Political Booknotes
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy. Jeffrey E. Garten. Times, $ZZ.During the war against Iraq, George Bush built a consortium...
...The essence of American politics may be compromise, but when you reduce it all to deal-making, it can come off looking sordid...
...On the one hand, Glynn discusses what we might call “the urge to disarm,” which he attributes to war-weariness in the aftermath of World War I1 and Korea...
...The fractious ministries and backroom Mr...
...Yet defending these three international public zones against parochial pandering and opportunistic free-riding requires that, as Garten puts it, “at least one of the Big Three, and probably two, will have to take a broad and long-term view of their interests...
...Smitten with the magnificence of his own backroom maneuvers on Capitol Hill, Andrews’ boasts were often received by voters with puzzlement...
...As for Japan, it’s a “follower,” partly because its political system is virtually incapable of setting big policy directions...
...Congressional Quarterly, $29.95 hardback, $19.95 paper...
...Who will be the technological leader in a nip-and-tuck race...
...and each has had its-shall we be delicate?problems with the others...
...It’s like speaking to the American public in Old Norse...
...He sketches out and then counterposes what he regards as the two overarching tendencies in postwar American foreign policy...
...Unlike so many of his ideological brethren who have felt the need to unburden themselves on these contentious, if now slightly pa&, subjects, Glynn has taken the time and energy to develop an argument that is internally consistent and grounded in a close and, for the most part, accurate reading of history...
...For example, in his deft parallel treatment of German and Japanese development since the 1850s, it is America, not Japan, that emerges as the special case...
...Left to Glynn, however, McNamara’s interest in promoting strategic stability comes perilously close to treason...
...He predicts tensions over military burdensharing, over the division of environmental responsibility, and especially over economic policies and practices...
...Others-according to Fenno, Mark Andrews was one of them-look upon the job of senator as a slightly sublimated version of House member...
...The great political scientist Harold Laswell once observed that “political science without biography is a form of taxidermy...
...armed forces, which numbered 12 million in September 1945, declined to a postwar low in the late forties of approximately 1.6 million, not 660,000...
...Indeed, Bush’s one major accomplishment as president has been to show what the great democracies can do when they choose to act in concert...
...The Gulf war or the GATT...
...each is a regional fulcrum...
...administrations between 1945 and 1980 succumbed to some degree to the false promise of arms control and were repeatedly victimized by the chimera of negotiations with the “evil empire...
...Dispensing with the usual social science impedimenta, Fenno gets his subjects to open up, and their reflections make compelling reading...
...Like House alumni A1 Gore and Phil Griimm, they understand immediately the potential for agendasetting and policy leadership the Senate offers...
...Garten can handle the economics, security issues, and politics of all three countries...
...Glynn’s book is still worth reading -despite several annoying factual errors: Stalin, not Lenin, was responsible for the concept of “socialism in one country...
...He reserves special praise for the late Senator Henry Jackson of Washington state, who, it seems, singlehandedly saved the nation by outmaneuvering those well-known liberalpacifist...
...Thus, we could have had the best of both worlds: strategic defenses and fewer nuclear missiles...
...He and the Europeans did it again following the coup in Moscow, quite possibly saving democracy for the Soviet people...
...Furthermore, each side would have engaged in an accelerated competition to procure additional offensive missiles in order to ensure each side’s “assured destruction” capabilitythe bedrock concept of nuclear deterrence...
...Then there is the German-French plan for a European defense force, which drew a sharp public rebuke from Bush...
...They still don’t...
...While not bereft of merit, Glynn’s analysis falls short on several counts...
...He says that poverty is at 20 percent rather than the actual 13.5 percent, and that U.S...
...and Russian offensive weapons are reduced by something on the order of 90 percent, a process almost certain to require additional negotiations...
...The Big Three share a compelling interest in secure borders and open trade...
...The GATT is one such controversy...
...The more likely outcome would have been an enormously expensive race to develop unwieldy defensive systems that would have afforded neither the American nor the Soviet people any meaningful degree of protection against a major nuclear attack...
