There’s something about travel that seems to bring out the worst in both the American and British governments. Exhibit A is American: the Travel Promotion Act of 2009. Introduced by Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and John Ensign (R-NV), the Act would impose a $10 fee on visitors coming from visa waiver countries. The money raised would be matched by a $100 million levy on “United States members of the international travel and tourism industry,” and would be spent by an independent, non-profit travel promotion corporation governed by an eleven-member board of directors appointed by the Secretary of Commerce. The purpose of all of this is to “establish a non-profit corporation to communicate United States entry policies and otherwise promote leisure, business, and scholarly travel to the United States.”

The Act is currently hung up in the Senate. That is just as well, because, as my colleague Jena Baker McNeill points out, it contains remarkable number of bad ideas. It reminds me of the old Monty Python sketch in which a “man on the street” suggested that Britain raise money by taxing foreigners who lived abroad. The idea that imposing additional fees will encourage “scholarly travel” — or any other kind of travel, for that matter — is bizarre. The Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) — used to automatically determine the eligibility of visitors to travel to the U.S. under the visa Waiver Program — was supposed to be free: imposing fees, as outraged letters from European ambassadors made it clear, could have negative implications for reciprocal visa-free travel between the E.U. and the US.

By definition, ESTA users already want to visit the U.S. The Act would tax them in order to subsidize campaigns aimed at boosting interest in tourism among uninterested foreigners, and promote parts of the U.S. they do not want to visit at the expense of those that are popular. Anyone who catches a whiff of tourist promotion-flavored pork in the requirement that the Corporation identify opportunities and strategies to promote tourism to rural and urban areas equally, including areas not traditionally visited by international travelers, is right on target. And then there is the curious belief that the travel industry can be defined clearly enough to pay a levy, or that particular industries should be levied to fund policies that will supposedly benefit everyone. Yes, levies may work for the National Peanut Board, but is that really what the travel industry wants to compare itself to?

But compared to Exhibit B, from Britain, the American Act almost looks sensible. The UK has a new points-based visa system. In theory, this is the right approach. But in practice, it’s going to have a disastrous effect on U.S. interest in the UK. That’s partly because the visa application fee ranges from 145 pounds for a student up to an eye-watering 1,020 pounds for an unsponsored applicant. More fundamentally, though, it’s because the government wants to curtail the number and type of non-EU passport holders working in the UK, apparently on the economically illiterate theory than there are only so many jobs to go round. As a result, it now bars non-EU passport holders (with a few exceptions) from taking even unpaid internships.

As Scott Paul at the Adam Smith Institute points out, the argument that this will force employers to hire and pay Britons is nonsensical: what the requirement will really do is “[pronounce] a death sentence on thousands of UK internship programmes at universities around the world,” including in the U.S. He’s right: Yale, for example, canceled its “British Bulldogs” program this summer for exactly that reason. And over the long run, that’s going to be bad for Anglo-American relations, and for the British economy.

Nations have the right to control their own borders. But wouldn’t it be great if governments on both sides of the Atlantic would stop taxing, deterring, and rejecting potential visitors who cost nothing, freely spend their own money abroad, and do a great deal to promote friendly relations between the U.S. and Britain?

My colleague at Heritage, Mike Gonzalez, points out a fascinating report available through the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It consists of the leaked work of EPA veteran Dr. Alan Carlin, and makes a serious argument that

We have become increasingly concerned that EPA and many other agencies and countries have paid too little attention to the science of global warming…. the EPA is largely relying on scientific findings that are, by early 2009, largely 3 years or more out of date.

Dr. Carlin’s paper is substantial and deserves to be read in its entirety. But his takeaway is clear: the best explanations for global temperature fluctuations are changes in the amount of energy emitted by the sun, and, especially, oscillations in the temperatures of the oceans. The explanatory power of CO2 levels is much weaker, and, over the past decade, almost non-existent.

So why, when the House has just passed a “global warming” bill, is this report only available via a leak from CEI? Because, as Dr. Carlin puts it, “I’ve been involved in public policy since 1966 or 1967…. There’s never been anything exactly like this. I am now under a gag order.” The internal EPA e-mails between Dr. Carlin and his superiors that were leaked along with the report back up this claim.

The left has been very free over the past few years — actually, the last several decades — with claims of being pro-science, as opposed to those knuckle-dragging obscurantists on the right. But it’s the left that badly wants global warming to be real, so as to justify pet policies — such as a bigger, more intrusive state apparatus — that it champions for unrelated and, frankly, ideological reasons. If upholding such policies entails ignoring scientific opposition, the left’s quite willing to stick its fingers in its ears and start whistling.

As a newspaper veteran, my colleague regrets that “the media has happily gone along with this suppression.” For my part, it reminds me of a paper I once graded at Yale. The student author was absolutely persuaded that carbon monoxide caused global warming.

When I pointed out that CO was indeed toxic, but that no one called it a greenhouse gas, and that it was not the same as CO2, the student had no idea what I was talking about (and refused to revise the draft). All evidence had become irrelevant: what mattered was asserting his ill-informed belief, and refusing to reconsider on the grounds that doing so would be akin to apostasy. In a student, that is sad; in the making of policy, it’s both expensive and foolish.

Last week, three British judges ruled that JFS, formerly the Jews’ Free School, in north-west London, racially discriminated against an applicant. The school is state-funded. As the Telegraph reports:

The boy’s father is Jewish by birth, but his mother is Jewish by conversion conducted at a Progressive rather than an Orthodox synagogue and therefore not recognised by the Office of the Chief Rabbi.

The school sought to discriminate in favor of Jewish applicants certified by the Chief Rabbi — a procedure formerly thought to be legal, as long as the school was oversubscribed and the discrimination was not based on ethnicity. The judges found that, contrary to a decision by a lower court, what had been “characterised as religious grounds were in fact racial grounds, despite their theological motivation.” In short, the judges held, Jews are an ethnicity, and therefore are not eligible to maintain state supported schools that discriminate in favor of Jewish students, no matter if they are oversubscribed or not,
because that discrimination is racist.

I will leave it to the readers of this forum to debate the matter of the Chief Rabbi’s decision, as I suspect they possess expertise on this subject that I lack. But personally, I think the decision is appalling. Its tacit logic is that only religions based on proselytizing and conversion are real religions: those one is born into are ethnicities in disguise. This is a curious and indeed baseless truncation of religion, but if that is indeed is the reasoning, Britain’s Hindus and Sikhs will be as badly affected, in theory, by this decision, as are Britain’s Jewish citizens.

In practice, though, the weight of the decision will fall almost entirely on Jewish schools. In 2007, there were two state-funded Sikh schools in Britain, no Hindu schools — and 37 Jewish schools, educating almost half the Jewish children between the ages of four and fifteen. If the decision stands, these schools will either have to choose between going private or abandoning their identity.

There may be a case to be made that the state should not be supporting faith-based schools at all, and that their operations — like much else in Britain — should be left to local government organs. But that is not, as David Conway of Civitas points out, the existing system in place, as evidenced by 6,802 Christian state-maintained schools and seven Muslim ones operating in Britain. Indeed, all state-maintained schools have a legal obligation — often admittedly evaded — to provide religious instruction. The faith-based schools do not, therefore, stand as far apart from secular schools as one might think.

