September 30, 2007
Munich and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 PM EST The homepage of the website notes that this is the anniversary of the 1938 Munich Agreement, where Great Britain and France betrayed the people of Czechoslovakia and spawned a very durable analogy. At the time, Neville Chamberlain triumphantly remarked that “my good friends, for the second time in our history a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” Churchill memorably as well as prophetically demurred, his most durable, prophetic and pithy phrase being that “you were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.” Churchill being Churchill, there are a pretty fair number of memorable remarks to choose from: “You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude,” which was eerily prophetic, but there was also “we have sustained a defeat without a war,” which has the savage compression more often found in a politican’s mouth when Thucydides has composed the phrase at leisure, and then put it there. There is also “do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.” There was such a recovery, Churchill incarnated it, and for a generation Munich was the epitome of a particular form of moral cowardice, stupidity, and self-deception. After an analogy to Munich was blamed for getting the United States into the Vietnam War, pejorative references to Munich fell into disrepute among some liberals, while on the political right attempts to rehabilitate Chamberlain saw the suggestion that the canny old fellow had wisely delayed war until the Spitfires were ready, etc. I find this remarkably unpersuasive, for reasons discussed on this blog in August of 2006, here and here, but it is worth noting that Munich remains not only the analogy many people love to hate, but the catastrophic misjudgement some people still long to exonerate. (For example, as recently as 2006 a historian published a defense of Chamberlain’s policy at Munich titled Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain, 1936-1939.) Pondering this on the anniversary of the Munich Agreement, I think the simple power of the Munich analogy provokes most of the venom directed against not only the analogy, but against the conventional assessment of the agreement itself. What are taken to be the horrible and by implication avoidable consequences of the Munich Agreement, widely believed to include a significant portion of the scores of millions of dead of the Second World War, still make the strongest argument we know for the possible virtues of preemptive war. People who detest the notion of preventive war, often for excellent reasons, are tempted to go that one last, mad step, and suggest that there has never, ever been a case for such a policy. I think it was Robert Heinlein, born a century ago this year, who once remarked that the difference between a man and a cat is that while neither will sit on a hot stove twice, a cat will never again sit on a cold stove either. Thinking over the historiography of the Munich Agreement, that thought suddenly seems unfair to the cat.
September 29, 2007
The Great (Board) Game II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:45 PM EST Alexander Burns yesterday posted about a board game, Avalon Hill’s Diplomacy, which he described as “kind of like Risk, but without the dice.” I haven’t played Diplomacy since college, nor Risk for rather longer, but that description rings true. An interesting thing about Diplomacy in the context of our thread about Great Powers is that as I remember its rules, the game, if played properly, could never end. Diplomacy was a zero-sum game: one side won, which meant all the others lost. An ending required one power to control all of Europe, and rational actors would always combine against so great and obvious a threat—or at least they should have. But they didn’t, so the game always did end. Players made mistakes, which meant failing to realign with other threatened powers quickly enough to restabilize the state system. They too vividly remembered grudges, which they avenged at a greater long-term cost than they were willing to see, or they let clamoring greed excessively mute the shrewder voice of fear, and they took a smaller prize that in the long run let a current friend but future master extinguish their sovereignty. Balance of power theory as classically articulated has that problem: People are often too greedy or too angry or too stupid to see their real collective interest. Additionally, most actors, when threatened by a very great power, do not seek to combine against it, either in Diplomacy or in diplomacy. Some people engage in what the theorists call balancing behavior, but most people seek to propitiate a risen and truly threatening power by sucking up to it, or by seeking to grab a share of the loot. One thing Diplomacy did teach you, if you could learn, was that open treachery was (until the penultimate moment) self-defeating. If you lied repeatedly, nakedly, and shamelessly, few would again trust you, and you were without allies. But since repeated betrayal was necessary, you learned to use evasive and ambiguous language, to which you could later point