Anne Applebaum's Blog, page 49

LONDON - Half a million jobs will be lost. More than $130 billion in public spending will be cut. Payments of all kinds — to university students, inhabitants of public housing, the BBC — will be chopped, blocked or frozen. Thus did the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, usher in what has been called "a sober decade" in Britain while the nation listened in stony silence.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, the French were loudly on strike. Or perhaps I should say the French remained on strike, having already been on strike for more than a week, blocking airports, trains and refineries, shutting down everything from gas stations to colleges and other schools. Thus did the French react to what President Nicolas Sarkozy has called a "difficult, complex" decision to raise the national retirement age from 60 to 62 and the age for full state pension from 65 to 67.

And thus did they conform to national stereotypes. In an age of supposed globalization, when we are all allegedly becoming more alike — listening to the same American music, buying the same Chinese products — it is astonishing how absolutely British the British remain and how thoroughly French are the French. Both countries need to change state spending patterns and cut budgets to cope with economic crisis. Faced with this challenge, the British have stiffened their upper lips — while the French have taken to the streets.

Now, there were some Brits behaving as if they were French and vice versa. After Osborne's budget speech, protesters did gather here outside Downing Street. They looked suspiciously fringe, however, and many waved signs advertising the Socialist Worker, a newspaper nobody reads. In France, meanwhile, polls indicate that some 70 percent of the population support the strikes but fully 18 percent oppose them. One brave Frenchman even told a journalist that he agreed completely with Sarkozy's pension reform. "We shouldn't think it's still acceptable to stop working at 60 years old — we should work until 65. Like other European countries, we have to work longer than 60 years."

Most people, however, did conform to the stereotype — so much so that an explanation is surely necessary. National character is not genetic, after all. Yet here are two nations acting like living caricatures of themselves.

Part of the answer lies in historical experience. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the British, unlike Americans, have positive memories of wartime austerity and even rationing. More recently, Margaret Thatcher's 1981 budget cuts heralded real reforms in Britain and, eventually, a period of growth and prosperity. It is not unreasonable to imagine that these cuts will do the same. The French fondness for strikes is based on experience, too. Strikes, riots and street demonstrations led to political changes not only in 1789 but also in 1871, 1958 and many other times. Although they started over what seemed like trivial issues, the famous strikes of 1968 heralded genuine reforms in France and, eventually, a period of growth and prosperity.

There is an explanation to be found in current politics as well. For most of the past year, scandal has dominated the French media: ministers who spend government money on expensive cigars and private jets, rich widows who misplace their Picassos and hide their money in tax shelters, accountants who stuff envelopes with cash for bribes. With politicians behaving like so many Marie Antoinettes, is it any wonder voters object to being told they must work harder?

By contrast, the British budget cuts are being carried out by a recently elected government, one that hasn't been in office long enough to be caught up in financial scandal. More important, it's a coalition government, made up of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, two parties with very different voter bases. Conservative conservatives don't like everything about this arrangement and neither do liberal Liberal Democrats. But the pool of people whose sympathies lie one way or another is much broader, and thus the number of people who will accept budget cuts — however resentfully — is broader, too.

This doesn't mean the British reforms will succeed: Angry voters might still turn against the government. And sullen French strikers might accept change as inevitable and go home. The counterrevolution has triumphed before in France, just as reforming governments have been chucked out in Britain. But until then — plus ça change. And every unhappy nation will go on being unhappy in its own way.

In 1958, an English sociologist and Labor Party politician named Michael Young imagined a future in which the British establishment dissolved itself, abolished all forms of hereditary power and created instead a meritocracy (a word Young invented) based on IQ. In Young's fable, the academically talented from the working class happily join the elite. But the less-talented resent them even more than they did the old dukes and duchesses. By 2034, this resentment leads to a violent populist revolution that sweeps the meritocracy away.

To some, this story has always seemed like a warning to America. In 1972, the American sociologist Daniel Bell cited it and predicted, with amazing prescience, the rise of an anti-elite-education populism. Bell got one thing wrong, however: He thought the coming attack on universities would take the form of enforced quotas and lowered standards. In fact, American universities staved off that particular populist wave in the 1970s by expanding their admissions to include women and minorities, while keeping standards high.