...But their eagerness to keep the boat from rocking leads them to freeze when a controversial decision is needed-witness Japan’s paralysis during both the Gulf war and the GATT...
...Times, $ZZ.During the war against Iraq, George Bush built a consortium of like-minded democracies and held it together, with impressive results...
...security, given that Kremlin leaders might have been tempted to launch their none-too-reliable nuclear weapons toward the United States in the event of a severe superpower crisis rather than lose them as a result of a U.S...
...Differences may breed conflict, as American universalism and missionary zeal collide with the realities of quite different, yet very successful, German and Japanese capitalism...
...Other “liberal-pacifists,” includ.ing Paul Wamke, the former arms control negotiator, and Cyrus Vance, Jimmy Carter’s first secretary of state, fare no better...
...Liberal politicians do at times place the pursuit of peace ahead of the task of military preparedness, often with disastrous consequences...
...society in the wake of Vietnam should be pinned on the excesses of “liberal-pacifism,” including the attempts to negotiate binding arms control agreements with the Soviets...
...Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and instilling a little backbone into the gelatinous Jimmy Carter during his first few months in office...
...first strike...
...Alas, they never did...
...A senator whose legislative efforts are limited to introducing amendments to fund water diversion projects will end up in trouble...
...On the other hand, there is “the urge to resist’’-by force of arms if necessary-the dangerous and imperial designs of the Soviet Union and its communist allies...
...Fenno makes the case that, while in the Senate, Andrews continued to act not only like a House member but, even more pointedly, like a minority member of the House Appropriations Committee...
...Patrick Glynn...
...Each of the Big Three is a major economic power (together they account for almost half of the world’s economic output...
...What Fenno implies is that Andrews could not get out of the habit of cutting grubby little deals, offering pettifogging amendments, and serving as a delivery boy for shipments of loaves and fishes to constituents...
...There would have been nothing wrong with this if Andrews had gone beyond legislative charcuterie, but nothing he did was part of anything bigger or nobler...
...Since 1968, 28 senators have campaigned for the presidency, and only one-George McGovem in 1972 -even came away with a nomination...
...Indeed, the defeat of Andrews was a kind of harbinger of what lay in store for sitting congressmen...
...What Fenno tells us, based on his first-hand observation of Andrews, is that a Senate career built merely on porkbarreling may lead constituents to take pork for granted or, even worse, to ask that most devastating of all political questions: What have you done for me lately...
...And it was conservatives who warned that without immediate remedial action the United States would find itself the victim of Soviet nuclear blackmail, if not a nuclear first strike...
...This urge, rooted in a misguided belief that we can attain universal peace, results from mushy-headed thinking by well-meaning but naive political leaders...
...In trade, however, there is no Saddam Hussein to scare off parochialism...
...When he tries, as in his discussion of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, the effort proves unconvincing...
...In a particularly revealing passage, Fenno describes the convention of the North Dakota Nurses Association, at which Andrews appeared along with his anticipated 1986 rival, Rep...
...Garten the pundit and analyst frets over drift, tension, and challenge...
...In Glynn’s hands, for example, Robert McNamara comes across as a willful, manipulative, dishonest, and confused techno-geek, a computerdriven monster all but impervious to reason and military logic...
...The questions are rather: How will we apportion environmental responsibility...
...Many readers, in the end, may emerge from Garten’s book a good deal less pessimistic than its author...
...While they fought together in the Gulf, the same allies were also fighting in Geneva-except there, at the negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), they were fighting each other...
...When Incumbency Fails, then, is political science without stuffed animals...
...Glynn is also guilty of glorifying the contributions of politically conservative office holders, bureaucrats, and analysts...
...Senate in 1980 and lost it to Democrat Kent Conrad in 1986...
...Here, as with many who see America in decline, he gets carried away...