in self-exculpation. The game taught you, with great precision, what the phrase “diplomatic language” means. People learned that they had to pin you down, and when they thought they had and later discovered that they hadn’t, there was rueful admiration for your successful misdirection, rather than hatred for your deceitfulness. Diplomacy was in that sense less than perfectly realistic but not hopelessly so; it may have captured the frame of mind of some successful old-regime diplomats. Mr. Burns mentions “the dearth of new board games after the model of Risk or Diplomacy.” There was one fascinating hybrid game called World in Flames, which when played with all of its modules simulated the warfare, war economies, and some of the diplomacy of the period 1936 to 1950. Diplomacy, which started in a very abstract version of 1905, had very few pieces and fewer rules, whereas World In Flames, which aimed at much less abstraction, had thousands of pieces and what seemed like thousands of rules. Like Diplomacy, it was best with seven players (the British Commonwealth, Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, Japan, and China), and while hard to play—understanding the rules could be real work—I found it utterly fascinating. As I got older, however, it was increasingly difficult to find the time. Before age and responsibilities carried me away, I helped write a few of the rules for a diplomatic module and test some of the other rule sets the game successively employed. Unlike Diplomacy, World in Flames, played competently could end, although in my experience it rarely did, since it seemed to take 80 hours or so (at tournaments it was played over a weekend), and the side that realized it was clearly losing tended to concede. I did notice that people who played it were older—they had grown up on the Avalon Hill historical military simulation games of the 1960s. My guess is that games of its kind lost their audiences to people who grew up with computer games. Too bad. World In Flames was hypnotically interesting, if you were that sort of person. A friend, lost at sea for a couple of days (a small plane had crashed), later claimed that he’d spent some of what he’d thought were his last hours planning a set of moves, and regretting that he would never make them. True story.
September 28, 2007
The Great (Board) Game Posted by Alexander Burns at 06:10 PM EST All the talk of “Great Powers” over the last few days has reminded me of one of my favorite board games of all time: Avalon Hill’s classic Diplomacy. It’s kind of like Risk, but without the dice. The game has up to seven players, each of them representing a major European power of the World War I era (the choices are Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and Turkey). All the countries start with equally balanced military forces, and there is a limited amount of free territory to gobble up. I won’t go into the minute details of game play, except to say that the game’s crucial innovation is that it does not permit any power to build up hugely superior armed forces in any one geographical area. As a consequence, you can only defeat your opponents through negotiation and deception. If you want to invade Trieste, you must somehow persuade the player holding it that, in fact, those armies you’re shipping through the Adriatic are actually heading toward Italy. Then you catch him off his guard and you’re on your way to Belgrade. This might sound like players have a limited set of actions available to them, and that games should get predictable pretty quickly. I assure potential players that this is not the case. The range of possible actions and outcomes is restricted only by the creativity of the players involved. Because there is no element of totally random chance, as there is in Risk, you won’t end up having the game dissolve into a series of ridiculous, strategy-free battles and utterly unlikely outcomes. You just might need to patch up a few friendships after a winner is declared. A while back I was speaking to a friend about the dearth of new board games after the model of Risk or Diplomacy. We agreed that part of this had to do with the expanding comparative appeal of computer games. But he pointed out that it also probably stemmed from the fact that the world we live in today doesn’t lend itself so much to a Diplomacy-style board game. As John Steele Gordon observed a few days ago, warfare between heavily armed, developed nations is a far less likely prospect today than it was a century ago. Maybe that helps explain why a Diplomacy enthusiast like Henry Kissinger has become even less effective with age.
September 28, 2007
A Name Spread Far and Wide Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s mention of Endicott Peabody reminds me of his grandson Endicott “Chub” Peabody, who was governor of Massachusetts for a couple of years in the 1960s and ran one of the few campaigns by anyone ever to get nominated for Vice President in 1972. He has stayed in my mind ever since only because of what a fellow Bay Stater once said of him: that he was the only man to have four towns in the state named after him—Endicott, Peabody, Marblehead, and Athol.
