In a piece on ForeignPolicy.com, Terra Lawson-Remer and I distill the lessons gleaned from these case studies, with an eye to providing useful insights for those countries working their way through transitions today. Here, we provide some excerpts from the article for each lesson learned:

1. Don’t miss the opportunity presented by a good economic crisis.

Many experts once believed that economic growth led inevitably to democracy. Although most rich countries in the world today are relatively democratic, some–such as China and Saudi Arabia–have enjoyed growing economic prosperity without a commensurate increase in political freedoms. Indeed, studies show that it’s not economic growth but rather economic crisis that triggers regime change. Over the past three decades, many democratic transitions have been precipitated by serious economic shocks that ruptured the authoritarian bargain…The bottom line here is the need to recognize how economic crisis can upend the status quo and open the door for fundamental change. In anticipation of that moment, policymakers should pursue strategies to nurture a middle class. Once upheaval hits and democracy begins to take root, a resilient middle class can be the necessary safeguard against backsliding to autocracy.

2. On elections, “Fake it till you make it.”

A clear lesson from our case studies is that elections–even sham elections–lead to greater success in the transition to substantive democracy. International observers often denounce flawed elections as meaningless attempts to dress authoritarian rule in the trappings of democracy, but elections can also sow the seeds of public expectations that over time blossom into democratic demands that cannot be ignored.

3. Be wary of armed rebellions, but back nonviolent, mass mobilizations.

Armed rebellions often fail to lead to democratization, even when regimes are overthrown. History is littered with failed uprisings, coups d’états and violent revolutions that succeeded in nothing more than replacing one form of dictatorship with another. Nonviolent, mass mobilizations, on the other hand, have a stronger track record of laying the groundwork for democratic change. Proponents of nonviolence, from Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King, have long noted that sustained peaceful protests lead to a more engaged citizenry and a better-organized civil society–critical for staying the course during the inevitable challenges of democratic transitions.

4. Encourage Inclusive Growth.

The promise of political freedom raises peoples’ expectations for economic and social opportunities. The success of emerging democracies depends fundamentally on whether democratization can also materially improve people’s lives. When citizens do see improvements in social inclusion and living standards, they reward the politicians who provide them, creating a powerful feedback loop that helps consolidate democracy. On the other hand, if unemployment skyrockets, or if the rich just seem to get richer while nothing changes for the masses, a return to autocracy can begin to look pretty good.

5. Double Down on Rule of Law.

Should I believe in this new government, or not? That is the question confronting someone in a new and often shaky democracy. To answer that question, a new democracy needs to show its citizens that it can protect their core rights and establish fair economic and political rules. It’s not rocket science: If people believe that legal systems and public institutions work for them, rather than against them, it gives them a stake in the system and a greater willingness to tolerate the inevitable turbulence of a transition. An effective, transparent, and predictable legal system also prevents well-connected insiders from amassing wealth and public assets through shady backroom deals.

6. Spread Out the Power.

Spreading power out to local regions has strong benefits. It helps dilute the dangerous concentration of central authority often inherited from authoritarian regimes; it also increases accountability by bringing administration closer to the people…Decentralization of power of course is not a panacea. It requires effective local governance structures, and it can be risky in situations where centrifugal forces threaten the stability of the state. But it can also blunt violent separatist movements. Transitioning countries should therefore decentralize thoughtfully, in ways that help deepen and sustain democratization.

7. Lean on Good Neighbors and Compensate for Bad Ones.

Good neighbors can help fragile democracies succeed through tough times by providing critical economic and technical assistance and exerting constructive political pressure. Conversely, bad neighbors can undermine transitions by fostering power-grabbing and corruption–or simply by failing to provide support for democratic consolidation. Neighborhoods are not merely geographic, although shared borders are an important element of interdependence between countries. Neighborhoods are also economic communities, such as the European Union; political-military alliances, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and cultural groups based on a common heritage. Neighbors exert a powerful force on the trajectory of countries with which they share interests and destinies.

On the Pathways to Freedom book page, you can view previews of each chapter, which contain relevant graphs, timelines, and suggestions for further reading for each country.

The report shows the close connection between West African piracy and the ongoing plague of oil theft, called “bunkering,” in the Niger Delta and the Gulf of Guinea. In many cases, the pirates are veterans of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) insurgency that demanded a greater proportion of Nigeria’s oil be settled on those areas that produce it. That insurgency was defanged by an amnesty that involved payoffs to militant leaders and some training for the movement’s foot soldiers. The amnesty—including its payments—is scheduled to end in 2015. Meanwhile, bunkering appears to have greatly increased—and piracy seems to be an important aspect of it. And should the MEND insurgency reignite on a large scale, piracy is likely to escalate in kind.

A chilling side note of Human Cost is its finding that piracy in the Gulf of Guinea is more violent than off the Somali coast. The report suggests that this is in part because of the greater availability of relatively sophisticated weapons and a culture of their use dating from the insurgency.