The result of that expansion is now with us: Barack Obama, brought up by a single mother, graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School, is president. Michelle Obama, daughter of a black municipal employee, graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, is first lady. They brought with them to Washington dozens more people, also from modest backgrounds, mostly not with inherited wealth, who have entered high government office thanks in part to their education. Not that Washington wasn't stuffed with such people already: Think of Clarence Thomas, son of a domestic servant and a farm worker, graduate of Yale Law School, Supreme Court justice.

Despite pushing aside the old WASP establishment — not a single member of it remains on the Supreme Court — these modern meritocrats are clearly not admired, or at least not for their upward mobility, by many Americans. On the contrary — and as Bell might have predicted — they are resented as "elitist." Which is at some level strange: To study hard, to do well, to improve yourself — isn't that the American dream? The backlash against graduates of "elite" universities seems particularly odd given that the most elite American universities have in the past two decades made the greatest effort to broaden their student bodies.

Because they can offer full scholarships, the wealthier Ivy League schools in particular are far more diverse, racially and economically, than they were a few decades ago. Once upon a time, you got into Harvard or Yale solely because of your alumnus grandfather. Nowadays, your alumnus grandfather still helps, but only as long as you did well on the SAT, captained your ice hockey team and, in your senior year, raised a million dollars for charity (the last was not a requirement when I got into Yale, but it seems to be now). If you did all that and come from a broken home in Nevada, so much the better.

At one level, the use of "elite" to describe the new meritocrats simply means that the word has lost its meaning. As Jacob Weisberg points out, when Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell or — bizarrely — Justice Thomas's wife fling the word "elitist" at opponents, it often means nothing more than "a person whose politics I don't like" or even "a person who is snobby." But after listening to O'Donnell's latest campaign ads — in which the Senate candidate declares proudly, "I didn't go to Yale . . . I am YOU" — I think something deeper must be going on as well.

I suspect the "anti-elite-educationism" that Bell predicted is growing now not despite the rise of meritocracy but because of it. The old Establishment was resented, but only because its wealth and power were perceived as undeserved. Those outside could at least feel they were cleverer and savvier, and they could blame their failures on "the system." Nowadays, successful Americans, however ridiculously lucky they have been, often smugly see themselves as "deserving." Meanwhile, the less successful are more likely to feel it's their own fault — or to feel that others feel it's their fault — even if they have simply been unlucky.

I can see how this is irritating, even painful. But I don't quite see what comes next. When Ginni Thomas tells a cheering crowd of Virginia Tea Partyers that "we are ruled by an elite that thinks it knows better than we know" who, or what, does she want to put in its place? Young imagined a revolution (led, interestingly, by the wives of the high-IQ elites) and a classless society to follow. Unfortunately, this idea has been tried before, and let's just agree that it wasn't an overwhelming success.

In America, the end of the meritocracy will probably come about slowly: If working hard, climbing the education ladder and graduating from a good university only wins you opprobrium, then you might not bother. Or if you do bother, then you certainly won't go into politics, where your kind is no longer welcome. We will then have a different sort of elite in charge of the country — and a different set of reasons to dislike them, too.

"The State Department alerts U.S. citizens to the potential for terrorist attacks in Europe. . . . Terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons and target both official and private interests. U.S. citizens are reminded of the potential for terrorists to attack public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure. Terrorists have targeted and attacked subway and rail systems, as well as aviation and maritime services. U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling."

– State Department travel alert, Oct. 3

Speaking as an American who lives in Europe, I feel it is incumbent upon me to describe what people like me do when we hear warnings like this one issued on Sunday: We do nothing.

We do nothing, first and foremost, because there is nothing that we can do. Unless the State Department gets specific — e.g., "don't go to the Eiffel Tower tomorrow" — information at that level of generality is meaningless. Unless we are talking about weapons of mass destruction, the chances of being hit by a car while crossing the street are still greater than the chances of being on that one plane or one subway car that comes under attack. Besides, nobody living or working in a large European city (or even a small one) can indefinitely avoid coming within close proximity of "official and private" structures affiliated with U.S. interests — a Hilton hotel, an Apple computer shop — not to mention subways, trains, airplanes, boats and all other forms of public transportation.

Second, we do nothing because if the language is that vague, then nobody is really sure why the warning has been issued in the first place. Obviously, if the American government knew who the terrorists were and what they were going to attack, it would arrest them and stop them. If it can't do any better than mentioning "tourist infrastructure" and public transportation, it doesn't really know anything at all.

