the two Asian giants. But does that translate into influence for its public intellectuals?

I urge you all to choose a Japanese public intellectual (Oe Kenzaburo, Murakami Haruki, Funabashi Yoichi, whoever) as your write-in vote.

"Pride" is not just the property of the LDP

In this post earlier this month, I discussed the importance of "pride" — hokori (誇り) — in the thinking of the Japanese right.

In this vein, Younghusband at Coming Anarchy writes of a dispute between the DPJ and The Economist over the recent cover that featured the pun "Japain."

Iwakuni Tetsundo, head of the DPJ's international bureau, wrote to complain about the cover:

...I strenuously object to the title on the cover of your Asia edition, 'Japain'. Japan is the official name of our nation, registered and acknowledged by the United Nations and other international bodies. It is completely outrageous that you combined the word for our nation with 'pain'. You made fun of our respected nation's name on a cover that is sold on newsstands all over the region. This conduct is equal to burning a national flag, which is base and inconsiderate. No nation's name should be treated like this.

I disapprove of the utter lack of humor on the part of Mr. Iwakuni, and, presumably, the DPJ, since Mr. Iwakuni seems to have written in an official capacity. Please take a deep breath: this is nothing like the burning of a national flag, and this stance makes the DPJ look silly and irrationally nativist.

This episode goes to show that a national pride that occasionally borders on chauvinism is not the unique property of the LDP and conservatives like Nakagawa Shoichi. This is a reality of Japanese politics today. I suspect Japanese politicians — and the Japanese people — may have a bit of a chip on their shoulder as a result of the slights and put downs the country endured during the lost decade. (Of course, the Japanese establishment engaged in ongoing self-criticism throughout the 1990s.) This suggests that nationalism and related-foreign policy issues will not be the basis for a new cleavage in a realigned political system. A certain degree of nationalism — if not loyalty to the nationalist agenda proposed by the LDP's conservatives — may be common to most Diet members.

This episode may also reflect a certain powerlessness on the part of the Japanese establishment, prompting officials and businessmen to lash out like this: it is difficult, after all, for Mr. Iwakuni to take issue with the substance of The Economist article, although he attempts to refute the magazine's criticism of the DPJ. Japan is mired in intractable social and economic problems that have diminished the country's international profile. As such, the DPJ and the establishment as a whole should not vent its frustrations at foreign critics, who for the most part have Japan's interests at heart.

Japan on the brink

The Diet returned to business yesterday after a two-day recess, with Prime Minister Fukuda and members of his cabinet delivering speeches outlining the government's basic policies for the 2008 regular session.

Prime Minister Fukuda — despite his decline in popularity, which he has said "can't be helped" — gave another excellent speech, his second in two days, in which he outlined the nature of the problems facing Japan and the work that remains to be done. Continuing the soft approach that he has followed since taking office in September, Mr. Fukuda opened his address by praising the work of the recently finished special session and calling attention to the ways in which the government and the opposition were able to cooperate to pass legislation, despite the conflict over the anti-terror law.

He then correctly identified the problems facing Japan today: "In the midst of the change in the global economy symbolized by the rapid growth of China, India, and others, how do we preserve our country's economic strength, how do we maintain our social security system in tough economic conditions, how do we deal with the problem of declining birth rates, how do we deal with the problems of expanding irregular employment and stagnant regional economies, and also, how do we deal with the fierce global competition in technology, and how do we deal with the problems of the global environment, natural resources, and energy?" He spoke of building a new Japan, not a beautiful Japan, and he said "our" — he emphatically did not lay down an ideological blueprint for this new Japan. Indeed, if Mr. Fukuda has an ideology, it is one that upends the traditional way of politics in Japan, elevating the people at the expense of the government and bureaucrats.

As expected, he emphasized the need of build a consumer-centered society. He stated five goals: (1) realizing a consumer-centered society; (2) securing the livelihood of the people by creating a new social security system; (3) constructing a vital economic system; (4) "realizing Japan as a peace cooperation state"; and (5) finding a way to a society that is both energy-efficient and prosperous. What follows is a long and detailed statement articulating how the government will pursue these goals. I doubt that he will have enough time and power to act on this agenda, but it's important to note that Mr. Fukuda gets it. As I have suspected since he took office, Mr. Fukuda, far from being an aged functionary and tool of the factions, has a keen appreciation for the problems facing Japan today. He may not be flashy like former prime minister Koizumi, but in many ways he has a more constructive vision for Japan than the mercurial former prime minister. (Like Mr. Koizumi, I think Mr. Fukuda realizes that a new system will not emerge without political change. The political system has long been dead weight holding back Japan.) He recognizes the interconnectedness of the problems facing Japan; for example, towards the end of his address he spoke of the importance of changing the education system to enhance Japan's international competitiveness. Unlike his predecessor, whose ideas about education harkened back to the Meiji-era rescript on education, Mr. Fukuda recognizes Japan's responsibility to its children. (He also undoubtedly angered the conservative ideologues by noting that if Japan is to revise its constitution, revision has to be the result of broad consensus among all parties. For an illustration of the contrast between Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Abe, check out the picture of Mr. Abe in this article.)

