Category: Essays
Declaring Makes It So: What it Means that the U.S. Now Thinks it is a Pacific Nation
Note: this article was originally published on Fox & Hedgehog.
In a speech to the Australian Parliament in 2011, President Obama declared that "Our new focus on this region [the Asia Pacific] reflects a fundamental truth—the United States has been, and always will be, a Pacific nation." His phrasing belied a rather circular logic: if the United States has always been a Pacific nation, how can it suddenly take a new notice of the region it believes marks its own identity? And if the United States must now declare itself to be a Pacific nation in order to be one, doesn't its absence of prior declarations show how new this understanding of itself as a nation is?
A declaration of national identity in terms of geography is very different from a declaration in terms of ideology or creed. The latter, I believe, are internally focused declarations. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, is the declaration that speaks to Americans as a people about what as a nation they stand for. It describes the markers of difference between Americans and the British. But declarations of geographic identity are not like this. Declarations of geographic identity speak externally, giving those outside the nation an idea of what that nation believes its interests to be.
The United States of America pre-1916 was just that—it defined itself on its own, consciously rejecting external labels of association. It stood for itself, and in its isolationism made no declarations of what external geographies it saw itself as part of. But 1916 meant that security required looking across the Atlantic to Europe, to events there that threatened American interests within its own borders. The Atlantic commitment grew and grew as U.S. interests were threatened for a second time by Germany, and then became seemingly irrevocable with the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as U.S. grand strategy came to embody the response to the Soviet threat.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization: an organization, focused on the Atlantic, that counts as members nations that share no border with that ocean, and which exists to respond to threats nowhere near the Atlantic. The Atlantic here is simply a construction used to declare externally where ideology and interests lie, without necessarily remaining faithful to geographic truth.
Even as U.S. territory in the Pacific was attacked in 1941, the response seemed not to require declarations of Pacific identity, but only an immediate military response. The focus of U.S. identity remained across the Atlantic, in Europe, where the U.S. saw itself fighting for its own values, rather than solely its territorial defence.
There were tepid attempts by the United States to look westwards following WWII—the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), for instance—but these did not extend to definitions of identity, even as the U.S. became embroiled in Vietnam. Christopher Hemmer and Peter Katzenstein have explained how following the Second World War the United States tried to secure itself both from the west and the east, but the approaches it took to doing so demonstrated the relative importance of each region. The U.S. preference for multilateral institutions in Europe and bilateralism in the Asia Pacific, argue Hemmer and Katzenstein, shows clearly where the United States' self-identity lay during the latter half of the twentieth century. Because U.S. identity lay so strongly in Europe, it was willing to give up a larger degree of control to European partners through multilateralism than to those in the Asia Pacific. Existentially threatened by the Soviet Union, the U.S. was defined by the Atlantic connection.
The United States indeed shares a long coastline with the Pacific ocean. But geographic features do not define a nation's identity. New Zealand, a country with no geographic markers other than the Pacific, nevertheless defined itself as a European country until forced to focus anew on the Pacific following the fall of Singapore. That a country geographically as far from another as is physically possible can still align itself ideologically to the other side of the world demonstrates the constructed nature of geographic identities. It seems disingenuous for the U.S. to claim long-standing identity as a Pacific nation merely because of its Pacific coastline, or its territories in that ocean.
But if the world's superpower declares something to be so, it most often is. "The United States has been, and always will be, a Pacific nation." It matters not whether the historical record supports this; that the United States now believes it is enough to change the record, to change the commitments of nations, to make it a fact that must be taken into account when calculating responses. It is a fact that is now incorporated into the international political security market.
All this is to say: geographic identity descriptors are the strongest statements that can be made by a nation to demonstrate a commitment to a part of the world. In other words, these types of statements are the broadest conception of a grand strategy, where all other components within a nation must then adhere to that broadest commitment made. Those who question the commitment should not do so easily, because such a descriptor has proven historically to be long-lasting and meaningful.
