Left Flank

David Remnick mentions how President Barack H. Obama, before announcing his candidacy last year, used biblical tropes to express political tactics. Even more than building a multiracial coalition, it's this use of religious themes to bind fractious interest groups makes the Republican pandering to social conservatives almost offensive.

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I'm not surprised The Weekly Standard's John McCormack links to an article trashing FDR by asserting «The seeds of that global conflict [WW2], unimaginable in 1933 given the relative weakness of Germany and Japan, were planted in the first years of the Roosevelt administration as FDR focused on the American economy.» I'm surprised Frederick W. Kagan wrote it.

As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a «real» problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Americans than Haifa Street.

One problem with this emotion is that it ignores the sequel to the Great Depression -- the rise of militaristic Japan marked by the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and Hitler's rise to power in Germany in 1933, both of which resulted in part from economic dislocations spreading outward from the U.S. The inward-focus of the U.S. and the leading Western powers (Great Britain and France) throughout the 1930s allowed these problems to metastasize, ultimately leading to World War II.

Is it possible that American inattention to the world in the coming years could lead to a similarly devastating result? You betcha.

I actually agree with this opening, and I expected Kagan to argue that economic issues are security issues. Instead, Kagan turns hack and attacks FDR. This is an astounding reversal of post-WW1 history, when Republicans, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, blocked ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, because of Article One enabling the League of Nations. The US officially ended its participation in WW1 with the Porter-Knox Resolution on July 2, 1921. Republican presidents, Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, were bystanders as private agents conducted American foreign policy and Congress increased tariffs. Coolidge's term witnessed the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 outlawing war. Herbert Hoover's most significant foreign policy successes involved improving relations with Central and South American nations by replacing the Roosevelt Corollary with the Clark Memorandum. The most significant Republican foreign policy goals in the 1920s involved German reparations. FDR, in 1932, confronted Republican isolationists in Congress.

Partisan animus must cloud Kagan's perspective on the Roosevelt administration. Kagan ironically doesn't appreciate «...the patience with which FDR brought the country to understand the danger of fascism.» FDR, one of the very few presidents fluent in foreign languages, including German, recognized the danger of Hitler's 1933 election immediately, yet it took him until 1941 to navigate the shoals of depression and Republican isolationism to position the US as the arsenal of democracy. In the process, FDR battled Democratic segregationists who, though, supportive of military force, also confronted FDR's economic and social policies. Kagan wants to divide presidential responsibilities for economic, social, and foreign policies, as if any president could get congressional approval for one without considering logrolling attempts to combine the three made by election-minded politicians.

Kagan deserves a spot on Fox with Michael Goldfarb, not a foreign policy fellowship.

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Bill Maher on the October 17 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher offered a clip of a quote from the Federal Reserve chairman, Marriner S. Eccles, who served from 1934 to 1948, and retired from the Board of Governors in 1951.

In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

At the least, this is an efficient illustration of a cause for the current financial meltdown. Here's the complete quote Maher excerpted.
Steve McDevitt, after offering the Eccles quote as a foil to Milton Friedman monetary policy, goes on to conclude that Senator Barack Obama's fiscal policy, devised by University of Chicago advisers, trumps Republicans supply-side nonsense and populism.

Following this line of reasoning Obama would be opposed to more adjustment of the interest rate by the Fed. This would be a move that seeks to make credit more available to consumers or investors. Instead, Obama seems to be advocating what I would consider the more sound policy of organically growing both purchasing power and investment capital (the grassroots mentality apparently filters through to his governing style as well). The way he seems to be doing this without the federal government engaging in active monetary or fiscal policy (as opposed to laissez-fair monetary and fiscal policy) is through wealth redistribution by tax restructuring.

While some may disagree with these conclusions there is no doubt that there is heavy intellectual and rational thought going into the formation of Democratic economic and tax policy. It is not just populist rhetoric, as some Republicans claim. Here is a list of Obama's economic advisors with links to their profiles and other articles just in case you'd like to see what their theoretical backgrounds are.