It is truly unfortunate that Mr. Fukuda was not elected LDP president and prime minister in September 2006, when he would have been in a position to move forward aggressively with this agenda. He would have control of both houses of the Diet, the goodwill of the public, and a sincere desire to tackle the problems facing Japan. Instead Japan got Mr. Abe, and the rest is, of course, history. Now Mr. Fukuda has to juggle a divided Diet, a divided party, and an insecure public that does not seem to be particularly willing to be patient while Mr. Fukuda tries to make progress on building a new Japan.

I do not think that Mr. Fukuda was exaggerating when he spoke of the scale of the problem facing Japan. As Ota Hiroko, his minister of economic policy, said yesterday, Japan is no longer a first-rate economic power. Takenaka Heizo, Mr. Koizumi's reform czar, made the same point in an article in the February issue of Voice. Mr. Takenaka called Japan a "policy third-world country," citing the government's inability to resolve any of the long-standing economic problems facing Japan.

But I also think that Mr. Fukuda will be hard-pressed to address these problems in this Diet session, especially with the prospect of a general election looming over the proceedings. He will not be helped by talk of a consumption tax hike, which Finance Minister Nukaga Fukushiro dared to do yesterday. I don't doubt that Mr. Fukuda's approach will put pressure on the DPJ in a general election campaign — and may make the difference in the LDP's keeping an HR majority — but the festering problems within the LDP may be enough to undermine his government fatally.

It may be the case that true reform will have to wait for regime change.

Fear and loathing in the global economy

Every once in a while, I read an article that is worth posting largely without comment. Tony Judt, a professor of European history at NYU, has written one such article, a review in the New York Review of Books of Robert Reich's Supercapitalism.

The key paragraphs:

But we have good reason to believe that this may be about to change. Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one's daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

Half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an "economic age" collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent—in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities—that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent. Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.

We need to recover some of that sense. We are likely, in any event, to rediscover the state thanks to globalization itself. Populations experiencing increased economic and physical insecurity will retreat to the political symbols, legal resources, and physical barriers that only a territorial state can provide. This is already happening in many countries: note the rising attraction of protectionism in American politics, the appeal of "anti-immigrant" parties across Western Europe, the call for "walls," "barriers," and "tests" everywhere. "Flat worlders" may be in for a surprise. Moreover, while it may be true that globalization and "supercapitalism" reduce differences between countries, they typically amplify inequality within them—in China, for instance, or the US—with disruptive political implications.

In the midst of an unfolding credit crisis that could wind up destroying major US banks and who knows what else, Professor Judt is sobering as only a historian of the European twentieth century can be.

Read the whole thing. (HT: Andrew Sullivan)

Don't panic

Pollster Karlyn Bowman, writing at American.com, presents data on Japanese public opinion drawn from a variety of recent surveys (mostly old Pew Global Attitudes polls).

The overall picture — Japanese are generally pleased with relations with the US, displeased about the rise of China — is not altogether surprising, although some findings were unexpected.

First, in response to the question "Do you believe globalization, especially the increasing connection of our economy with others around the world, is...," 92% of respondents said it was "mostly good for Japan" and only 8% "mostly bad." In comparison, only 60% of Americans respondents said it was "mostly good" for the US, with 35% saying "mostly bad." I suspect that this discrepancy says more about the comparative intensity of globalization in the US and Japan than about what Japanese people actually think about globalization. After all, when it comes to things like, say, foreign direct investment in the form of foreign ownership of Japanese firms, the Japanese don't seem all that thrilled about the greater economic openness that globalization entails. Accordingly, if and when Japan actually globalizes, I would expect more Japanese to feel that it is "mostly bad."

Second, asked whether "Japan has apologized sufficiently for its military actions in the 1930s and 1940s," 44% of respondents said "has not," 40% said "has." Hey, Ampontan, look: even Japanese think that Japan has more apologizing to do. Perhaps Congress is not altogether out of line — and not just engaging in "vainglorious moral preening" — in asking for another Japanese apology.