The United States' "pivot to Asia" seems itself a component of its newfound Pacific identity. Without being a Pacific nation, it is a stretch of imperial power for the United States to claim interests in the East and South China Seas. Only through believing itself to be a Pacific nation can the United States justify its re-alignment of military and economic structures to focus on Asia.
It is also interesting to reflect on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in light of the new U.S. commitment to the Pacific. Discussion has been strong over the purported benefits of the TPP to signatories' economies. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative estimates real income benefits to the United States of approximately $77bn annually; other sources put it at up to $131bn. At its best this represents a 0.5 percent increase in annual GDP resulting from the TPP—a not insignificant material benefit, but nonetheless not the sort of world-changing trade deal that the TPP has been billed as by governments. The fervour of the Obama administration in getting the TPP through represents, I think, the recognition that the deal would cement the U.S. de facto as a Pacific nation, as the major partner in the Pacific's trade deal. To anyone who then questions the U.S.' Pacific identity and commitment, the U.S. can simply point to the TPP and ask what all the fuss is about. Trade benefits are important, but pale in comparison to the effect that the deal may have on the U.S.' grand strategy contra China.
There seem to be two further points of interest in relation to the TPP. First, there are signatories to the TPP that do not even touch that ocean, showing, just as with NATO, the necessity of constructed geographic groupings. Second, China is expected to lose approximately $35bn annually through a successful TPP implementation. If the deal was just about increasing incomes through increased trade, China would have been included in the deal. For the deal's major partner it is about much more than that.
There are, I think, two things that can be taken away from this brief history of the U.S. as a Pacific nation and of the uses of geographic identity descriptors. The first is that U.S. allies in the Asia Pacific should be reassured of the United States' commitment to the region. As a Pacific nation the United States cannot let other countries it believes not to be Pacific states fundamentally destabilise the region. Second, and more broadly, is the way that other nations themselves may use geographic identity descriptors to align themselves more deeply with allies. This is an important lesson for countries like New Zealand, Australia, and even those nations that do not lie in the Pacific but believe their national interests to be fundamentally affected by stability in the region.
Author mmoorejonesPosted on March 24, 2016 May 1, 2016 Categories Essays, Foreign Policy & PoliticsTags grand strategy, NATO, Pacific, USALeave a comment on Declaring Makes It So: What it Means that the U.S. Now Thinks it is a Pacific Nation
What Is Our Time Here For?: The Meaning of Yale-NUS College and the Liberal Arts
Note: This is an article I wrote that was originally published on The Octant, Yale-NUS College's student newspaper.
This semester at Yale University I'm taking a class called Successful Global Leadership with New York Times columnist and author David Brooks. In class David frequently refers to what he calls "resume virtues" and "eulogy virtues". As he described them in his most recent book, "The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They're the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed".
It struck me that how we think about these two virtues will to a large extent determine the way we approach our time at college—the major and classes we choose, how we think about grades, and which student organisations we choose to commit to. Not only that: the way that Yale-NUS College, or any institution for that matter, thinks about these two virtues will determine how it views its mission, and how it educates generations of students after us. Daily life, with its classes, meeting and events, loomed over by exams and papers, can make it all too easy to forget why we are here in the first place. I think that is true not only for us students, but also for faculty and college leadership.
The resume virtues are ever-present in discourse, to the extent that it can be hard to realise there is anything else. As David describes, "Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character." Juniors are in the midst of applying for penultimate year internships: the Centre for International and Professional Experience (CIPE) and our advisers are stressing the things we need to do to land our desired internship, to in turn get the job we want after graduation. The major and classes we choose, the student organizations we join, and the amount of effort we decide to put into different aspects of student life—I would be disingenuous not to admit that my decisions are at least in part determined by how these things may appear on my resume. And the resume virtues are inculcated in us from the top, by our CIPE and major advisers, some of our professors, and even by the thought that Yale-NUS' long-term impact depends on our own post-graduation professional success.