In which case, why are they telling us about it? Since the warning made breakfast television on Sunday morning, speculation has been rife. So far I have heard at least one full-blown conspiracy theory: Some believe the U.S. government has issued this statement to frighten Europeans into greater intelligence cooperation, and in particular to persuade the European Union to agree to a new system of airline passenger data exchange.

Other rumors say that the CIA believes al-Qaeda, or some al-Qaeda knockoff group, is planning simultaneous attacks on hotels in major European cities, something like the 2008 attacks on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai. This information, according to the rumor, is supposed to have come from an interrogation carried out last summer.

Yet even if U.S. intelligence agencies possess information as solid as that — and, I repeat, I have absolutely no evidence that they do — there is still no point in the State Department telling us to remain alert when standing next to any American object, because even if we do it today, we won't tomorrow.

This sort of thing has happened before. In 2004, the employees of the IMF and World Bank in Washington arrived at work to find themselves the subject of sudden media interest: Maps and detailed plans of their offices had been found on a laptop in Afghanistan, and a warning had been issued as a result. But, of course, it wasn't realistic to maintain a vigilant watch of indefinite length on a building used by hundreds of people every day, many of them suspiciously foreign-looking. And, of course, the advice was quickly forgotten, and everyone went back to work.

In truth, the only people who can profit from such a warning are the officials who issue it. If something does happen, they are covered: They warned us, they told us in advance, they won't be criticized or forced to resign. And if nothing happens, then we'll all forget about it anyway.

Except that we don't forget about it. Over time, these kinds of enigmatic warnings do al-Qaeda's work for it, scaring people without cause. Without so much as lifting a finger, Osama bin Laden disrupts our sense of security and well-being. At the same time, such warnings put the U.S. government in the position of the boy who cried wolf. The more often general warnings are issued, the less likely we are to heed them. We are perhaps unsettled or unnerved, but we don't know what to do. So we do nothing — and wish that we'd been told nothing as well.

In April, the Chinese navy abruptly deployed 10 warships near the Japanese coast and sent helicopters to buzz Japanese ships. In July, the Chinese foreign minister angrily asserted his country's claim to international waters in the South China Sea, along with some islands claimed by others. Last week, a Chinese fishing trawler smashed into two Japanese Coast Guard boats, possibly on purpose, leading to a Japanese arrest and a furious reaction from Beijing.

Throw in a few rhetorical outbursts — the Chinese U.N. official who ranted a couple of weeks ago about not liking Americans — and certainly it does seem as if Chinese military, territorial and diplomatic aggression is rising. It is an extraordinary development, largely because, from China's point of view, it doesn't make sense. Why on earth should China shout, bully and push its neighbors around? Over the past decade, China has kept silent, lain low and behaved more like a multinational company than a global superpower — and garnered enormous political influence as a result.

The fruits of this success are everywhere. Look at Afghanistan, for example, where American troops have been fighting for nearly a decade, where billions of dollars of American aid money has been spent — and where a Chinese company has won the rights to exploit one of the world's largest copper deposits. Though American troops don't protect the miners directly, Afghan troops, trained and armed by Americans, do. And though the mine is still in its early phases, the Chinese businessmen and engineers — wearing civilian clothes, offering jobs — are already more popular with the locals than the U.S. troops, who carry guns and talk security. The Chinese paid a high price for their copper mining rights and took a huge risk. But if it pays off, our war against the Taliban might someday be remembered as the war that paved the way for Chinese domination of Afghanistan.

America fights, in other words, while China does business, and not only in Afghanistan. In Iraq, where American troops brought down a dictator and are still fighting an insurgency, Chinese oil companies have acquired bigger stakes in the oil business than their American counterparts. In Pakistan, where billions in American military aid helps the government keep the Taliban at bay, China has set up a free-trade area and is investing heavily in energy and ports.

China has found it lucrative to stay out of other kinds of conflicts as well. Along with Western Europeans, Americans are pouring vast amounts of public and private money into solar energy and wind power, hoping to wean themselves off fossil fuels and prevent climate change. China, by contrast, builds a new coal-fired plant every 10 days or so. While thus producing ever more greenhouse gases in the East, China makes clever use of those government subsidies in the West: Three Chinese companies now rank among the top 10 producers of wind turbines in the world.