Human Cost observes that Gulf of Guinea piracy is under-reported. However, should piracy continue at this level, presumably maritime insurance rates will go up and there may be calls for greater international efforts to address the scourge. Unlike off the Somali coast, very few of the piracy victims have been from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The largest numbers of victims have been Filipino, Indian, Russian, Nigerian, and Chinese.

It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation.

Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome.

While the overall architect of American policy is of course the President, this position by Dempsey is significant–significant because it is nonsensical. If our Secretary of Defense was at this meeting, or our National Security Advisor, this statement should have embarrassed and angered them.

Why?

Because the “700 sortie” argument is an old Pentagon line, updated for this particular argument about Syria, that can be translated simply as “I don’t want to.” As Goldberg noted, it is impossible to believe that Israel can do three air strikes in Syria (apparently stand-off strikes from beyond Syria’s borders) but the U.S. Air Force cannot do one–until it makes 700 sorties to take down Syrian air defenses. Israel lacks our stealth bombers; Israel does not have the mix of ground to ground or air to ground missiles that we do; Israel lacks the naval strength we have in the Sixth Fleet. For our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to argue that it is simply too dangerous for us to do anything, anything at all, strikes me as shocking.

This is not a policy argument, and one might conclude that despite our great capabilities we should not do what Kerry is said to have recommended (though I agree with Kerry). But that’s not what Dempsey did; he added to his policy argument a ridiculous military argument that should have been shot down with alacrity. In a better administration, the SecDef would have told him to knock off the policy arguments disguised as military advice, or the National Security Advisor would. Meanwhile those officials, or the President, ought to be seeking less biased and more realistic military advice–an action that would itself teach the current military leadership not to repeat the “700 sorties” line of argument.

In 2007, when President Bush considered whether to bomb the North-Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria, he asked CJCS Pace about the military issues. Pace told him we could do it, period. The President decided not to, for other policy reasons–and those policy arguments were advanced by the Secretaries of State and Defense, not the uniformed military. That’s the way the system ought to work. But that’s not the way it appears to be working now.

The summit marked the formal launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP).  Failure to do so would have been disasterous, and last minute objections from the French government over the cultural exception threatened to ruin the party.  Negotiations now begin in early July with an ambitious timeline of finishing within 18 months, on a “single tank of gas”.  With tariffs already low within the region, negotiations will focus on harmonizing rules and regulation across a range of sensitive sectors.  I remain skeptical that a big deal can be reached, but if I’m wrong the benefits could be substantial.

Taxes were the other major economic item on the agenda.  It’s easy to be against tax avoidance and tax evasion, harder to agree on what to do about it.  Aside from the enormous complexity of the issue, there is the basic question of national interest–at a time of significant fiscal pressure, avoiding tax competition will remain a challenge.  Nonetheless, recent disclosures of aggressive tax strategies by multinationals has turned up the heat.  In response, The G8 issued the Lough Erne Declaration . It calls for automatic sharing of tax information, harmonization of rules to reduce tax avoidance strategies by multinationals, and an expansion of a U.S. Dodd-Frank rule that extractive companies report payments made to all countries (scheduled to go into effect next year if it survives court challenges).  In sum, this is a name and shame strategy, on the assumption that publicity is the best disinfectant.

It looks like the next step on taxes will be national registries that require shell companies to disclose ownership (the U.K. idea of a central register of beneficial ownership looks out of reach for now).  In addition, the ambition remains for agreement on automatic information exchange by the time of the G20 summit in Russia in September.  I suspect that in the next few years we will see increased pressure on tax havens and, consequently, on the multinational companies that use them.  Time will tell if this was the turning of the tide.

The upshot of the Maputo summit is that Mugabe agreed to ask the constitutional court to allow a delay in the elections for about two weeks. Mugabe also apparently agreed to regularize through parliament some amendments to the electoral act that he had already implemented using presidential powers. In addition, the Zimbabwean security forces are to restate their commitment to the rule of law. SADC further urged the Zimbabwean parties in parliament to agree on legislation concerning a number of proposed reforms that remain outstanding.

Mugabe also agreed to a greater role for SADC than he had wanted. A SADC facilitation team will sit in with the Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC); this is a Zimbabwean multiparty body established in 2009 to ensure that the Zimbabwean parties adhere to the letter and spirit of the Global Political Agreement that SADC negotiated. Mugabe, however, had wanted the SADC facilitation team to merely receive JOMIC reports. Mugabe also apparently confirmed that SADC could deploy election observers. Up to now, Mugabe had rejected foreign election observers—although it was unclear whether that included SADC’s. Apparently, the ban still holds with respect to European or American observation teams.

