Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea: A Critical Analysis of Jane and Bertha

{In a belated, yet continuing celebration of Women's History Month, this week's entry will flashback to a literary analysis of the novel considered to be a Victorian feminist classic (Charlotte Brontë’s (1847) Jane Eyre) and a postcolonial response and critique to the latter, Wide Sargasso Sea.}

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, widely regarded as a feminist classic in the European tradition, provides a rich psychological profile of Jane Eyre in the Bildungsroman genre. This female Bildungsroman, adapted from a traditionally male literary template, provides the reader intimate access to Jane’s internal struggles as she progresses from childhood to a self-realized adult (Crutchfield). Bertha Mason, otherwise known as Antoinette Cosway (and the first wife of Edward Rochester) to readers of Jean Rhys’ critical novella to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, features prominently in the supernaturally-infused plot, especially in terms of Jane’s contention with the gender discrimination inherent in 18th century Victorian England. I make the argument that Bertha Mason is an outward expression of Jane’s (and to some extent Brontë’s) inner self that she must hide (or lose) in order to become effectively integrated into the society of the time. Moreover, I argue that Bertha’s death at the end of Jane Eyre is purposeful, so as to deprive Jane of her defiance to Victorian society while giving the appearance of gender equality. I make this argument through a close analysis of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, in which the character of Bertha is portrayed and explored with marked differences.

In order to better facilitate a close-reading of Jane Eyre, it is helpful to provide a brief description of the context in which Brontë writes the novel. Victorian England severely restricted the roles of women, as women were regarded as incapable of complex thought and physically fragile (Newman 3-13). Moreover, the ideal Victorian woman was docile, physically beautiful, graceful, and largely confined to the domestic sphere (that is, if she was of a sufficient socioeconomic class; lower class women often had to leave the house out of the need to meet the prerogatives for basic survival) (Newman 3-13). Meanwhile, Great Britain was active imperially, having established colonies in the Caribbean, such as in the West Indies, and we see its influence throughout both narratives in consistent references to slavery, rebellion, and yearnings for freedom (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13). The aftermath of slavery in the British Empire in the Caribbean in which Rhys focuses her novel on, demonstrates parallel tensions between the development of Jane and Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, and it can be argued that Antoinette is a critical refiguring of Jane (Crutchfield).

As a child, Jane is described by her aunt, Mrs. Reed, as fiery and otherwise rebellious for a child (especially of her gender), implicitly invoking the social training of obedience and docility in female children (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13). This fire is similarly expressed in Rhys’ narrative of Antoinette’s home of Jamaica and the vibrant landscape there, which symbolically embodies Antoinette’s true self (Rhys 103). Rhys’ allusions to Brontë’s red room in Jane Eyre, in which both protagonists face similar prison-like conditions as imposed on them by society, is telling. Nowhere is this expressed more clearly than in Mr. Brocklehurst’s first meeting with Jane and her aunt, when Mrs. Reed expresses hope for Jane, through careful and strict teaching at the Lowood School, to come to embody the key Victorian ideals of femininity: “‘I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects…to be made useful, to be kept humble’” (Brontë 45). However, from an early age Jane expresses her inner passions regarding social justice and women’s autonomy, often pushing back against societal prescriptions surrounding gender and class, but never fully able to escape their constraints (Crutchfield; Newman 3-13).

Moreover, Jane is very vocal about the unjust lack of love that Mrs. Reed regards her with, in a sense arguing that it is this compassion that every human being, regardless of class, is entitled to (Brontë 28-39). It is through her experiences at the Lowood School in which these ideals, her accompanying fiery disposition, and her human yearning for love and acceptance are nearly quenched by the instilling in her of the qualities of a proper Christian young lady (a lofty standard symbolized by Miss Temple), including humility, submission, and devotion to God and any other superior such as a future husband (Brontë 65-90). Similar to this narrative in Jane Eyre, in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette (before being rechristened Bertha), also undergoes a similar indoctrination at her convent school, but nevertheless feels a similar inner disquiet, commenting at one point that “my needle is swearing” and paradoxically asserting that she “felt bolder, happier, more free” but “not so safe” within the walls of the convent (Rhys 30, 34). To me, this shows her identification and connection with the natural beauty of her home island, in which she instinctively understands that it represents her unbound self (Crutchfield; Rhys 30, 34).

Similar molding and indoctrination of women into happy acceptance of the domestic sphere happens to both Jane and Antoinette at the common nexus of the husband or male authority figure (Crutchfield). Much like Rochester seeks to mold Jane into his ideal version of a docile Victorian woman, “this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon [Bertha],” the Rochester of Rhys’s novel re-christens Antoinette as Bertha, giving her an anglicized name (Brontë 290; Rhys 81). This renaming is a prelude to his further attempts to wipe away core aspects of her identity, such as by taking away her previous wardrobe (including the symbolic red dress) and isolating her from the other residents at Thornfield (Brontë 290; Rhys 112). This loss of identity and innocence is summed up as Antoinette muses about her appearance and the lack of a mirror: “Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away” (Rhys 107). To me, the renaming and the withholding of a looking glass (uncertainty of identity) symbolizes to me the destruction wrought on colonized nations by the male colonizer figure (Brontë 290; Rhys 81).

Despite finding friendship and acceptance from fellow classmate Helen Burns, Jane still feels a sense of psychological isolation and continually describes the Lowood School as a prison that restricts her from exploring the outside world as she pleases, developing a similar agoraphobic fear of the outside world as Annette (Brontë 65-90; Rhys 30-34). Jane laments in Chapter 10 that:

I had had no communication by letter or message with the outer world: school-rules, school-duties, school-habits…and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences and antipathies: such was what I knew of existence. And now I felt that it was not enough…I desired liberty…change, stimulus… (93) 

For me, this signals events to come, such as the imprisonment of Bertha Mason in the attic at Thornfield Estate, in which Jane’s inner turmoil comes to boil when she confronts Rochester about his possible engagement to Blanche Ingram (before encountering Bertha), in which she decries the socioeconomic and patriarchal barriers to their equality in love and expresses her inner disquiet whereby snapping at Rochester, “Do you think I am an automaton—a machine without feelings?” (Brontë 252). To me, this alludes to Bertha’s parallel frustrations at Rochester’s remolding of her identity. Similarly, Bertha’s psychological suffering in Wide Sargasso Sea, partially from a similar upbringing in which she too searched for love (primarily from a matriarchal figure, like her mother Annette) begs comparison to Jane’s growing unease with her life situation and the fires that remain burning inside of her (Brontë 116-117). Moreover, despite the best efforts of her teachers and Mr. Brocklehurst, whose shaming of Jane’s accidental drop of her slate (an incident that highlights her outsider status and the evils present in her childhood defiances) serves to define her as “not a member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and alien,” Jane merely internalizes rather than expunges this “alien” fire (Brontë 75). It is this mindset where Jane escapes her limited sphere of existence to a new place as governess: Thornfield Estate.

