ScaifeNet because we can't let Soros have all the fun...

featuring Roger Pilon

President Barack Obama has tried to prop up the housing market by helping people stay in their homes, even though they're still overwhelmed with mortgage debt. This is the latest in a long series of government interventions intended to promote homeownership.

But propping up the housing market has only prolonged the housing slump — a depressing fact brought home by the recent dismal home-sales reports.

So what to do?

Perhaps Obama could learn a lesson from our neighbors to the north. Canada, after all, didn't have a housing bubble. What explains the difference?

For decades, the U.S. has actively promoted homeownership through a raft of programs: generous mortgage interest tax breaks, subsidized loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan guarantees, limits on what banks can repossess when a borrower defaults and so on.

The result has been an increase in homeownership, true, but it's also convinced far too many people to buy homes who couldn't afford them, helping to unrealistically push up home prices, which inevitably led to the subsequent collapse.

Even now, with interest rates near zero, millions continue to struggle to make mortgage payments, making it likely that the number of mortgage defaults will increase when interest rates rise. That means more homes will be offered by individual homeowners and banks with an urgent need to sell, depressing home prices.

Contrary to popular belief, a home isn't a good investment for everyone. First of all, it's imprudent for people of limited means to have virtually everything tied up in a single asset such as a home, whose value can go down as well as up. The bills are never-ending. For many, owning a home makes it almost impossible to save money for anything else.

And when people get government help to make their mortgage payments, they still have more debt and housing-related expenses than they can handle. In such circumstances, it's almost impossible to save money for the future.

Until the affected homes have been transferred to people who can afford the costs and risks of homeownership, those homes will hang over the market and continue depressing prices, as we're seeing now. When the government steps in to keep financially stretched people in their homes, it simply delays inevitable adjustments.

What's needed isn't more government involvement to help to prop up homeownership, but less. And if you don't think so, look at what's happened in Canada. More Canadians (68 percent) than Americans (66 percent) own their homes, yet the Canadian government has interfered very little in the private housing market.

• Canada doesn't have an income tax deduction for mortgage interest. Nor is there a tax advantage to converting home equity into debt.
• In Canada, mortgages aren't issued without verification of employment and income.
• Unlike Americans, Canadians cannot walk away from their homes without serious consequences — Canadian mortgages are generally full recourse, which means a bank can attach an individual's other assets and wages/salaries if necessary to pay the deficiency in the event of a mortgage default.
• Canada has nothing like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, subsidizing subprime mortgages on a gigantic scale.
• Nor has Canada had anything comparable to the U.S. Community Reinvestment Act that promotes political influence over mortgage lending decisions.

The principal Canadian intervention in the housing market is to require that people buy mortgage insurance if their down payment is less than 25 percent of the purchase price.

As a result of these policies, in Canada people generally buy a home when they can afford it. Canadians tend to have significantly more equity in their homes than Americans do.

The Canadian housing market has been remarkable for its long-term stability. Occasional fluctuations have mainly reflected local circumstances, such as the oil-driven housing booms in Calgary and Edmonton, and the waves of Chinese money that have flowed into Vancouver.

Obama should end government interference that does much to prolong the housing slump. He should stop trying to prop up the housing market and let inevitable adjustments take place, so we can get through hard times as quickly as possible — enabling a genuine housing recovery to begin.

featuring James A. Dorn

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This article is Jim Harper's closing remarks in a larger debate on The Economist's website.

Marc Rotenberg has been wise — in terms of debating tactics — to speak only in generalities about the "critical role" of government oversight, about government agencies taking a "more active role" and about independent privacy agencies that "speak up" when privacy is threatened. Putting forward concrete ideas for regulating the information economy would cause people to think more carefully and to recognise costs and benefits, which do not cut in favour of his position.

Privacy is about trade-offs. In exchange for the modicum of information people share online, they receive copious information and commentary, free e-mail services, search services, maps, driving directions, interaction with people who share their interests and much more. Greater government privacy regulation is not the death knell of the free internet, but it would undercut information services that are just getting by, as well as unproven ways of serving consumers.

(People should withhold information if they care to, of course. Here again is how to exercise control over cookies, the major source of demographic information for ad networks: in Internet Explorer and Firefox, go to the "Tools" pull-down menu, select "Options", click on the "Privacy" tab and then customise cookie settings.)

Then there is the benefit side of the ledger: can we expect privacy to flourish once governments begin doing "more"? The evidence suggests not.

In October of this year, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) will celebrate its 40th birthday. As Mr Rotenberg's organisation notes on its website, this American legislation "establishes a framework of Fair Information Practices for personal information that include rights of data quality (right to access and correct), data security, use limitations, requirements for data destruction, notice, user participation (consent), and accountability". The FCRA is a model that proponents of government control would apply to the internet and the information economy.

But the credit-reporting industry has not blossomed with fairness, privacy, good customer service or transparency since Congress passed this legislation. Indeed, EPIC's 15-page, 6,000-word exegesis on the FCRA lists a dozen ways it believes the law still needs to be improved. In four decades, government legislation has not produced the information values Mr Rotenberg wants.

The Privacy Act of 1974 is another "Fair Information Practices"-based regime that was intended to improve the privacy practices of the American government. As with credit reporting, few would say that Washington, DC, has burbled up springs of privacy protection, data accuracy and transparency over the past 35 years.

The arguments for government control certainly seem to rest on good-hearted premises: if we just elect the right people, and if they just do the right thing, then we can have a cadre of public-spirited civil servants dispassionately carrying out a neutral, effective privacy-protection regime.

But this romantic vision of government seems never to come true. Crass political dealmaking inhabits every step, from the financing of elections, to logrolling in the legislative process, to implementation that favours agencies' interests and the preferences of the politically powerful.

The government regulation rêve is a bête noire. Congress passed the FCRA in the same legislation as the Bank Secrecy Act, creating a flaccid consumer protection regime in exchange for a robust and still-growing system of private surveillance on behalf of government.

The law was also a sop to business. As EPIC itself notes, "In order to gain passage of the FCRA in 1970, consumer advocates gave [industry] a big concession-immunity from defamation lawsuits based on information in the reports." The FCRA stopped American state governments doing what they were supposed to do — guarding individuals' rights — in favour of a federal information regime that made consumers helpless objects of government policy.