Nor does the faddish belief in “community cohesion” offer any justification for this decision, because no one with a fair mind maintains that Jewish schools are indoctrinating their students into social isolation or hostility. If that charge could be pressed against any schools in Britain, it would be against a section of the Muslim schools, which will be entirely unaffected by this decision.

And that, sadly, says a lot about Britain today, where judges perversely find that it’s the Jewish schools that are the nasty, racist, discriminatory ones. A better example of condemning the victim and using anti-discrimination law to do it would be hard to find.

If the government wants to spend money on a program — presuming it’s unwilling to simply roll the printing presses — it must choose between two ways of acquiring the needed funds. It can borrow the money, or it can raise it through taxation. Neither source is ideal. The disadvantage of raising taxes is obvious. The disadvantage of borrowing stems from markets taking notice, and — if you do it often and irresponsibly enough — punishing you for it.

In Britain, Labour found a third way: i.e., writing very long-term contracts to private firms responsible for building and maintaining capital assets, in return for annual payments. Practically speaking, this mounts up to the same as borrowing — a contact, like debt, represents an obligation to make a stream of future payments. But legally speaking, it’s not the same, because in the U.K. contractual obligations are not accounted for in the same way as traditional debt.

The result? Since 1997, Britain’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has piled up billions of pounds of obligations that do not figure on the balance sheet. Simply adding up the future payments is naïve, because it ignores the time value of money, but the figure is illustrative nonetheless: it’s now 217 billion pounds over the next twenty five years. A better estimate is that, in today’s money, Britain’s PFI obligations amount to 124 billion pounds through 2041 — not an unsustainable sum on its own, but also not the kind of debt that’s wise to ignore.

Britain’s unions, suffice it to say, have never been fans of PFI, and now that the buzzards are circling over Labour and Gordon Brown’s spendthrift ways, they’re out for blood. In theory, this is because, as one union officer put it:

PFI is a flawed and expensive exercise that continues to consume billions of pounds in costly contracts for the enormous profit of private companies. This is money that could be better spent on frontline services for patients and clients.

Of course, it is union members who are responsible for providing those “frontline services,” so, in practice, the union is actually exercised about competition for the funds going toward these costly contracts. The unions are right to criticize the government’s failure to put PFI on the books, but wrong about most everything else. The next government in Britain will have a tough time retaining the good in PFI and discarding the bad.

But fixing PFI isn’t an isolated internal problem for Britain. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, it’s got serious implications for Britain’s defenses. And, more broadly, it’s also an issue worth keeping an eye on in the context of U.S. fiscal policy. As the Obama administration’s budget bloats, the temptation to try a PFI-style trick in America will grow. Right now, the U.S.’s system of budgetary scoring makes it difficult to keep expenses off the books. But as the history of British Labour shows, a desire to spend combined with an unwillingness to pay can lead to all sorts of creative accounting concoctions, even in a country like Britain, formerly renowned for fiscal honesty.

Last year at about this time, Harvard’s endowment was $35 billion. In the first four months of the fiscal year, through October 2008, it lost $8 billion. Observers believe the losses may actually total $18 billion. Harvard relies on income from its endowment to cover about 35% of its budget.

Late last week, a memo from Harvard President Drew G. Faust put two and two together. The result: 275 layoffs. Harvard had already skipped raises for 9,000 faculty and non-union staff and shed 500 employees through a voluntary early retirement program. It wasn’t enough.

The reaction from union organizers at Harvard was predictable. Quoth one:

The fact that this is happening at Harvard, who is still sitting on a chest of billions and remains the richest university in the world, shows it is pursuing this incredibly narrow path of naked self interest. . . . They’re using this drop in the endowment as an excuse to justify really terrible cuts that will have a disastrous impact on the surrounding communities.

Ah yes, the narrow path of naked self interest, where the amount of money you have to spend affects the number of people you can afford to employ. That narrow, naked path. It’s the beaten path, which universities around the country, and, indeed, around the world have already traversed — Harvard having no good reason to avoid it.

I have a lot of friends in higher education, so, personally, this is a painful story. But it recalls my experience as a graduate student at Yale in the 1990s, when the farcical “Graduate Employees and Students Organization” made life thoroughly unpleasant for anyone who was not an academic Trotskyite.

GESO’s constantly reiterated line was that a) the capitalist system is unjust and built on sand foundations; b) the stock market and the endowment are going relentlessly upwards, so Yale should give us lots more money. The possibility that these two obsessions were mutually contradictory never appeared to occur to them. As with the union organizers at Harvard now, the university, GESO argued, had only one appropriate response to any situation: spend more money.

And that is precisely why Harvard is in this mess now. In 2000, Harvard’s budget was $1.9 billion. Last year, it was $3.5 billion. That’s an 80% increase in eight years. Instead of fixing the roof when the sun was shining, it spent and spent. And with personnel costs accounting for half the university’s budget, a good deal of the money went to swelling the ranks of staff. Naturally, those are the people who are taking it in the neck today.

In universities, as everywhere else, there are always more things worthwhile spending money on than there is money available. What I fear isn’t that higher education as such will suffer terribly as a result of this downturn — though a lot of individuals are going to pay a steep price for the popping bubble. What I fear is that universities will try to get by simply through scrimping, instead of by dropping nonessential programs and focusing on core competencies. That will only set them up to limp along for a while until the balloon begins another unsustainable inflation.

In universities as in government, efficiency-drives yield minimal gains. What’s needed here are not job cuts but rather amputations. Unfortunately, those usually involve firing faculty members, and if there’s one thing universities like Harvard hate more than losing $8 billion and firing staff, it’s caning faculty members. As soon as the faculty realizes that the dynamic has devolved into “them or us,” they will decide that the missing 275 were not so important after all.

Candidate Obama promised to break the long-standing and regrettable American tradition of naming big donors as ambassadors. But as the Washington Times points out, President Obama has not delivered on this lofty promise. Instead, he’s reverted to type: the big donors mysteriously always seem to be best suited for the most attractive jobs.

Of course, some of the donors can hardly be said to have landed their posts by virtue of their contributions. Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah is headed for Beijing after donating $2,300 — to Senator McCain’s campaign. Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, won’t miss the $500 he donated to Obama when he’s buying a Guinness in Dublin. And while Susan Rice’s donation of $4,600 is a bit more substantial, she’s obviously a true believer. After all, working for this administration at the U.N. will take a true believer.

But when you move to the more tradition-steeped posts, the value of the donations made by the nominees rises pretty sharply. Louis B. Susman, nominated for the Court of St. James’s, bundled $400,000. Howard W. Gutman, nominated for Belgium, bundled $775,000. And Charles H. Rivkin, head of the entertainment company Wild Brain Inc., nominated for France, topped the list by bundling $800,000 for the President.

To my mind, though, the most interesting post in this regard is the newly-created position of Special Representative for Global Partnerships, which Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley took up on June 23. In her swearing-in remarks, the Ambassador described her approach as “Ubuntu Diplomacy: where all sectors belong as partners, where we all participate as stakeholders, and where we all succeed together, not incrementally but exponentially.”