Admittedly, these poll numbers aren't the freshest, and I have to imagine there would be some changes in light of recent events. Nevertheless, they show that basically, fundamentally, relations between the US and Japan are sound, whatever temporary vacillations come along.

What's in a name?

Quite a bit, when the name is that of an important government policy document, and when that name is missing a phrase near and dear to the former prime minister's heart.

So suggests the Asahi Shimbun in its editorial on the Abe government's recently announced 2007 fiscal policy plan.

Unlike the title of the annual fiscal policy plans produced under Koizumi's watch — "Basic policies for economic and fiscal management and structural reform" — the Abe's Cabinet's program is called simply "Basic policies for economic and fiscal management." And so, concludes Asahi, "the flag of 'structural reform' has vanished."

To Asahi, this is yet another sign, perhaps the clearest yet, that the Abe Cabinet has discarded the Koizumi Cabinet's "no growth without reform" motto and the policy perspective behind it. The policies in this program timid — a hodgepodge of vague "pro-growth" policies including more funding for universities, "investigating" economic partnership agreements with the EU and the US, "drastic [but unspecified] tax reform," and a ludicrous promise to double Japan's OECD-worst productivity in five years (see Ken Worsley on this point in particular), packed into fifty-two pages, the longest such report since the government first began drafting them. Not only is there no overall vision beyond the Abe program, but the lack of detail leaves room for bureaucrats to muscle back in, as Asahi noted when a first draft was issued to the public.

Yomiuri, for its part, also noted the lack of details in the program — and a lack of priorities. At the same time, however, Yomiuri seems to give the prime minister the benefit of the doubt, gently chiding Abe for not giving enough details now, but assuming he'll get around to it eventually.

Considering the point I raised in this post earlier today, this damp squib of a document is not just another dull, useless policy report issued by the government — it is a sign of the utter failure of imagination that characterizes policy making throughout the developed world.

Are we all social democrats now?

I could not help asking that question — paraphrasing Richard Nixon's famous pronouncement — read a pair of articles that look at how post-industrial global capitalism is evolving, and how publics, especially in the US and other mature democracies, are responding to the emergent order.

In Foreign Affairs, Kenneth Scheve and Matthew Slaughter, noting the rise of protectionism in the US, call for a "New Deal" for the post-industrial age (hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily). The basis for their argument is quite simple:

...Policy is becoming more protectionist because the public is becoming more protectionist, and the public is becoming more protectionist because incomes are stagnating or falling. The integration of the world economy has boosted productivity and wealth creation in the United States and much of the rest of the world. But within many countries, and certainly within the United States, the benefits of this integration have been unevenly distributed -- and this fact is increasingly being recognized. Individuals are asking themselves, "Is globalization good for me?" and, in a growing number of cases, arriving at the conclusion that it is not.

They point in particular to falling incomes for every category of education except for holders of PhDs and professional degrees, and the corresponding feeling of economic insecurity that they argue jeopardizes the sustainability of the new capitalist order. Accordingly, they criticize the inadequate response of public officials to this sense of insecurity — the failure of governments to explain the virtues of the new age while simultaneously initiating policies that will ease the fears of anxious publics and try to provide individuals with the tools to compete.

Meanwhile, in the FT Martin Wolf lays out how the "permanent revolution" that is capitalism is transforming industrial capitalism into something else (he calls it, perhaps channeling Rudolf Hilferding, global financial capitalism, but that strikes me as too limited a term, because the impact of the decoupling of wealth creation from the production of tangible goods is and will continue to be wide reaching, throughout societies). Wolf is definitely worth reading, because he outlines the extent of the transformation underway, the extraordinary changes that have left publics scared and governments overwhelmed. The benefits, as Wolf notes, are substantial, but if they are to be preserved and expanded governments need to act to disarm public opposition and build a new regulatory framework, in the same manner that countries developed a regulatory framework for the industrial age.

As Harvard's Dani Rodrik notes in a comment on Wolf's analysis, "The problem, at its root, is the incompatibility between global finance and fragmentation of political sovereignty at the national level. Domestic finance could be tamed in the previous century through national institutions (regulation, legislation, central banks, and so on). Global finance, to work well and safely, requires institutions similarly global in scope. The chance that these global institutions can be created is, well, nil—at least in our time."