Quietly, the Chinese have also cornered the market in rare-earth metals, unusual minerals that have lovely names (promethium, ytterbium) and are vital for the production of cellphones, lasers and computers — not to mention hybrid cars, solar panels and wind turbines. Though China doesn't control the world's reserves of these elements, some of which aren't all that rare, mining them is dirty, labor-intensive and ideally suited for cheap production in a country with low wages and lower environmental standards. Nobody else can compete, which is why China now controls 99 percent of the world's supply of some of these elements.

Of course if they are so inclined, their monopoly could be used to raise the prices of solar panels and cellphones. They could do even more damage if they wished. Last week, it was reported that China had stopped shipping rare-earth metals to Japan in retaliation for the Japanese arrest of that Chinese fisherman. The glitch in supplies now appears to have been connected to a Chinese holiday — or that's what the Chinese are saying — but markets and pundits sounded belated alarm bells nevertheless.

Which brings me back to my original point: Why on earth are the Chinese playing military games with Japan, threatening Southeast Asia or entering politics at all? When they stay silent, we ignore them. When they threaten boycotts or use nationalist language, we get scared and react. We still haven't realized that the scariest thing about China is not the size of its navy or the arrogance of its diplomats. The scariest thing is the power China has already accumulated without ever deploying its military or its diplomats at all.

LONDON - "In all my years as a campaigner I have never felt such animus against any individual as I do against this creature. His views are so disgusting, so repellent and so hugely damaging to the rest of us, that the only thing to do is to get rid of him." Thus did Claire Rayner, a British journalist, novelist, former advice columnist and professional-campaigner-for-worthy-causes, greet news of the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI in the United Kingdom.

Others were more welcoming. Because this was the first papal state visit to Britain, Benedict had a friendly chat with the queen, shook hands with the prime minister and prayed with the archbishop of Canterbury. He said Mass in Hyde Park and beatified Cardinal Newman, a 19th-century convert from Anglicanism. It was the first beatification to take place in England, ever.

Yet Rayner's reaction to him was, at least in some circles, more typical. One prominent left-wing pundit lumped together the pope with the Florida pastor who wanted to burn the Koran; another accused Benedict of manipulating Newman to "serve his own autocratic, homophobic leadership." Others called for protests — against pedophilic priests, against sexual discrimination, against religion itself. The phrase "aging theocrat" was bandied about quite a bit.

So vicious were the attacks in the run-up to the visit, in fact, that there was talk of cancellation. One Vatican official grumbled publicly about the "aggressive new atheism" in Britain, a country where all religions are protected except Christianity. Whatever your view of the pope, you can see his point: It is certainly hard to imagine liberal British pundits using such words as "disgusting" and "repellent" about a prominent foreign Jewish or Muslim religious leader, particularly one whose visit was intended to honor an Englishman and have tea with Queen Elizabeth II. He wasn't there to instigate violence or terrorism, after all.

On the other hand, it is even harder to imagine many other foreign religious leaders receiving so much air time or having their views so expertly dissected. Because the pope was attacked so furiously, his defenders were given acres of newspaper space — if nothing else, the British press knows that a two-way controversy is always more interesting — and multiple slots on talk shows. Some environmentalists discovered Benedict's little-known views on global warming (he's worried about it). Some atheists decried the "intolerance" of other atheists. Accounts of Cardinal Newman's life and teachings appeared everywhere.

Competitive politics also played a role: Since the nastiest attacks on the pope came from the left, the Conservative Party became interested in the case for the defense. A cabinet minister called a Catholic journalist of my acquaintance and asked to be taken, point by point, through the Humane Vitae, a previous pope's encyclical on birth control. The Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, publicly thanked the pope for making Britain "sit up and think" and said it had been "an incredibly moving four days for our country."

All in all, it was a huge success. But had the pope been treated politely from the start, I suspect he would have come and gone without a trace. The vast majority of Britons are not Catholic and would have tuned out deferential accounts of his sermons. The press would have relegated the whole thing to the religion section. Perhaps the faithful would still have gone to Mass, though maybe not so many: In the end, some 500,000 people probably saw him during his visit, which is quite a lot in a country largely composed of pagans and Protestants.