The Zimbabwean media is talking about how Mugabe was “humiliated” at Maputo. Still, he seems to have gotten most of what he wanted. SADC has agreed to elections before the passage and implementation of reforms that might have resulted in free and fair elections. A two-week delay seems to be little more than symbolic, and few doubt that the court will agree to Mugabe’s request for the delay. SADC’s success in having its observers allowed into Zimbabwe and its facilitators in the JOMIC, however, will allow SADC a better view of what is actually happening in Zimbabwe than otherwise would have been the case.

In the aftermath of the Maputo summit, there continue to be few positive scenarios and many negative ones with respect to Zimbabwe’s elections. Absent a comprehensive reform package, pre-electoral and electoral processes remain vulnerable to rigging, violence, and intimidation. The struggle within the dominant ZANU/PF ruling party over the succession to the eighty-nine-year-old Mugabe continues to be a wild card. And the opposition parties may boycott the elections—or a runoff—as they did in 2008 in the face of violence and intimidation.

Here’s the opening:

Zombies, the dictionary tells us, are “animated corpses revived by mystical means, such as magic or witchcraft”. This is how their many enemies have often regarded neoconservative foreign policy ideas and those who propagate them. Foreign Policy magazine once happily concluded that neoconservative ideas “lie buried in the sands of Iraq”, but back they came, dominating the 2012 Republican Party presidential campaign and dominating the party still. Can this be explained — except by black magic?

What do neocons believe in? I suggest that it’s an amalgam, of:

patriotism, American exceptionalism, a belief in the goodness of America and in the benefits of American power and of its use, and a conviction that democracy is the best system of government and should be spread whenever that is practical. It should not be shocking that such views win wide popularity in the United States, though perhaps that last idea — spreading democracy — is the most controversial. The continuing relevance, indeed power, of these ideas is clear, and it is equally clear that they are not held only by a small coterie of intellectuals in Washington.

The full article can be read here.

As Churchill wrote the speech—he did not rely on others to craft his words—the situation was dire. Indeed, over the previous six weeks Churchill had given two major speeches preparing Britons for what was to come, first telling them he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and then urging them to “never surrender.” Now the Germans had raised the swastika over Paris. It was just a matter of time—four days in fact—before the French government would formally surrender. Britain was left alone to face Hitler’s Germany.

When Churchill began speaking on the floor of the House of Commons, his fellow parliamentarians knew that June 18^th marked a significant date in British history—the 125^th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, when British troops under the Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon. Churchill’s task was to rally their descendants to stop another authoritarian from dominating the European continent, this time against even longer odds.

Churchill spoke for thirty-six minutes. His final paragraph summarized what Britain and the world faced:

The Battle of France is over: the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: This was their finest hour.

That night at 9:00 p.m., Churchill repeated his speech almost word for word, this time on BBC radio. An estimated 60 percent of the British people listened to the broadcast. Churchill’s delivery left a lot to be desired. He spoke the entire time with a cigar in his mouth, leaving some of his listeners to conclude he was drunk.

However imperfect Churchill’s delivery may have been, the emotional power of his words is unquestioned. Three weeks later, on July 10, 1940, the German Luftwaffe began bombing Britain. What Churchill had named the Battle of Britain had begun. The tribulations of that summer would show Britons at their finest hour, in no small part because Churchill gave one of his finest speeches at his country’s moment of greatest need.

With countries as opaque as Laos and North Korea, it can be hard to draw conclusions about any event, but the Post and other news outlets offer several speculations. One, that North Korea is pushing Southeast Asian nations harder to crack down on refugees, possibly providing financial incentives to do so. Or, the harsh and xenophobic government of Laos may have become more skittish about giving rights to anyone, including fleeing North Koreans, after facing a torrent of international criticism for the disappearance, last winter, of Laos’ best-known activist, who vanished after being seen at a police station in Vientiane.

What is interesting is that few of the news stories talk about the role of China, and whether China may have influenced the behavior of Laos– and potentially of other Southeast Asian nations with North Korean refugees in the future. Over the past decade,China has replaced Vietnam as the most important foreign actor in Laos: China is on track to becoming the largest investor in the country, pouring billions into Laos’ hydroelectric plants and roads and rails and other physical infrastructure, and Beijing has upgraded its defense ties with Laos significantly since the late 1990s. In the past five years, as China has become more assertive in its regional relations, and countries like Laos and Cambodia more dependent on Chinese investment and aid, Beijing has become more aggressive about enlisting Southeast Asian nations’ assistance in returning refugees from China itself, such as fleeing Uighurs. Cambodia, for example, in 2009 returned a group of fleeing Uighurs to China; shortly after this repatriation, which was condemned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR, China pledged nearly a billion dollars in grants and loans to Cambodia.