Thus, this overwhelming theme of imprisonment (having gone from the “red room” at Gateshead to Lowood School beforehand) continues at the Thornfield Estate in which Jane is now governess to Mr. Edward Rochester’s illegitimate child Adéle (Brontë 95-105). Brontë’s frequent allusions to slavery seem to become even more frequent as Jane acutely feels the socialized feelings of inferiority in comparison to the strong male figure of Mr. Rochester, the master of Thornfield estate (Brontë 95-105). For example, when Rochester attempts to give Jane new dresses and jewels, Jane remarks that Rochester smiles “such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched” (Brontë 269; Thomas 57-58). In between these emotionally confusing encounters with Rochester, she feels trapped by the dark, gloomy surroundings of the Gothic estate and expresses this paramount longing for freedom that both she and Rhys’ Bertha feel:

Who blames me? Many no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the third story, backwards and forwards…and allow my mind’s eye to dwell on whatever bright visions rose before it--and certainly there were many and glowing…It is in vain to say human beings out to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they can find it…Women…feel just as men feel…they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation… (116-117)

This previous passage is notable in the respect that it shows the vitality of Jane’s self, particularly her inner self, her vivid imagination correlating very nicely to the parallel psychological landscape and physical hometown of Antoinette/Bertha, which is described in vivid, fiery tones that to Rochester are anathema to his own sense of self, almost to the point of seeming unnatural or “demonic” (Brontë 116-117, 290; Rhys 103). However, Jane’s and Bertha’s cold, prison-like surroundings in England serve as a foil to their fiery natures that both have tried to conceal for better or worse (Brontë 45; Newman 3-13; Rhys 107). England, described by Bertha, is “cold” and anathema to her inner fire (Rhys 107). This ominous feeling continues when she expresses that she and Rochester must have “lost our way” to England, the manifestation of her nightmares, “this cardboard world where everything is coloured brown or dark red or yellow that has no light in it” (Rhys 107).

The embittered and slightly mad Rochester recognizes this fire in Antoinette, seeking to take away from her that vitality in a bid to regain control over his identity as male colonizer whereby taking her back to England; here, Rhys seems to draw the reader’s attention to the similarities in the “man’s” treatment of Antoinette and Brontë’s Rochester’s treatment of Jane (Crutchfield; Rhys 103). In fact, Rochester’s subconscious aversion to a woman on a plane of equality with himself manifests itself outwardly in the scene in which Jane comes to the attic and discovers the existence of his first wife, Bertha. He states his preference for a submissive woman in his choice of Jane as “a change after that fierce ragout,” whereas Bertha was “a stranger who did not think or feel as I did” (Brontë 290; Rhys 55). It is in Rhys’ novel that the reader understands that part of Rochester’s preference for Jane stems partly out of the fact that Bertha was hinted to have possessed unusual sexual cravings unbecoming of a Victorian woman (Brontë 290; Rhys 55).

Moreover, in the buildup to the climax of Jane Eyre in a seemingly unconscious revolt on Jane’s part, there come to be very alarming happenings at night in Thornfield, from the setting on fire of Rochester’s bed, the tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, and the stabbing of Mr. Mason (Gilbert 796). This revolt is unconsciously expressed by Jane, who cannot sleep one night prior to her wedding: “I could not sleep—a sense of anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising; seemed to my ear to muffle a mournful under-sound; whether in the house or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred…” (Brontë 279). This “gale” and “mournful under-sound” parallels Bertha’s entrance into her room and tearing of Jane’s wedding veil, before Jane is fully cognizant of her presence (Brontë 279-281). A terrified Jane describes Bertha, whose identity was similarly fractured under patriarchal attempts to expunge her deviance, through such descriptors as “hyena” and notes “her bloated” and ultimately alien features (Brontë 290). In other words, Jane is terrified to recognize the innate similarities between both women, but later in the book, Jane comes to a peaceful acceptance of herself whereby sympathizing with Bertha, saying that “she cannot help being mad” (Brontë 297).  Later, when meeting Bertha in the attic, Jane is forced to confront the fact that Bertha is her avenging self, who in physically resisting Rochester is showing “virile force in the contest” because of her “stature almost equaling her husband” (Brontë 290). Here, Bertha is Jane’s agent who is able to attack Rochester’s betrayal of his promises to Jane for equality in marriage (Brontë 290). As Gilbert eloquently puts it in her critical piece “Plain Jane’s Progress”:

Bertha…is Jane’s truest and darkest double: the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead. For as Claire Rosenfield has pointed out, ‘the novelist who consciously or unconsciously exploits psychological Doubles’ frequently juxtaposes ‘two characters, the one representing the socially acceptable or conventional personality, the other externalizing the free, uninhibited, often criminal self.’ (796)

Thus, when the reader reaches the point in Jane Eyre in which Thornfield Estate is discovered to have been burned down by Bertha (who also perishes in the fire, despite Rochester’s attempts to rescue her), Jane is understandably horrified (Brontë 414). This horrible realization is only furthered as she realizes the outcomes of her tempestuous dreams while at Thornfield, in which Jane questions a former Thornfield servant, in which Jane “feared now to hear my own story” in his description of the “lunatic” and her kindling of first Jane’s bed before the whole estate (Brontë 416-417). In other words, unconsciously she recognizes Bertha as the agent of her unconscious (Gilbert 796). It is this same foreboding that Rochester feels when he encounters “a paved road” in the forest in Rhys’ Granbois (his and Bertha’s imagined honeymoon house) leading to the “ruins of a stone house” where at the back of the house was Jane Eyre’s “tree of life,” described here as “a wild orange tree covered with fruit, the leaves a dark green” (Brontë 414; Rhys 62).

Rochester’s dread is his dread for when both women in his life will defy him in order to retain or regain their sense of socially-fragmented identity, as Bertha does in her rediscovery of Antoinette at the end of Rhys’s novel, whereby she sees the red sky with “all my life in it,” evoking memories of her childhood and giving her the strength (and clarity) to make the liberating decision to burn down the house (Brontë 414; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Antoinette expresses this feeling of freedom at regaining her identity whereby expressing that “the wind caught my hair and it streamed out like wings” that might “bear me up” and away from the Thornfield attic that was the scene of her psychological trauma (Rhys 112). Similarly, Jane’s attempt at running away (both physically and metaphorically) from Thornfield after discovering the existence of Bertha reflects a sense of regained agency on Jane’s part in her conscious decision to remove herself from Rochester’s emotional manipulations and false promises of equality in marriage (Brontë 290-294; Crutchfield; Rhys 108-112). Jane’s prior struggle between rationality and passion is emulated in descriptions of her wrestling with the decision to leave, lamenting how her “conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but slipped her dainty foot in the slough…of agony” (Brontë 294).