September 28, 2007
What Hath Google Wrought? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:40 AM EST Last night I was watching a documentary on the life of Franklin Roosevelt by David Grubin. I got it from Netflix, and I recommend it. The film showed FDR delivering his Fourth Inaugural Address, on January 20, 1945, which he gave at the White House with little ceremony. I was struck by a sentence in it and made a mental note to look it up this morning. The speech is not one of FDR’s more famous ones and so it is not to be found in such compendia as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. Twenty years ago, I would have had to go to a library. The odds are no better than fifty-fifty that the local ones would have had it, so I probably would have had to send for a book, and it might have been three or four days before I was able to get my hands on the text. Even at the New York Public Library it would probably have taken me at least an hour to determine where I could find it, send in a slip, and get the needed volume. That was yesterday. This is now: I turned on my computer, typed “Roosevelt 4th inaugural” into Google, and had the text in less than 30 seconds. Just as the telegraph speeded up communication by orders of magnitude in the middle of the nineteenth century and changed the world profoundly thereby, so the Internet has accelerated research by a similar amount. Google has, in effect, created a single, integrated index to all the knowledge in the world. You don’t even have to flip the pages. Just type in a few keywords, and there is what you are looking for, ready to be highlighted, copied, and pasted into whatever you are working on. Is this a great world we live in, or what? By the way, the quotation I was looking for is an apposite one. It turns out that FDR was quoting his old Groton headmaster, Endicott Peabody: “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.”
September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:20 PM EST John Steele Gordon asked of the term “Great Powers,” what defines a Great Power? In an initial answer he quotes his college professor, who defined the term to mean “any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” I think this was true in a particular way. “Great Power” is in part a historical term, denoting one of those European states—when the term was coined, France, Great Britain, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia—that could in combination with any two of the others make an unassailable combination. The concept, if not the language, dated back to the mid-eighteenth century (in some ways, earlier), and lasted through the beginning of the First World War. I was once told that the great German historian Ranke thought that there would always be five Great Powers, with some falling from that rank as others rose. There is something to the last half of that—Spain had once been a superpower, before there was such a phrase, and Sweden a Great Power, but neither was either by the time of Castlereagh, the British foreign minister Mr. Gordon indentified as having coined the phrase "Great Power." There was once something to the first half of it: Bismarck clearly thought in terms of the number five when he remarked that the secret of diplomacy was simply to be one of the three rather than one of the two. After reunification, Italy became an honorary Great Power, but it didn’t possess the requisite military strength to play the role (Bismarck again, on Italy: “What a good appetite, but what poor teeth!”). After 1905, Japan in a sense became a Great Power, initially because it could affect the military balance of a system involving Russia. So Great Powers were states with the capacity to significantly sway the European balance of power by their own diplomacy; Middle Powers (Sardinia, at one period, similarly Saxony and Bavaria) were powers one might have to take seriously, but the movement of one of them did not almost inevitably alter the balance of power. An implication of the historical term Great Power was that power was additive in a straightforward way. One counted corps or divisions (at one time, battalions), or ships of the line, or battleships, or dreadnoughts, and toted up the numbers on either side. The alliance possessing the significantly larger number of the relevant unit of force could in theory get its way on any question where the other side could possibly back down. In an age in which decisions for war were made by monarchs or elite groups advised by smallish numbers of specialists, and war aims did not generally involve the extinction of an adversary’s sovereignty, backing down was usually possible, which didn’t mean that the apparently weaker party would inevitably do so, as the existence of war between coalitions, sometimes vicious and protracted wars, very clearly demonstrates. The habit of counting units of force to determine dominance, and assuming that the will of the stronger would usually prevail, lasted well into the nuclear age, where elaborate disputes over counting made up a discipline once wittily dubbed “nuclear theology.” There were almost always obstacles to counting and getting reliable and useful results, and there were often difficulties with weighing the effective power of a coalition, which might have various troubles bringing its theoretical quantitative advantage to bear. But a Great Power was simply a power whose numerical weight was thought intrinsically additive, impressive and decisive. Nowadays, most people realize that nuclear weapons are rarely this sense additive. Past a fairly low threshold, you do not necessarily get a proportionate or even obviously useful increment of power by having more of them, which helped dissolve the simple category of Great Power. Leaving aside nuclear weapons, increases in the relative power and reach of some states notoriously made two states first “superpowers” and then made one state a “hyperpower.” That would be us. Former Great Powers, even in combination, seemed dwarfed by the power of either superpower or the subsequent hyperpower. Claims that the current hyperpower cannot enforce its will by means of violence to my eyes suggest only what are by most historical standards the peculiarities of the current hyperpower—its relative restraint and moderation. In the past, economic power was not too sharply distinguished from military power, because it was thought that it could readily be turned into military power, by raising and equipping, or renting, military or naval units. The events of 1940, when Germany defeated and apparently came near to crushing the British and French empires, ought to have made clear the fact that the potential military strength suggested by economic power may not matter if the conversion of the latter into the former lags too much. It is possible that military power can nowadays be pretty effectively restrained by law, as Mr. Burns suggests. Alas, I have my doubts.
