SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010
KLMNO
B
B5
Pride goeth before a superpower’s fall
hubris from B1
why wouldn’t it work for the world? Except the world was disinclined to follow along. European leaders, too steeped in real-life, balance-of-power politics to ponder things as they ought to be, looked skeptically at Wilson’s Fourteen Points, with its calls for dis- armament, rights for colonial peoples and a League of Nations, among other warm fuzzies. The president did not fare better back home, where Congress re- fused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, which included U.S. entry into the league. “The real tragedy was that Wil- son could not himself abandon his dream . . . and thus help bring Amer- icans to the painful, crucial realization that they must commit themselves to a world they could not perfect,” Beinart writes. The imperfect world gave way to
KRISTIN LENZ
Spills, crashes and asteroids: Never say never
disaster from B1
Such certainty about timing is rare; indeed, a key obstacle to taking pre- ventive measures against unlikely dis- asters is precisely that they are un- likely to occur in the near future. Of course, if the consequences of the disaster would be very grave, the fact that the risk is low is hardly a good reason to ignore it. But there is a natu- ral tendency to postpone preventive action against dangers that are likely to occur at some uncertain point in the future (“sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as the Bible says), es- pecially if prevention is expensive, and especially because there is so much else to do in the here and now. Our tendency to procrastinate is ag-
gravated by three additional circum- stances: when fixing things after the fact seems like a feasible alternative to preventing disaster in the first place; when the people responsible have a short time horizon; and when the risk is uncertain in the sense that no objec- tive probability can be attached to it. All these forces came together to permit the economic crisis, despite abundant warnings from reputable sources, including economists and fi- nancial journalists. Risky financial practices were highly profitable, and giving them up would have been costly to financial firms and their executives and shareholders. The Federal Re- serve and most academic economists believed incorrectly that in the event of a crash, remedial measures — such as cutting interest rates — would be enough to jump-start the economy. Meanwhile, depending on how they
even sensible to wait and see, hoping that with the passage of time, at least some of the uncertainty about risks to the economy would dissipate.
T
he BP oil leak reveals a similar pattern, though not an identical one. One difference is that the
companies involved must have known that in the event of an accident on a deepwater rig, prompt and effective remedies for an oil leak would be un- likely — meaning that there was no re- liable alternative to preventing an ac- cident. But the risk of such an accident could not quantified, and it was be- lieved to be low because there hadn’t been many serious accidents involved in deepwater drilling. (No one knew how low; the claim by BP chief exec- utive Tony Hayward that the chance of such an accident was “one in a mil- lion” was simply a shorthand way of saying that the company assumed the risk was very small.)
But other forces were similar in the leak and the financial crisis. If deep- water oil drilling had been forbidden or greatly curtailed, the sacrifice of corporate profits and of consumer welfare (which is dependent on low gasoline prices) would have been great. The regulators who could have insisted on greater preventive efforts were afflicted with the usual short ho- rizons of government officials. Elected representatives did not want to shut down deepwater drilling over an un- certain risk of a disastrous spill, and this reluctance doubtless influenced the response (or lack of it) of the civil servants who do the regulating. The horizon of the private actors
It is very hard for anyone to be rewarded for preventing a low-probability disaster. Officials bear the political costs of prevention, but none of the benefits.
were compensated, many financial ex- ecutives had a limited horizon; they were not worried about a collapse years down the road because they ex- pected to be securely wealthy by then. Similarly, elected officials have short time horizons; with the risk of a finan- cial collapse believed to be low, and therefore a meltdown unlikely in the immediate future, they had little in- centive to push for costly preventive measures. This in turn discouraged the ap- pointed officials of the Federal Re- serve and other regulatory agencies from taking such measures. “We’ve never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis,” Ben Bernanke, then chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in 2005. It happened the next year.
Finally, with no reliable probability
estimate of a financial collapse avail- able, it seemed natural and perhaps
was foreshortened as well. Stockhold- ers often don’t worry about the risks taken by the firms in which they in- vest, because diversified stock hold- ings can help insulate them. Managers worry more, but they are not person- ally liable for the debts of the firms they oversee and, more important, the danger to their own livelihood posed by seemingly small threats is not enough to discourage risk-taking. It seems that no one has much incentive to adopt or even call for safeguards against low-probability, but potential- ly catastrophic, disasters.