Mr Rotenberg's ambiguity may mean to signal otherwise, but there is no free lunch: regulation is costly, and it does not work well. Consumers' best source of protection is their own behaviour. Learn how internet communications work, withhold personal information more often and mete it out carefully when appropriate.

It is often said that consumers vote with their dollars. Online, consumers vote with their clicks. Spending and clicking are small but, in their numbers, powerful ways of influencing the world around us. And they are much more direct and effective than voting for politicians every few years, then begging them to do the right thing.

Consumers reveal their true interests (they move from generality to reality) when they make a purchase or visit a website — none more than my worthy debate opponent, Mr Rotenberg, whose count of Facebook friends recently surpassed 4,000. We should all work to change consumer understanding of reality by making clear the privacy costs of many online activities, but in the meantime real-world voters make clear their appreciation for interactivity, even at some cost to privacy.

Will a lame duck Congress pass cap-and-trade?

Judging from recent news, it might try. But, more likely, all the sound and fury will end up signifying its usual nothing. And it leaves the preferred option, where Congress punts the problem to the EPA, very much alive.

On Aug. 10, the House of Representatives blocked a resolution from Tom Price, R-Ga., that would have prohibited the House from convening a lame duck session after November's election unless there was a national emergency.

Climate Czarina Carol Browner recently suggested that such a bill could "potentially" be passed before the 112th Congress opens for business in January. In the new Congress, the House may very well be under Republican control. Hence the need for a lame duck climate bill.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., also supports the ideal of the lame duck session, telling The Hill that if climate legislation isn't passed in September, "then we're going to keep pushing and maybe come back after the election and do it in a lame-duck."

Kerry and Browner are dishing out good old-fashioned Washington bunkum, pandering to the Democratic "base," and hoping to eke out a few votes from the very disappointed green left, which feels that the administration and the Senate left it out in the cold when it comes to global warming.

Despite all the protests about ceding power to Obama, it's exactly what senate Democrats want. If the Senate passes a bill, at least 60 senators would be held accountable. If EPA does the dirty work, the onus falls on only one man, Barack Obama.

Another reason that the EPA option is the most politically acceptable solution is that their proposed emissions reductions are likely to be challenged in court, and that very little that is substantive — aside from EPA's demand for increased car and truck fuel economy — could see the light of day for several years.

It should come as no surprise that the Sierra Club, Environment America and the Union of Concerned Scientists said their new priority on global warming was to help protect EPA from litigation. Judging from how they and their allies failed to get a cap-and-trade bill, it looks like EPA will be tied up in court for a long time.

So there you have the future of global warming. No lame duck passage of cap-and-trade. EPA, cheered on in private by the Senate, takes over emissions regulation, transferring responsibility to the president, and legal challenges keep anything expensive in limbo for the foreseeable future.

Criminal defense systems are in a state of perpetual crisis, routinely described as "scandalous." Public defender offices around the country face crushing caseloads that necessarily compromise the quality of the legal representation they provide. In a new paper, Professors Stephen J. Schulhofer and David Friedman examine the broken criminal defense system and propose free market solutions to better serve indigent defendants.

• "Reforming Indigent Defense: How Free Market Principles Can Help to Fix a Broken System," by Stephen J. Schulhofer and David Friedman

featuring Christopher A. Preble

President Barack Obama is continuing to reorient U.S. foreign policy in general, and in the Middle East in particular, along the lines of the internationalist/neo-realist approach pursued in the pre-9/11 years of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Obama's Tuesday's televised address marking the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq — coupled with his earlier decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan — and this week's start of a new round of U.S. orchestrated Israeli-Palestinian talks in Washington fit very much into his effort to reducing the costs of — as opposed to doing away with a policy based on the assumption that Washington will continue setting the agenda and determining the policy outcomes in the Broader Middle East — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel-Palestine.

That should not have come as a major surprise to those of us who have been calling for long-term structural changes in American global strategy, starting with the necessary reassessment of the U.S. goal of maintaining a hegemonic position in the Middle East. After all, much of presidential candidate Obama's criticism of President George W. Bush's foreign policies as well as his proposals for changes in those policies sounded like the kind of the assessments that were being made by President Bush I's former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft who not unlike Obama was opposed to decision to invade Iraq and to oust Saddam Hussein and who was calling for a diplomatic engagement with Iran.

Indeed, contrary to the hopes raised by some of Obama's admirers in the anti-war movement — or the fears stirred up in his neoconservative bashers — Obama was not a closet peacenik, an isolationist, a "third wordlist" or an "Arabist;" and his positions on Arab-Israeli issues reflected a view shared by most of his predecessors in office. Moreover, compare Obama's phony "confrontation" with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue of the Jewish settlements with the Bush pèreway challenged former Israeli PM Yitzchak Shamir over the same question (threatening to withhold loan guarantees to Jerusalem, among other things), and the notion promoted by neoconservative pundits and others that Obama is the most "anti-Israeli" U.S. President seems laughable.

By trying to improve U.S. standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds, to engage Iran in the diplomatic arena, to begin a process of military disengagement from Iraq and to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by emphasizing the U.S. role as an honest broker, Obama has not been attempting to transform traditional U.S. policy in the Middle East (or elsewhere). Instead Obama has been playing the role of a counter-revolutionary, turning back the radical foreign policy approach pursued by Bush the Second and his neoconservative advisors (the policy of preemption; regime change; diplomatic unilateralism; the Democracy Agendawhile embracing the more realist strategies pursued by Clinton and Bush the First.

That Obama has discarded the Bush era's stand of treating Israel as Washington's sheriff in the Middle East may explain why after eight years of having uninterrupted access to a U.S. diplomatic blank cheque some Israelis and their American supporters may have reacted with so much animosity towards the new president. Similarly, by treating the threat of international terrorism as a manageable national security challenge — as opposed to a part of a new global war against Islamofascism — Obama has helped protect the moral and strategic principles of U.S. foreign policy. It is President Bush and his advisors who had been violating those same principles.