September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:55 PM EST I did indeed mean to invite a response, and I agree with most of Alexander Burns’s. So I have just a few comments. He asks, “is there any country other than the United States that must have its interests considered by every other one?” He doubts if Britain or France these days meets that high bar. Certainly they are lesser powers than the United States, which he agrees meets this definition of a Great Power. It seems to me, however, that where British and French interests are involved, any country would be very foolish indeed not to take them into account. India felt free in 1961 to snap up the Portuguese colony of Goa, on the west coast of the subcontinent (without bothering to ask the people of Goa whether they wished to be snapped up, although a U.N. Security Council resolution had called for self-determination) because India knew that there wasn’t a thing Portugal could do about it. However it negotiated over the course of 15 years with France to have French India merge with it. The merger was accomplished peacefully and legally, not with 40,000 Indian troops. The different Indian approaches to very similar circumstances, I think, must be due to the relative power of Portugal and France. While neither Britain nor France in the 1950s could have projected enough power in the Indian subcontinent to have prevented a military takeover of territory, they both were capable of exerting a lot of economic and diplomatic pressure. No country, I would think, would want a veto-holding member of the Security Council as a sworn enemy, and Britain, with the worldwide insurance and financial power of London markets, could impose painful economic sanctions unilaterally. The duc de Richelieu joked in 1818 that there really were six Great Powers: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and the banking house of Baring Brothers. Mr. Burns notes that India, Pakistan, Israel (almost certainly), and North Korea are also nuclear powers and therefore under one possible definition are Great Powers. I left them out because none of these countries has more than a regional ability to project nuclear power. North Korea not even that, as its one nuclear test was mostly a fizzle. The five permanent members of the Security Council, however, have the power to drop a nuke wherever they decide to drop one. Britain could have won the Falklands war in a few minutes, merely by moving one of its boomer submarines to the South Atlantic and lobbing the big one into Buenos Aires, thereby decapitating the Argentine state. I have every confidence that the British government never contemplated such a move and that the Argentine government was entirely confident that Britain would not. But I’m equally sure that even that gang of thuggish half-wits running Argentina in 1983 must have thought about it, along with other possible British responses. They gambled that Britain would swallow a military takeover rather than go to the trouble and expense of undoing a fait accompli. Margaret Thatcher turned out to be made of sterner stuff than they bargained for. Here, of course, is the trouble with nuclear weapons. While they are immensely powerful, they are also immensely expensive, in terms of public opinion, to use. which is a big reason they haven’t been since 1945. Britain, as a practical matter, could not have annihilated several million Argentinians to regain control of some rainy islands and a lot of sheep. But a nuclear deterrent with global reach makes one, ipso facto, one of the big boys, i.e., a Great Power. Charles de Gaulle said as much when he was building the “force de frappe” (with public American tut-tutting and private American help). But I agree that the term, very clear in 1900, is much less meaningful today and perhaps should indeed be buried. Maybe it’s a sign that we have moved (or at least are moving) beyond the day of the nation state as well.