Having read that announcement, I am not much the wiser about what her actual job will be, and I rather suspect the Administration will soon find out that it doesn’t really know either. But the position would
seem to be an excellent lure for donations in advance of 2012: I, for one, would pay not to be burdened with the job of “instill[ing] a new culture of inclusiveness and accessibility” in the State Department.

Congressional Quarterly reported yesterday on the then-pending cloture vote on the nomination of Harold Koh to be Legal Adviser to the State Department, and on the anxiety that Republicans have expressed about his legal transnationalism, which seeks to “bring international law home” by subsuming it into the U.S. legal system without Congressional action. Koh, realizing that being tagged with that would hurt his nomination, was at pains to deny that this is what he wants, and CQ notes his denial - with a quotation directly from Koh that makes the case for the opposition:

They are only binding in our court, international and foreign law, when judges make them so, the president suggests that they should be so, or Congress embodies them into an act of Congress that’s signed by the president . . . . International and foreign law don’t become our law unless they are brought into our law by an act of American legal institutions.

I have been reading Koh’s writings for months.  At times, it’s Alice in Wonderland, six impossible things before breakfast stuff.  But this one made my jaw drop.  Forget about the argument that judges have the power to make international and foreign law binding in U.S. courts, even though that’s legal transnationalism in a nutshell.  What really shocked me is Koh’s contention that international and foreign law are binding when “the president suggests that they should be so.”  So not only is the president an “American legal institution,” he also has the power to bind U.S. courts to follow foreign law with a simple suggestion.

True, Koh’s said this kind of thing before.  In 2002, he described “informal state-to-state gatherings” as a “legal process” that constituted “a law-declaring forum that can operate at the global level” and “declare an international norm.”  A few months ago, on the Heritage Foundation’s blog, I pointed out that this “implies that the informal, international word of the President or his representatives is law, and therefore incumbent upon the State Department’s Legal Adviser to enforce.  This is a radical claim.”

But even I didn’t think that Koh would put it quite as plainly as he did in the CQ piece.  As long as Koh likes what he says - because he certainly didn’t extend that kind of deference to George W. Bush - Koh believes the President’s word is law.  With thousands of pages of legal writing behind him, it was always going to be tricky for Koh to escape from his record.  But quotations like this one make me wonder why he even bothered to try, or how anyone can claim with a straight face that his repeatedly-expressed beliefs are not, in fact, his.  Perhaps the answer is simple: it works.  Koh won his cloture vote today, by a pretty comfortable 65-31 margin.

Maajid Nawaz, the director of the London-based Quilliam Foundation, has a superb article in the Observer about his recent return to Pakistan to campaign against Islamism. There are a lot of ironies here — ten years ago, Nawaz, then a radical Islamist, was on his way to Pakistan to spread Hizbut Tahrir’s message in Lahore and prepare the way for the coming of a nuclear-armed Islamic caliphate.

And he wasn’t alone. We tend to think of Pakistan as a source of radicalism and terrorism. Well, it is. But pipelines can and do flow in both directions. So Pakistan’s not just a source of terror. It’s also a target. And furthermore, it’s a lot easier to get to a third country coming from Britain, and with a British passport, than it is to go direct from Karachi. So this new “British disease” has spread around the world. As Nawaz notes chillingly:

British members of HT also played crucial roles in exporting their group to Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, Mauritius, India, Egypt and Denmark, among others. I know because in each case I know the people ho did it.

It’s easy to find parts of Nawaz’s message — and, indeed, the entire Quilliam Foundation campaign — that still raise an eyebrow or three. But some of the West’s most effective early campaigners against Communism — George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, most obviously — were defectors from the cause of the left, and all the more powerful as a result, not simply because they knew what they were talking about, but because they shattered the myth of Communism as a monolithic, impenetrable block. Nawaz has much the same merit.

Of course, fragmentation cuts both ways: the most frightening and important part of Nawaz’s article is not his dissection of Britain’s role in promoting Islamic terrorism, but his discussion of the conspiracy theories and the social, cultural, religious, and ethnic strains that have prevented Pakistan from coming together, and are now pulling it apart. Nawaz did his bit to make that happen, and to spread the virus around the world. It’s a pity that, for some of the victims, and perhaps for Pakistan itself, Nawaz’s tour — with all its obvious and commendable bravery — is coming too late.

Yesterday evening, Senator Harry Reid filed cloture on the nomination of Harold Koh, formerly Dean of Yale Law, to be Legal Adviser to the State Department.  There were multiple holds on Koh, so absent administration willingness to make a deal this was the only way forward. It will take every Democratic vote to get to the sixty required.

No matter where you stand on Koh it’s difficult to avoid a sneaking admiration for him.  So much of academia at its most public is performance art - even if the issues at stake are serious - and Koh is a superb performer.

Judge Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment has already come in for extensive criticism, and Jennifer Rubin, among others, has raised wonderful questions about the “noxious double standard” involved in the Judge’s membership in the all-female Belizean Grove.  But Koh’s gotten in on the feminist act too.  His views on American exceptionalism, sovereignty, and treaties, among other subjects, have been widely ventilated, but no one has picked up on his 1993 article in the University of Cincinnati Law Review on “Two Cheers for Feminist Procedure.”

On two dimensions - the cognitive and the critical - Koh gives feminist procedure “very high marks.”  By cognitive, Koh means that feminist theory, correctly in his eyes, reveals that legal procedure “reinforces certain values which could be called ‘male’: individualism, neutrality, formality, separateness, and autonomy” and devalues the female “connectedness, reciprocity, empathy, relationship, informality, and context.”  By critical, Koh means that feminist theory has  introduced “a new dichotomy - the male/female dichotomy - to the study of procedure.”

I’ve rather lost track of whether feminists believe in innate differences between men and women, or whether they believe it’s all socially constructed.  Koh’s not too clear on this either: he says differences are socially constructed, but also claims the dichotomy between men and women will soon be basic to legal procedure.  It’s on that basis that Koh applauds the “very substantial contributions that feminist theory can make to the study of [legal] procedure.”

So what’s lacking?  Feminist procedure, according to Koh, hasn’t yet - or hadn’t yet, in 1993 - “begun to address a constructive program of reform” to create a world in which “gender issues are taken systematically into account,” in which procedural rules are significantly tailored to the personal attributes - i.e. the gender - of the litigant.  That, in Koh’s words, is “the unfinished task.”  So, onwards to the world of Judge Sotomayor and the “wise Latinas.”

And then comes the performance twist.  Koh’s been around long enough to see the attack coming: he’s asked for feminist procedure to formalize itself, but feminist procedure, according to him, is anti-formalist, formalism being a male virtue.  So by asking this, he’s revealed his own complicity in the gendered nature of justice. He parries with the skill of a judo master, with a mea culpa that he is, after all, a man - more essentialism - and that it’s important for feminists to “reach out beyond the converted” if “we” are to move to a “distinctively feminist procedure.”