From that perspective, the prose of Obama's televised address on Iraq on Tuesday seemed to reflect his goal of "de-neoconizing" U.S. foreign policy. There was no talk about democratizing Iraq and the Middle East, confronting an Axis of Evil or defeating Islamofascism. "The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people," Obama said in the address from the Oval Office. "Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility," he concludes. "Now, it is time to turn the page." Indeed.

At the same time, the decision by Obama Administration to invite President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington on September 2nd to resume direct negotiations to resolve all final status issues — including Jerusalem, the Jewish settlements, and the Palestinian refugees, within a year — seems to send a signal to Arabs and Israelis that unlike his predecessor, President Obama was placing the Israel-Palestine issue on the top of his foreign policy agenda and was preparing to invest more time and energy — and involves paying huge political costs — in trying to resolve the Mideast conflict. Or so it seems.

On one level, Obama may be trying to recapture some of the elements of the strategic status-quo that had existed in the Middle East before 9/11 and the ensuing invasion of Iraq — and in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War and Gulf War I — during which the U.S. could maintain a relatively cost-free hegemony in the region. It could do so by pursuing a strategy of offshore balancing, by keeping U.S. military forces "over the horizon," through the "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran (and by playing the one against the other), and by sustaining the momentum of a perpetual Arab-Israeli peace process. While Bush and his advisors have contended that their radical foreign policy agenda — including the invasion of Iraq — was the proper U.S. response to 9/11, a realist strategy aimed at preserving U.S. status in the Middle East at weakening Arab and Muslim radicals would have been to topple the Taliban, destroy Al Qaeda and its satellites and reviving the Israeli-Arab peace process (and not to oust Saddam Hussein and transform the Middle East). So it is not surprising that that is exactly what the Obama Administration is trying to do now by trying to close the Iraq chapter, getting the peace process moving and "finishing the job" in Afghanistan.

The reason why this strategy is probably not going to work now is that the Bush Administration's policies may have already changed the balance of power in the Middle East as well as the political balance of power at home in a way that makes it difficult — if not impossible — to "de-neoconize" U.S. foreign policy and turn back the strategic clock and re-establish the pre-9/11 status-quo. Indeed, announcing the end of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq and convening an Israeli-Palestinian summit in Washington do not change the depressing realities on the ground. They amount to not a lot more than media events. Iraq's Pandora Box of ethnic and religious rivalries remains wide open and a more powerful and assertive Iran and its Shiite allies there (and in Lebanon) are perceived as posing a major threat to the interests of the mostly unstable Arab-Sunni regimes in the region (Saudi Arabia; Jordan; Egypt). At the same time, Turkey is very concerned about the objectives of the Kurds in the North of Iraq and is ready to take action to protect its interests there. A huge powder keg is ready to blow up.

In the Holy Land, the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships are divided and the national consensus on both sides has been radicalized since the second Intifadah, 9/11, and the continuing Israeli occupation and settlements buildup, making it less likely that the Israelis and the Palestinians could resolve any of the major final status issues within a year. They could not achieve that goal in 2000 when Yasser Arafat was ruling over a unified Palestinian camp, when a relatively moderate political figure was serving as Israel's PM — and at a time when the U.S. was at the peak of its so-called unipolar moment and Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas were having great difficulties in trying to exert their influence. So why exactly will the peace process lead to the promised land of peace now?

Hence even if one presupposes a best-case scenario under which the issue of Iran's nuclear ambitions are resolved or being placed on the policy backburner in a way that averts a military conflagration involving Israel, the U.S. and Iran, it is still very difficult to envision a state of affairs that could bring about peace and stability in Iraq and in Israel/Palestine in the near future. To paraphrase what Oscar Wilde has said about marriage and second marriage, pursuing policies based on these assumptions would make would mark the triumph of intelligence and hope over intelligence and experience. But then many marriages and second marriages do work.

It is possible to imagine an alternate universe in which the U.S. has not endured the triple blows of 9/11, the war in Iraq and the Great Recession and was ready to use its enormous military and economic power to make peace and bring stability into the Middle East. But one does not have to be great geo-strategic thinker to conclude that in the real universe of post-Iraq war and the current economic mess coupled with the mood of the American public, the U.S. not going to have the needed economic and military resources and the political will to use them in order prevent he likely explosions in Mesopotamia and the Levant and to impose its own agenda there as it also tries to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere and when, as Obama put it on Tuesday, "Our most urgent task is to restore our economy and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work." Something gotta give, and it will probably be Obama's Mideast policy that will be the first to lose ground.

In his prime-time address last night, President Obama wisely avoided many of the pitfalls that tripped up his predecessor. He did not declare victory under a "mission accomplished" banner or claim that a fully-flowered democracy had been created in Iraq. Rather, he expressed his hope that violence comes down, that Iraqi politicians will reconcile their differences, and that Iraq may someday be capable of defending itself.

All Americans, even the president's most vocal detractors, share these same desires. But most Americans know that we can't want these things more than the Iraqis do, and our troops understand that best of all. Explains Maj. Joseph Da Silva, who logged three tours in Iraq, "We had military successes, but the Iraqis will decide whether it is a long-term success or not."

Maj. Da Silva and all of our troops have performed admirably. The president honored their sacrifices in his speech. Despite being told that they would be greeted as liberators and home by Christmas 2003, they have persevered through seven Christmases. But they also learned the limits of their power. Short-term success in Iraq will be measured by a reduction in violence. Ultimate success will be achieved when an independent Iraqi government commands the respect of the Iraqi people. We can declare mission accomplished when Iraqis are responsible for their own defense.

A rising chorus of voices, however, is working diligently against the ultimate goal of U.S. withdrawal and Iraqi self-sufficiency. Some people are advising the president to leave a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, essentially arguing that the United States is the rightful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty, and that the Iraqis simply can't be trusted with security matters. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says that Americans must "remain open to the possibility of a mutually agreed longer-term security commitment or military presence" along the lines of our five-decades-long presence on the Korean peninsula.

In fact, the disposition of U.S. troops in Iraq has been a point of contention from the beginning. In 2003, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations advised that Americans should "get used to U.S. troops being deployed [in Iraq] for years, possibly decades, to come." Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute agreed, predicting that "the protection of the embryonic Iraqi democracy" would be a "duty that will likely extend for decades" and calling for a "quasi-permanent American garrison in Iraq" to protect American interests there.