And thus did Benedict's visit to Britain turn into an advertisement for religious freedom — the freedom to abhor religion and the freedom to practice it. Much to everyone's surprise, including the Vatican's, raucous discussion of Catholicism turned out to be good for Catholicism and interesting for atheists, too. The true aging theocrats — in Saudi Arabia, in Iran — should take note.

LONDON - "Vicious cuts." "Savage cuts." "Swingeing cuts." The language that the British use to describe their new government's spending reduction policy is apocalyptic in the extreme. The ministers in charge of the country's finances are known as "axe-wielders" who will be "hacking" away at the national budget. Articles about the nation's finances are filled with talk of blood, knives and amputation.

And the British love it. Not only is "austerity" being touted as the solution to Britain's economic woes, it is also being described as the answer to the country's moral failings. On Oct. 20, the government will announce $128 billion worth of spending cuts, and many seem positively excited about it. Okay, the trade unions are not so excited, but Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats — the smaller party in the governing coalition — is overjoyed. Recently he gave a speech in which he explained that tough choices had to be made, so that "we will be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye and say we did the best for them."

Clegg went on to explain that his own generation, born in the 1960s, had got things wrong. "We have run up debts, despoiled the planet and allowed too many of our institutions to wither." By contrast, his government's forthcoming austerity budget will value "long-termism" over "short-termism" and eliminate "the dead weight of our debt and our failings," so that future generations could flourish. "I think it was a Hollywood actress," Clegg quipped, "who said that nowadays instant gratification isn't quick enough for some people."

Actually Meryl Streep said that, in a 1990 movie ("Postcards From the Edge," if you must know). But she wasn't talking about the earnest Brits who voted for Clegg or David Cameron, his Tory coalition partner. For these voters, the very idea of instant gratification is anathema, in theory if not in practice. And they elected this government because they've convinced themselves that they've had enough of it.

Austerity, by contrast, has a deep appeal. Austerity is what made Britain great. Austerity is what won the war. It cannot be an accident that several British television channels are running programs this year with titles such as "Spirit of 1940," all dedicated to the 70th anniversary of that "remarkable year" of rationing, air raid sirens and hardship. One series, "Ration Book Britain" is even devoted to that era's parsimonious cooking. "With bacon, eggs and sugar rationed, wartime cooks had to be jolly resourceful," explains an advertisement for the show. Its host promises to "re-create the recipes that kept the country fighting fit."

Sometimes the depth of the Anglo-American cultural divide reveals itself in unexpected ways, and this is one of those moments: No cooking show featuring corned beef hash and powdered eggs would stand a chance in the United States. Perhaps for similar reasons, nobody is talking about "austerity" in the United States either. On the contrary, Republicans are still gunning for tax cuts, and Democrats are still advocating higher spending. Almost nobody — not Paul Krugman, not Newt Gingrich — talks enthusiastically about budget cuts. Instead, our politicians use euphemisms about "eliminating waste" or "making government more efficient," as if no one had ever thought of doing that before.

Despite the deep shock the United States supposedly experienced during the banking crisis of 2008 and the resulting recession, we are, in other words, still far from Clegg's "long-termism." Hardly anyone in America is talking about cuts in Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, for example, the biggest budgetary items (even though "private" pensions now look a lot safer, even when taking stock market fluctuations into account, than those who will depend entirely on a bankrupt federal budget 20 years hence). In Britain, by contrast, everything is on the table: pensions, housing benefits, disability payments, tax breaks.

Politics explain some of this difference, but I reckon history explains more of it. The last period of real national hardship Americans might remember is the 1930s, too long ago for almost everyone alive today. But rationing in Britain lasted well into the 1950s, long enough to color the childhoods of many politicians now in power. Nostalgic Brits, longing to re-create their country's finest hour, remember postwar scrimping and saving. Nostalgic Americans in search of their own country's finest hour remember postwar abundance, the long consumer boom — and, yes, a time when even instant gratification wasn't fast enough.

In lower Manhattan last weekend, an internet evangelist named Bill Keller held a meeting in a makeshift church, not far from what used to be the World Trade Center. He called upon the gathered faithful to help him in his great task: The construction of a "9/11 Christian Centre at Ground Zero", a counterweight to the Islamic cultural centre which is being planned in the same part of town, and which has been the central topic of an angry and unfocused national conversation all summer.