It is very possible that the pressure on the government of Laos to return the North Koreans came as much from China as from Pyongyang. Beijing has never considered the fleeing North Koreans refugees, always referring to them as economic migrants, or illegal economic migrants, thus depriving them of official refugee status in China. And in recent years China has taken a more proactive stance in deporting North Koreans from inside China back to the North. Overall, Beijing apparently wants to decrease the flow of fleeing North Koreans, to take no chances of destabilizing northeastern China with an influx of migrants or of destabilizing North Korea itself. As China becomes closer to the government of Laos, which in the past had more astutely played China and Vietnam and Thailand off of each other, preserving some measure of independence (at least as much independence as a tiny, poor, land-locked nation could have), Beijing likely is applying more pressure on Vientiane to proactively deport North Koreans. Combined with appeals from Pyongyang to Southeast Asian nations not to harbor fleeing refugees, China’s weighing in may create a new, even more dangerous situation for North Koreans in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, or even Thailand.

Right now, there are still at least twenty more North Koreans in the South Korean embassy in Vientiane. Will they face the same fate?

The genesis of Smoot-Hawley was a bid by Republican members of Congress to pick up the farm vote. Commodity prices had fallen in the 1920s, and Republicans argued that raising tariffs on agricultural imports would help farmers. (Yes, tariffs are taxes, and today’s GOP favors lower rather than higher taxes. But before World War II, Republicans were the party of higher tariffs. Times change.) The call for higher agricultural tariffs was made politically attractive by casting it as a matter of fairness: the average tariff on manufactured goods was higher than the average tariff on agricultural goods. So farmers deserved the same kind of protection that industrialists did, or so the argument went.

Officially labeled the United States Tariff Act of 1930, Smoot-Hawley took its name from its congressional sponsors: Senator Reed Smoot (R-UT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Representative Willis Hawley (R-OR), chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. The ordering of their names was unusual. The normal practice for tariffs bills is for the House sponsor’s name to go first because the Constitution requires all tariff bills to originate there. However, Smoot was far better known than Hawley, so he got top billing.

Smoot had a parochial interest in the bill. Utah’s sugar beet industry faced tough competition, especially from Cuban sugar growers. A higher tariff would help keep Utah’s farmers in business. Smoot’s effort to take care of his constituents prompted the humorist Will Rogers to joke: “120 million Americans eat sugar, 1,200 raise sugar, but Smoot ‘had dedicated his entire political career to make sugar not only sweet but dear to the 120 million.’”

Smoot wasn’t the only member of Congress to see the tariff bill as a way to help particular interests back home. Pretty much every member thought the same thing, which was the problem. The version of the bill that passed the House raised 845 tariff rates and cut just 82. Unwilling to be outdone, the Senate increased 890 tariffs and cut 235. To make matters worse, most of changes Congress enacted specified tariffs in specific amounts rather than a percentage of product cost. So if the cost of an imported good fell, the tariff (tax) on it actually increased in percentage terms.

It didn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to realize that Smoot-Hawley would be, as economists like to say, “contractionary.” Famed industrialist Henry Ford spent an evening at the White House trying to explain to Hoover why Smoot-Hawley would be bad law. Several of Hoover’s close advisers thought the same thing. One of them later recalled: “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff.” Their arguments worked with Hoover—to a point. He concluded that the tariff bill might be a bad idea.

But Hoover signed Smoot-Hawley into law anyway, attesting to the power of politics to drive smart people to do dumb things. Just as economists predicted, Smoot-Hawley triggered a vicious cycle of self-defeating actions that trade experts call beggar-thy-neighbor policies. Foreign countries angry at what they saw as a U.S. effort to hurt their exports enacted retaliatory tariffs. The net result was to spark a steep decline in U.S. and global trade. U.S. exports in 1929 stood at almost $7 billion. Three years later they totaled just $2.4 billion. World trade fell by as much as two-thirds between 1929 and 1934. Smoot-Hawley didn’t cause the Great Depression, but it made it much worse than it should have been.

Smoot-Hawley did have one saving grace: it prompted a major re-think of U.S. trade policy. In 1934, Congress passed, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act. It was premised on the idea that negotiating with other countries to reduce tariffs promotes economic growth. That principle has driven U.S. trade policy ever since; it is reflected in such things as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Lower tariffs and more open trade in turn have proven to be a major driver of global economic expansion over the past seven decades. Economists may have lost their battle to win over Hoover, but they won the larger intellectual contest to discredit protectionism and promote trade liberalization.

A White House statement in response to the offer emphasized the necessity of North Korea taking actions to show its commitment to denuclearization before the United States would accept talks. It stated that such actions would involve North Korea “living up to its obligations to the world, including compliance with the U.N. Security Council resolutions, and ultimately result in denuclearization.” In other words, without accompanying actions that show a North Korean willingness to enter “authentic” negotiations, the Obama administration assesses North Korea’s proposal as a non-starter.

While it is certainly preferable for North Korea to pursue diplomatic rather than missile or nuclear tests, all of North Korea’s neighbors by now are well aware of North Korea’s history of diplomatic initiatives as just another tool through which North Korea has sought to consolidate gains following periods in which North Korean brinkmanship has driven political tensions to high levels. To simply accept North Korea’s dialogue proposal and come back to the table as though nothing has changed since the last six party talks were held in 2008—or since North Korea’s dramatic reversal only two weeks after concluding the 2012 Leap Day understanding—would imply acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear  and ballistic missile tests.