But Wolfowitz's apparent embrace of an open-ended nation-building mission is a particularly curious turn for one of the Bush administration's leading lights. It was Wolfowitz, after all, who conceded that the U.S. troop presence in Saudi Arabia and the military pressure on Saddam Hussein had "been Osama bin Laden's principal recruiting device." Looking ahead to the post-Hussein period, Wolfowitz implied that the removal of Hussein would enable the United States to withdraw troops from the region. "I can't imagine anyone here wanting to ... be there for another 12 years to continue helping recruit terrorists."

While George W. Bush must shoulder responsibility for the loss of blood and treasure in Iraq, he at least recognized that U.S. strategic interests were not served by a long-term presence there. Senior officials in the Bush administration had no intention of conducting nation-building in Iraq. They had no desire to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on an eight-year-long occupation. They erred in believing that a functioning Iraqi democracy would spring forth with minimal U.S. effort.

As an Illinois state legislator, Barack Obama saw the flaws in this thinking. He correctly predicted that the costs of the war would far outweigh the benefits. As president, he has wisely turned aside recommendations to leave U.S. troops in Iraq. He should heed the lessons that our troops have learned after multiple tours there, and avoid repeating the same errors in Afghanistan. "If Iraq is to teach us anything, it must be that a new idea cannot be beat into a society," Maj. Walt Cooper wrote in an e-mail in 2006.

"The lesson I fear we will take from Iraq is that we have figured out a way to impose order or governance on other societies," Cooper explained to the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe, "It is a different brand, but the same kind of hubris that got us into the mess I saw in 2006."

Despite today's milestone, the costs of the Iraq war will continue to mount until all U.S. troops are withdrawn from the country. President Obama should ignore those who have been proven wrong, and bring our troops home as scheduled.

At first glance, it seemed a silly headline even by the standards of MSNBC: "Can the GOP Survive a Tea Party Takeover?"

Of course, the story was yet another in the narrative that has been eagerly embraced by both the mainstream media and desperate Democrats: "Extreme" candidates who are associated with the tea-party movement are dooming Republicans to defeat this fall. If only the Republicans had nominated more moderate, "go along to get along" candidates, who supported tax increases and the health-care bill — why, they might even manage a ten-point lead in the Gallup generic ballot.

In fact, Republicans do have a ten-point generic-ballot lead, the biggest GOP lead in the history of Gallup's tracking poll.

Has anyone actually looked at those races featuring "tea-party candidates?" In Kentucky, Rand Paul has been the poster boy for tea-party Republicans. The media has wrung its hands and worried mightily about how his primary victory could cost Republicans a competitive Senate seat. However, the most recent Rasmussen poll shows Paul with a 9-point lead. With only two exceptions, he has led in every poll taken in the three months since his nomination. His opponent has not gotten above 42 percent in the polls all summer.

In Colorado, Ken Buck, another tea-party favorite, won the GOP Senate nomination, prompting more crocodile tears from the media. Despite the implosion of the Colorado Republican party, Buck is leading his opponent, incumbent Democratic senator Michael Bennett, by four to nine points and is pushing 50 percent in recent polls. The defeat of incumbent Utah senator Bob Bennett was met with wailing and the gnashing of teeth among D.C. pundits. The GOP nominee, Mike Lee, holds a 25-point lead. And, most recently, with challenger Joe Miller apparently upsetting Republican senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, the media is wondering whether there is now another Democratic "opportunity." Apparently, not much of one: Miller leads his Democratic opponent 47—39 in the only post-primary poll.

Meanwhile in Florida, Rick Scott's insurgent victory in the gubernatorial primary was trumpeted as great news for Democratic candidate Alex Sink. No doubt Scott carries some baggage, but he leads by three points in Rasmussen's latest poll. At the same time, tea-party favorite Marco Rubio has retaken the lead in his three-way race for Florida's Senate seat.

Similar results can be found in House races across the country: Supposedly "extreme" Republicans are leading in race after race.

Only in Nevada, where Senate majority leader Harry Reid has climbed back into a tie with Sharron Angle, is the media's narrative even close to true. But one has to ask how different would things be if a more establishment candidate such as Sue Lowden had won the Republican primary. Angle has been nothing if not controversial, but Lowden was hardly gaffe-free. (Remember the "pay your doctor with a chicken" flap?) After Reid spent $3 million on negative advertising, voters would likely have thought that any Republican candidate was slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. Despite this, Reid is still far from safe.

In the real world, as opposed to the one inhabited by most of the media, this new breed of anti-spending, pro-Constitution, limited-government candidates does not appear to be dragging Republicans to defeat.

But looked at another way, the question asked by that MSNBC headline is indeed relevant. If by "GOP" one means the party establishment that has controlled Congress and the national party since at least the Bush era, this group of insurgent candidates represents a significant threat. There's a reason why the tea-party Republicans had to run against their own party leadership.

Just look at where the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and its House counterpart put their muscle. While it was understandable that the NRSC would stick with incumbents like Murkowski and Bennett, it also backed Trey Greyson in Kentucky, Jane Norton in Colorado, and Lowden in Nevada, and stood with Charlie Crist in Florida right up to the moment that he ditched the party. Even now, NRSC chairman John Cornyn has dispatched attorneys to Alaska to help Murkowski with her potential recount against Miller — even as Murkowski explores her options for a third-party run.

After all, a Senate full of Pauls, Angles, Millers, Rubios, and others of that mindset would be a very different place. For someone like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who based his last reelection campaign on all the pork he had brought home to Kentucky, the thought of Rand Paul joining him in the Senate must be uncomfortable.

The House Republican leadership can't feel any more secure. Minority whip Eric Cantor has already suggested that the GOP leadership may jettison its moratorium on earmarks next year. But dozens of new anti-spending Republicans will be elected this November. Will they stand for that sort of Republican backsliding?

Republicans claim that they have learned the lesson of their defeats in 2006 and 2008. They say that they are now firmly committed to limited-government principles. This new breed of candidate intends to hold them to that — and that is making the Washington establishment very uncomfortable.