Based on the thinking of elected officials in not only the US, but also in Japan and Europe, I must share Rodrik's skepticism. It seems that few officials quite realize the extent of the change underway. They remain stuck in the industrial age, content to jury rig old institutions rather than imagine new post-industrial institutions. As such, public opposition, in the form of protectionism, will undoubtedly continue to grow. What I am curious about is how that opposition will metastasize into more formal opposition, reminiscent of the late nineteenth century's Grangers and Populists. In fact, I am amazed that John Edwards seems to be the only candidate actively trying to tap into growing fear and resentment.

So the question is whether the heralds of "global financial capitalism" — to whom state intervention is largely anathema — will be flexible enough to embrace some form of social protection as a way to disarm and undermine more potent opposition to the post-industrial order.

Buying the hype?

Michael Auslin, a history professor at Yale and soon to be scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has a somewhat challenging survey of contemporary Japan at American.com, AEI's online magazine.

As the article's title — "A Beautiful Country" — suggests, Auslin buys into the confident rhetoric that has emanated from Tokyo in recent years, but at the same time, he does not deny that Japan is beset with a host of problems that make Japan's future prospects far from certain. As he writes, "From a shrinking population to a static military budget, from alienated youth to a declining savings rate, the country will be forced to make major choices in the coming decades. What has changed, however, is not only that real reform seems to have taken root, but perhaps more importantly that the expectations of the Japanese themselves have moved beyond both the irrational exuberance of the 1980s and the gloom of the 1990s."

Has real reform taken root? I guess that depends on what one makes of recent developments in Japanese politics. Who is the aberration, Koizumi or Abe? Did Koizumi permanently knock the Japanese political system onto a new course, and Abe's problem-laden government is just a temporary detour to better governance? Or is it the reverse? And where does Japan's dissatisfied public — as shown by Asahi's poll on attitudes towards politics — fit in the picture? Can that aimless discontent be channeled to productive ends, or will it simply serve to punish the LDP next month before returning to the LDP's side the next time a Lower House election rolls around?

As such, I cannot necessarily share Auslin's optimism. There is potential for real, lasting change to how Japan is governed — but it will not happen automatically. The Japanese people will have to forge a coherent program out of inchoate discontent, which of course leads one to wonder whether Japanese citizens are prepared to exercise their rights.

And as for Japan's changing security policy, there has been real change in the past decade, but it is an open question as to the extent of that change. How far along has Japan come, forces in the Indian Ocean and Iraq notwithstanding? What role are the Japanese people willing to countenance? Without the abductions issue — used to great effect by Abe and others to present the North Korean challenge in terms individuals can understand and provide a "softer" basis for a firmer Japanese defense posture — would the public be quite so eager to support "normalization"? And what to make of the abiding unease about being dragged into American wars abroad?

The more closely one looks at what Japanese are saying and thinking, the more questions arise, and far from being vibrant and confident, Japanese society seems rife with insecurity — about the future, about Japan's place in Asia and the world, and about the ability of the durability of the Japanese system in the age of globalization.

Blair looks forward while looking back

I think it goes without saying that outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be recalled as a tragic figure, full of potential but consumed by circumstances largely beyond his control. (Check out the debate hosted by PostGlobal on this question.)

Nevertheless, Blair remains impressive as a world leader who has tried to look forward and anticipate the myriad ways in which the world is changing, and thus his retrospective in the current issue of the Economist is well worth reading.

I particularly like his acknowledgment, "The line between 'foreign' and 'domestic' policy is being blurred." That does not mean that globalization is homogenizing the world, but it does mean that what happens abroad has tremendous consequences within the borders of faraway states, and what happens within a state's borders have tremendous impact on its position in the world and its ability to cope with challenges emanating from abroad. This is, of course, a lesson that Japan's politicians and bureaucrats would do well to appreciate.

For all the talk about Japan's playing a more active international role, it is all hot air if Japan cannot figure out how to open Japan's economy and make it more dynamic, care for its elderly without permanently handicapping economic performance, determine the best way to make use of foreign labor, and revamp its education system to prepare Japanese children to compete in a service-driven global economy. Does anyone really think that Japan will be able to compete — and lead — in Asia without taking these steps? The Abe Cabinet's Innovation 25 project sounds nice, but as this Sankei Shimbun editorial makes inadvertently clear, the cultural changes necessary to make the policy changes successful are daunting.

Also of interest, of course, is Blair's insistence that "political parties will have to change radically their modus operandi":

Contrary to mythology, political parties aren't dying; public interest in politics is as intense as it ever was. As the recent turn-out in the French election shows: give people a real contest and they will come out and vote.