As performance, this is wonderful stuff.  But as law, it is - well, it is not law.  It is procedure made anew for every case.  In other words, it is arbitrary.  It is also a ridiculous slander on both men, who are capable of appreciating context, and women, who are capable of being neutral.  And that is one of the worst things about the kind of justice Koh, and Sotomayor, are espousing: far from condemning legally-approved social separation as inherently unjust (as liberals used to), they are actively promoting it in the name of their brand of justice.

The administration recently released its Treaty Priority List, designating the treaties for which it supports - and those for which it does not support - Senate action.  As is to be expected, the news is mixed.

Encouragingly, the U.S.-U.K. Defense Trade Cooperation Treaty, and its U.S.-Australia counterpart, is on the list. Dr. Liam Fox, the British Shadow Secretary of State for Defense, will be holding an event in support of the U.S.-U.K. treaty in Washington later this month.  I have written at some length on this Treaty, which enjoys
bipartisan British backing.  Also, interestingly, the administration is not backing the Protocol II additions to the Geneva Convention, which would scupper their plans for the GITMO detainees.

Of course, the news is hardly all good.  The administration supports the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and other Related Materials, and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, among others.

And the “others” list is extensive, running from a tax treaty with Malta to the “Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade,” to the “Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels.”  Take a moment to cast your eye across the List and see if there’s anything worrying, or encouraging, coming along in your areas of interest.

To my mind, there’s one real surprise: the absence of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child from the List. As I pointed out in March, this looked to be an administration priority.  It was certainly a priority of Sen. Boxer (D-CA).  But it’s gone by the boards, not only unsupported by the administration but not even mentioned by it. Along with the defense trade treaties and the refusal to back the Protocol II additions, this is encouraging stuff from the State Department.  Sure, it’s worse than it should be, but it’s better than I expected.

Yesterday, Methodist Central Hall hosted a polling place for Britain’s European elections. When I arrived at the Hall, just after noon, the camera crews outnumbered the voters by four to zero. I asked the biggest crew who they were for: Al Jazeera English, come to see how democracy works, it turned out. How were things going? “Eh,” the interviewer grunted. After half an hour only five voters had come and gone — as, by then, had the flacks from Al Jazeera — so I did likewise. And that was par for the course: turnout in 2004 was just 38 percent — in spite of much of Britain voting at the same time in local council elections.  Apart from the blanket newspaper and media coverage, there was almost no sign of any actual campaigning: in many hours of walking around London over the past three days, I’ve seen only two political posters — one for an independent, and the other for the Socialist Party.

The voting system in the European elections gives complexity a bad name: the entire U.K. is divided into twelve regions, and each party puts up a maximum of ten candidates in each region to fill Britain’s 78 seats in the European Parliament. When votes are counted, seats are allocated between parties in proportion to their total, and to candidates in proportion to their place on the party list. The net result is that not a single voter in Britain will actually be voting for the representative they prefer: they will be voting for a party and for the hierarchy of candidates as arranged by the parties. No wonder the excellent Conservative Member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, has described his selection at the top of the list in South-East England as a victory for himself and a defeat for democracy.

Hannan is right, and not just about the European electoral system. With local government now responsible for raising only about a quarter of its own revenue, there’s not much incentive for voters to take it seriously. And few in Britain have much time for the European Parliament, which has little power and exercises even less responsibility. The result is that local and European elections have turned into an enormous opportunity to send a message to the government of the day (and, increasingly, the opposition). And that is what is likely to happen today. The message for the main parties is simple: an overwhelming majority of the British public is not excited enough about them to bother voting, and a near-majority of those who do bother will vote for one of the minor parties — either the nationalist parties in Wales or Scotland, the Greens, the British National Party (BNP), or the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

If this election has a surprise it will be how well UKIP does.  Every journalist, politician, and think-tanker I’ve talked with has said the Tories will take a lead over the other parties. But every one of them has also followed that by saying, identically, that UKIP will cut into the Tory margin of victory and come a clear second, pushing the Liberal Democrats and Labour into a bitter struggle for the irrelevancy of fourth place. Together, that means that the Tories — a moderately Eurosceptic party — and UKIP — a very Eurosceptic one — are likely to poll almost 50 percent of the vote. That is an enormous warning to the other parties that there are no votes to be had by sidling closer to Brussels, and to David Cameron and the Conservative Party that any straying toward Europe will be noticed and punished come the general election.

There is real anger here about the role the EU is assuming in British life, and the seeming lack of interest the main parties have displayed in putting an end to it. Traditionally, Europe is a shouting issue but not a voting one in British politics: these elections suggest that the anger is coming out in the fragmentation of the political system and the rise of the minor parties.

The other thing that has surprised me in the past week here is the division between some in the political class and the public as a whole about the parliamentary expenses scandal that has hit all the major parties in Britain over the past month. One veteran newspaperman confessed that he simply didn’t understand what the fuss was about. And it seems that quite a few politicians shared that incomprehension: Brown’s stumbling handling of the scandal, which has hit the Tories just about as badly as Labour, has done him tremendous damage and led to the surprise resignation of another minister, Hazel Blears, on Wednesday.

To my mind, the answer is simple. The British political elite have forgotten what the British public still  partly remembers: that Britain invented the concern of disinterested public political service, that it defined high standards of financial honesty in politics, and that both of these justified the British faith in parliamentary sovereignty, and in the Commons as a body that genuinely sought the public good, not its own enrichment. The expenses scandal symbolizes the obvious failure of the political class to live up to ideals that have been thoroughly abused, but which still command public respect; the degradation of the Commons by Europe is another assault from a different direction on the same faith. And that is what the results of today’s elections are likely to show: that the British public is tired of it. It may not know what it wants — and some of the disillusionment will come out in ways, such as support from alienated Labour voters for the BNP, that are distinctly undesirable — but it is quite fed up with what it had got.

Abe has taken a crack at explaining the meaning of the U.S.’s negotiations with Europe over the Guantanamo detainees. My take is slightly different. Last week, Michele Flournoy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as arguing that:

When we are asking allies to do their fair share in dealing with this challenge we need to do our fair share.

I am of two minds about this argument, but I lean toward considering it nonsense. Though part of me just blames the administration for being naïve, for actually believing that Gitmo has ever been a serious issue for Europe, as opposed to something it could beat George W. Bush over the head with.

That part of me is willing to give the administration some credit for trying, albeit gullibly, to encourage the Europeans to live up to their responsibilities. It blames the administration only for committing the fundamental liberal error of believing that the misbehavior of others is merely a reflection of our own supposed faults.

The other part of me thinks this is far too generous. Abe quotes the update on the negotiations, and argues that the administration is doing the bidding of the Europeans. As our partners in Europe put it:

We reaffirm that the primary responsibility for closing Guantanamo and finding residence for the former detainees rests with the United States.

But the way I read both that sentence and Flournoy’s comments, both sides are actually advancing the same position: the detainees are going to be housed in the U.S. What the administration wants is a vague agreement with Europe to provide them with the necessary domestic cover. The Europeans will naturally extract a price for this agreement, since they hold all the cards: they do not, after all, have to take a single detainee, while the administration is desperate to close Guantanamo.

My prediction: when all is said and done, the overwhelming majority of the detainees will be housed in the U.S., and the Europeans non-cooperation will yet again be excused.