When we think of human-rights problems, most of us imagine arbitrary arrests, political repression, religious persecution, torture, show trials, censorship, and the like. In America, we don't often have those kinds of problems. Even the current controversy over an Islamic center near ground zero isn't about the right to build there; it's about the wisdom of doing so.

All of which made it surprising to learn from the Obama State Department that America does indeed have human-rights problems.

The news came last week in the form of our first report on U.S. human-rights conditions to the U.N. Human Rights Council, submitted pursuant to a U.N. mandate that members conduct self-assessments every four years. According to the State Department, we fall short on "fairness, equality, and dignity" in areas such as education, health, and housing, especially when it comes to women, blacks, Latinos, Muslims, South Asians, American Indians, and gay people.

On closer reading, however, the claimed "human rights" problems start to look dubious. Take the report's contention that "work remains to meet our goal of ensuring equality before the law" — a human right, to be sure. The supposed evidence is that unemployment is higher among blacks and Hispanics; there are racial and ethnic disparities in home ownership rates; and "whites are twice as likely as Native Americans to have a college degree." But those are socio-economic inequalities owing to many factors, not inequalities before the law.

Or consider this point: "Asian-American men suffer from stomach cancer 114 percent more often than non-Hispanic white men." That's a human-rights problem?

So what's going on here? A little background will be useful. Founded on the ashes of the Second World War, the United Nations assumed as one of its gravest missions the protection of human rights. Toward that end, however, its declaration on the subject cobbled together both real and spurious "rights."

Hence the United Nations' two main rights covenants: one on civil and political rights — those any American would recognize — to which the United States is a party; and the other on economic, social, and cultural "rights" commonly recognized by European welfare states, which the United States signed but the U.S. Senate has never ratified.

The Carter administration was less than adept at defending America against Soviet charges that we failed to protect the second class of "rights." By contrast, the Reagan administration showed that the United States not only protected real rights, but in doing so afforded American citizens far more of the results that the Soviets purported to be providing their citizens as rights. Moreover, President Ronald Reagan went on the offensive, using the U.N. Commission on Human Rights as a forum for public diplomacy against some of the worst regimes of the Cold War, including the Soviet Union.

With the end of the Cold War, however, the lines between the two kinds of rights grew blurry. What's more, "human rights" became just another club to be wielded for political ends by human-rights abusers who sat on the commission, often targeting Israel and America.

When it got so bad that Sudan, deep into its ethnic cleansing of Darfur, was elected unanimously to the Commission on Human Rights in 2004, the U.S. ambassador walked out. But things got even worse, and the commission was abolished two years later — only to be reconstituted as the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members today include such human-rights exemplars as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Cuba.

Just last year, however, the United States joined the council as part of President Obama's outreach to the world. But in doing so and being required to produce last week's report, we've implicitly sanctioned the conflation of real and supposed rights, even as the Senate has declined for decades to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Moreover, the report reads like a politically correct campaign brochure, touting everything from stimulus spending to Obamacare as promoting human rights, which renders the idea boundless and therefore meaningless.

History has shown that nations that promise everything as a matter of rights have provided little but the oppression required by that misconceived goal. We should not abandon a distinction at the core of our political order that has enabled us to be both free and prosperous — much less do so in the good name of human rights.

President Obama on Tuesday addressed the American people on the evolving role for the U.S. military in Iraq. Obama discussed what the U.S. military draw down in Iraq means for national security efforts and the fight against terrorism. Observes Cato scholar Christopher Preble, "Some people are advising the president to leave a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, essentially arguing that the United States is the rightful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty, and that the Iraqis simply can't be trusted with security matters. The president has wisely turned aside such recommendations in the past, and should do so again."

• "The Iraq Mission Shifts to the Iraqis," by Christopher Preble
• "War in Iraq Not Over," by Christopher Preble
• "Iraq Is Defenseless," by Ted Galen Carpenter

President Obama on Tuesday addressed the American people on the evolving role for the U.S. military in Iraq. Obama discussed what the U.S. military draw down in Iraq means for national security efforts and the fight against terrorism. Observes Cato scholar Christopher Preble, "Some people are advising the president to leave a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, essentially arguing that the United States is the rightful guarantor of Iraqi sovereignty, and that the Iraqis simply can't be trusted with security matters. The president has wisely turned aside such recommendations in the past, and should do so again."

• "War in Iraq Not Over," by Christopher Preble
• "Concerning the End of 'Combat Operations' in Iraq," by Christopher Preble
• "Iraq Is Defenseless," by Ted Galen Carpenter

featuring Michael F. Cannon

Drums are beating in Washington for a value-added tax in addition to the "stimulus" taxes, health care taxes, energy taxes and other taxes President Obama has imposed and wants to impose on hard-pressed taxpayers.

Supposedly a value-added tax is a magic elixir for curing budget deficits and excessive debt. Quack remedy would be more like it. If it worked, you'd observe that countries with a VAT had budget surpluses and no debt problems. But almost every country that has a VAT is plagued with budget deficits and excessive debt.

The most notable exception is Norway whose government has net assets larger than its gross domestic product, thanks to large oil revenues and a small population.

By contrast, the U.S. GDP is dwarfed by trillions of dollars of the government's unfunded liabilities. In the event Washington introduced a VAT, the government would spend all the revenue and then some, as has happened so many times before, and we would again find ourselves struggling with budget deficits and excessive debt — and a bigger tax burden.

A VAT puts big spenders on steroids. It generates lots of revenue, and because this tax is substantially hidden from consumers, there's less political resistance to it.

For example, a lumber company sells $100 of lumber to a furniture manufacturer, and let's say there's a 10% VAT on that transaction. The lumber company remits $10 to the government. The manufacturer turns the lumber into furniture, sells $350 of it to a retailer and there's a 10% — $35 —VAT on that transaction, but the manufacturer deducts the VAT previously levied on the lumber ($10). So the manufacturer remits $25 to the government.