Listening to Senator Bernie Sanders is a bit of a red herring, since FDR, Eccles, and Obama are not devising ways of deploying socialism in the US. It just goes to show that there is a place for a redistributive fiscal policy in a capitalist society.

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Yesterday was Liberation Day in ROK. That I have mixed feelings about the day is an understatement.

On one hand, Liberation Day (or V-J day in the States) is an odd national holiday on the face of it. The day celebrates the surrender of the Japanese to the US and its WW2 allies, which as a result, liberated the Japanese colony of Chosen from Japanese rule. The Koreans did not liberate themselves, and many actively collaborated with the Japanese or joined the Communists in China.

Korea was not liberated truly from foreign intervention in August 1945 since Korea came under the spheres of influence by another two foreign powers (the US and the USSR). Moreover, Korea was not handed over to the Koreans to rule, but it was divided in half.

Much misconceptions exist about this transitional period, from 1945 to 1948. For example, a common belief is that the division of Korea was agreed upon by the allies at the Potsdam Conference, but during Cairo and Potsdam Conference discussions on the future of Korea, no mention was made specifically about a division of Korea, only that Korea would be granted independence in due course following the war. Without a clear agreed plan and with the Pacific War coming to end hastily, and Soviet troops nearing Korea and Japan, with US forces far away in the Pacific, the US came up with a unilateral and quickly-drawn proposal to divide Korea in half into two occupying zones (as Imperial Russia and Japan had proposed many years before when their ambitions on Korea clashed) so that the US would at least get a foothold in Korea even though it was not feasible to reach Korea in time to challenge the Soviet occupation of whole Korea. The US was surprised that the Soviets complied to this proposal and stopped at the 38th parallel. If a proposal for joint occupation of whole Korea was made, as in Austria, it would have expedited decolonialization of Korea and would have left Korea in one piece to chart its future. But that was not the case.

The US side maintains that the zonal occupation proposal was a temporary measure, a military one and not a political one, but history tells us that that fateful decision sealed a series of events that made the division of Korea permanent: different approaches to decolonialization and demilitarization of Japanese forces in Korea, the trusteeship confusion and debacle, deep polarization of political forces in respective zones, political assassinations and violent purges, uprisings and beginnings of civil war, border clashes that led to all-out war, foreign military interventions, precarious armistice with lack of peace treaty, security-first policies and political repression .......

One minor quibble: At Teheran, all parties agreed upon the principle of Korean independence. FDR at Yalta recommended dividing the Korean peninsula into trustee zones, administered by the US, USSR, and China, to prepare Korea for independence.
One major quibble: There were at least two Korean governments-in-exile, with many leaders self-exiled to other states. Inter-factional and personal squabbles between prominent Korean leaders, even those of the same hue, developed before the Japanese had even consolidated control of the peninsula. Also, both American and Soviet forces arrived on the peninsula after the formation of the Korean People's Republic on September 6, 1945, whose cabinet included both Communist and conservative leaders.

As Carter Eckert and Ki-baik Lee argue, «Koreans in 1945 were not merely pawns in a great power game: just as Koreans actions were affected by the presence of two foreign armies, so too were the Americans and Soviets influenced and constrained by the Korean milieu.» (p. 335) Generally, the Soviets allowed the KPR to do its work within its zone; Americans refused to recognize the KPR outright. Although both governments were committed to reconciliation of the trustee zones, local forces co-opting native, and antagonistic, political parties undermined the KPR and the zones devolved into states. Fratricidal enmity between politicians ensued, resulting in murder, exile, and marginalization. The enmity between Kim Il-sung and lee Syng-man predated the KPR and never abated.

Using the American and Soviet occupations as a justification for their own fratricidal enmity is a Korean specialty. The plain fact is, that Korean and foreigner contributed to the tragedy of division.

Yet, this continual revisionism only distracts from the present-day reality of a national holiday that oddly always uncovers the impotence of Korean nationalism, not its triumph. Worst of all, it's the time for presidential pardons, when eminent criminals and traffic violators get off easy. It's no surprise, that on July 17, Constitution Day, Seoul de-emphasized that national holiday by requiring South Koreans to work. Fratricidal enmity and government ineptitude are stronger than law in Korea still.