I think that if we fall into the trap of viewing this institution as a unique fast-track to impressive resume virtues then we will have missed an incredible opportunity to shape our own lives, and to "redefine liberal arts and science education for a complex, interconnected world." The question asked by Yale-NUS' inaugural curriculum committee was "What must a young person learn in order to lead a responsible life in this century?" It was not, let's be clear, "What must a young person learn in order to get their desired job?"
The liberal arts and sciences are not a unique selling point for a resume, or a euphemism for an elite college. They are about having freedom—four years of freedom, in our case—to learn about ourselves and our own minds so that we can approach everything else we do in life with solid foundations, with "inner character". I've come to think that college is, at its core, about beginning to build a wide and sturdy foundation of eulogy virtues, upon which we can build our external and professional lives. I learned this the risky way. With just over a year left before graduating from high school, I left to work at a technology company. I returned not long after, once I'd learned what education seemed to really be about. It took leaving school to show me that there was a difference between "an education" and "becoming educated", to highlight the parts of school that seemed fundamentally meaningful, and to show me why it was worth devoting four years to college. To put it another way, in the words of Bill Deresiewicz, who visited Yale-NUS earlier this semester: "College helps to furnish the tools with which to undertake that work of self-discovery… There's nothing "academic" about it."
I am not saying that resume virtues are unimportant; they are. But I believe we are here for something more than that, and that the decisions we make during college should be about those larger ideals first, resumes second. Resumes can be built upon a sturdy understanding of yourself, but I don't think the reverse is true.
I'm fearful that in the relentless focus on how our time at college will serve our resumes and our careers we will end up wasting the chance to expand our opportunities, and to create the foundations for meaningful lives. Not only that, but I'm fearful that Yale-NUS will forget its mission, falling back on the easy and externally satisfying pursuit of resume virtues for itself as an institution, and for its students. We all play a role in Yale-NUS' mission, and in setting its tone for decades to come. So, at the very least, let us think about the tone that we want, and whether the decisions we make today are ones we would be proud of when we gather at Yale-NUS in three decades' time.
Author mmoorejonesPosted on March 9, 2016 May 1, 2016 Categories Articles, Education, EssaysTags liberal arts, Yale-NUS CollegeLeave a comment on What Is Our Time Here For?: The Meaning of Yale-NUS College and the Liberal Arts
Reflection on a Grain of Sand
This was originally a reflection I wrote for a class called "The Search for a Habitable Planet" with Professor Bryan Penprase at Yale-NUS College.
From ages three until six I lived in Rarotonga, the largest island of a disparate group in the middle of the Pacific that make up the Cook Islands. This meant that I grew up during those three formative years with the night sky more clear and visible than I've ever seen since. Asking questions about space, and the earth's place in it, probably came naturally with all those stars and satellites spread above me every single night.
Around age 4 my parents bought me a videotape of Sam Neill's TV program Space. In my favourite episode Sam Neill stands on a beach and picks up a hand-full of sand. Letting the grains run slowly through his fingertips, he explains the vastness of space by saying that for every grain of sand on every beach in the world there are more than a billion stars, each with their own planets and moons. And so on that small Pacific island surrounded by one endless beach I let the grains of fine white sand run through my own fingertips and thought about the enormity of space. Though it may sound strange or ridiculous, I could comprehend it: that grain-of-sand analogy was the perfect way for my young and malleable brain to understand that this tiny island I lived on, surrounded by vast ocean, was itself the same as the tiny world we live on surrounded by vast space. And with that understanding came the sense that there was no doubt that there were other habitable planets out there: with so much sand on earth pure chance means we will eventually discover another planet like ours (said my young brain).