Finally, the retailer sells the furniture to a consumer for $500, and there's a 10% — $50 — VAT on that transaction, but the retailer deducts the VAT previously levied on the furniture ($35). The retailer remits $15 to the government. In this example, $50 of value-added taxes ($10 + $25 + $15) are passed on to a consumer, but the net tax on the final sale is only $15. Although the specifics of a VAT vary from country to country, a major political aim is still to conceal most of the tax from consumers.

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development reported that since the 1960s, when the VAT began to be widely adopted, government spending by OECD member countries with a VAT soared from 30% of their GDP to 50%. Governments tend to spend all available revenue, and then some.

No surprise that the worst financial basket cases all have a VAT. Iceland has the highest VAT rates, but this didn't prevent its financial crisis and the near bankruptcy of its government. Italy's VAT rates are almost as high, and its debt exceeds its GDP. Financial crises are looming in Spain and Portugal, and of course they have a VAT.

Greece has a VAT, too, and when politicians ran out of money to pay government employees for more than a year's worth of work every year, they rioted in the streets. Great Britain has a VAT, and its government finances are in the worst shape since World War II — its budget deficit is expected to be bigger than that of Greece.

Moreover, the OECD has acknowledged that "(VAT) tax and transfer wedges have discouraged firms from offering employment and individuals from taking it, reduced employment and increased inequality."

By disrupting the economy, VAT-induced spending makes it more difficult to handle budget deficits and debt. The last thing we need is a VAT.

Have you noticed that many in the political class are absolutely shameless in trying to protect themselves and their colleagues from legitimate inquiry into their activities? For instance, Congress has passed a number of whistle-blower statutes, including the "financial-reform bill," to protect government and private-sector employees from retaliation when reporting the misdeeds of their superiors. Yet, the staff of members of Congress — precisely the people who are most likely to know about political corruption — enjoy no such protection.

Congress, under the guise of "campaign-finance reform," has repeatedly tried to find constitutional ways of limiting the free speech of real and potential opponents. What is even more remarkable, some members of Congress are not content with just trying to protect themselves, but have gone so far as to try to protect corrupt foreign leaders from those who may wish to expose their wrongdoing.

Exhibit A in this tawdry tale is a bill introduced by a notorious member of Congress, Rep. Maxine Waters, California Democrat, now up before her colleagues on ethics charges involving her successful attempt to get the taxpayers to bail out a bank where her husband sat on the board and where the Waterses had a substantial financial interest. This same Ms. Waters sponsored a bill, HR 2932, known as the "Stop Vulture Funds Act," which would basically prohibit investment funds that have acquired foreign debt that is now in default from seeking restitution from the defaulting and often highly corrupt governments.

These funds, which those who pander to the corrupt and irresponsible call "vulture funds," are actually the "good guys," because the investment fund managers have a very strong incentive to make sure that crooked government officials do not run off with their money, and thus they are willing to spend considerable time and money to provide the necessary evidence about ethically challenged government officials to the courts and news media.

Most of these fund managers do not undertake this activity for high-minded purposes, but to make a profit. As Adam Smith noted more than two centuries ago, the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker provide useful products for their fellow citizens primarily because they wish to make a profit — but in doing so, everyone benefits.

Why has Mrs. Waters introduced a bill to try to eliminate some of those who expose government corruption? In an excellent article in The Washington Post last week, Carol Leonnig explained how the corrupt president of the Republic of Congo, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, had funded a number of Washington lobbyists — to the tune of $10 million — with the goal of shutting down the sovereign debt investment funds. These lobbyists, in many meetings with Ms. Waters' staff, convinced her to introduce the legislation, which they largely wrote. But there is more to the story.

Back in 2006, I wrote several articles for The Washington Times exposing the misdeeds of Mr. Sassou-Nguesso — including his misuse of Washington lobbyists. These articles described, as others are now doing, how Mr. Sassou-Nguesso left his people in poverty while enriching himself from the Republic of Congo's huge oil wealth. English courts had certified his corruption, in part based on the good legal and investigative work of one of the foreign government debt investment funds. As a result, Mr. Sassou-Nguesso finally settled most of his country's debts. Now he appears desirous of getting revenge by trying to get the U.S. Congress to prohibit funds that have invested in government debt from legitimately going after those who defrauded them and other investors.

In last week's column, I described an arms deal between the French and Saudi governments, whereby the French are alleged in documents that will be presented to the court to have overcharged grossly the Saudis in order for kickbacks to be given to officials in the government of former President Jacques Chirac and his political party. The only reason this multibillion-dollar scam came to light was because of a complaint and legal filing in Paris by an individual involved in the case who felt cheated out of his commission. This is another example of a private party pursuing his own self-interest but, in doing so, revealing a major crime involving government officials. In an interesting twist, Jean-Yves Ollivier, a crony of Mr. Chirac, set up the system of international accounts to hide funds for African dictators, as documented by Global Witness and court filings in Hong Kong and London. Mr. Ollivier received $1 million dollars from the same Washington lobbying firm that received millions from Mr. Sassou-Nguesso and convinced Mrs. Waters to introduce "The Stop Vulture Act." Why, why, why?

Corruption in the issuance of government contracts is often brought to light by businesses that were deprived of the right to compete on a fair basis. Organizations representing taxpayers and public policy think tanks have identified many hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, abuse and unconstitutional federal spending, which, if corrected, would take away any excuse by the political class about the "need" for tax increases. Rather than eliminate the unnecessary spending, some of the political class, directly or indirectly, threaten Internal Revenue Service audits or the tax-exempt status of these spending watchdogs.

Governments rarely adequately police themselves, and international organizations, such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, World Bank, etc., not only fail to police their member governments, but often end up sanctioning some of their members' worst practices. Thus, the news media, private companies, including investment funds, private individuals, and taxpayer and good-government organizations must not be quashed in their efforts to expose corrupt government officials. Fortunately, we can still vote out those in power who seek to restrict our ability to expose their wrongdoing.

In the run-up to Glenn Beck's religious-themed rally at the Lincoln Memorial Saturday, Rep. John Fleming, R.-La., issued a stark warning about the voters' choice in November. Either we "remain a Christian nation," he told a GOP women's group last week, or it's "down the socialist road" to "a godless society."

Standing by was Fleming's fellow Louisiana Republican, Sen. David Vitter, the most famous "john" in 2007's "D.C. Madam" scandal. Awkward.