South Korean media report that Xi Jinping flatly opposed a proposal from North Korea’s top military official Choe Ryong-hae during his visit to Beijing in late May that China accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. One of the major accomplishments of the Xi-Obama summit talks at the Sunnylands estate was the securing of a public pledge from China’s top leader that China will not accept a nuclear North Korea, while China continues to emphasize that the standoff be resolved peacefully through dialogue.

The timing of North Korea’s proposal to resume direct talks with the United States appears primarily designed to discern fissures in the converging positions of the United States, China, and South Korea on North Korea’s denuclearization. The North Korean proposal tests Sino-U.S. relations since the United States has conveyed that North Korea must take concrete actions to show its sincerity as a precondition for the resumption of nuclear talks while China has emphasized the importance of returning to dialogue even while affirming it will not accept a nuclear North Korea. It also tests the U.S.-ROK alliance by tempting the United States to bypass resumption of inter-Korean dialogue only a week after the North refused participation in proposed talks with Seoul in favor of U.S.-DPRK negotiations that would marginalize South Korea.

Regardless of the intention behind North Korea’s proposal, the National Defense Commission statement begins to lay the foundations for a North Korean climb down from its assertion of nuclear status through its statement that “the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is the behest of our leader and our general and the policy task that must be carried out by our party, state, and millions of soldiers and people without fail.” Since this statement stands at odds with North Korea’s inclusion of its nuclear status in the preamble of its constitution and its acknowledgment of nuclear weapons development as one of Kim Jong-il’s main contributions, sincerity of the statement will remain suspect absent accompanying concrete actions reinforcing the statement’s credibility.

Although North Korea’s statement provides Pyongyang’s first public recognition of the need for an exit strategy from its current situation, it is cloaked in defiance and makes an odd call on the United States to drop preconditions for talks while adding preconditions of its own. The preamble to North Korea’s offer of “high-level” dialogue demands that the United States stop “all forms of provocation, including sanctions.” In addition, the National Defense Commission statement claims that “our legitimate status as a nuclear weapons state will be maintained without the least wavering, regardless of whether others recognize it or not, until the denuclearization of the entire Korean peninsula is realized and nuclear threats from outside are put to an end completely.” In other words, North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons program when hell freezes over, but let’s talk about it.

As President Obama and the other leaders of the G-8 nations prepare to convene in Northern Ireland, a closer look at the U.S.’s trade agenda reveals that the Obama administration’s rhetoric is more smoke and mirrors than serious policy. Even if the TPP or the Europe deal were viable initiatives, the White House knows that they will almost surely never pass Congress, which took five years to approve free trade deals with even minnows like Panama and Colombia. On a broader scale, global trade and economic integration are in crisis. Banks are retreating from international deals. The World Trade Organization’s Doha Round is dead. Leading nations like France, China, and Brazil are throwing up new types of protectionism, and a new era of deglobalization – the opposite of global economic integration –has arrived.

I analyze the factors behind this deglobalization, including the failures of Asia’s regional trade pacts and the rise of state capitalism, in a new piece for BloombergBusinessweek. Read it here.

One notable element of the document, which reports on features agreed by Euro ministers, is to make a country whose bank was receiving aid put in its own resources alongside the ESM.  If a bank is to receive direct support, the country in question must first ensure that the bank’s capital meets the minimum level of 4.5 percent for tier 1 capital, and then must pay in 10 to 20 percent of the amount of the recapitalization. This looks steep.  Such burden sharing is justified by the need for the country to address all legacy problems (the ESM only resolving a capital shortfall that occurs once the ECB takes over supervision), but moral hazard concerns look also to be in play.

Other ways in which the ESM plan will fail to address the debt sustainability question were already known–banks need to be systemically important and pose a threat to eurozone stability, as well as solvent with the injection of capital; the country needs to be able to issue in markets but at risk of fiscal unsustainability if it fully funds the rescue; and creditors and private shareholders of the bank receiving support will need to have paid up (affirming the precedent set in Cyprus). The recap program is limited to 50 to 70 billion euros from the 500 billion euro fund.  As pointed out by the FT, its unclear that many of the banks at the center of the crisis (Anglo-Irish, Bankia and Laiki for example) would have qualified for assistance under this scheme.

It is not surprising that policymakers would be wary of announcing more ambitious plans while the German constitutional court is considering the legality of ECB support policies, and ahead of German elections.  But what if German elections come and go, and the policy doesn’t change?  The best that can be said is that, when faced by the risk of imminent crisis, creditor governments have done the minimum each time to avoid a country collapse. Markets remain untroubled, apparently anchored by its confidence that Europe has shown the flexibility to change in the past, and would do so again. Two problems with that: first, that diminishing popular support for European policies and the rise of non-traditional political parties may make justification of changes harder in the future than it would be now; and of course, having to go to the edge of the cliff to get the policy changed has a corrosive effect on markets. It’s hard to see how this helps.