But politics is subject to the same forces of change as everything else. It is less tribal; people will be interested in issues, not necessarily ideologies; political organisation if it is rigid is off-putting; and there are myriad new ways of communicating information. Above all, political parties need to go out and seek public participation, not wait for the public to be permitted the privilege of becoming part of the sect.

So, membership should be looser, policymaking broader and more representative, the internet and interactive communication the norm. Open it all up.

While obviously some of this is unique to the British political system, the injunction to "open it all up" should resonate in all mature democracies struggling with voter apathy and disgust with partisan politics and mediocre governance.

In Japan's case, it needs to reconsider its Public Election Law, which stifles democratic activity and serves in effect to shield incumbents from opposition.

So, to the last, it is worthwhile to listen to Tony Blair. Maybe in retirement he can come advise the DPJ.

Japan's own Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

The Abe Cabinet, in the interest of promoting a more globalized and more competitive Japanese economy, has announced that it will seek to repeal Japan's equivalent to the US New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed in the US in 1999 with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act. (The FT's coverage can be read here.)

The Abe Cabinet's move -- like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act -- is in some sense a concession to the reality that Japanese financial institutions, to become globally competitive, need to be able to realize the economies of scale and the diversification of services that characterizes major financial institutions from the US and Europe.

But removing the barrier separating banks from brokerages raises the same risks of a moral hazard -- institutions that are "too big to fail," requiring government assistance in the event of trouble -- that the US deregulation did, perhaps even more so, given that Japan's banking system is still on the road to recovery from the bad loan problem.

And what will this mean for the soon-to-be-privatized Japan postal savings bank, which upon privatization will become the world's largest private bank?

Questions to think about

Novelist Thomas Mallon, writing at The American Scholar, provides a list of questions -- no answers -- about "the future of the humanities in America." (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

For a short piece of ten questions, Mallon provides an awful lot to think about. I particularly like number ten: "Are we also willing to admit that the universalization of English is more apparent than real? And that our general failure to know foreign languages is an act of both laziness and arrogance — one that threatens America’s legitimate claims to leadership in the world?"

I'm sure that will resonate readers with experience in teaching in Japan or elsewhere, but Mallon hints at a larger problem. It's not just laziness and arrogance, it's a general inability to empathize with foreign peoples, to try to understand their concerns, hopes, and confidences instead of just assuming to inside every foreigner is a red-blooded American patriot. I fear that too often Americans -- or at least the American media -- tend to group other countries and peoples into "those who like us" and "those who hate us." The world, however, is far more complex than a public opinion poll.

If Americans cannot break this habit of simplifying the world outside of the US, the coming decades, in which the vaunted "American way of life" will be subject to events abroad more than ever before, then the US is in for a rough century.

A new "new world order"?

Apologies for the lag in posting; life in Nagata-cho has gotten busy, leaving little time to dash off notes.

In any case, I want to call attention to an article in Foreign Affairs by Tufts University professor and blogger Daniel Drezner, called "The New New World Order."

Drezner argues that US foreign policy in recent years has been characterized by an increasing willingness to welcome emerging powers, namely China and India, into leadership roles in international society, lest they opt out and create parallel structures: "If China and India are not made to feel welcome inside existing international institutions, they might create new ones -- leaving the United States on the outside looking in."

His thesis links to a notion I've been toying with for some time. In the early years after the cold war, various international relations theorists (realists, by and large) were quick to point out that a new multipolar order would quickly replace the aberrant unipolarity that had followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Numerous articles talked about the inevitability of multipolarity, and speculated as to which powers were the leading candidates to become the next great powers. (Germany and Japan were the leading candidates -- just as Japan's economy stalled and Germany was forced to absorb the enormous costs of reunification with the impoverished East.)

It seems, however, that those realists were right, about fifteen years too soon -- and their vision of multipolarity owed more to bygone nineteenth century European balance of power than to the world order actually coalescing today. It seems that the multipolar order emerging today more resembles the "three-dimensional chessboard" discussed by Joseph Nye and others, in which multipolarity in economics, culture, and politics exist alongside and despite US military dominance.

Rather than resisting this, Drezner argues, the US has embraced the emergence of new powers and sought to revise international order accordingly, given them a stake in the system in a bid to forestall a revolution of the "upstarts."

This is especially interesting in light of the recommendations of the recent second Armitage-Nye Report, which I have previously discussed at length. The picture painted by the report is of a US more willing to cooperate with China, India, and other regional powers -- including Japan -- to shape the regional environment so to accommodate the new giants. The extent to which the US has worked to engage China was revealed today, in a talk by Randall Schriver, partner at Armitage International, former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia/Pacific affairs, and participant in the drafting of the Armitage-Nye Report. (I was attending on behalf of my boss.)