The GOP has lately drawn energy from the Tea Party movement, which sprung up in 2009 to protest overweening government. That's where the TP'ers kept the focus early on, sensibly calling a truce on "culture war" issues.

Unfortunately, judging by the rise of "Christian nation" rhetoric among Tea Party figures, that's starting to change.

In April, Sarah Palin told the evangelical group "Women of Joy": "Lest anyone try to convince you that God should be separated from the state, our founding fathers, they were believers."

They were — but so what? Those believers deliberately crafted "A Godless Constitution." In their 1996 book by that name, scholars Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore chronicle our proud heritage of secular government, in which, as Madison put it in his Memorial and Remonstrance, religious beliefs are "not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction."

The Constitution's early critics complained "that it was indifferent to Christianity." The Rev. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, thought we were losing the War of 1812 because we had "offended Providence," having "formed our Constitution without any acknowledgment of God."

Indeed, Kramnick and Moore write, the Framers enshrined "the Lockean liberal ideal" in the nation's fundamental law, creating "a demystified state, stripped of all religious ambitions."

Today, some Americans apparently fret about whether President Obama is "really" a Christian. Well, he sure sounds like one, as when he complained last summer about "folks who are frankly bearing false witness" about his health care bill, or when, on the campaign trail, he told one church gathering that, with the right leadership, "we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

Whatever happened to that "demystified state"?

I headed to the Beck rally Saturday, seeking fodder for a "What I Saw at the Revolution" column. But what I saw wasn't all that revolutionary.

Amid the usual Gadsden ("Don't Tread on Me") banners were a few "Christian flags" — white, with a red cross in a blue canton. Mostly gone were the spunky anti-government signs that dominated earlier rallies (organizers had discouraged them). Overall, it was largely as Beck had promised: 8/28 had "nothing to do with politics" and "everything to do with God."

The God Preacher Beck described from the Lincoln Memorial steps wasn't a vengeful Old Testament deity enraged by ruling-class corruption, but a benign, grandfatherly one who just wants America to be all it can be.

Some reporters likened 8/28 to a "religious revival," but it wasn't nearly that fervid and exciting. For once, the New York Times's description rang true: It "had the feeling of a large church picnic."

I confess I liked the Tea Partiers better when they were a little angrier — and when they stuck to the point.

America is a "Christian Nation" only in a trivial sense: that most of us, now and at the founding, are Christians.

And that's neither here nor there. "Creeping secularism" and insensitively situated mosques aren't what plagues us — it's a deluge of red ink falling on the just and the unjust alike.

Renewed faith may save your soul, but it won't save us from our looming fiscal apocalypse. For that, we need energized citizens who keep their eye on the ball.

Today we will look at a perfect example of sack of gutlessness that goes by the name of William Kristol. But he is far from alone.

This past weekend I turned on the TV and saw the end of a past event that was held at the Brookings Institution back on May 13. The event was Neoconservatism and the Future of American Foreign Policy and was held to mark the publishing of the book Neoconservatism — The Biography of a Movement. by Justin Vaïsse. All well and good; especially given the role neoconservatives have played in advocating the invasion of Iraq or urging military strikes on Iran.

The panelists were E.J. Dionne, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; William Kristol, Editor, The Weekly Standard, Francis Fukuyama, Bernard L. Schwarz Professor School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the book author Justin Vaïsse, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution.

Unfortunately, the part I saw was at the very end of the Q&A, literally the last question that was asked. But it was more than enough.

Here is how it appears in the transcript

SPEAKER: Hi. My name is Pete and I'm just a taxpayer. I guess one of the lines I liked in your book, Justin — my French is terrible, but I apologize — was that speaking about the neoconservative love of — love affair with the military. And I'm just curious to each member of the panel whether or not the intellectual underpinnings of the ideas should at all be influenced by the fact that as far as I know — and, hopefully, I'm wrong — none of the leading thinkers or proponents of the movement as you call it have ever served in the military. And I'm just curious does that contribute in a way to their lack of understanding of what soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors can actually do on the ground, especially in those forward operating bases, joint security stations, combat outposts that we speak about, continuing to man and our posture in the years ahead?

Interestingly, or perhaps tellingly, almost all panelists avoided dealing with the question.

Vaïsse said, "And as for any neoconservatives serving in the military, I will simply defer to the other panelists and to Bill maybe."

Dionne said, "Just on this question, I want to leave it to them.

Fukuyama said nothing.

And here is what Kristol is said:

You know, people can debate. I'm not going to give some — in some defensive way, give some list of people who have served in the military on one side or the other. I think the question is really contemptible.

One can understand Dionne. After all he was never a neoconservative and has not incessantly called for invading other countries.

Fukuyama should have said something considering that as a key Reagan Administration contributor to the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine, he was an important figure in the rise of neoconservatism. He was active in the Project for the New American Century think tank starting in 1997 and as a member co-signed the organization's letter recommending that President Bill Clinton support Iraqi insurgencies in the overthrow of then-President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. He was also among forty co-signers of William Kristol's September 20, 2001 letter to President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks that suggested the U.S. not only "capture or kill Osama bin Laden", but also embark upon "a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

But beginning in 2002 he began to distance himself from the neoconservative agenda of the Bush Administration, citing its overly militaristic basis and embrace of unilateral armed intervention, particularly in the Middle East. By late 2003, Fukuyama had voiced his growing opposition to the Iraq War and called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as Secretary of Defense.

So perhaps he feels he has already done his penance.

But it is Kristol whose rhetorical chutzpah that deserves our attention. Remember that Kristol, aside from being the son of Irving, who served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine and has been described as the "godfather of neoconservatism" was best known as Chief of Staff to the Vice President Dan Quayle in the George H. W. Bush administration. The New Republic dubbed Kristol "Dan Quayle's brain" upon being appointed; which, both in retrospect and obvious at the time, was not exactly a big hurdle to jump.

Kristol was a leading proponent of the Iraq War. In 1998, he and other prominent foreign policy experts sent a letter to President Clinton urging a stronger posture against Iraq. Kristol argued that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to the United States and its allies: "The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."