Rev Keller, who became a preacher after serving a federal sentence for insider trading, was clear about his own intentions, however. As he explained to the New York Times, Muslims "can go to their mosque and preach the lies of Islam and I'll come here to preach the truth of the Gospel". He also opined that the people worshipping in the lower Manhattan mosque – if it ever gets built, which seems unlikely – would be guilty of murder by association. After all, it was "their Muslim brothers" who "flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and killed 3,000 people".

Meanwhile, down in Gainesville, Florida, another preacher, the Rev Terry Jones, has also made international headlines by threatening to hold a ceremonial burning of the Koran. In fact, he announced his plan to celebrate "International Burn the Koran Day" last July, but nobody noticed until this week. Somehow, his plan made the national news – and all hell broke loose, as they say down in Florida.

Within days, President Obama had condemned the burning as a "recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda"; the Secretary of Defense had personally called the Rev Jones and asked him to desist; and a raft of other politicians from the Left, Right and centre had criticised the plan in no uncertain terms. There were rumours of riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan; American Muslims bemoaned the events. Finally, on Thursday, the Rev Jones appeared to reconsider his plans, or at least to postpone them – although it still isn't clear whether his mind was changed by all the high-profile pleading or by his apparent conviction that his threat to burn Korans has helped block the construction of that mosque in New York.

Today, on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, there is only one relevant question to ask about this sudden outburst of anti-Muslim rhetoric: why now?

Nine years have passed – nine years during which the public discussion of Islam has in fact been rather subdued, even non-existent. There was fear of repercussions against American Muslims in the autumn of 2001, but the repercussions never materialised. No political opposition to Islam, as such, ever emerged either. President Bush made a very public visit to a mosque in Washington, and declared Islam "a religion of peace". American Muslims joined the American military in unusually high numbers. A number of prominent Muslims played important diplomatic and political roles in post-9/11 politics. Zalmay Khalilizad, for example, served as US ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq.

But nine years is a long time, in both war and politics. And though it sounds counter-intuitive, the renewal of anti-Muslim anger is surely happening now, not despite the passage of time but because of it. In the wake of mass tragedies, it often happens that the children of survivors – or even the distant acquaintances of survivors – are angrier than the survivors ever were themselves. Note, please, for the record, that neither the Rev Keller nor the Rev. Jones was present in New York or Washington on the day the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They did not suffer personally. They probably do not know anyone who suffered personally. And thus they find it easier to manipulate the memory of that tragic day for their own political and commercial ends.

It is also true that the past nine years have been unsatisfactory for many Americans, in many different ways. This summer, President Obama declared an official end to the war in Iraq. But it was a cheerless, unenthusiastic, unvictorious end. The war is over, but we still have 50,000 troops on the ground, we still have high oil prices, and we still have a pretty shaky government in control of the country. The Iraqi war may still be remembered, ultimately, as a success. But even so, Americans are no longer sure that a weak Iraqi democracy was worth the price, in money (trillions of dollars), lives, and national prestige.

The same is true of Afghanistan, where a frustrating war against medieval tribal leaders still seems to lead nowhere. The Bush administration failed to recognise the complexity of Afghanistan, the Obama administration is just coming to terms with it, and the American people are already tired of it. Nobody ever explained to them that it would take up to a decade to complete – on the contrary, following the initial victory over the Taliban in 2001, it seemed to be almost over – and nobody seems able to say when, exactly, it will finally end. That isn't a very satisfying response to the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Economic woes are also a part of the explanation, but only indirectly. Frustrated by high unemployment, sinking living standards, and a sense that the optimism of the long economic boom has turned into permanent pessimism, Americans have been listening in ever larger numbers to demagogues of a sort we haven't heard for decades.

On the mainstream, Murdoch-owned Fox News television channel, pundit Glenn Beck rants and raves about the secret cabal of Weathermen – violent, bomb-toting, Sixties' radicals – who allegedly control the Obama administration. On the internet, ludicrous theories gain legitimacy through constant repetition. Nearly one in five Americans now believes that President Obama is a Muslim, a number which has been steadily rising since his election. The "birther" movement – people who are convinced that the president was not, in fact, born in the United States – seem to have a permanent foothold in cyberspace. Anti-Obama bloggers regularly describe the president as "pro-jihad" or just plain "anti-American".