The picture painted by Schriver -- whose brief was to discuss China-Taiwan relations, which ended up encompassing Sino-US relations -- is of a US that, while still hedging somewhat in the event that China takes a belligerent turn, has fully embraced engagement with China, from the president down. Thanks to Secretary Paulson, the China-US Strategic Economic Dialogue ensures that US fears don't subvert the overall economic relationship. Under outgoing chief of Pacific Command William Fallon, the US Military and the PLA held their first joint exercises and engaged in a number of visits and exchanges. The Bush administration, like earlier administrations that have entered office intent on taking a hard line against China, is now pushing for greater engagement with China in the hope that it will become, in the words of former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, a "responsible stakeholder" in international society.

I will close with a number mentioned by Schriver in his talk. In the first Armitage-Nye Report, published in October 2000, China was mentioned a total of six times. In the most recent Armitage-Nye Report, China was mentioned 123 times. It is a new Asia, and, perhaps, a new world order.

Second time farce...

An embattled George Bush in the White House, a Democratic Congress riled up about Japanese practices to give itself an unfair advantage in international economic competition...is it 2007 or 1992?

But seriously, as this FT article reports, Congress is pushing hard for Secretary Paulson to join with European governments to pressure Japan to raise interest rates and push up the yen.

What exactly do these esteemed members of Congress hope to achieve? Do they expect that if Japan changes its supposedly errant ways that America's economic concerns will vanish and its economy will continue to lead the world? (I say supposed because it's not exactly clear how Japan is manipulating its exchange rate, aside from having extremely low interest rates.)

As I've posited here before, America's problems are rooted in the long-term challenges associated with the move to a post-industrial economy, and no amount of badgering of foreign governments will solve the long-term question of how to re-envision American institutions for the new era. Not surprisingly, John Dingell (D-MI), is leading the charge on this issue; it seems that Dingell, whose district includes the suburbs of automobile industry-dependent Detroit. It seems Dingell would rather freeze American industry than advance measures that will strengthen American dynamism and ensure that the engines of growth continue to purr -- including Detroit. There's no going back to 1950. And frankly, since a world with many major liberal economies means that millions, if not billions, of people are being lifted out of poverty, we shouldn't want to go back to 1950 even if we could.

Dingell and his fellow Democrats should be using their majority to ask how to provide some degree of assistance in the short term to those affected by the post-industrial transition, and to consider long-term solutions to ensure that rising generations have the skills to compete in new global economy that has many major nodes, with which competing fiercely for an edge on the rest. Undermining the global economy by hectoring foreign governments is a solution to neither the short-term nor the long-term problem.

So to re-enact the early 1990s efforts to pressure Japan to do America's bidding economically, given what we know now about how the global economy is changing, is indeed a laughable farce.

Paulson's long-anticipated journey

US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is in Beijing this week at the head of a mission that includes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Will these talks achieve concrete results?

I have my doubts, because I don't think talks of this nature can "resolve" long-term structural changes in the global economy. As noted in this article in the International Herald Tribune:

Still, focusing on China as the economic bogeyman may turn out to be a politically easy but economically misbegotten strategy. Even if China allowed the yuan to float, it might not make much difference to the American trade balance.

"The United States is no longer a manufacturing economy," Chen [Xingdong, BNP Paribas's chief economist in Beijing] said. "They have to import the daily necessities."

The most recent statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, show that durable goods made up only 14 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product; adding in clothing, shoes and some other nondurable products, the total is still less than a quarter of U.S. output.

Referring to Americans, Chen said: "If they don't import from China, they will have to import from other countries anyway. The only change is that they may not have such a good combination of quality and prices."

Does the US really want to go back to manufacturing the kind of goods being cranked out of Chinese factories? Or, alternatively, does the US want to curb its consumption of the products being produced by those factories?

I fear that the US is currently tempted by the "pull up the ladder" response. Having reaped great advantages from global economic integration, the US wants to call its quits on the whole global economic openness thing in the face of intense competition from new developers. So the US can badger China, but it shouldn't expect major results. The best that the US can do is focus on structural reform at home to enhance America's ability to compete in a world where more and more countries are learning to take advantage of economic liberalization.

The paranoid fantasies of Lou Dobbs

This morning before work I caught Lou Dobbs on CNN International while flipping through the news channels. In the span of the few minutes I watched, he reported on grassroots efforts to fight illegal immigration quashed by the US corporations and the government, US cooperation on policing with "totalitarian" Red China, "the march of the leftists" in Latin America, and the specter of Putin's menacing new Russia.