Tellingly, if one accepts the interpretation that the psychologically fragmented selves of Bertha and Jane are a united whole, then Bertha’s sacrificing herself to fire at Thornfield estate represents the fact that Jane essentially had to sacrifice the socially-ostracized self in order to maintain her place (and feel some sort of peace) in Victorian society (Gilbert 798). While Gilbert sees this as necessary in order for Jane to truly reach her self-actualization at the end of the Bildungsroman plot, in a sense, Jane still is sacrificing an essential part of herself in her quest for equality in marriage with Rochester (Gilbert 802-804). It is Jane’s inability to completely come to terms with Bertha’s sacrifice, upon which Jane Eyre closes (Brontë 438-441). Nevertheless, Jane masks the missing part of herself and consents to being Rochester’s wife, convincing herself of the equality of their union because of her being (seemingly) “independent…as well as rich” and her “own mistress” (Brontë 423). What Jane doesn’t recognize in her seemingly fairy-tale ending is that her perceived equality was a mask to disguise void where the part of her that she had to sacrifice to be accepted into society again as an “equal” used to be (Gilbert 802-804).

In the end, Jane never fully escapes from the red room that is reminiscent of the societal trappings upon which Jane and her double Bertha are imprisoned in and must find some way to escape (Gilbert 783).  Perhaps Brontë never was fully to escape the confines of Victorian femininity herself, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak notes in “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” that the killing of Bertha, the designated Other, is the only way for Jane to achieve this self-realization in an age of English patriarchal imperialism (Spivak 251). Spivak scathingly explains that “she [Bertha] must play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’ into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction” (Spivak 251). In other words, this sacrifice of Jane’s Other self in favor of conforming to the dictates of Victorian society leaves us with the sense that achieving gender equality is an ongoing process and may not be achieved to perfection (Spivak 251).
 
Works Cited:

Crutchfield, Susan. “Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Women Authors Class Discussion, 27 and 29 September and 4 October 2016, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI. Lecture.

Gilbert, Sandra. "Plain Jane's Progress." Signs, vol. 2, no. 4, 1977, pp. 779-804. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173210.

Newman, Beth. Introduction. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, 1847, Boston/New York: Bedford St Martin’s Press, 1996, 3rd ed., pp. 3-13. Print.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea, Introd. by Francis Wyndham, 1999, New York: W.W. Norton, p. 1-18. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985. pp. 243-61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343469.

Thomas, Sue. "Christianity and the State of Slavery in Jane Eyre." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 35, no.1, 2007. pp. 57-79. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40347124.

Foreign Policy Case Studies: Iran Hostage Crisis

{This week, we will take a look at the Iran Hostage Crisis, as incoming Trump national security advisor, John Bolton, has expressed hawkish views towards the aforementioned country in his advocation of a preemptive military strike as the best path to a regime change beneficial to the United States' foreign policy interests (BBC News, 2018). The Iran Hostage Crisis of 1980 was a major example of how the lack of an effective coordinator and a comprehensive, coherent plan for multiple moving pieces in any foreign policy operation (especially those brought on during periods of significant domestic or foreign political pressure) significantly reduces the success of the mission and can actually do more damage in the end. Similar considerations must be taken into account before the United States decides to set aside diplomatic tools in favor of blunt, military force, as we shall see below.}

Background:

The public opinion dynamics surrounding the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1980 were heavily influenced by the larger context of the Cold War and the foreign policy shifts outlined in NSC-68. The fear engendered in the American public by NSC-68 in regards to communism and the Soviet Union’s expansionary aspirations thus impacted their perceptions of President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iran Hostage Crisis. Moreover, to a great extent, domestic public opinion pressure drove Carter’s subsequent decision to go ahead with an ill-fated covert military operation to rescue the hostages. After all, Carter was elected in 1977 on a platform of assertiveness against the Soviet Union, with a high point of 75% approval. NSC-68’s portrayal of Russia as a communist power threatening world domination meant that Carter, as with his predecessors Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, had an imperative to take decisive action against the Soviet Union and their perceived proxy states. Thus, the Iran Hostage Crisis shows the extent of the United States’ reliance on their containment strategy, with Iran serving to check Soviet expansion in the Middle East and North Africa, as Marxist rebels gained ground in 1979 in Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan.

One of many examples of the United States supporting non-democratic leaders for strategic objectives in the Cold War, in the case of Iran the United States sought to counter the Soviet Union by supporting the CIA-installed and increasingly unpopular moderate regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The previous 1953 coup had ousted democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh, creating considerable tensions. The burgeoning Iranian Revolution insurgency in 1979 against the Shah’s rule would complicate this strategy, as hard-liner Ayatollah Khomeini gained significant followers. However, the national intelligence apparatus failed to foresee trouble in the infamous 1978 annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which predicted the Shah would be in power for another ten years. Contradicting the NIE’s erroneous thinking, the Shah was ousted in 1979 by Khomeini’s supporters, creating significant political instability in a country that Carter termed in 1978 an “island of stability,” seeking to reassure Americans of the success of the United States’ containment foreign policy. Worse yet, on November 4th 1979, Iranian radicals supporting Khomeini seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, taking sixty-six Americans hostage, including many CIA operatives in the area. Thus, the administration was left in the dark about the evolving situation on the ground.

Domestically, Carter faced considerable criticism for having admitted the Shah into the United States, an action that contributed significantly to the storming of the embassy by the Iranian radicals protesting the United States’ interventionism in their country. Facing considerable electoral pressure in the election year of 1980 as various attempts at setting up direct negotiation channels failed (with his approval ratings hovering in the low 30% range), Carter faced a critical decision point in deciding whether or not to use military force to free the hostages. In the end, while the rescue mission (dubbed Operation Eagle Claw) temporarily boosted Carter’s approval ratings, as the mission went terribly wrong those ratings inevitably tanked, as the mission’s failure on multiple fronts signaled a weak America in the face of a belligerent Soviet Union and Ayatollah Khomeini.

Evaluation:

For me, this case is explained best when considering the international paradigms of realism and the foreign policy perspective of homo bureaucraticus, as I argue in my analysis that electoral pressures reflecting the realist views of America’s Cold War foreign policy projecting onto the bureaucracy led to the mission’s failure. Operation Eagle Claw was conceived not only as a rescue mission for the trapped American hostages, but also to reassert United States strength in its realist containment policy for the domestic constituency, as Carter had run a 1976 campaign similar to his predecessors primarily on being assertive towards Soviet Union expansionism. However, with the failure of previous diplomatic attempts to secure the release of the hostages, including reaching out to Iranian moderates via the United Nations as well as economic sanctions, President Carter was desperate in 1980 to project an image of American democratic strength in the face of an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.