The president himself seems unable to cope with the torrent of vitriol, even when it comes from his own party. Even his attitude towards the Manhattan mosque was oddly equivocal. At first he made a clear statement: Americans believe in religious freedom and Americans believe in private property. If someone wants to build a mosque, they cannot legally be prevented from doing so. (He might also have added that there are plenty of mosques in Manhattan, some not too far from Ground Zero, already).

But then he seemed to waver, as if unsure whether the opponents of the mosque might not in fact have a point, and that there might not be some delicate issues of "sensibility" to consider. Regardless of what you think about this whole issue, wavering was a mistake. It gave the demagogues another opening, and another round of attacks and discussion began. Instead of dying away, as these stories tend to do, the president's comments helped revive discussion of the mosque, Ground Zero, and Islam. And thus we now have the phenomenon of the Rev Jones and the Rev Keller and their weird, attention-grabbing crusades.

As ever, it is important to take all of this with a grain of salt: we are talking about pretty marginal people – a Florida preacher? An internet evangelist? – and I doubt that the majority of Americans feel any differently about Muslims now than they did on September 11, 2001. Generally speaking, in the US there is a certain amount of wariness about the Muslims who live abroad, mixed with a large dose of tolerance for the Muslims who live next door.

Still, anger is a popular emotion at the moment, and those who cultivate it can receive a lot of attention, as well as material rewards which follow. Attention brings book contracts, book contracts bring lectures, lectures bring money. Now it is the turn of the anti-Islamic preachers and their friends in politics and the media to benefit from those links – but I'm sure it will be someone else's turn next.

AGIOS NIKOLAOS, CRETE - A handful of Estonians and a Pole are sitting around a Greek taverna, telling stories. There are some jokes about the good life the Greeks lead — all of that vacation time, and the Germans pay for it! There are some anecdotes about the way time seems to work differently here, about how things take longer here. One regales the others with tales of the Greek real estate market. The thing to remember, he says, is that all houses have two prices: the "official" price and the "real" price. You pay taxes on the official price. You pay the owner the real price. Everybody knows about this, and everybody winks — including the tax office.

Ah yes, someone says, those corrupt bureaucrats — we used to have them in Estonia, too. Ah yes, someone else says, Polish houses used to have an "official" price and a "real" price as well. But that was two decades ago — back in the days when Europe was divided into "West" and "East." Now, at least in the eyes of some, it is slowly redividing itself into "North" and "South."

"North and South": Not everybody is going to like that concept, especially not the new South, some of whose members are not necessarily in the southern half of the continent. For these are not geographical designations but, rather, political terms of art. The South contains all of those countries whose political classes have not been able to balance their national budgets, whose bureaucrats have not been able to reduce their numbers, whose voters have not learned to approve of austerity: Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and, at the moment, Ireland.

The North contains the budget hawks: Germany, Poland, Estonia, Scandinavia, the Czechs and the Slovaks. Britain's new government, with its new austerity budget, aims to return to the North, following its recent experience of life in the South. France floats somewhere in between. "Wealth," as such, isn't Northern: Much of the South is very rich. But in the North, private wealth has grown more or less in tandem with the public sector. Private wealth and public squalor are more typical of the South.

Or at least that's one perspective. I realize that these are subjective categories and that the members of these two clubs, as listed here, could easily be disputed. Polish bureaucracy is no better than the Spanish kind. Irish capitalism is in some ways healthier than the Czech version. Living standards are still higher in Italy than in Estonia. And some leaders of the South — socialist governments, ironically, in both Greece and Spain — are struggling to institute reforms that should have been made years ago and that are aimed at making their economies more Northern.

But even if we swap a few of the names around, or at least agree to disagree about some of them, it's still hard to ignore the existence of this new North-South division, which is suddenly so much more important than that old East-West division. It's also tough to ignore a few hard truths about the new North, which is clearly dominated by Germany. So far, Germany is leading the region by example: Its relatively high growth rate — achieved thanks to recent labor market and tax reforms — is attracting imitators, not subordinates. Nevertheless, German economic clout within this region is large and will get larger.