Space was my childhood fascination, and from ages five until ten I was determined that I would be an astronomer. But somewhere along the way I simply stopped thinking about space and the earth. Perhaps it was when I moved to Manila, a light-filled metropolis, and for a year didn't see the night sky. Space practically exited my mind, and what filled it was concerns with how islands and continents within this earth can best organise themselves. Global affairs became my fascination: empires and wars, ideologies and negotiations. International Relations takes as its premise that the earth and the resources on it are finite, and therefore conflict is to a degree inevitable. Statesmen concern themselves with working within the confines of this earth to secure the interests of a subset of its people. Planets for me during this decade were the different continents that different ideologies occupied.
And now, reflecting on earth and space in the first year of my third decade on earth, I have a sense of incredulity: did man really go to the moon? Is a man-made object truly in interstellar space and still transmitting to earth? Everything that I have consumed my mind with for a decade has been confined to continents and islands and managing the conflicts that flare up in the world. How could humans have possibly exited this atmosphere and looked at the whole of earth at once? With so much still to do and organise on this earth, how is it possible that humans have left its atmosphere to search for other worlds? In this decade, planets seem almost to be fiction.
But when I think back to those grains of sand on all the beaches on earth I'm left with a sense of ridiculousness. How can people consume themselves with something so small? "Every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant"; "every 'supreme leader', every saint and sinner in the history of our species"… has been absorbed in one infinitesimally small grain of sand no different to all the trillions of others. Even the Voyager 2 image of our "pale blue dot" privileges our position in the universe, because we can make it out amidst the darkness. I prefer to conceptualise Earth as a planet as just one of those grands of sand on one of the beaches on earth, indistinguishable from the rest.
The great irony is that humans only started leaving Earth's atmosphere during a period of intense human competition and rivalry: it was preoccupation with portions of this Earth that led humans closer to discovering other worlds. Are other planets therefore only discoverable and reachable through human rivalry? In these moments of reflection, Earth becomes a symbol of the confines and preoccupations of the human mind.
Author mmoorejonesPosted on February 27, 2016 May 1, 2016 Categories EssaysTags earth, space, Yale-NUSLeave a comment on Reflection on a Grain of Sand
What the Permanent 5 Can Learn From the Painting That Hangs Above Them
Copyright United Nations.
Note: I conducted research for this article in 2015 for an art history class at Yale-NUS College, and originally published this article version of my research on Fox & Hedgehog.
On the east wall of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) chamber hangs an enormous painting that all will recognise and yet be able to say almost nothing about. It is a grand backdrop, but little more, to the grander discussions occurring at the table before it.
The story behind this painting, its artist, and its present context is a complex one that highlights the tensions between the Security Council's aspirations and its conflicted past; it is an important reminder to the Council that radical changes are sometimes needed, not just superficial adjustments. As I'll explain, Per Krohg, the artist, made precisely this mistake when he reused work he had completed during the Nazi occupation of Norway as the centrepiece of his UNSC work, completed in 1950. Both Krohg's painting and the P5 are remnants of the war, and risk failing precisely because, out of fear or misunderstanding, they refuse to reinvent themselves for the times we now live in.
Per Krohg's painting is some five by nine metres, and is divided horizontally; the lower-third is executed in dark colours, the upper two-thirds much lighter with UN-white and blue motifs. Colour alone gives much of the work's message: the lighter colours suggest peace, progress and truth, while the darker colours depict a hellish landscape. "Symbolising", the UNSC tells us, "the promise of future peace and individual freedom", the work shows a phoenix rising from a dark landscape into a light-filled world of progress. Though complex, with many panels depicting separate scenes, the painting's overall message is simple: technology, justice and truth, united by the nuclear family and the UN-led world order, are forces that progress humanity.