Thus, a military operation to rescue the hostages held increasing appeal to the Carter administration to both check communist expansion and shore up Carter’s approval ratings, but disagreement about the size and coordination of the rescue force among the different military leaders cooperating ultimately led to various logistical failures fatal to the mission: the failures of the helicopters to fly in and out of Tehran airspace under cover of the night, the failure to anticipate the hazardous visibility created by the helicopters and transport planes at the rescue point Desert One, and the fact that the rescue point itself was too close to a main road to maintain mission secrecy. In the immediate aftermath of the failed April mission, President Carter’s approval ratings sat at began to drop further from 40% again after an initial bump inspired by the decisiveness with which voters perceived the actions of the administration.

What went wrong with the mission? There were various organizational interests in play that hampered established standard operating procedures (SOPs). The military won out in the preliminary meetings against the objections of presidential advisers Walter Mondale, Jody Powell, and Hamilton Jordan concerned with the effects of a rescue mission on Carter’s electoral fortunes. Moreover, State Department officials Warren Christopher and Cyrus Vance supported similar misgivings concerning Operation Eagle Claw, concerned that their people among the hostages in the Tehran embassy would be harmed if negotiations were not conducted first. However, an uneasy alliance formed between the hawks eager to prove their capabilities and regain the presidential trust after the Bay of Pigs and the closest presidential advisers after Carter’s presidential approval ratings were still trending downward from 40%. Already on shaky foundation as the decision to go ahead was largely one made out of electoral desperation, Operation Eagle Claw came to represent a patchwork of competing branches of the military itself. Four military commanders were chosen underneath the leadership of Major General James Vaught (Army) according to Pentagon standard operating procedures (SOPs) in missions of joint military cooperation: Colonel James Kyle (Air Force), Lt. Colonel Edward Seiffert (Marines), and Lt. Colonel Beckwith (Army). Here the SOPs that bureaucracies rely on to function efficiently in the face of high uncertainty ultimately failed, as Vaught was not physically present to coordinate the rescue mission, leading to an unclear chain of command when it came to decision-making.

Ultimately, the failure of the hostage rescue operation came down to potent public opinion pressures exerted on the Carter administration and the bureaucracy, in which bureaucratic SOPs were overcome by the inherent weaknesses of the bureaucratic patchwork assembled for the mission.

{The above forces cited in the case study are still at work today. Any foreign policy apparatus must take particular care to minimize as much as possible these pressures on key decision-makers, from politicians to those concerned with logistical operations, in order to make the best call for a country's overall domestic and foreign interests. In today's current domestic political environment and in consideration with rumblings in some corners about the need for unilateral, preemptive military operations in hotspots like Iran and North Korea, this need for clear-mindedness in our leaders is more needed than ever in U.S. foreign policy.}

 
Works Cited:

BBC News. (2018, March 23). "John Bolton: Five Things New Trump Security Adviser Believes." Retrieved March 23, 2018, from http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43512175.

Gallup, Incorporated. (2016). “Presidential Approval Ratings: Gallup Historical Statistics and Trends.” Retrieved October 19, 2016 from http://www.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ratings-gallup-historical-statistics-trends.aspx.

Houghton, David Patrick. (2013). The Decision Point: Six Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy
Decision Making. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ikenberry, G. John, and Peter L. Trubowitz. (2015). American Foreign Policy: Theoretical
Essays. 7th Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sigelman, L., & Conover, P. (1981). “The Dynamics of Presidential Support During International Conflict Situations: The Iranian Hostage Crisis.” Political Behavior, 3(4), p. 303-318. Retrieved October 17, 2016 from http://libweb.uwlax.edu:2101/stable/pdf/586105.pdf.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian (n.d.). “The Iranian Hostage Crisis.” Retrieved October 17, 2016 from https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/short-history/iraniancrises.

Foreign Policy Case Study: The Bay of Pigs

{In the vein of Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, this week I will be providing additional background concerning the United States' Cold War policy (the foreground of the U.S.'s military buildup, including increased nuclear capabilities) by examining the failed Bay of Pigs operation in closer detail.}

Background:

The overall context for the Bay of Pigs case ultimately rests on NSC-68 (1950), the document in which the United States re-articulated its foreign policy via advocation of rearmament in response to a perceived Soviet plot of world domination (and thus the concurrent spread of communism) in the midst of the Cold War. Arguably, NSC-68 adopts a very realist view of the international system in acknowledging the uncertainty the United States had about the international aspirations of the Soviet Union. It is in this vein that the Kennedy administration considered carrying out Eisenhower’s CIA-developed amphibious invasion of Cuba (dubbed Operation Zapata) to topple the Communist-sympathizing regime of Fidel Castro. Going hand-in hand with NSC-68 and rearmament was the domino theory (which heavily influenced the realist foreign policy thinking expressed in NSC-68) in which if one country fell to communism at the hands of the Soviets, then more countries would inevitably fall, jeopardizing America’s hegemonic interests in the world. Seemingly demonstrative of this was the establishment of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), which seemed to confirm NSC-68’s predictions in that Asia seemed to have been compromised. Thus, America turned towards Latin America.

Cuba was perceived as an even greater threat because it was in America’s backyard and thus strategically compromised the United States’ ability to maintain a defensive buffer between it and the Soviet sphere of influence. Complicating matters further was the possible Soviet buildup of nuclear weapons in particular predicted by NSC-68 and the possibility of Cuba being a symptom of further breakdown of the United States’ defensive buffer in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple Latin American regimes potentially sympathetic to the communist cause.

Thus, President Kennedy and his administration faced pressures from multiple fronts politically in regards to the rise of the Castro regime in Cuba in 1961, a country that had previously enjoyed regular diplomatic relations with the United States under the Batista regime. Meanwhile on the home front, Kennedy’s campaign had capitalized on domestic fears of communism and could not renege on its promises to stand up to the Soviets. The Democratic president faced considerable political pressure from a vocal Republican coalition in Congress as well as from his own party to not be “soft” regarding the spread of communism. Seen in this context, Operation Zapata becomes a potentially plausible and very effective counter-political demonstration against critics in sending the message that the administration was not afraid to use military force to secure United States interests, even when possibly provoking an opposing great power like the Soviet Union into war. Up until this point, the United States and the Soviet Union had largely fought each other in proxy conflicts within various allied regions of the world and fought diplomatically through institutions like the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), where they wielded veto power that was often used to send political messages to the other party. In the end, the prospect of a direct confrontation between the two great world powers in the bipolar international system became that much more of a possibility with Kennedy’s decision-making in the Bay of Pigs case (and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis).