Much attention has been focused on his staunch economic populism and anti-globalism. This attention is not misplaced or unwarranted, but just from watching a few minutes of his show I discerned a much broader and much more dangerous worldview than simple economic nationalism.

As the stories mentioned above indicate, Dobbs essentially believes that America is a haven amidst a sea of troubles. The countries of the world are dysfunctional and/or dangerous. Unfair economic competition is only one facet of the dangers posed by the rest of the world. Foreign governments and peoples are hostile to America, and therefore we must retreat within our borders, tend our own garden, and watch the world fall to pieces.

Even if this approach were possible, it would be undesirable. Despite apparent disorder in the short term, the world may be on the brink of true peace and prosperity, as the likelihood of great-power war diminishes and billions of people are pulled out of debilitating poverty by economic liberalization. The US has an interest in using its power to usher this new era into being, and interdependence means that it has little choice in the matter. Thus to view the world as a cavalcade of threats to the American way of life is paranoid to the extreme.

Take his views on China. His report on US cooperation on policing and law enforcement expressed bafflement at the "contradictions" in US China policy. This reporting is gravely misleading, given that as every observer of US-China relations knows, US policy vis-a-vis Beijing has been riddled with contradictions ever since Nixon and Kissinger went to China. "Coopetition" is the watchword of the relationship, as every US administration since 1972 has found in China a potential partner in the management of regional security and, post-1978, a trading partner of ever-growing importance, even as the same administrations saw a looming threat to Taiwan and a brutal oppressor of its own people. But China is changing rapidly, and in unknown ways -- it's impossible to know what it will look like in ten, or even five, years. So to talk of "Red China" like some kind of 1950s newsreel is unhelpful in the extreme. The US should cooperate wherever possible and criticize and cajole only when necessary, but most importantly it must not view China as a kind of unmitigated enemy of America.

In short, America must not succumb to Dobbsian paranoia. The challenge of my generation -- indeed of every generation of American leaders -- will be to use American power to help usher in a more peaceful, prosperous world, which necessarily means rejecting the fear peddled by Lou Dobbs and his ilk.

Final roundup on the Democratic victory

In the past day several writers have produced worthwhile post-mortems on the elections that have echoed my concerns about the Democratic victory.

First, at the New Republic website (free registration required), John Judis -- who must be happy now that he can return to his "emerging Democratic majority" trope -- provides a sober review of the election that suggests that the Democrats benefited in 2006 from "Perot voters":

In the South, independents tend to be former Democrats who have begun to vote Republican but are unwilling to describe themselves as Republicans. In the North and West, however, they occupy a much more distinct political niche. They include libertarian-minded professionals and small-business owners--especially in the West--and white working-class voters in the Northeast and Midwest. They are equally uncomfortable with the feminist left and the religious right. What they dislike most is government interference in their personal lives. They see Washington as corrupt and want it reformed. They favor balanced budgets but also Social Security and Medicare. They worry about U.S. companies moving their plants to Mexico and about China exporting underpriced goods to the United States. They favor a strong military, but they want it used strictly against foreign aggression.

In the 1980s, these voters generally supported Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush; but, in 1992, many of them abandoned Bush for Ross Perot, who received 18.9 percent of the national vote. Perot did well in the West, Midwest, and Northeast, but not in the Deep South. In 1994, two-thirds of Perot voters, disgusted with what they saw as continuing corruption in Washington, backed the Gingrich revolution, accounting for much of the GOP's success outside the Deep South.

It's Perot's variety of anti-globalization -- if anti-globalization is the word for it -- that characterizes the positions of many members of the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. They support a kind of populism at home, populism abroad, that sees the struggle between Main Street and Wall Street as little different than the struggle of the US against foreign countries that supposedly play dirty: Japan in the 1980s, China and the other BRICs today. I doubt these voters would think of using the word "anti-globalization" to describe their positions, and compared to those who proudly wear that label, they're not. They just want the fair deal they think they deserve individually, and that the US deserves internationally.

While this position sounds innocuous enough, the policies that could result from this sense of insecurity -- whether retaliatory tariffs against countries with trade and exchange policies deemed detrimental to theUS or the rejection of bilateral trade agreements that have strategic as well as economic merit and multilateral and regional agreements that could assist development in benighted regions of the world -- could devastate the international economic order and effectively cede US leadership to...well, that's anyone's guess. (For an example of foreign fears of economic retaliation from the Democratic Congress, see this article in the English edition of South Korea's largest circulation daily, the Chosun Ilbo.)