The passage of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill on May 31, 2013, by the Nigerian House of Representatives places President Goodluck Jonathan in a tricky position. Not signing the bill risks alienating his own government and signaling to the general public that he does not support one of the few issues that brings the majority of Nigerians together. Alternatively, signing such legislation may cost the country substantial sums of international aid and investment. Either way, gay marriage—an otherwise unlikely political issue—may significantly influence the Nigerian political debate leading up to the 2015 national elections.

The bill, which received unanimous approval in the House, has inched another step forward to becoming law in the oil-rich nation. In the simplest terms, the bill prohibits same-sex marriage contracts from being issued or recognized by the state. However, if President Jonathan signs the current version, the law would also enable courts to levy criminal charges against public displays of affection between individuals of the same sex. It would further make it a criminal offense to establish or operate gay organizations in Nigeria—incurring penalties of mandatory imprisonment if found guilty.

Recent studies have found Nigerians to be overwhelmingly against accepting homosexuality, even in comparison to other African nations with anti-gay legislation. However, according to Nigerian civil society groups, the recent version passed by the House places more than just the LGBT community at risk. Both Nigerians and international aid workers implementing HIV/AIDS-prevention programs may be prosecuted under the new law if their efforts are construed as promoting same-sex relationships.

If President Jonathan signs the bill, questions loom as to what extent the law will be enforced and if the international community will retreat. In 2011 when the Nigerian Senate passed a similar bill, the United Kingdom threatened to withdraw aid; but the Nigerian Senate did not back down.

Even more may be at stake for Nigeria this time. Since the 2011 passage of the Senate-version of the bill, the Obama Administration has publicly affirmed its stance towards the advancement of LGBT rights across the globe—even suggesting that the United States might tie aid to support of LGBT rights. However, it remains an open question whether the United States will divest aid from countries with anti-LGBT legislation, particularly in light of President Obama’s previous statement that “Africa’s future is up to Africans.”

The recently passed bill has the potential to violate not only international treaties and conventions—many of which Nigeria has signed—but also the country’s Constitution. There is justifiable fear that this law will be used to abridge Nigerians’ right to freedom of speech, association, and assembly. Yet, the bill’s enactment may also lead to political blackmailing and rampant abuse by the country’s security forces.

The report starts with a simple assertion that is truer today than at any other time in American history: “Human capital is the single most important long-term driver of an economy.” In their seminal study The Race Between Education and Technology, Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin argue that U.S. investments in education in the early 20th century were the most important contributor to the country’s rise to global leadership. The United States was a pioneer in free and accessible public education, such that by the late 1930s nearly 70 percent of 14 to 17-year-olds were enrolled in school, more than twice as many as in the United Kingdom. The result was the creation a vast reservoir of human talent that allowed the United States to build the strongest economy and the strongest military forces the world has ever seen.

But that lead is long gone, partly because other countries came along and made the same or greater investments in public education, and partly because the United States has done far too little to protect the lead it had built. The report and scorecard are filled with examples of this slippage. Among 55-64 year olds, the leading edge of the baby boomers, a higher proportion of Americans has at least a high school education than any other country in the world; among those a generation behind however, American 25-34 year olds rank just 10th in the world in high school completion. Compared with other advanced countries, too few U.S. children are enrolled in pre-school education, and too many drop out of college before getting a degree.

One of the striking conclusions of the report is that the failure of federal education policy has been greatest in its core mission of reducing disparities in public education. While states still play a primary role in public schools, the federal government has long used its funding power to try to bring up the performance of children from poorer, under-served neighborhoods. While the report charts some progress in reducing racial disparities in education achievement, the gap in achievement by income is growing. In short, children from well off families are vastly more likely to succeed in school than children from poorer families. According to the report: “The real scourge of the U.S. education system—and its greatest competitive weakness—is the deep and growing achievement gap between socioeconomic groups that begins early and lasts through a student’s academic career.”

There seems little question about the federal commitment to improving education. President George Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was among the signature initiatives of his eight years in office, and federal funding for education had increased sharply under President Obama before the recent belt-tightening. College students in particular have been beneficiaries of growing federal aid. And Obama continues to be ambitious – in his January State of the Union address he called for a big expansion in pre-school education, which has shown some promise in closing the achievement gaps.

The stakes are unquestionably high. In an advanced economy like the United States where economic growth is largely the result of innovation in products and processes, human talent is by far the most important ingredient. Immigration helps us import some of it, but the vast majority must be homegrown. If the United States can’t maintain its leadership in education, in the long run it will not remain a leader in anything else.

The full text of Deputy National Security Advisor Benjamin Rhodes’ statement concerning the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Ben Piven and Ben Willers provide an infographic of Iran’s elections, which begin today.