Outcomes:

In understanding Bay of Pigs case, I turned to the homo psychologicus and realist theoretical perspectives to analyze how the administration acted before and during Operation Zapata. Insofar as the external environmental conditions at the time were important, I argue that it is essential to understand how key foreign policy events at the time and in the past were assimilated into the existing mental schema and other cognitive structures of the Kennedy administration. Therefore, I argue that analogical reasoning and cognitive errors along with realist thinking heavily influenced the decision-making of Kennedy’s administration to go ahead with the ultimately flawed operation. To summarize, Operation Zapata was a catastrophic failure, with the US-backed resistance forces ultimately routed by Castro’s military because of a failure of a second air strike by U.S. planes (an order that the CIA assumed President Kennedy would make, lest he ultimately betray the resistance fighters). A retreat of the fighters to the Escambray Mountains was essentially nullified because of the geographical location chosen for the operation allowed Castro’s forces to easily flank and capture the resistance fighters.

Starting with the analogical reasoning that the administration used, I wish to highlight the following foreign policy analogies espoused by the administration: Munich, China (Eisenhower’s domino theory), and Guatemala. The Munich case goes hand in hand with the domino theory idea coined by the Eisenhower administration in that the Soviet Union and its allies were representative of a dictatorial and expansionary adversary that would not be open to a strategy of diplomacy or appeasement. This closely follows the line of realist theory in which states will often use force to provide for their security rather than diplomatic cooperation. In the case of the United States, the Kennedy administration felt that Operation Zapata would perhaps deter the spread of communism better in Latin America, in particular El Salvador and Nicaragua, than a similar Chamberlain-esque appeasement strategy of Castro, and thus showcase U.S. leadership in halting the spread of communism in the process (and perhaps make up for the losses the U.S. suffered in Asia).
Following this line of realist reasoning, the administration thus had the perfect justification for the use of American military force (albeit covertly, as was planned) in Cuba, essentially portraying Castro as another potentially expansionist dictator. However, the fateful analogy that doomed the operation was the 1951 case of Operation PB Success in Guatemala, in which the U.S. was successful in deposing communist sympathizer Jacobo Arbenz. In the end, Arbenz was ultimately cowed by the threat of US military force and fundamental logistical flaws in the operation that would ultimately pass to Operation Zapata were hidden because the plan did not need to be fully executed. Despite any similarities that could be drawn from Operation PB Success to Cuba in terms of the operational plans (a US-trained force of exiles and a strike against government forces under guise of a popular uprising), the one difference involved the fact that Operation Zapata was an amphibious operation. Therefore, its potential success was very uncertain.

Tying together these commonly-shared worldviews and accompanying foreign policy analogies is the concept of cognitive consistency. The Kennedy administration ultimately succumbed to this cognitive error in rejecting any contrary intelligence that did not necessarily conform to their preconceived realist worldviews and analogies, such as the operational differences between the Cuba and Guatemala cases. Especially relevant to this case is the CIA’s reliance on Kennedy’s use of military force to support the exiles if anything went awry and the assumption that the success of a revolt would be assured because of Castro’s unpopularity. Their intelligence proved contrary. Ultimately, the mission’s further infeasibility was ignored as key mission plans were published in the New York Times beforehand, ruining the intended covert nature of the operation.

In the end, the Kennedy administration failed to overcome cognitive consistency and foreign policy analogies in the Bay of Pigs case, which ended in catastrophic failure and perhaps ultimately countered U.S. security interests in Latin America and elsewhere. 

{Foreign policy is always filled with uncertainty, which undoubtedly is magnified when one takes into account the people in charge during everyday or crisis situations who may not have all the information needed to make informed decisions. It is further complicated when an idea turns into a mindset that puts blinders on foreign policy-makers (like that a certain country/countries/religious group is/are out to achieve world domination). Does the United States have the ability to minimize these latter risks inherent in the conduct of today's foreign policy, especially in the present age of more powerful nuclear weapons, a proposed Cold War-like military build-up, and toxic anti-immigrant populism? We shall see.}


Sources Cited:

Ikenberry, G. John, and Peter L. Trubowitz. (2015). American Foreign Policy: Theoretical
Essays. 7th Edition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Houghton, David Patrick. (2013). The Decision Point: Six Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy
Decision Making. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

United States State Department: Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. (2015, July 21). “U.S. Relations with Cuba”. Retrieved September 28, 2016, from http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2886.htm.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “A Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations, By Country, Since 1776: Cuba.” Retrieved September 24, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/countries/cuba.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “Milestones: 1945–1952: NSC-68.” Retrieved September 23, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/NSC68.

United States State Department: Office of the Historian. (n.d.). “Milestones: 1945–1952: The Chinese Revolution of 1949.” Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/chinese-rev.

Book Review: Dr. Amy Chua's "Political Tribes"

Humans are social creatures. We need the company of a group in order to feel a sense of belonging and purpose. In some cases, groups can also serve as important social safety nets. However, groups can serve both good and more nefarious purposes, creating uncomfortable gray areas in human relations because of the multiple identities people necessarily inhabit and the moral, ethical, political, social and perspective issues surrounding group identity and function. Enter politics, which makes these kinds of group or tribal dynamics much more complicated. In the current era of divisiveness in the country, it is hard not to feel like Donald Trump's election as president exposed many fractures among the different groups that make up the United States. Are these fractures going to get worse, to the point of unsustainability (e.g. a potential break-up of the country and a larger heralding of a decline of the current international order built upon universalist notions of individual human rights)? Dr. Amy Chua takes up these questions in her latest book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. 

Because the book was published in 2018 after all of the chaos and tension surrounding the 2016 election and others around the world, which appeared to herald a new (or not so new) era of intolerant populism, Chua has a fascinating starting point from which to start her analysis of political tribes and their policy impacts and implications. Her book's anchor is the United States through the first part of the book, where she chronicles the impact of our universalist notions about human rights, democracy and free market economics on the implementation of foreign policy, to the second part where she takes a critical look at the homeland. Her main argument is that American foreign policy, from southeast Asia (Vietnam) to Latin America (Venezuela) and the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan) has failed to be effective because of the discounting of the role of tribal dynamics in these countries (and in our own).

Why has America been, to use Chua's terminology, so "group-blind" (Chua, 2018, p. 19)? According to Chua, it is because the United States belongs to a rare breed in group dynamics she terms a "super-group," in which group membership can be claimed by peoples of many different backgrounds without necessitating the sacrifice of such unique "subgroup identities" (Chua, 2018, p. 15). What holds a super-group together is a "collective identity" that binds these people together with common purpose, experiences, loyalties and values (Chua, 2018, p. 15). In the case of the United States, this social glue for American citizens is our common quest of working towards the achievement of the American Dream despite our backgrounds, as we are a nation of immigrants. Because the American citizenry is so diverse and bound by a relatively strong national identity, the U.S. has become both a world power and super-group.