Jennifer Rubin writes on the confrontation between reality and Obamanomics, namely that the president’s economic strategy consists of piling up mountains of debt, printing money, acknowledging this is unsustainable, and hoping that the rising interest rates borrowers are demanding don’t impinge too heavily on the recovery.

Still, it’s nothing compared to Britain’s mess. A pity there’s no catchy name for Gordon Brown’s policies. But “failure” sounds about right. The markets noticed when Standard & Poor’s downgraded Britain’s credit assessment last week, from stable to negative and implied it might lose its AAA credit rating if it did not mend its ways. This is something I’ve been onto for months. Even the official figures on public debt are alarming. According to the Office of National Statistics:

Public sector net debt, expressed as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was 53.2 per cent at the end of April 2009, compared with 42.9 per cent at end of April 2008. Net debt was £754.0 billion at the end of April [2009].

And that reckons without the liabilities the state has assumed from the financial sector, which the ONS estimated in February would be between one and 1.5 trillion pounds: even the lower range of that estimate would more than double Britain’s debt. When you add in the growth rate of the money supply — between 17 and 19 percent on an annual basis every month this year — you can see why Standard & Poor’s was pessimistic.

Britain is almost uniquely poorly placed to weather the storm: it’s heavily reliant on trade and the financial sector, it has massively expanded the state sectors and their debt burden since 1999, and it has responded to the crisis by spending and printing money at a rate that is only marginally less excessive than that of the Obama Administration.

The curious thing is that none of this is terribly popular. A recent poll in Britain found that 52% of voters agreed with the statement “The government spends too much and therefore taxes us too much.” All economists agree that a simple analogy between an individual budget and a national one is wrong. But when the markets and the people agree that it’s time to cut back, the government and the parties could do worse than listen.

President Obama will be visiting two places in Germany on June 5: the concentration camp at Buchenwald and Dresden.  It is hard for me to convey how tactless, bad, and wrong I think this juxtaposition is.  In fact, I do not think that Obama should go to Dresden at all.  As I’ve noted in a paper just published by the Heritage Foundation, the Anglo-American bombing raid on Dresden on February 13, 1945, is the subject of a great deal of mythology, most of it concocted by the Nazis and spread by the Communists after the war.

But mythology matters, because it creates its own symbolism.  Whether he intends it or not, Obama’s appearance at Dresden will, to many Germans, have the feel of the Emperor’s pilgrimage of penance to Canossa.  There are better and worse ways to handle a visit to Dresden: the worst would be for Obama to start apologizing for Dresden - which, given its iconic status in myth, would be an apology for the air war as a whole.

The myth of Dresden is essentially unchallengeable in the minds of those who want, for reasons of contemporary politics, to accept it. It would have been better if Obama had recognized this.  He should
simply have said to the Germans that, while he felt it was necessary to go to Buchenwald, he did not feel the same compulsion about Dresden, and that he would prefer to meet Chancellor Merkel somewhere
else.

The fact that Obama accepted the Dresden location gives me the horrible feeling that he recognizes its symbolism and intends to do in Germany what he has already done in Strasbourg: apologize for the U.S. Except in this case, he will be apologizing for the Allied conduct of World War II.  I hope I am wrong about this.

Dresden’s symbolism is particularly potent now, because Germany is holding European elections on June 7, and national elections on September 27.  Whether he intends it or not, Obama is intervening in German politics by giving Merkel the kudos of being the German leader who brought an American president to Dresden.  That is a minor matter compared to the fundamental moral issues raised by the Holocaust and the Second World War, but it is unwise nonetheless.  From Egypt to Germany to France, this latest trip is all about symbolism, and, in Germany, Obama, so far, is striking a note that could not be more discordant with his final stop on the beaches of Normandy.

According to the British government, centers of Islamic studies in Britain are an important part of its counter-terrorism strategy. Launched in March, the “Contest 2″ strategy repeats its predecessor in setting forth a predictably alliterative “Pursue-Prevent-Protect-Prepare” approach to defeating violent extremism.

The strategy is, undeniably, an improvement over the original, in that it acknowledges the broader need to challenge the Islamist narrative, even when that narrative is not explicitly violent. That is where the academic centers come in: their role, claims the government, is to “challenge the ideology that supports violent extremism and support those who develop positive alternatives” by “address[ing] the gaps in Islamic studies, teaching, and research.”

Unfortunately, Iran is a step, if not two or three, ahead of this strategy. There are some obvious problems inherent to relying on universities, including the biases of the Middle Eastern Studies field and, as the Centre for Social Cohesion in Britain has revealed, the reliance of many British universities on Middle Eastern sources of funding.

But Iran is taking a more direct approach. The Tehran Times reports that the Iranian Ministry of Science, Research and Technology “feels the necessity to help establish and strengthen departments of Islamic studies. . . .  The departments will be set up to train and educate experts on Islam so as to assist in the introduction of Islam and its realities to the world in a proper academic setting.” I very much doubt that many British universities will look askance at this assistance, especially if it’s lubricated with Iranian funding. That the Iranian regime has survived, in part, by brutally oppressing student-led reform movements will not matter in the slightest.

On the other hand, Americans should not be looking down their noses at Britain. We’re targets too. The Ministry says that it is “currently studying proposals by numerous world academic centers and universities including several universities from Britain, the United States, and Germany.” The close trade ties between Germany and Iran are well-attested, so the mention of Germany comes as no surprise. But it would be very interesting to know which U.S. universities took the initiative to seek out the Iranians. It’s precisely that kind of accommodating attitude, here and in Britain, that leaves me skeptical
about the utility of relying on higher education to defeat Islamism.

Last week, Yale announced that it has received “a $50 million gift from John W. ‘67 and Susan G. Jackson to establish the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.”  This is a big deal in the field of education in international affairs: it signals that Yale, in its own words, is going to challenge the MA programs at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and attempt to “build . . . the premier program of its type.” As Mr. Jackson tells it, the purpose of the Institute is to “inspire students to pursue careers in diplomacy and public service.”

But what does “public service” mean? ‘Service’ appeared again in the message that announced the Jackson gift, in a reminder that Saturday was Yale’s “Global Day of Community Service.” As I’ve pointed out, sometimes “community service” is all about partisan politics. But academia’s confusion over “service” is often subtle. The reminder, for instance, stated that “Yale has a long, proud tradition of community service, dating back to its founding in 1701 as a ‘Collegiate School’ to prepare students ‘for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.’”

Yes, that’s right: “For God, For Country, and for Yale” is a community service motto. Serving in the clergy, or working for the government, is part of the same “tradition of community service” as picking up trash.  Now, I have no gripe with many of the “Community Service” activities on Yale’s site, but Yale’s broader argument is doubly fallacious: government is both more serious than “community service” and less all-encompassing than civil society, of which I suppose “community service” is a small part.

The two announcements reminded me of the lawsuit by the Robertson Family against Princeton University, over the control of the funds for the Woodrow Wilson School. That School was funded by the Family to encourage students to pursue a career in the diplomatic service. Over time, it came to emphasize careers on Wall Street, so the Robertsons sued to get their money back. There are many lessons to be drawn from this story, but James Piereson gets a central one right: it is dangerous to “[award] endowment gifts to . . . universities in order to achieve some well defined purpose,” because the gift always outlasts the purpose.