Despite its initial simplicity and message, the iconography of this painting becomes deeply troubling the more it is observed. It is clearly a propagandistic image in favour of the UN-led order, but only a thin film separates it from being a troubling and conflicted remnant of war, and a symbol of what the UN has or could become. Created to represent the lofty goals of the world's most inclusive and progressive organisation, the painting in fact depicts the opposite. It is so deeply rooted in the Second World War, with all of that period's problems, that Gregory Maertz, an art historian specialising in the Third Reich at St. John's University, even told me that Krohg's painting "could easily function as nazi propaganda on behalf of national socialist eugenic (later eliminatory) ideology". For instance, it is caucasian men and women who pull chained, black figures out of the hellish lower-third of the painting; it is caucasian figures who look through telescopes and microscopes in the upper-right of the image, and the same figures who weigh gold in the upper-left. And, of course, the centrepiece of the image is a caucasian nuclear family surrounded by Biblical iconography. These were the figures and motifs ever-present at Nazi art exhibitions throughout the Third Reich, in Munich, Oslo and Vienna, for instance.
It is the centrepiece of this painting that says the most about the painting as a whole, and, perhaps, the state of the Security Council today. What seems to be unrecognised or even unknown in the scholarship about Krohg's painting is that the centre panel, depicting the nuclear family, is not original. In fact, the panel is almost identical to a painting that Krohg completed in 1940, at the start of the Nazi occupation of Norway. This other work, titled Peace, the Artist and His Family, is a forlorn painting, the man and woman at the centre of it both with downcast gazes, and even the children surrounding them looking melancholy. It can be read as Krohg's reaction to the occupation, and the knowledge that he might be separated from his family. In the version Krohg produced for the centrepiece of the UNSC painting, the only changes made are that the figures have much lighter skin and hair, have subtle smiles, and the man and woman now have linked arms.
Per Krohg was an artist who was invited to paint a monumental work for the world's most important room; he was tasked with encapsulating the notion of peace in a single image. But for Krohg, who had lived through the Nazi occupation, and even been imprisoned for a year by the Nazis, peace seemed only to function in relation to war. The same can be said of the Security Council today, a body whose permanent members remain because of the role they played in the Second World War; the P5 reflects global power in 1945, not global power today.
For Krohg, the United Nations was a promise of avoiding the preceding decade that he had lived through. The problem with reusing his own work from 1940 is not so much self-plagiarism as forever tying the Security Council chamber to a very specific war, and its very specific problems. The Security Council itself functions in the same way. By mooring itself, through permanent membership and the veto power, to a specific war and very distinct problems, the Security Council risks becoming a body that no longer has the power to inspire peace, just as Krohg's mural today is more problematic than it is inspiring. Reforming the Security Council by expanding permanent membership to reflect present global power would be an immediate way for the Council to un-stick itself from the remnants of war.
In 2013 the United Nations completed extensive restoration of the Security Council chamber which had been ongoing for seven years at a cost of USD$1billion. If there was ever a time to update the physical Council chamber—or even Council permanent membership—to reflect the times in which it now operates, that would seem to have been it. When asked by a magazine about the changes made to the Security Council chamber, Michael Adlerstein, the assistant secretary-general in charge of the project, responded: "We didn't change very much. The Americans and the Russians and the Chinese are all extremely nervous about Security Council reform and the slippery slope—'If you change this, where is that going to lead us?'" He went on: "Whether it works for the world is a matter of opinion, but it works for the five permanent members, so there's a great deal of reluctance to change anything."
The image of the family, and the other tropes so prevalent in his painting, clearly worked for Per Lasson Krohg. Whether they work for the world is a matter of opinion. But the irony is that the permanent members of the Security Council are watched over by a painting that is meant to remind them of their role in maintaining and advancing peace in the post-war world, and instead should remind them of the dangers of being stuck in the past. The latter is the immediate lesson they should pay attention to, or else the former may become impossible.
Author mmoorejonesPosted on February 23, 2016 May 1, 2016 Categories EssaysTags art, Security Council, United NationsLeave a comment on What the Permanent 5 Can Learn From the Painting That Hangs Above Them
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