But Chua sees this same strength as our Achilles heel, making policymakers overoptimistic about the ability of mostly developing countries to recognize and bridge salient group divides with a similarly strong, overriding collective national identity. This also means the U.S. sees foreign policy largely in grander, more ideological struggles (e.g. capitalism versus communism, democracy versus authoritarianism). In Vietnam it was our failure to recognize the centrality of Vietnamese identity as a larger anti-colonial struggle against countries like France and China (who held disproportionate power over the masses) rather than an embrace of communism. Similarly, in Iraq it was the story of Shia Muslim majorities being oppressed by a dominant Sunni Muslim minority. Dismissing the power of these group identities and their fraught histories and the way these animosities can be amplified rather than subsumed by democracy, Chua believes, has doomed U.S. foreign policy adventures in democratization and nation-building.

Similarly, policies by American political elite (on both liberal and conservative sides) of deliberate group-blindness at home have led to toxic political dynamics reminiscent of these developing countries U.S. foreign policy has tried to help, such as anti-establishment, ethno-nationalist brands of populism. It is the very same paradox that hampers our foreign policy: how to create an identity that transcends group divides but at the same time recognizes and seeks to ameliorate those inequalities. In America, the left and right have increasingly become polarized and with it, have embraced identity politics to problematic levels. The left has become enmeshed in what Chua sees as the increasing divisiveness from the misuse of the understanding of "oppression operating on multiple [and] overlapping axes of identity" simultaneously where it is used to drive even further wedges between people based on the very subgroup identities a collective identity is meant to smooth in binding people together (Chua, 2018, p. 230-231). Meanwhile, the right has retreated into anti-immigrant sentiment and embrace of white identity in response to the left's celebration of other non-white minorities' differences in popular and political culture and a perceived gradual loss of power to those same minority groups that by mid-century could supplant them as a majority in the United States. In summation, the rhetoric of inclusiveness and diversity on both sides can be hypocritical in its exclusion of certain groups in the process (on the left, marginalization of group rights in favor of individual rights; on the right, a rejection of affirmative action in favor of equal opportunity for all). Either way, it ends up being us versus them, a destructive dynamic in any political system, especially a democracy that depends on various groups finding common ground in order to effectively govern.

How then to get out of this vicious cycle of increasingly zero-sum politics (whether or not you agree with Chua's premise that it is primarily political tribes that have gotten us into this mess)? Chua does not explicitly conclude Political Tribes with a concrete answer to this question. Admittedly, I was disappointed by a lack of specialization after such an insightful (yet somewhat uncomfortable) analysis into the failings of both sides, in which she answers that we have to find a new American Dream that acknowledges the historical failings of the United States while keeping us all striving towards the ultimate ideal of a "promise of freedom and hope for every individual" (Chua, 2018, p. 264). Nevertheless, I did see her overall point in this deliberate lack of specificity in that we must all work to make our collective identity and the American Dream more inclusive and egalitarian in order to restore faith and efficiency in the democratic process.

Essentially, this process of redefinition as our nation gets increasingly diverse will take a lot of work. While I am not as optimistic as Chua in our chances of successfully bridging the divides (I am probably not alone in that), that does not mean we should not continue to strive towards achievement of the ideals of equality and freedom our country was founded upon.


Works Cited:

Chua, Amy. (2018). Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.

Book Review: Daniel Ellsberg's "The Doomsday Machine"

There are many examples of when technological progression outstrips society's ability to adjust swiftly to the social, cultural, economical and political consequences brought about by such change. In the current era, the most visible instance of society's slow rate of adaptation is in response to the Internet and the explosion of social media with positive effects like connecting people around the world clashing with more negative consequences like mental illness and electronic addiction. It's also the same today with climate change, as the fossil-fuel based technologies we built our civilization around are also altering the ecological balance of the planet and threatening more extreme weather events. Nevertheless, underneath these more visible trends that could go towards catastrophe if we fail to take collective responsibility for these issues is a similarly potentially apocalyptic problem: the development of nuclear weapons and the shadowy policy surrounding them. Daniel Ellsberg, who first gained notoriety for leaking the classified Pentagon Papers that revealed a troubled history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, takes on a concurrent investigation into the history of American nuclear policy in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

While having lost the official documents copied alongside the Pentagon Papers to Mother Nature (and having to compensate with recently declassified documents in both American and Russian archives as well as his notes and recollections from his defense work), Ellsberg still gives the reader an important and chilling window into the development of American nuclear policy and the larger geopolitical consequences of secrecy through his time as a government worker and contractor at the RAND Corporation and the Pentagon during the Cold War. In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki haven't been the only times America has threatened to or actually used nuclear weapons in order to end a prolonged conflict or prevent one from breaking out in the first place. These weapons have permeated American foreign and military policy (and continue to do so presently) despite a significant reduction of superpowers America and Russia's nuclear arsenals through many international and bilateral nonproliferation treaties primarily due to a hybrid strategic doctrine that has been in vogue since WWII: strategies that deliberately target cities in their capacity as the production centers of the enemy (note: targeting noncombatants is illegal and considered morally reprehensible under international law) in order to end wars quickly with less risk to one side's military and security objectives in combination with the principles of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction (MAD).

Having studied theories of decision-making under uncertainty, I found its combination with nuclear weapons in an era of threats of non-state terrorism and continued proliferation (such as President Trump's proposed build-up of America's nuclear arsenal) to be troubling (to put it mildly). This book proved the insanity of trusting the planet's fate to such a strategy. There's a point where the supposed strategic value in MAD is lost because of the vulnerability of these nuclear arsenals to a variety of actors (outside of the state actors possessing nuclear weapons, like the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, North Korea, Israel, India, and Pakistan) and seemingly random institutional and situational factors.

Starting with the institutional factors, one of the more troubling vulnerabilities of our nuclear infrastructure (known as "the Doomsday Machine") are the seemingly lax security measures around communication and weapons-lock codes that delegate the authority and access to nuclear weapons to many subordinates underneath the president and their commanders (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 274). Centralized control would make a strike on HQ devastating to a nation's response to such a strike, but...this policy also leads to more fingers on the proverbial nuclear button. As for situational factors, Ellsberg found that America's command centers around the world regularly experience communications outages for hours at a time due to atmospheric conditions, which can lead to dangerous assumptions by commanders or individual pilots to go-ahead with a retaliatory nuclear strike after a false alarm in a situation of heightened alarm (such as a runway crash involving a nuclear-armed aircraft on a base where such attack drills are not routine) after not hearing from Washington (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 51). After all, HQ probably couldn't send communications to launch if they'd been destroyed by a nuclear attack (even if it actually was an accident and they are in that narrow window of non-communication with Washington and will regain it soon) and the pilots could then act as if nuclear war was underway. (Did I mention that such orders to launch cannot be taken back, because of military fears of America compromising its ability to survive a nuclear strike because of hesitation by civilian leadership?) Additionally, the same aforementioned communications issues mean a simultaneous, coordinated response to stop a nuclear war from escalating becomes near impossible. Oh and there are poor password protections on the safety locks on the weapons themselves.