T
wo final problems illuminate our vulnerability to such risks. First, it is very hard for anyone to be
rewarded for preventing a low-prob- ability disaster. Had the Federal Re- serve raised interest rates in the early 2000s rather than lowering them, it might have averted the financial col- lapse in 2008 and the ensuing global
economic crisis. But we wouldn’t have known that. All that people would have seen was a recession brought on by high interest rates. Officials bear the political costs of preventive meas- ures but do not receive the rewards. The second problem is that there are so many risks of disaster that they can’t all be addressed without bank- rupting the world many times over. In fact, they can’t even be anticipated. In my 2004 book “Catastrophe: Risk and Response,” I discussed a number of disaster possibilities. Yet I did not con- sider volcanic eruptions, earthquakes or financial bubbles, simply because none of those seemed likely to precipi- tate catastrophes. In principle, all disaster possibil- ities should be ranked by their “expec- ted cost” — roughly speaking, by mul- tiplying the dollar consequences of the disaster if it occurs by the prob- ability that it will occur. If Disaster A would cause a loss of $1 trillion, and the annual probability of it occurring is 1 percent, then its expected annual cost is $10 billion. (That means we wouldn’t want to spend more than that each year to prevent it.) And sup- pose Disaster B would exact $100 bil- lion in damage, and its annual prob- ability of occurring is 5 percent. That is a higher probability, but the expec- ted cost — $5 billion — is only half as great, so we should spend less trying to prevent it. It would be nice to be able to draw up a complete list of disaster possibil- ities, rank them by their expected cost, decide how much we want to spend on preventing each one and proceed down the list until the total cost of prevention equals the total expected cost averted. But that isn’t feasible. Many of the probabilities are un- known. The consequences are un- known. The costs of prevention and remediation are unknown. And any- way, governments won’t focus on re- mote possibilities, however ominous in expected-cost terms. A politician who proposed a cam- paign of preventing asteroid collisions with Earth, for example, would be ridiculed and probably voted out of of- fice. Yet, planetary scientist John S. Lewis has estimated that there is a 1 percent chance of an asteroid of one or more kilometers in diameter hitting the Earth in a millennium, and that such a hit would probably kill on the order of 1 billion people. That works out to 10,000 deaths per year, far ex- ceeding the annual deaths from air- plane crashes. There are many stubborn obstacles
to effective disaster prevention, and I do not expect them to be solved. We must brace for further crises, magni- fied by increases in world population (meaning more potential victims) and by the relentless march of technology, whether in oil extraction or financial speculation. After all, it’s only in the movies that we send deep-sea oil drillers to blow up asteroids — and watch them suc- ceed.
World War II, which in turn gave rise to a new, postwar mutation in America’s foreign policy: the hubris of toughness. Containment, a doctrine articulated by diplomat-scholar George Kennan as a narrow political strategy against the So- viet Union, morphed into a military strategy against global communism. Cheap victories against the reds in places such as Iran and Greece soon led U.S. policymakers to believe that they could succeed anywhere. And apparently they needed to, be- cause the national security doctrine of the age — embodied in National Security Council Report 68, issued in 1950 — dic- tated that America not only had to be strong, but to look strong as well, be- cause even the appearance of weakness in one part of the world would embold- en communists elsewhere. This made any spot on the planet strategically im- portant for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, from the Bay of Pigs to Viet- nam. “Even when presidents realized that global containment was impossible,” says Beinart, “they feared saying so pub- licly, and as a result, they perpetuated the political dynamic that held them captive.” For instance, Lyndon Johnson’s true passion was the Great Society, not “that bitch of a war,” as the Texan put it, but he told biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin that if he pulled out of Viet- nam, people would say that “I was a cow- ard. An unmanly man.” A high price for keeping one’s manhood intact. Beinart argues that it was not Jimmy Carter or the New Left pacifists but rath- er Ronald Reagan who successfully faced down the hubris of toughness, ending the idea that America should de- ploy substantial forces to contain com- munism across the planet. The Gipper
that Homer had given his gods.” But then the wings began melting.