So the question is what the Democrats will do to ease the insecurity of their new constituents. As Judis writes, "In this election, the Bush administration's failure in Iraq and the corruption of the Republican Congress allowed this heterogeneous group to find a temporary home in the Democratic Party. But it will take all the ingenuity and craft that Democrats can muster to turn this halfway house into a permanent residence for a long-term Democratic majority." Will they build their "permanent" majority by pandering to the fears of these homeless voters, or will they find a way to convince them to "buy in" to globalization, introducing reforms that alleviate their insecurity and convince them that they too can benefit from global economic openness? If they opt for the latter, the Democrats will be doing a great service to the country -- something that George Bush's Republican Party has yet to attempt.

Gerard Baker too suggests, in his column in The Times, that the results of the election hardly provide a clear policy mandate. He wrote:

Republicans lost not because the American people have suddenly seen the wisdom of the collective leadership of the European Union or the editorial pages of the world’s press but because they deserved to lose.

When you foul up as comprehensively as this Administration and Congress have done for six years you need to spend a period of time contemplating politics from the other side. The recent debate on these pages about whether Iraq was a bad idea in origin or just badly executed has been entertaining but jejeune from a political standpoint. It is literally impossible to know whether it was misconceived because what is absolutely certain is that is has been almost miraculously mismanaged from the moment Baghdad fell.

When you throw in “Heckuva Job” Katrina and a Congress that has devoted most of its time to enriching itself at the expense of every principle and value it was supposed to hold dear, you wonder why anyone even doubted that the good common sense of Americans would demand a change.

And how. It seems that all that mattered this year was that the candidate had a "D" next to his or her name on the ballot.

Baker ends with a note of doubt, however, suggesting that the (James) Baker survey on Iraq due in several weeks could, combined with the new Democratic majorities, spell the end of the line for the Bush administration's revolutionary project to transform the Greater Middle East.

Meanwhile, in the FT, former Harvard President Lawrence Summers suggests that previous "repudiation elections" in which the opposition parties made significant gains as voters rejected the sitting president's policies may provide a guide to the next two years in American politics. Summers too concludes that there is no clear way forward regarding domestic and foreign policies. He expects that both sides will be maneuvering to the center, with neither party getting everything that it wants. Bush may actually have to use the veto pen, or else make real efforts to compromise with the opposition.

The American political system will likely benefit from the change. One benefit may be that by no longer being locked out of power, the Democrats could shed the poisonous anti-Bush rhetoric that has characterized their past six years in the wilderness.

In any case, the only clear conclusion that can be drawn from this election is that the American electorate punished the Republican Party for a series of policy failures and for the shameless corruption of congressional Republicans. What the new majority will mean in terms of policy will remain largely unknown until next year.

An end to openness?

Obviously the biggest stories of the day -- pretty much all around the world -- are the Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation.

I gave my take on the former yesterday, in this post, but I want to call attention to comments on the election over at Maderblog, and a column by Jacob Weisberg appearing simultaneously in Slate and the FT. I think Weisberg nails it on the head. I am not going to be shedding tears for the departed Republican majority, but at the same time I think there are real worries that the incoming crop of Democrats could mean a significant turn away from the US commitment to free trade and other policies that undergird that spread of globalization. If the Democrats think they can fix structural problems in the American economy related to the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society by scapegoating foreigners, whether in the form of Mexican illegal immigration or those scheming cadres in Beijing, they are in for a shock.

The US and other developed economies are in the midst of a major shift to an economic model that for the most part is not rooted in the production of tangible items. For people in developed countries still engaged in these activities, the shift is proving painful, as developing countries have out-competed them. But US economic policy must not be "Ohioized"; the only way is forward, with the federal government acting to limit the destructive impact of the reordering on citizens employed in sunset industries and easing the transition to the new economic order. Meanwhile, the US needs to maintain its liberal trade policy, using access to its market as a carrot to induce developing countries along the path to capitalism, and ultimately liberal democracy. (Daniel Drezner has more on this meme here.)

Congress alone may be unable to implement an agenda detrimental to economic openness, but it can stymie the administration's effort to promote openness, most notably by withholding trade promotion authority from the president, as noted by Weisberg. This means that the White House must redouble its efforts to secure a multilateral trade agreement (with regional and bilateral trade agreements second-best options). And it means, as I've said before, that Henry Paulson will be the most important cabinet official during the final two years of Bush's presidency, especially now that Rumsfeld has resigned.