1. Leaked NSA information could hurt U.S.-China ties; Snowden makes it to Hong Kong. Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee and contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), fled to Hong Kong shortly before leaking information about a secretive NSA program called Prism. From Hong Kong, Snowden told Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post that the U.S. government has been hacking into computers in Hong Kong and mainland China for years. (more…)

Nuhu Ribadu is a former presidential candidate who opposed Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan in the 2011 elections. As the former chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, he campaigned against official corruption and was well-respected within the donor community. Many outside of Nigeria were chagrined when he was dismissed from his post without credible explanation, seeing it as the federal government stepping away from the anti-corruption struggle.

Subsequently, Ribadu has been an articulate critic of Nigerian governance. Speaking at Ahmadu Bello University on June 8, he called the current state of Nigerian politics a “sinking ship,” and criticized it for “perpetuat[ing] a tyranny of interests.” He said that politicians have taken advantage of ethnic, religious, and regional divides to keep Nigeria fragmented and preserve the status quo. Ribadu encouraged Nigerian youth to combat the “exclusionists” by identifying themselves primarily as “Nigerian” rather than as belonging to a particular ethnic or religious group.

The government’s response to the speech consisted of personal attacks on Ribadu, accusing him, inter alia, of disseminating “falsehood,” and for insulting his own country’s government. Reuben Abati, the presidential press spokesman, accused Ribadu of bitterness over losing the presidential election of 2011 and of a “selfish” desire to stay relevant.

Ribadu’s emphasis on national unity across dividing lines has precedent. As he mentioned in his speech, the January 2012 protests against the end of the fuel subsidy represented a unique moment in which Nigerians came together despite their differences. They demonstrated a new possibility for Nigerians to bridge ethnic and religious differences by focusing on governance issues. Ribadu’s message likely resonated with his university audience. The Ahmadu Bello University Student Representative Council responded to Abati’s attack on Ribadu, calling his “outburst…an embarrassment to Nigerians and the academic community.” It remains to be seen whether that resonance will translate into political action as the next electoral season approaches.

With the reforms in Myanmar since 2010, there has been considerable hope among the country’s neighbors that political change also would reduce the burdens Myanmar’s serious domestic problems placed on them. Thailand hopes to send back thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Myanmar migrants, and to be able to better cooperate with the Myanmar government in shutting down drug production in Myanmar’s wild northeast.  China hopes that the cease-fire between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar government – seemingly the most stable cease-fire with the KIA in decades – will decrease migration into China and keep China from having to play a larger role in the KIA-Myanmar dispute. Overall, the entire Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has hoped that, with Myanmar no longer a pariah, it will be easier for the group to reach consensus on regional issues, and ASEAN will be able to punch at a higher weight internationally.

Yet in some ways, the reverse of these aspirations is happening. The cease-fire in Kachin State is a clear step forward. But Myanmar’s inter-religious violence, which seemed confined to Rakhine State last year, now is spreading across the country, even to places, such as Lashio in Shan State, in which there have been few Muslim-Buddhist clashes in modern history and where there are few Muslims living anyway. And now the violence is spreading to other countries in the region, sucking them into Myanmar’s battles; they already are being sucked in by the outflow of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine State. In the past two weeks, at least eight people have been killed in Malaysia. Buddhist and Muslims from Myanmar have begun attacking each other in Kuala Lumpur. (There are hundreds of thousands of people from Myanmar living in Malaysia, mostly doing low-paying labor.) This comes just after violence between Myanmar Buddhist and Muslim refugees in Indonesia resulted in several deaths.

Yet, just as on the issue of how to handle Rohingya refugees, on the broader problem ofMyanmar’s spiraling inter-religious conflict, ASEAN is almost nowhere to be seen. Other than Indonesia, most ASEAN members have not been proactive in trying to help Myanmar tamp down tensions, and the region has no coherent plan for addressing the Rohingya “boat people” turning up in Thailand, Malaysia, and elsewhere.

Happy Flag Day everyone. Two hundred and thirty-six years ago today, the Second Continental Congress adopted the design that became the American flag. So Happy Birthday, Stars and Stripes! (more…)

Why, then, does it matter whether PRC diplomacy as a whole in 2010 can or cannot be characterized as “newly assertive”? It may matter because language can affect internal and public foreign policy debates. There is a long-standing and rich literature on the role of the media in agenda setting. What does agenda setting mean in concrete terms? It means focusing attention on particular narratives, excluding others, and narrowing discourse. In the agenda setting literature, it refers to the power of information entrepreneurs to tell people “what to think about” and “how to think about it.” It can make or take away spaces for alternative descriptive and causal arguments, and thus the space for debates about effective policy. The prevailing description of the problem narrows acceptable options.