In June 2006, at the height of the Lebanon War, he suggested that, "We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

Now everyone has the right to exercise their First Amendment opinion, no matter how ill-informed it is. The country has allowed American neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois in the late 1970s and more recently we've let the funerals of dead soldiers be disrupted by hateful, religious bigots, all in the name of free speech.

But by the same standard people have every right to question the qualifications and wisdom of those advocating a policy, especially when the stakes are literally life and death. If a member of the general public suddenly claimed that eating Big Macs was the way to cure America's obesity one would expect that questions would be asked of their medical credentials.

Similarly, when Kristol who rarely, if ever, sees a possible U.S. military action he doesn't support — as he said in his response "we are just generally hawkish" — should absolutely expect to be questioned about his qualifications for advocating wars.

As is obvious to anyone who has ever served in the military wars are ALWAYS about killing people and destroying things. There is no way around it.

People like Kristol and Fukuyama, and so many others in Washington and elsewhere who deliberately choose to be mouthpieces in the service of American empire deserve all the skepticism and doubt that can be piled on them. Wars are not just another mere public policy debate; they are the ultimate life and death choice, affecting not only those in the military who carry them out but the rest of the country which sends them as well. Those who advocate them damn well better be prepared to back up their choices with logical reasoning, instead of gutlessly sputtering with feigned indignation and acting like the American version of the famed British Colonel Blimp . You want to know what is really contemptible? Being a pompous, jingoistic warmonger who has no stake in the policies he advocates is contemptible.

After all, taking responsibility for one's action is supposed to be a bedrock conservative principle. One would never have seen a real conservative like Bill Buckley ducking the question. Of course, unlike Kristol, Buckley had actually served in the military, and the CIA.

All in all, Kristol, and far too many others like him, is the perfect example of the classic Latin expression, "dulce bellum inexpertis", translated as war is sweet to those who have never experienced it. This is a quote from an ancient Greek poet Pindar, made famous by the Dutch Renaissance humanist Erasmus as the title for his meditation on the subject of war.

And, before you ask, I served four years active duty in the U.S. Navy, 1973-1977.

featuring Julian Sanchez

Despite occasional conciliatory language, the overall tone of the Pentagon's just-released annual report to the US Congress regarding China's military power seems more worried and confrontational than its predecessors, with the exception of the extremely hawkish version released in 2006 during the Bush administration's most militant phase. While American commentators generally have not interpreted the tone in that fashion, scholars and journalists in East Asian countries, especially Japan, certainly are doing so, and they express concern about a further deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing. Such a prospect understandably agitates nations in East Asia, since it would inevitably raise tensions throughout their region.

In terms of substance, most of the major observations and complaints contained in the report are familiar ones. Washington once again objects to lack of "transparency," both with respect to the level of China's military spending and the nature of China's security doctrine.

The point about spending is entirely warranted. Beijing habitually understates the amount of its military budget. No credible Western analyst takes the official figure (some $71 billion in 2009) seriously. Numerous items, including research and development costs for major weapon systems — normal features in nearly every other country's defense budget — are not included in China's. Most independent estimates of Beijing's military spending conclude that the actual level is anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent higher. The Pentagon's own estimate is that spending was approximately $142 billion in 2009, and will be "over $150 billion" in 2010. Interestingly, previous reports included both "low end" and "high end" estimates. In the current document, the low-end figure seems to have disappeared.

The complaints about the lack of transparency in China's defense doctrine are less legitimate. China does not give much detail about its military's goals and purposes, but that reticence is not all that different from most other major countries. Indeed, the same allegation could be directed at the United States, which Chinese officials and policy analysts have done from time to time.

Even less justifiable are the concerns expressed that China's overall military expenditures, and the development of certain weapon systems, seem to be more than necessary for the country's legitimate defense needs. That objection is especially in bad taste coming from the United States. Even if one accepts the Pentagon's estimate of PRC military outlays, they are still dwarfed by the more than $700 billion US military budget. China has a stronger case that it is Washington's spending and capabilities that are wildly out of proportion to America's legitimate defense needs.

With regard to China's apparent strategic objectives, the new assessment intensifies the warning in last year's report that while Taiwan remains the core issue for Beijing, China's ambitions now seem significantly broader. Specifically, the Pentagon notes the growing efforts to project power farther out into the Pacific and, increasingly, into the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the greatest worry expressed in the document concerns China's development of a new anti-ship ballistic missile with a projected range of nearly 1,000 kilometers. Such a weapon could put the US naval fleet, including the vaunted aircraft carriers, in the Western Pacific within striking distance.

That development would, at a minimum, complicate Washington's implicit commitment to intervene on Taiwan's behalf if Beijing sought to use force to compel the island's reunification with the mainland. Such a potent weapon, combined with the rest of China's military modernization program, could even raise the probable cost of any US intervention so high that no rational American president would incur the risk.

It is unsurprising that China would seek to expand its reach out from its homeland. Historically, that is what rising great powers do, and China is clearly a rising great power. It is also unsurprising that Beijing appears intent on developing the military wherewithal to settle the Taiwan issue on terms favorable to China. Both the Chinese people and the regime regard Taiwan as rightfully Chinese territory, and they view the return of the island to China's possession as the last remaining major piece of unfinished business from their country's long period of humiliation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although Beijing clearly prefers to use economic incentives and other peaceful measures to entice Taiwan into accepting eventual reunification, the threat of force lurks in the background if a conciliatory strategy proves unsuccessful. Washington must face that reality, and US leaders must ask themselves whether preserving Taiwan's de facto independence is ultimately worth the risk of a nasty confrontation with China.

The new Pentagon report merely confirms that China is a rising great power with ambitions to match. That is an uncomfortable development for the United States as the incumbent hegemon in East Asia. And perhaps that accounts for the somewhat grumpy tone of the latest document. But China does not appear to be a malignantly expansionist power akin to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union. Instead, it seems to be a conventional great power seeking to shape the international system in a prudent way to its own advantage. Although that understandably creates some anxiety for the United States — and for China's neighbors in East Asia — it is an anxiety that can and should be managed. Unfortunately, the Pentagon report does little to advance such a goal.