...Certainly, one would want to think twice, for example, before placing General Curtis LeMay (an unreconstructed hawk and commander of the Strategic Air Command during the fifties and early sixties) in the same ideological camp as Paul Nitze (a primary architect of Truman’s defense policy and a SALT negotiator under Nixon...
...presidents from Truman to Carter -came to devote enormous effort to the pursuit of agreements aimed at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and how poor the results have been...
...It was conservatives who depicted America as the declining superpower, exhausted and morally adrift...
...but Garten the synthesist leaves us feeling, above all, how blessed we are today to have such manageable problems...
...The New World Order will, in fact, be a world without order...
...In place of East-West tensions,” he says, “we will see competition among the various kinds of capitalism...
...Yes, yes-but...
...I was the principal sponsor of that...
...There is a lesson in all this for incumbents ill-starred enough to have to run in 1992...
...America, Garten argues, is tangled in its own economic and social problems...
...The more appropriate response, it seems, would have been to augment U.S...
...Roughly one third of the Senate at any given time consists of former members of the House...
...So which world will it be...
...He is correct when he writes that political leaders, not arms races, precipitate wars...
...These latter sources of tension are the less inflammatory ones...
...No such dichotomy exists, nor has it ever...
...And d l this time I thought it was an overdue and not entirely unwelcome :retreat from globalism on America’s part, along with a severe case of Soviet hubris, that caused these changw in world politics in the seventies...
...According to Glynn, all U.S...
...Some pols desire the enormous political opportunity the Senate offers-the chance to occupy one of 100 bully pulpits from which to stake out position...
...Now that America’s postwar moment of unchallenged economic dominance is over, who will ride herd over parochialism...
...Garten stresses Japan’s recurrent political scandals, but those are symptoms of a deeper problem...
...Few people can produce political analyses that both sparkle with the brilliance of first-class scholarly investigation and resonate with the solid thunk of the real world the way Fenno can...
...and Soviet nuclear missiles as a net plus for U.S...
...And arms control negotiations do tend to develop a logic and a momentum of their own, even when their contribution to national security is, to be charitable, less than compelling...
...Reagan also emerges as a political figure of almost heroic proportionsbrave, smart, and resolutemuch closer to the archetype of the philosopher-king than I had realized prior to reading this book...
...Such efforts, he insists, intensified the American people’s nascent sense of defeatism and moral indifference, thereby ena.bling Leonid Brezhnev and company to run up an allegedly devastating string of political and military victories at the expense of the West...
...Or even: Whose homeland is this...
...productivity is declining, which it most certainly is not...
...Jonathan Rauch When Incumbency Fails: The Senate Career of Mark Andrews...
...He wins praise from other political scientists for his scrupulous methods and attention to theoretically important questions but his books also receive accolades from practitioners for their descriptions of politics and politicians as more than abstractions or numerical aggregates...
...First, because where common interests are strong, countries with quite different systems can and do work together...
...However flawed the final product-and flawed it iswe are indebted to Patrick Glynn for writing a book about the arms races and arms control that is serious, lively, and literate...
...The preoccupation with arms control, Glynn alleges, owes much to the first of these schools, which is in keeping with what he terms the longdominant “liberal-pacifist” tradition in Western politics, a tradition that initially placed the pursuit of peace and later the pursuit of “strategic stability” before the more mundane but essential search for national security...
...Basic, $30...
...As valuable as these and other findings are to the literature on security, they do not compensate for Glynn’s larger analytical failure-his inability to demonstrate that it is the practice of arms control, rather than the development and acquisition of ever more weapons of mass destruction, that poses the greater and more immediate threat to national and international security...
...I served on this or that conference committee...
...Only the restoration of conservative values in the Reagan era enabled the country to break with the failed policies of the past, rekindle American political, economic, and military prowess, and chart a fundamentally new course in foreign and defense policy...
...Collisions and chaos are inevitable unless someone takes control...
...security would have been enhanced by eschewing arms control...
...Ross K. Baker Closing Pandora’s Box: Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War...