September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:05 AM EST John Steele Gordon poses an enticing question about how we assess the relative strengths of nations: “Do we have 5 Great Powers, based on nuclear weapons, or 12, based on GDP?” I don’t know if he means this as a rhetorical question or whether it’s intended to invite a response, but I’ll take a crack at it all the same. This query follows a more challenging, broader question: What defines a Great Power? To this second question, Mr. Gordon essentially offers four potential answers. First is the reply of his former international politics professor, who said a Great Power is “any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” Second is A. J. P. Taylor’s definition: “The test of a Great Power is the test of strength for war.” A third method is by asking whether a country has nuclear weapons. Fourth, and lastly, is by measuring a nation’s GDP. Taking each of these methods individually, I find them problematic. Mr. Gordon’s old professor’s definition probably works fairly well for defining the Great Powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But in a world where nearly 200 countries interact with one another, is there any country other than the United States that must have its interests considered by every other one? Countries like Britain and France, which hold veto power on the United Nations Security Council, don’t necessarily meet this high bar. China might, but even if it does I think the list stops there. Maybe it should, or maybe this definition is flawed. I’m slightly more tempted by Taylor’s. This actually fits better with the example of Britain’s casual attitude toward Icelandic sovereignty in World War II. In that case, it seems that Britain was the greater power because it could act with impunity in military affairs, whereas Iceland could not even provide for a common defense. Yet in a world bound to an increasing degree by systems of international arbitration and law, range of military action doesn’t quite work as a definition of Great Power status, either. It’s much harder these days to disregard your neighbor’s sovereignty (ask Saddam Hussein, circa 1991). Even the United States, which remains, in military terms, the world’s most powerful country, lacks the unilateral ability to successfully invade a smaller nation and occupy it at will. In our time, when the international community has so many platforms from which to express outrage, and when every disgruntled ex-Baathist can find his way to a firearm, asymmetrical warfare just ain’t what it used to be. Counting Great Powers by their nuclear arsenals is a tempting third alternative, but it is also a limited one. Mr. Gordon says that five countries would qualify by this rubric, but that estimate is actually a little low. To the five nations that signed the original Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968, we have to add India and Pakistan, and probably North Korea and Israel. When you throw in those last two, this definition gets especially dicey. Kim Jong-Il can’t be totally ignored by other world leaders, but North Korea’s interests don’t carry nearly as much weight as those of nuke-free nations like Japan and Mexico. Nuclear arms empower a country to hold others hostage, or to trigger a global war, but they don’t necessarily increase the prestige or bargaining power of a nation’s government in general. The fourth option Mr. Gordon offers, GDP, is also an interesting measure to use, but the list of the top 12 nations, as judged by this statistic, leaves me with serious doubts. Some of the countries that come out on top, economically, are relatively insignificant by any other standard for national greatness. By any of the other suggested rubrics, countries like Canada, Italy, and Spain are decidedly less significant. I’m not sure that GDP alone can compensate for a comparatively weak military and diplomatic position. These are a lot of objections, so let me try my hand at a positive answer of my own. To some extent, I think you have to measure a nation’s power by a subjective mixture of these various standards. Is a nation economically robust? Is it heavily armed? Is it advanced enough to possess nuclear weapons? Is it empowered by international institutions to advance its interests? I think you have to answer all these questions to know if a country’s power is really extraordinary. On the other hand, though, we might just be dealing with an outdated set of vocabulary. The term “Great Power” comes from a time when the Western world was led by a set of competing nations with differing but matched capabilities. Today, no such set of countries exists. The United States and, to a lesser degree, China, far outpace their nearest competitors by most assessments of national power and potential. To pretend otherwise is to flatter countries like Britain, Germany, and Russia, but without good reason. Maybe it’s time to bury the term “Great Power” alongside the man who coined it.