The conventional description of Chinese diplomacy in 2010 seems to point to a new, but poorly understood, factor in international relations—namely, the speed with which new conventional wisdoms are created, at least within the public sphere, by the interaction of the internet-based traditional media and the blogosphere. One study has found, for instance, that on some U.S. public policy issues, the blogosphere and the traditional media interact in setting the agenda for coverage for each other. Moreover, on issues where this interaction occurs, much of the effect happens within four days. Other research suggests that political bloggers, for the most part, do not engage in original reporting and instead rely heavily on the mainstream media for the reproduction of alleged facts. The media, meanwhile, increasingly refers to blogs as source material. The result is, as one study put it, “a news source cycle, in which news content can be passed back and forth from media to media.” Additional research suggests that the thematic agendas for political campaigns and politicians themselves are increasingly influenced by blogosphere-media interaction.

Together, this research suggests that the prevailing framework for characterizing Chinese foreign policy in recent years may be relevant for the further development (and possible narrowing) of the policy discourse among media, think tank, and policy elites. As the agenda-setting literature suggests, this is not a new phenomenon. What is new, however, is the speed with which these narratives are created and spread—a discursive tidal wave, if you will. This gives first movers with strong policy preferences advantages in producing and circulating memes and narratives in the electronic media or in high-profile blogs, or both. This, in turn, further reduces the time and incentives for participants in policy debates to conduct rigorous comparative analysis prior to participation. This is ironic, of course, given the proliferation of easier-to-access data and original information sources on the internet with which to conduct such rigorous comparative analysis.

James Kitfield, “A Hollow Military Again?” National Journal, June 12, 2013.

“The way President Obama put it to me is, ‘Give me fewer Iraqi Freedoms and more Desert Storms,’ said Adm.  James Winnefeld Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who coordinated the new defense strategic guidance.

Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on “Preparing for and Responding to the Enduring Threat,” June 12, 2013.

Sen. Mary Landrieu: “I hope that in the classified hearing that more of this can be brought to light. And I most certainly am going to be explaining this to my constituents in an appropriate, balanced way.”

(3PA: This quote summed up the congressional oversight process.  Only behind closed doors can controversial surveillance programs be brought to light, and which, constituents must rely upon the judgments of their elected members.)

Ruth Marcus, “James Clapper’s ‘least truthful’ answer,” Washington Post, June 13, 2013.

Ron Wyden doesn’t want to call the director of national intelligence a liar. The Oregon Democrat is too seasoned a politician for that — and James Clapper’s self-assessment, that he answered in the “least untruthful manner” when the senator asked whether the National Security Agency was collecting data about millions of Americans, speaks for itself. “No, sir . . . not wittingly,” Clapper said, when the answer was clearly — and is now demonstrably — yes.

“When I heard his response, I said, ‘I’ve got more follow-up work to do,’ ” Wyden said with studied mildness when we spoke Thursday.

Did Clapper lie? “I want to leave it at that,” Wyden demurred. Then he added, pointedly: “You cannot have strong oversight if intelligence officials don’t give you straight answers.”

And that is the paradox — the fallacy, even — of congressional oversight in the post-9/11 environment.

Brigid Schulte, “Many women in CIA still encounter glass ceiling, agency report says,” Washington Post, June 13, 2013.

In many ways, the dearth of women at the top levels of leadership at the CIA is not unlike the dearth of women at the top of any federal agency. Women make up 31 percent of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service and 33 percent of the entire federal government’s Senior Executive Service.

In public remarks to staff members, CIA Director John O. Brennan said he fully supports the recommendations and has named a senior female officer in the clandestine service to oversee their implementation. Changing the agency culture may take years, Brennan said, but doing so would “ensure all employees have the opportunity to reach their full professional potential” and enable the agency to better meet its mission.

“The countries that figure out how to crack this code,” she said, “will be tremendously advantaged in the future.”

Read the full report: “Director’s Advisory Group on Women in Leadership.”

Statement issued by the White House on behalf of Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, New York Times, June 13, 2013.

The President has been clear that the use of chemical weapons – or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups – is a red line for the United States, as there has long been an established norm within the international community against the use of chemical weapons.  Our intelligence community now has a high confidence assessment that chemical weapons have been used on a small scale by the Assad regime in Syria.  The President has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has.

Put simply, the Assad regime should know that its actions have led us to increase the scope and scale of assistance that we provide to the opposition, including direct support to the SMC. These efforts will increase going forward.

(3PA: Sending arms to support Syrian rebels will not change the outcome, let alone topple Assad. For more see: “The No-Plan Zone.”)

Tom Vanden Brook, “Marines, Army form quick-strike forces in Africa,” USA Today, June 14, 2013.

The Marines will base 500 troops at Moron Air Force Base in Spain, about 35 miles southeast of Seville, said Capt. Eric Flanagan, a Marine Corps spokesman. They can be flown on short notice to African crises aboard six Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

The unit is known as the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force for Crisis Response. It will act as a first responder to U.S. embassies in the region on behalf of U.S. Africa Command, Flanagan said. It will be on standby to help evacuate Americans from hot spots and to provide disaster relief and humanitarian missions.