The Jacksons have done exactly what Piereson advises against. I wish them, and the International Relations program that will benefit from their generosity (and for which I worked for four years), all the good will in the world. But nothing Yale writes instills much confidence in me that it will, over the coming decades, treat their gift as the Jacksons state they want it to be treated, because they do not
appear to mean the same thing by “service” as Yale does. So this is not just an argument about terms.  It has implications for how the university educates its students and respects the intent of its donors.

The Economist makes its living as much off its covers as its reputation. This past week was no exception: “Europe’s New Pecking Order,” with a triumphant French model Sarkozy looking down at a glum German model Merkel and a nearly invisible “Anglo-Saxon” model Brown.

Well, Brown’s in a hole, all right.  And the Economist points out that the long-term cost of the statist French model is slow growth, high unemployment, and tremendous difficulties assimilating immigrants.  But before we also accept the down and out picture of the Anglo-Saxon model, maybe we should look at what Britain has actually done.

In the fifteen years after they won the Cold War, the U.S. and Britain have done something curious: amidst the hubbub about the end of history and the triumph of capitalism, they retreated from the model that helped them win.  On the other hand, the Continent, under the relentless pressure of failure, moved the other way.

In 1997, the average governmental share of GDP across the OECD was 38.8 percent, higher than Britain’s 38.4 percent.  Key European competitors, such as Germany, at 45.7 percent, had substantially larger states.  By 2008, Germany’s share had declined, to 43.4 percent, a 2.3 percent drop, while Britain’s had increased to 41.9 percent, a 3.5 percent rise.  Within a decade, Britain went from being a country with a limited state and a flexible economy to one that looked more like a Continental economy.

Anyone who thinks that Britain is a model of “Anglo-Saxon” deregulation hasn’t paid much attention for the past ten years.  As the Tax Payers’ Alliance points out, since 1998, “[The UK’s] use of ‘command and control regulation’ has actually increased, pulling it from 9th to 21st in the OECD rankings of its 30 members, alongside ex-communist countries such as Hungary and the Czech Republic.”

The problem was that regulators - including Gordon Brown’s creation, the Financial Services Authority - got it wrong.  But while the failed banks are being punished, the regulators who failed are getting more power.

We’ve seen all this before.  When the Great Depression struck, France seemed immune: as Le Figaro put it in 1931, “For our part let us rejoice in our timid yet prosperous economy as opposed to the presumptuousness and decadent economy of the Anglo-Saxon races.”  Not until the mid-1930s did the Depression hit home in France.  Since then, France has lost a world war, had four different regimes, and innumerable governments.  And yet the pattern of French resilience in the early stages of a world economic crisis remains.

To my mind, this suggests that what matters in this painful short term is not so much French policies, but the nature and behavior of the French — as savers.  It is not so surprising that France, which relies less on the financial sector than the U.S. or Britain, and less on exports than Germany or Japan, is doing better in the face of a financial crisis that has led to a world slump in exports.

Of course, active financial markets and exports are powerful engines of long-term growth.  And that is why, as the Economist concludes, the French model is not likely to stay on top for very long.

Francis Cianfrocca writes that the solution to the dilemma of how to design a real-world free market is to have a “system of strict financial regulation that makes it largely impossible for people to take risks with other people’s money.”

I respectfully disagree with a good bit of the rest of his post, which appears to me to run conservatism, classical liberalism, and libertarianism together into an undifferentiated “Right.”  Nothing of which I am aware in conservatism, or classical liberalism, requires or even recommends an entirely free market.  Such a thing would not be self-enforcing, and is a self-evident impossibility, for reasons Hobbes could explain.

To my mind, Adam Smith, from the classical liberal perspective, dealt first and best with the problem with Francis discusses: the endless need to balance personal and economic freedom with some measure of government control through the legal system, and I would add, responsibility for the common defense.

But the idea that people should not be allowed, by regulation, to take risks with other people’s money is not viable.  Banks exist to take your money.  They give it back to you, with interest, when you need it.  In order to do this, they need to make profit. They do this by making loans.  Loans are risky.  They are also beneficial, because they provide capital that others need to improve their productivity, and thereby the economy as a whole.

A world in which no one was allowed to take a risk with someone else’s money would be a world with no banks and no investments, in which everyone was very poor and kept their meager lot under their mattress (if such a thing had been invented).  I doubt that we will get very far by requiring everyone in the world to get by without taking any risks with anyone else’s assets.

One of the more amusing sub-plots of the credit card regulations bill working its way through Congress — pushed by both the White House and Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) — is the story its supporters tell about the relationship between credit cards and college students.

According to Sen. Dodd, college students are sinking ever deeper into credit card debt because of the irresponsible companies that issue the credit cards. Indeed, says Dodd, this is the single most important reason to pass his bill: “We must protect our young people — who are faced with an onslaught of credit card offers, often years before they turn 18, or as soon as they set foot onto a college campus.”

Of course, college students are adults, and credit cards are entirely legal: Dodd likely has a couple himself. So there’s a certain piquancy in the claim that students who are old enough to vote, enlist, drive, and decide on their own majors are not mature enough to handle a credit card. Undoubtedly, some college students do go heavily into debt on their cards — but then, so do quite a few people a good many years removed from college.

Curiously, Dodd places very little blame on the students, and most of it on the credit-card industry. He conveniently downplays the cozy relationship between that industry and higher education. As the New York Times reported late last year, hundreds of universities have long-term contracts with various
issuers that give them exclusive rights to market intensively on campus.

Bank of America, for instance, “has an $8.4 million, seven-year contract with Michigan State giving it access to students’ names and addresses and use of the university’s logo. The more students who take
the banks’ credit cards, the more money the university gets.” This is unseemly.

Universities sometimes try to distance themselves from these deals by suggesting that the contracts are between their alumni associations and the banks. Of course, this explanation ignores the on-campus marketing, for which the universities are entirely responsible. But in any case, as the Times points out, it’s the universities that provide their alumni groups with information on students, which the groups then resell to banks.

If universities aren’t expected to have any educational standards about what all students should be required to learn in order to graduate — which is, after all, their job — it’s hard to see why anyone would expect them to have any ethical standards either.A few legislators, like Rep. Maloney (D-NY), have noticed the incongruity involved in attacking the credit card industry for having contracts with higher education while saying nothing about universities. In fact, credit card solicitations in higher education would disappear almost completely if universities wanted to put an end to them.

Whether legislating that would be a good idea is not for me to say: as my colleague David C. John points out, regulating access to credit is tricky stuff. And as universities obviously believe that cutting deals with credit companies is good business, they will likely respond to any Congressional action by finding a new, unregulated way to stay in the business. The deals reveal the irresponsibility not of the credit card industry, but of higher education.

Savor, if you will, the following three stories on education in Britain.