...it is above all the broadness of A Cold Peace that makes the book so useful...
...and Western military capabilities at every turn and to face down the Soviets at every opportunity...
...It is ironic that the very feature that disturbs Glynn most about democraciestheir tendency to underrate their own power and thereby invite the aggression .they seek to deter-was routinely, and quite effectively, exploited in America by the conservatives he sets out to lionize...
...The interpretations that Fenno draws so skillfully from Andrews’ defeat go well beyond the U.S...
...He says to the senators, Your reputation as an effective deal-maker in Washington and the admiration of your colleagues and lobbyists might cause Helen Dewar to write glowingly of you in The Washington Post, but voters at home will probably want more of you...
...Another occurred in 1987, when a public spat over monetary policy (Treasury Secretary James Baker announced that he would let the dollar sink rather than follow the Germans into tighter money) helped precipitate the stock market crash...
...It was US...
...The divisive question today isn’t: Can and should democracy survive...
...He apparently forgot that he was not in Washington regaling lobbyists on the subject of some procedural triumph in which he had snookered an adversary...
...They may even expect you to practice parliamentary legerdemain on their behalf...
...Fenno has always been something of a wonder in political science circles...
...conservatives, not liberals, who sought to portray the Soviet Union in the seventies as a military colossus...
...While Burdick responded with blunt directness to questions and Dorgan drew broader implications from the nurses’ concerns, Andrews spoke in the arcane Capitol Hill language of amendments, unanimous consent agreements, and floor action...
...administrations, save Reagan’s...
...The fact that one of the country’s leading academic political scientists has produced such a work gives hope that the discipline is not simply a museum of dusty correlation coefficients tended by a staff of credentialed curators...
...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES A Cold Peace: America, Japan, Germany, and the Struggle for Supremacy...
...Bigs of Japan’s Tammany Hall-style politics are good at routine management and taking care of private-sector friends...
...If current patterns prevail, the nineties could well be notable for its [sic] lack of leadership...
...Or: Can we avoid blowing each other to bits...
...While Americans hyperventilate about Japan, our more substantive dust-ups have been with Bonn...
...Right...
...Having written speeches for a few senators who were aiming for a presidential nomination, I can attest that the toughest task is to stop them from lapsing into the characteristic, and usually fatal, legislative braggadocio: I co-sponsored this...
...By implication at least, he suggests that the full range of ills that beset US...
...The French and Germans deadlocked the talks by stubbornly defending their outrageously cynical farm-subsidy system...
...Though the reasons for this sorry record are many, at least one explanation is that senators are, as Stephen Hess has called them, the ultimate insiders...
...Glynn, an arms control official during the Reagan years, wants us to understand the process by which Western political leaders-particularly U.S...
...The Americans have sulked petulantly toward unilateralism and a regional trade bloc...
...According to Glynn, without the ABM treaty the United States would have been free to construct nationwide defenses against ballistic-missile attack...
...One need not agree with more than a fraction of Glynn’s pronouncements and conclusions to recognize that Closing Pandorak Box is the product of an able and subtle mind...
...A second problem arises from Glynn’s tendency to treat as simpletons those who embraced arms control as a device to limit the US.-Soviet competition in nuclear weapons and induce a degree of stability in the relationship...
...Economic and technological rivalries, unlike the enmity of the past, pay dividends as they drive countries and companies to achieve-so long as no one panics...
...For the half dozen or so House members who successfully make the leap to the Senate each election year, When Incumbency Fails is required reading...
...they assume it will be done...
...on issues of national concern...
...Khrushchev, not Lenin, was the architect of the policy of “peaceful coexistence...
...The Japanese have dived under the furniture, hoping that they, the world’s second largest economic power, can somehow escape notice...
...Andrews presented himself to the voters of North Dakota as an insider at the very moment that the tide of anti-insiderism was beginning to rise...
...Perhaps th: most mystifying feature of Glynn’s analysis is his conviction that many of the most difficult problems that confronted the United States during the ;second half of the Cold War could and should be attributed to the liberal orientation of successive U.S...