September 26, 2007
The Great Powers Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:55 PM EST The Term “Great Powers” has been around since the end of the Napoleonic wars. It was first used by Lord Castlereigh, the British foreign minister, in 1814, and the term was used at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to describe Great Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, who called the shots at that conference. But what defines a Great Power? The professor who taught me international politics in college defined the term to mean, “Any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” He gave as an example of the difference between a Great Power and a lesser one an incident in 1940, after the fall of France. The Royal Navy, looking at a map of the Atlantic, realized that Iceland, without military forces and a tiny population, might be subject to a German coup de main. A German submarine base in Iceland, sitting athwart the vital Atlantic sea lanes, was a nightmare. Britain acted like a Great Power. A force of 1,500 Royal Marines landed at Reykjavik, and the Icelandic government was simply informed, after the landing, that Britain had assumed responsibility for the defense of Iceland. That, as it happened, was fine with the Icelanders, not that they had any say in the matter, and the next year the United States took over the defense of Iceland, a responsibility that it still has. By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had joined the ranks of the Great Powers, and many people regarded Japan as one as well. Prussia by this point had been subsumed into Germany, and Austria lost its status after the Austrian Empire was broken up following World War I. That made six Great Powers, now operating on a global scale. As defeated powers, neither Germany nor Japan were given permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, but China—at that point only potentially a Great Power—was given one. Today, the United States is often considered a Superpower, with by far the largest military establishment in the world as well as by far the largest economy with which to sustain that power. With China rising quickly, the other permanent members of the Security Council are major economic powers (Russia’s GDP being highly dependant on the price of oil, however) but much smaller military ones. Still, they are all nuclear powers, with the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. Following my old professor’s dictum, they are thus all Great Powers, as no one is going to ignore the interests of a country armed with nuclear weapons or feel free to land troops uninvited on its shores. The great historian A. J. P. Taylor, thought military capacity was the sine qua non of Great Power status, “The test of a Great Power,” he wrote, “is the test of strength for war.” But in a world where the possibility of Great Power wars, such as the conflicts that so dominated the first half of the twentieth century, is currently remote, and where the integration of the global economy is proceeding at a breakneck pace, I wonder if that is still true. Perhaps the test of a Great Power nowadays is the ability to compete in the marketplace, not on the battlefield. Germany and Japan are certainly Great Powers economically, but not militarily. India and Brazil are rising to that status. According to the World Bank in 2006, there were 10 countries whose GDP exceeds a trillion dollars (roughly 2 percent of world GDP): The United States ($13.2 trillion), Japan ($4.3), Germany ($2.9), China ($2.7), Great Britain ($2.3), France ($2.2), Italy ($1.8), Canada ($1.3), Spain ($1.2), and Brazil($1.1). Russia ($.98) and India ($.9) are nearly there. Do we have 5 Great Powers, based on nuclear weapons, or 12, based on GDP?
September 26, 2007
Two Presidents in Action Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:05 AM EST Following this week’s exchange about Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University, I encourage readers to see for themselves what kind of welcome the man received. Video of President Lee Bollinger’s introductory remarks is available here, and continued here. Ahmadinejad’s reaction to Bollinger can be viewed here, and clips of his extended remarks are elsewhere on YouTube. As I wrote earlier this week, I don’t know that I would have invited Ahmadinejad to speak, had I been in Lee Bollinger’s shoes. But if the Columbia president wanted to host him, this was the way to do it. Bollinger’s introductory remarks were, in my view, totally magnificent–beginning with a sophisticated argument about free speech and concluding with this blunt address to Ahmadinejad: “A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country, as at one of the meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.” One can see, from the video of Ahmadinejad taking the stage, that not everyone in the audience shared President Bollinger’s sentiments. But for the Iranian president, this event was a humiliation. He was publicly castigated by an American scholar and then laughed at by a room full of college students. I can think of few illustrations of American freedom more compelling than the image of 18- and 19-year-olds scoffing in the face of a despot.
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