First, yesterday, the former head of Ofsted, the Office for Standards in Education, Chris Woodhead, weighed in on the reasons why the middle-class do better in schools in Britain: they’re smarter.  Not all of them, of course, but, Woodhead says forthrightly, the fact is that some kids are “not very bright,” and that the brighter ones were “likely to be better if their parents are teachers, academics, lawyers.”  Smart parents, smart kids.

The Telegraph reports that he blames the poor for having bad genes, but they don’t provide a quote.  It’s too bad if he did say that, because, among the nonsense about the middle class being brighter, he talks a lot of sense about declining educational standards in Britain and the value of vocational training.  If anyone is qualified to know about both matters, it’s Woodhead, since he presided over the entire system for six years, three of them under Labour.

Second, there’s this somewhat more cheerful story: “Ethnic minority pupils race ahead of poor white classmates in schools.” Another former head of Ofsted, Sir Mike Tomlinson, points out that “We are seeing every ethnic group progress rapidly — Chinese, Bengali, Indian.”  But the performance of poor white boys is lamentable: they do worse than most, if not all, minority groups. The problem, the government and Sir Mike agree, is a culture of low expectations among the less well-off Anglo-Saxons, and a culture of achievement among the others.  So Woodhead’s on to something when he points to the value of having teachers as parents, but that something is cultural, not genetic.

And third, what has the government done about things?  Well, it has spent a great deal of money on education: from 1997 to 2007 — up 60 percent. As a proportion of the economy, education expenditures have risen from 4.8 percent to 5.5 percent of GDP. And test scores have gone up.  Unfortunately, as Woodhead points out, this is because the tests themselves have (entirely coincidentally, I’m sure), become a great deal easier.  Test scores certainly aren’t rising because there are more teachers around: since 1997, the number of teachers has increased by only 1.8 percent.  Makes you wonder where the rest of the money has gone.  I’m sure the bureaucrats could answer that one.

The other prong of the government’s approach has been ‘work-based’ or ‘skills-based’ training.  This too has been an unmitigated failure.  A study released yesterday by the University of London described the entire program as a “waste of time” that was “fixated by the number of people with qualifications,” at the expense of what they were actually learning.  The result has been the creation of “a many-headed bureaucratic hydra, which, in turn, devours part of the funding intended for the ‘real’ economy.”  The bureaucrats in ‘work-based’ training should meet their colleagues in the schools.

Like anything else, education can be as complicated as you want to make it.  But as the educational success of Britain’s ethnic minorities points out, it really isn’t all that hard: almost all children are quite smart enough to learn if they are kept at it by their parents, and not thwarted by undemanding schools.  All the government’s interventions have spent a great deal of money, but no amount of money will help if the parents are not there, or don’t care, and if the teachers refuse to teach.  And no one suffers more in that world of low standards than the poor.

Jennifer Rubin and John Steele Gordon referred to the figurative “mob outside the door” that is forming against John Yoo and Judge Jay Bybee.  Well, better a figurative mob than a real one.  I am told by academically-minded friends in various human-rights related NGOs that they have had to dissuade their organizations from launching on the ground, 1960s-style campaigns against any Bush Administration appointee who takes a job at any university.

As one of my friends said, there are lots of reasons why this is a bad idea, but the best one is that it would make the Left look intolerant.

Well, I suppose there’s some hope for sanity, though looking intolerant of conservatives on America’s campuses hasn’t been something the Left’s been worried about since, maybe, the mid-1960s.

Though the way things are going, it’s not a problem that will vex anyone much longer, since the last vestiges of ideological diversity will soon enough be driven away, covered in tar and feathers.

But the fact that some organizations have begged off from the holy war doesn’t mean that they all have.  It would be a real service if someone were to keep track of the protests.  Here’s a starting point: on April 20, five students conducted a sit-in in the “Studies in Grand Strategy” seminar at Yale, to protest the appointment of Ambassador John Negroponte to a position with International Security Studies’ Program in Grand Strategy.  (Full disclosure: I worked for ISS for a decade, and helped to teach the “Studies” seminar as recently as early April.)

Now, as protests go, this was a pretty tame one.  And the way the faculty handled it was, sadly, just about right: no one (certainly not the real students, or the faculty) wins if you make a stink out of unauthorized ‘visitors’ who show up to protest.  But it reminds me why we always had to be so careful at ISS with distinguished conservative visitors, and why we sometimes resorted to meeting off campus, or even out of town entirely: you just never know.  Actually, that’s not quite right: with some guests - Daniel Pipes’s visit in 2003 to Yale leaps to mind - you really do know.

But it sticks in my craw that the only way to deal with this sort of thing is to sit there and smile: my instincts run more towards asking the ‘visitors’ to leave and, if they don’t, calling the campus police to evict them from what is, after all, a private class meeting.

That’s unwise, I know, but it sure is tempting.  Of course, that sentiment probably explains why I don’t work in the academy any more.

In a pleasing reversal of roles, the Wall Street Journal asked several college presidents to write admissions essays. Russell K. Osgood, the president of my undergraduate college, Grinnell, was tasked to write on a “character in fiction, a historical figure, or a creative work… that has had an influence on you.”

Rather unexpectedly, President Osgood chose Edmund Burke. Now, it’s been eighteen years since I graduated from Grinnell, but I don’t recall that the name of Burke ever darkened my door when I was there. I did, certainly, have some very fine instructors: thanks, Profs. Smith, Moyer, Bateman, and Strauber.

But President Osgood’s essay did not give me much joy. He views Burke as a conservative, and that makes me twitch. In his time, Burke was a Whig. Nor, contra President Osgood, did Burke support the American Revolution. He opposed the British government’s policies that sparked the Revolution, but he urged the colonists not to separate from Britain, and called on the government to return to its policy of  ‘benign neglect.’

Burke also defended Britain’s rule in India, arguing that the real enemy was the spurious “geographical morality” that justified corrupt rule in India while claiming to oppose it in Britain. He was, in other words, a believer in the superiority – at their best – of British values and institutions. He was a conservative only in the sense that he supported the Glorious Revolution of 1689 and wanted to preserve its virtues from dangerous innovators like Lord North. For Burke, to go back was to go forward: to be conservative was to be liberal.

That is a measured view. And that is where President Osgood ends his essay: with the claim that he is a Burkean in practice as well as thought. Well, I am not qualified to speak fully to that. But when Grinnell had Angela Davis – the former two-time Communist candidate for vice president – as its commencement speaker in 2007, that did not strike me as Burkean, in thought or practice.

Commencement speakers are selected by a faculty/student committee. President Osgood had the power to overturn its selection of Davis – who is now (doesn’t this sum up the academy?) Professor Emeritus of the History of Consciousness at the University of California – but he declined to do so, even though I know he had no sympathy for it.

This from a president who claims that “it is incumbent on those who land in positions of power and influence, whether in 18th century Britain or today, to act on their moral intuitions in what they do.”

If President Osgood feels strongly about the value of Burkean thought, he should lead a class on the subject. I have my disagreements with his interpretation, but it would be better to have Burke read at Grinnell than ignored. And then there is the matter of practice. The next time the commencement committee selects a Stalinist, the president should act on his “moral intuitions,” reject their choice, and explain, publicly, why this is the right thing to do.