Okay, so far we have a nuclear policy in which the U.S. can potentially survive a nuclear war by launching all their weapons first (in order to prevent their defense capabilities from being destroyed), such launch orders (accidental or not) cannot be taken back, and there are a lot of fingers on the red button who are often acting underneath situations of uncertainty and a greater degree of incomplete information than their commanders. (In fact, this naiveté about nuclear war plans and their implications was fostered by the smoke-screen of secrecy about the most sensitive aspects of the plans by the military, leaving the commander-in-chief and lower parts of the military in the dark.) These latter factors all played a role in both known and unknown nuclear crises from Vietnam to Cuba (in the latter, a Russian submarine almost fired a nuclear missile at an American naval group in the area whom they thought was attacking them, the first time humanity came the closest to all-out nuclear war). Ellsberg shows there is no shortage of dangerous situational factors like the latter that can throw off what seems to be the most sound of plans when he zooms out to show that America's use and threatened uses of nuclear weapons has made other countries feel increasingly insecure, essentially pushing them to escalate by developing their own nuclear arsenals and equivalent Doomsday Machines (and then following America's example by engaging in dangerous levels of secrecy about such programs in the name of strategic ambiguity which paradoxically undermines the value of strategic deterrence in doing so as enemies would be in the dark to exactly what an attack on the homeland would do to the other side, making them more confident in their similarly dangerous escalations). Especially dangerous are partially or fully-automated "Dead Hand" systems that would launch all nuclear weapons if HQ were destroyed by a strike, assuring everyone on the planet would die immediately or over time from starvation and fallout. Human error can be catastrophic. Death by automation? Even more dangerous. Both the latter and former penchants for dangerous escalation due to misreadings of various situations is an especially sickening combination.

Bad enough yet? I wish it had stopped there. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project discovered the phenomenas of "atmospheric ignition" and "nuclear winter" (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 17, 275). The latter idea may be one that is more known to the public as it has slipped out into popular culture, in which the smoke and soot from the burning remains of nuclear-bombed cities and other terrestrial sites would be carried into the stratosphere where it would "remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight" leading to mass crop death and starvation by any survivors of the nuclear strikes (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 17). With the development of the more powerful cousin to the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki known as the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), the heat generated by such explosions resulting from the fusion of hydrogen atoms (itself a reaction due to the ignition of a fission-based atomic bomb core, which supplies the necessary heat for a fusion reaction) had the theoretical potential to overcome "the Coulomb barrier between atoms of hydrogen in water and nitrogen in the air...and ignite...all the hydrogen in the oceans and set the air around the globe afire" (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 274-275). Cheery thought, eh? I shiver to think if the technology already harnessed for such evil purposes of annihilation starting with the A-bomb through the H-bomb could be "improved" further for another generation of super-weapons.

Ultimately, The Doomsday Machine proves the insanity of relying on ever-expanding arsenals of any weapons, especially nuclear weapons, to preempt war between two or more adversarial parties. Therefore, Ellsberg's concluding non-proliferation message is an important clarion call for the global public, who ideally could put pressure on their policymakers and militaries to dismantle the Doomsday Machines around the world. But can we overcome decades of institutionalized policies that risk annihilation of all life on the planet in the name of potentially securing the chance of survival in a nuclear conflict? Ellsberg acknowledges the seemingly insurmountable odds of overcoming a very profitable venture for existing military-industrial-political complexes, suggesting first a commitment to not launch nuclear weapons preemptively in any situation (a "no first strike" policy), then proceeding in an incremental reduction of nuclear arsenals until they are ultimately eliminated (Ellsberg, 2017 p. 249). This will take an unprecedented effort from all sectors of society to address all threats to life on Earth, from nuclear weapons to climate change. Can we all muster the will to overcome what Friedrich Nietzsche described as the collective "insanity" (read: dangerous group-think) of societies (Ellsberg, 2017, p. 348)? I sure hope so, for our world depends on it.

Works Cited:

Ellsberg, Daniel. (2017). The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. New York: Bloomsbury.

Book Review: Edward Jay Epstein's "How America Lost Its Secrets"

Sorting through the various narratives is critically important when trying to ascertain the facts in any situation, especially when it comes to the murky world of international relations and espionage. Nothing has stirred up so many narratives and controversies in the latter domain than the massive theft of an estimated 1.7 million documents in 2013 from secure National Security Agency (NSA) computers by former IT worker Edward Snowden that ignited a fierce debate over foreign and domestic government surveillance. Treading through this murky world and how Edward Snowden changed the game for better or worse is investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein in his 2017 investigative book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft.

Epstein's primary assertion in his investigative work is to challenge the casting of Snowden as an unblemished whistle-blower, as an internal NSA investigation found that a majority of the documents concerned not domestic surveillance but methods and sources involved in foreign surveillance. He first examines the trail of Snowden's movements between various government contractors in 2011-2013 before his flight to Hong Kong and eventually Moscow, Russia where he presumably remains. Notwithstanding some very dubious caricatures of Snowden, his allies in the media and hacktivist communities and his girlfriend Lindsay Mills as alternatively nefarious, narcissistic and superficial, Epstein in this first section of his analysis does help highlight the facts and gaps about Snowden's movements before and after his document theft. Some of the more prominent gaps in the story are the interims after he arrived in Hong Kong before he contacted journalists there and the next interval after that until his departure to Russia.

These intervals become the focal points of the remainder of the book, where, necessarily, when concrete facts cannot be found, educated guesses and speculation are made as to the implications of Snowden's disclosure on America's national security and the ongoing debate about government surveillance and contracting in the intelligence business. While not necessarily succeeding in proving without a doubt that Snowden was a knowing Russian spy (an implication of his argument against Snowden's burnished image as a whistle-blower exposing U.S. government overreach), his consultation with fellow journalists and former intelligence workers about the situation and its context does raise a number of concerns surrounding the Snowden case such as the need for increased regulation under the Patriot Act of 2001 on when and how domestic surveillance of national security concerns is conducted and the vulnerabilities in outsourcing espionage functions to private actors.

Because of tightening budgets and caps on the hiring of government employees and the need to keep ahead in an era of cyber-espionage, the United States intelligence apparatus has come to rely on outside contractors like Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton for the vetting and hiring of employees and the maintenance of secure computer networks. However, because outside contractors are driven by the profit motive, the faster they can move on hiring, the more money they earn and increases the potential for more contracts to be fulfilled. Of course, this leads to a decrease in the quality of employee vetting, which means that potential hacktivists with ideological misgivings about the work U.S. intelligence agencies like the NSA conduct could be let in without much thought and provide potentially easy pickings for other intelligence agencies in terms of persuading those employees to leak various quantities of data. Enter Snowden, who was let in by Booz Allen Hamilton to a higher security clearance position despite flags raised by his previous employer, the CIA. It seems to give credence to the concerns by national security professionals of sacrificing computer network security for greater intelligence reach in the cyber-age and the need for a better balance between the two.