...Everywhere, Garten sees divergence and potential conflict...
...Glynn’s most egregious shortcoming, however, is his failure to establish precisely how U.S...
...And they will not, at least not until the existing stockpiles of U.S...
...Garten makes his case with exceptional clarity and balance, born of a simplifying assumption that, unlike so many other simplifying assumptions, does more good than harm: Relations between America, Germany, and Japan pose the “critical question determining the shape of the world as we head for a new century...
...Second, because the sources of Big Three tension that Garten describes are about as benign as sources of international tension can be...
...Richard F. Fenno Jr...
...But Conrad gets little of Fenno’s attention, because what really concerns him is how Andrews adjusted-or, more accurately, failed to adjust-to the job of U.S...
...officials-even the malevolent McNamara-would have seized on them in a flash...
...Garten is always detailed, never provincial...
...This, in Fenno’s view, fell short of what North Dakota voters wanted in a senator...
...And although Glynn criticizes Reagan for his backsliding on arms control-witness the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty-at least the Gipper’s willingness to hang tough with the Soviets compelled Moscow to agree to Washington’s terms for once...
...Glynn argues that the former defense secretary purposely set out to weaken the United States in the mid-sixties by actively encouraging Soviet leaders to acquire secure, second-strike nuclear forces...
...Byron Dorgan, and Senate colleague Quentin Burdick...
...True, his New World Order was held together by phone calls and presidential charm rather than treaties and institutions, but for a while it sure looked promising...
...He gloried in his role as parliamentary magician, errand boy, and Washington insider...
...Movement from the House to the Senate has been the noImal progression for the ambitious legislator in recent decades...
...Had nationwide strategic defenses ever held any real promise as a cost-effective alternative to nuclear deterrence, U.S...
...A number of Glynn’s observations are dead-on...
...When Incumbency Fails is an engrossing political biography of North Dakota Republican Mark Andrews, an eight-term House member who won a seat in the US...
...Avoiding a ‘Cold Peace,’ ” he writes, “will depend on whether the-Big Three can overcome the forces that will be pushing them in separate directions...
...The latter, says Jeffrey E. Garten, an investment banker and former State Department official, in his bracing new book...
...They also have enormous constructive potential...
...Senate, and help to explain the lamentable record of sitting senators in securing either presidential nominations or the presidency itself...
...The first is his determination that the postwar security community is divided into two groups-the disarmers and the resisters-and that all actors, from presidents to scholars, necessarily fall into one camp or the other...
...Each country benefits from free trade, secure borders, and some modicum of environmental harmonization...
...Without question, Fenno’s success as a congressional observer-a talent very much on display in When Incumbency Fails-owes more to anthropology than to contemporary political science...
...By any objective economic standard, the GATT’s efforts to liberalize trade worldwide were, and are, far more important than rescuing Kuwait...
...Coit D. Blacker...
...But never mind-there’s still plenty to worry about...
...Will we be able to control our tempers as our varying styles of capitalism instruct each other...
...senator...
...and total U.S...
...Out of those divergent national historiesJapan and Germany on the path of collectivist developmentalism, America on the path of individualist entrepreneurship-comes the book’s central worry...
...That seat, by the way, is now open due to Conrad’s decision to keep his promise to voters to retire after one term if the deficit was still raging out of control...
...Others might regard McNamara’s commitment to decreasing the vulnerability of U.S...
...Multipolar consortium or multipolar disarray...
...What distinguishes this work (and everything Fenno has written since his 1978 tour de force, Homestyle) is sensitivity to the interaction between what a member of Congress does in Washington and what he does back in his district or state...
...It tells the person who migrates from the south side of the Capitol to the north that voters essentially discount constituent casework and pork barreling...
...Had we done so, he insists, the Soviets would very likely have done the same, thus depriving them of the resources needed to continue their build-up of longrange offensive forces...
Vol. 24 • July 1992 • No. 7