Robert Kaplan’s cover story in the latest issue of Foreign Policy — their “Big Think” issue — centers on “The Return of Geography.” The premise is that this is the era of realism, which brings with it the “revenge of geography in the most old-fashioned sense.” Indeed, Kaplan argues, realism is based on geography, the “bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic” of all realities. And that is a good thing, for the time has come for a return to the Victorian era when “mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.”

As a description of the Victorian era, this leaves a good deal to be desired: Marx, the issue’s cover boy and for many years a resident of the Victorian British Library, would not have agreed that geography was destiny. But once you get past Kaplan’s 2007-era fixation with how badly the Iraq War is going, and if you ignore his bizarre claims that, for instance, “local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity . . . are best explained by reference to geography,” the essay settles down. After passing by Fernand Braudel, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman in quick review, Kaplan lays the crown of modern realism on the head of Sir Halford Mackinder, the great British scholar of geopolitics and author of, among other works, an influential 1904 essay on “The Geographical Pivot of History.”

Mackinder divided the world — in 1904 — into three areas: the pivot (the landlocked portions of Russia), the inner circle (Britain, Europe, the Middle East, India, South East Asia, and Japan), and the outer circle (the Americas). The story of history was the pressure the pivot brought to bear on the inner circle, and the efforts of the inner circle — aided by the outer — to resist. For Mackinder, the crucial geopolitical development was the rise of railways, and industrialization more generally, which were reducing the historic advantage of sea-power, and, specifically, of Britain’s hegemony over the inner circle. The flash point, he believed, was the border of India, for it was there that Britain and Russia would meet.

Kaplan is trying to update Mackinder for the modern age, while retaining his emphasis on the controlling role of geography. As he puts it, today we need the “authors who thought the map determined nearly everything, leaving little room for human agency.” Understandably, Kaplan points to Eurasia — extending from Japan through the Middle East, and north into Russia — as the zone of destiny. It might be objected that including everything except Europe, the Americas, and Africa does not provide much focus, but, for Kaplan, that is the problem: “contra Mackinder, Eurasia has been reconfigured into an organic whole.”  The division between the pivot and the inner circle has been erased, and “A Eurasia of vast urban areas, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational media  . . .[with] constantly enraged crowds” constitutes the “shatter zone” of the future, with the familiar array of problems — from Syrian meddling in Lebanon to the rise of the Chinese navy — all fitting into it.

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Every year, Yale gives the seniors a survey. A former student has just sent me a copy of this year’s edition.  What does Yale survey its soon to be graduates about?

Well, a great many things.  But here’s one question:

4A. As an undergraduate, did you ever seriously question or rethink your beliefs or values in any of the following areas? You need not have changed your beliefs or values in order to answer ‘yes’ to having questioned them in a fundamental way.

Curious.  I, for one, did not realize that one of Yale’s official goals is to encourage students to question or rethink their beliefs and values in “a fundamental way.”  Undoubtedly, some students will do this in the course of four years, whether a university wills it or not, and that is just fine.

But the point of these sorts of questions - and there are plenty of them on the survey - is to ascertain whether or not Yale has made its students more multicultural, more accepting of others, and more aware of problems as defined by the Left.  When universities talk about “fundamental” change, it is fundamental only in one political direction.

Maybe we shouldn’t make too much of this.  The Yale campus is inundated with surveys, and the fate of a good many of them is to be chucked into a closet and left there.  But the culture of surveying in academia is not a healthy one.  It is, for instance, not a good thing that teaching evaluations are publicly available for students to peruse.  “Customer service” is not the right model for higher education, because the “customers” are the ones being educated.

The senior survey is, of course, another example of the political partiality that prevails in Yale’s administration, but it is also a study in what has happened in education to cause surveys to run rampant: the more the institution loses confidence in its authority to educate in the classroom, the more it finds other goals to justify its existence, be it political indoctrination or keeping the students happy by letting them pick and chose the easiest classes.

And it works.  As the Yale Daily News put it,

Chris Young ‘09 has become a lot more comfortable with his body since he has been at Yale. So comfortable, in fact, that one of his final plans for senior year is to run through Bass Library naked with fellow classmates the night before the organic chemistry final, throwing candy to the students busy studying. ‘Four years ago I wouldn’t have been caught dead thinking about that,’ he continued. ‘But now it’s just like, “Okay, cool.” It’s not even a big deal.’

Streaking on campus is a tradition.  But there is something a bit creepy about the fact that Mr. Young has so eagerly learned the lesson that Yale is signaling in its survey: the values you came in with are not a big deal.  Apart from the fact that these values may, sometimes, actually be a big deal, this seems too vapid a lesson to be worth $200,000 and four years to learn.

Max Boot has written about the “good and bad of [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates’s agenda.” Others are inclined to see more bad than good in it. But as Max points out, it is “basically an austerity budget.” Some of the changes are defensible, others less so, but when you add it all up, defense is the only part of the budget that Obama wants to cut. And the cuts are being concealed by claims that the core defense budget is increasing. That’s true, but as the spending previously covered in supplemental appropriations is being moved to the core defense budget, total defense spending will decrease.

If you think the U.S. forces are going down the wrong road, spare a thought for Britain’s. For 2009-10, the budget of the Ministry of Defense (MoD) will rise by 850 million pounds, an increase of about 2.2 percent. But, in an arrangement that parallels the U.S. elimination of supplemental appropriations, the MoD will in future be responsible for meeting most of the cost of urgent operational requirements in Afghanistan out of its own budget. That alone will devour most of the announced increase.

The result is that, as in the U.S., programs are going to be delayed or canceled. As in the U.S., some of these programs, like the presidential VH-71 helicopter, are no loss at all: the U.K. cannot stop buying Eurofighters, or participating in the endless European A400M program instead of buying U.S. C-130 aircraft, soon enough.

These programs illustrate a sad reality — one of many — about most “European” defense: it is about jobs, and nothing but jobs. It’s unrealistic to expect defense spending to be only about defense, but pace Rep. Murtha, it should at least be mostly about defense. When defense becomes nothing more than an expensive industrial program, that’s a sure sign that the cultural rot is running deep.

But other programs under threat — like missile defense in the U.S., another one of Gates’s targets — are not Euro-monstrosities. The British carrier program looks likely to be postponed again, and the successor to the Trident submarine fleet is being challenged by an alliance of unilateral disarmers, Labour tightwads, and pro-defense Tories who are under the illusion that dropping the missiles would mean more money for the Army.

But in 2010-11, bad turns to worse. Next year, the Treasury promises to cut the MoD’s budget by two billion pounds, from about 38.5 billion to 36.5 billion. That is a cut of over 5 percent. While Alastair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, aims to rely mostly on the smoke and mirrors of efficiency increases to bring the budget closer to balance — a plan the Economist describes as a “dishonest piece of pre-election politicking” — defense spending will actually be cut.

As in the U.S., these cuts will undoubtedly be described not as cuts, but as a “reshaping of our basic capability.” Right now, the U.S. and Britain are singing from the same defense songbook, and even giving each other lessons. The pity is that, by and large, they’re teaching, and learning, the wrong lessons.