Now that a cataclysmic breach once speculated on in the intelligence community for decades became a reality in 2013, what are the other implications aside from the potential need for increased regulation of government contractors? Epstein concludes How America Lost Its Secrets by speculating how the compromising of sources and methods used by the U.S. and its allies impacts the NSA's post 9-11 focus on counter-terrorism efforts. Many of the documents released by Snowden revealed a significant breach of sources in the Middle East, with the potential for darkened channels at the worst to misinformation channels at the best. No matter where one stands on the Snowden issue (such as if he intended serious damage to U.S. intelligence-gathering ability), the reality remains that information is a key currency in this day and age, critical for optimal policy-making and the best use of government and private sector resources.

As noted, it is too early to tell the true impact of the Snowden breach and if Snowden was a willing spy, but one thing that all of us should agree on is finding a way to protect American interests and citizens in a way that doesn't involve dangerous, wanton and unchecked foreign and domestic surveillance characteristic of the authoritarian states we routinely denounce.

Works Cited:

Epstein, Edward Jay. (2017). How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Book Review: Richard McGregor's "Asia's Reckoning"

Much has been made in current affairs, news media and foreign policy circles about the emerging frenemies-type relationship between the United States and China, with assessments ranging from guarded optimism about long-term strategies to accommodate and work with the country to more bleak assessments of potential military conflict from the various miscalculations between rising and established powers alike (as in Graham Allison's Destined for War). But what about Japan, a traditional U.S. ally in East Asia and the rest of the volatile region? What is their impact on U.S. and Chinese policy? Richard McGregor, a journalist specializing in East Asian affairs, chooses to examine the often-ignored background relationships between the United States, Japan and other East Asian nations that add further nuance and perspective to the much-reported-on U.S.-China relationship in his 2017 work Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century.

With inside access to officials in both Asia and the United States, Freedom of Information Act requests, various news publications and diplomatic archives, McGregor examines the fraught history of the major trilateral (U.S.-China-Japan) relationship in East Asia and attempts to extrapolate its affects on the future of the region starting in the late 1940s (post WWII) to the present (the beginning of the Trump administration). McGregor teases out the many different interrelating strands of both the foundations of friendship between the two countries and also the frayed areas of tension in a complicated geopolitical quilt, finding a complex blend of political dynasties, conflicting historical narratives, shifting alliances and great-power dynamics that have the potential to seriously destabilize the region as in the Middle East or usher in a new era of unprecedented cooperation.

Our story starts in the wake of WWII, where former Axis power Japan had formed a security alliance with the occupying United States, on the condition that Japan reworks its constitution to be more restrictive to the use of military power, with the idea being to weaken the more militaristic segments of the formal imperial power to stave off further conflict. This alliance formed the anchor for the modernization of the region, with economic and political alliances then allowing for the stabilization of a new postwar international order through the Cold War era. China under the victorious Communist Party (CCP), having forced nationalists into exile in Taiwan, was then biding its time as it focused on uniting the country and fueling rapid economic growth and allowed the U.S. its Asian alliances (with Japan and South Korea, for example) as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Meanwhile, the United States encouraged the Japanese economic boom through the end of the 1960s under the stewardship of the dominant and conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) while warily eyeing the rise of communism in China even as diplomatic relations were established in the early 1970s. However by the 1980s, conservative agitations in each country combined with increasing economic competitions and struggles over the historical high ground threatened the meaningful diplomatic progress made over the decades.

Yet, these alliances (formal or not) have largely persevered. Why? McGregor's book is at its best when looking at all the factors that knit countries together and those that seek to tear them apart, revealing continuity among huge changes and subtle changes underneath a seeming continuity. The underlying historical traumas largely resulting from the war were essentially buried by pragmatic factions within each of the countries (the CCP, LDP and U.S. administrations) which sought greater security and economic cooperation to stave off the threats from the Soviets and later North Korea. This pattern of pragmatism has served as the glue that held the relationships between the three powers together through various political transitions within each country, meaning that core aspects of the grand strategy (containment and appeasement of an ambitious China through its integration into the international order and in regional forums as well as greater economic cooperation) tend to be adhered to no matter the political orientation of the party in power. That doesn't mean that there hasn't been much change to the relationship over the years or moments of diplomatic deep freeze.

All of the parties involved are guilty of succumbing to nationalist moments, whether it is the U.S. in demanding protectionist policies against a rising Japan (with familiar charges more recently aimed at China by those allied with the Trump administration) in the 1970s and 80s to the ongoing toxic history war flare-ups involving an assertive China demanding Japanese apologies for wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, past colonization of parts of China and South Korea after the first Sino-Japanese war in 1895 and prime minister visitations to the controversial Yasukuni shrine (which serves as a memorial for war dead that includes Class A war criminals). The U.S. wasn't pulled in until the later 1990s and early 21st century when its role in ending the war by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were brought into question by some factions in Japan and in China still wary of potential exercises of imperial power by Western nations, yet frightened by a potential resurgence of Japanese militarism.

Further complicating the toxic history debates that soured diplomatic progress was an assertive China building up its military and contesting the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which it claimed as part of a large swath of territory in the South and East China Seas, causing Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to embrace a continued U.S. military presence in the region. Sending further shockwaves through the system was Japan's reworking of its postwar pacifist constitution to allow a military buildup in response to Beijing's regional ambitions and a U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a signal of a potentially more isolationist and protectionist United States whose decreased regional presence or potential withdrawal threatened an upending of the power balance in the region.

Enter Trump in 2017 whose administration came into power espousing a similar campaign platform of economic nationalism and protectionism that espoused "retrenchment and every country fending for itself" yet contrary to expectations supported the continuing U.S.-Japan alliance and even some degree of cooperation with China on hotspots like North Korea (McGregor, 2017, p. 351). As with any work trying to predict the future by extrapolation from history, Asia's Reckoning is understandably tentative towards the future of the American power component of the title in the East Asia region, leaving such remarks to a brief afterword in which the infighting within the Trump administration's globalist and isolationist wings and Trump's own unpredictability are heavily featured, putting a big question mark at the end for readers. Ultimately, McGregor weaves together a compelling and intriguing narrative while highlighting the continuities below ever-changing foreign policy and thus equips and primes readers with the necessary historical understanding to keep watch through the Trump administration for a potential answer to the fate of American power in the Asia Pacific.


Works Cited:

Allison, Graham T. (2017). Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (1st ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: New York.

Mcgregor, Richard. (2017). Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century. Penguin Publishing Group.