B
einart is a classic Washington scholar-journalist-pundit — a Yale and Oxford graduate who has ed-
ited the New Republic, stamped his wonk pass at the Council on Foreign Re- lations and now hangs out at the New America Foundation and the City Uni- versity of New York. This is his second book on U.S. foreign policy, and he weighs in on politics and policy every- where from the Daily Beast to the New York Review of Books, where he recently issued a controversial takedown of America’s pro-Israel establishment. Unsurprisingly, this world of scholars and ideas takes on critical importance in his tale. As much as the presidents and generals who make and execute foreign policy, “The Icarus Syndrome” dwells on the thinkers, great and small, in and out of government, who have debated for- eign policy throughout the decades — people such as Lippman and Kennan, as well as Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Leslie Gelb, Elliott Abrams, Francis Fu- kuyama, Paul Wolfowitz and Beinart’s hero-foil, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. In other words, Peter Beinart’s book is premised on the notion that people like Peter Beinart matter greatly. (One might call that a hubris of some kind.) Yet, while Beinart deftly chronicles the bat- tles among these thinkers and their worldviews, he is somewhat less con- vincing at always identifying how these debates and doctrines affect real policy and action — what presidents actually do.
If anything, his account underscores how many of the best-known and most respected intellectuals either despaired at their lack of influence, watched their ideas get twisted beyond recognition or found themselves abandoned precisely at the moment when their insights could have mattered most. “The Icarus Syn- drome” should be required reading for all Kennan wannabes and aspiring Washington wonks. Its lesson: Abandon hope all ye who theorize here. The book already is on the must-read list, apparently, in the Obama adminis- tration. Politico’s Mike Allen reports that White House and State Department offi- cials are fans of it. Unfortunately, com- pared with his skillful historical narra- tive, Beinart’s policy recommendations for President Obama fall a little flat. “Barack Obama will need to redefine
our national faith, to decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery,” Beinart writes. “He will need to find new, more manageable mis- sions that draw upon that beautiful American lie: that nothing is beyond our
“We believe that our own desire for a new international order under which reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men everywhere.”
— Woodrow Wilson, May 1916
“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this
responsibility--I welcome it.” — John F. Kennedy, January 1961
“In the images of celebrating Iraqis, we have also seen the ageless appeal of human freedom... Men and women in every culture need liberty like they need food and water and air.”
— George W. Bush, May 2003
thumped his chest and spoke of an “evil empire” for dramatic effect, but in prac- tice he made nice with Gorbachev and invaded only “Potemkin Vietnams” such as Grenada, in Beinart’s words. Yet Reagan’s success in ending the
Cold War did not lead to an outbreak of peace or the disappearance of hubris. Unburdened by rivals, the next genera- tion doubled down on a new hubris of dominance — only to dead-end in Iraq. The road to Baghdad began in Pana- ma, with President George H.W. Bush’s 1989 ouster of Manuel Noriega. (“Years later,” Beinart writes, “Dick Cheney would call the invasion ‘good practice,’ ‘a trial run.’ ”) The easy triumph there, fol- lowed by the quick Persian Gulf War as well as the Kosovo war under President Bill Clinton, led to a new mission for America: “Rather then merely contain- ing evil,” Beinart writes, “it could impose good.” This mission found its coziest home in
the George W. Bush White House, and its impetus on Sept. 11, 2001. “We have to think of this as an opportunity,” Bush said just hours after the terrorist attacks. Again, success propelled further am- bition, as the speed with which the Af- ghanistan invasion toppled the Taliban led the Bush administration to believe that Iraq would be just as simple. At first, it appeared so. Beinart quotes an Icarus-like Gen. Tommy Franks, declar- ing that new technology meant com- manders could now see the battlefield with the “kind of Olympian perspective
reach.” And to avoid a Carter-like fate, Obama must “be as aggressive as Rea- gan in finding symbolic balm for Amer- ica’s wounded pride.” Be less like Carter, more like Reagan; sounds like good advice — it’s just not particularly actionable. And Beinart’s suggestion that Obama embrace the hu- mility of time (be patient) and of place (live up to the principles you advocate for others) translates into a convention- al list of liberal foreign policy objectives, such as sharing more power at the World Bank and other international in- stitutions, cutting our own arsenals be- fore demanding that other countries not pursue nukes and accepting that we should bear a heavier burden in dealing with global warming. Beinart also coun- sels that policymakers focus on the na- tion’s true interests over threat percep- tions and self-proclaimed values, devel- op a deeper understanding of history and of local conditions in key regions and “jettison our visions of invincibility.” I wish he hadn’t. Part of the appeal of
“The Icarus Syndrome” is the author’s decision to stop short of some grand doctrine for U.S. foreign policy — as vir- tually all books in the genre feel com- pelled to offer — and to let his stories do the talking. I can only hope the book’s cachet for Team Obama has less to do with Beinart’s prescriptions for the fu- ture than with his powerful cautionary account of how hubris can make already bad situations a lot, lot worse.
lozadac@washpost.com
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