At the moment, the new North Europe is not the same thing as the eurozone either: Not all of its members use the common European currency — though some of the South infamously does. Clearly, this is illogical: The increasingly similar, deeply connected and ever-converging economies of the North maintain different currencies. On the other hand, Germany, France, Italy and Greece — countries that have radically different attitudes about public spending and budgets — are bound into the same currency zone. Wouldn't it make sense to drop the euro in favor of a "Northern" currency? How long can it be before that begins to seem like a good idea, especially in Germany?

We aren't quite there yet: Europe, led by the Germans, did rescue the Greek economy this year, while demanding massive structural and budgetary changes in exchange for a massive injection of money. But the rescue was not carried out in the name of European solidarity or because the new North feels any responsibility for the new South. It was undertaken grudgingly, reluctantly, on behalf of banks that owned too many Greek bonds. And here is a prediction about such rescues: It won't happen again.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will make a speech about Iraq. With 50,000 troops still in the country in an "advisory capacity" he can't declare victory, so he will instead celebrate "the end of combat operations." If he follows others who have already marked this occasion, his comments will focus on Iraq: the state of Iraqi democracy, the level of violence, the impact seven years of war has had on Iraqi society.

All of which is fair enough. But I hope he spares a few minutes to assess the impact that seven years of war has had on American society — and American foreign policy. I supported the invasion of Iraq, I think the surge was a success and I believe that an Iraqi democracy could be a revolutionary force for good in the Middle East. Yet even if violence abates, even if all American troops go home, we have still paid a very high price for our victory — much higher than we usually admit.

Aside from the very real blood and the very real money spent in Iraq, there were other casualties, some of them hard to count and classify. Here are a few of them:

America's reputation for effectiveness. The victory was swift. But the occupation was chaotic. The insurgency appeared to take Washington by surprise, and no wonder: The Pentagon was squabbling with the State Department; soldiers had no instructions and didn't speak the language. The overall impression, in Iraq and everywhere else, was of American incompetence — and, after Abu Ghraib, of stupidity and cruelty as well. Two years ago, a German Marshall Fund poll showed that vast numbers of our closest friends felt that the "mismanagement" of Iraq — not the "invasion" of Iraq — was the biggest stumbling block for allies of the United States.

No wonder, then, that America's ability to organize a coalition has also suffered. Participation in the Iraq war cost Tony Blair his reputation and the Spanish government an election. After an initial swell of support, the Iraqi occupation proved unpopular even in countries where America is popular, such as Italy and Poland. Almost no country that has participated in the coalition derived any economic or diplomatic benefits from doing so. None received special American favors — not even Georgia, which sent 2,000 soldiers (a lot for Georgia) and received precisely zero U.S. support during its military conflict with Russia. It will be a lot harder to get any of the "coalition of the willing" to fight with us again, and indeed "Iraq" is part of the reason there is so little enthusiasm for Afghanistan and why it is so difficult to put organized pressure on Iran.

A related victim of the conflict has been America's ability to influence the Middle East. Admittedly, we were never as good at this as we would have liked. But the chaos in Iraq has clearly strengthened Iran. It has had no positive impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By helping raise the price of oil for a few years (this was supposed to be a "war for oil," remember?) it has also strengthened Saudi Arabia, the regime that produced 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers.

The high oil price also strengthened Russia and Venezuela — not that many have noticed. For another casualty of the Iraq war has been America's ability to think like a global power. Even if we eventually pull out of Iraq altogether, we will have been bogged down in that country for the decade in which China rose to real world-power status, Latin America drifted to the far left and Russia successfully used pipeline politics to divide Europe — all trends that commanded hardly any attention from the Bush administration and even less from Obama.

Finally, there are few domestic items that are often overlooked. One in particular worries me: America's ability to care for its wounded veterans. In historical terms, the number of U.S. fatalities in Iraq has been low — some 4,400, compared with nearly 60,000 in Vietnam. But thanks in part to extraordinary advances in medical technology, the number of severely wounded veterans — men and women who will need the highest level of medical and psychological care for the rest of their lives — is far higher than ever before. We need innovative programs — programs such as Musicorps, which I described last year — but high levels of bureaucratic energy are required to create and fund them. And the bureaucracy is understandably tired.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the assessment of the Iraq war is a project for the next decade, not the next week. Before speaking on Tuesday, Obama might ponder the words of former Chinese leader Zhou Enlai — who, when asked to assess the long-term impact of the French Revolution, allegedly told Richard Nixon that "it's too soon to tell."

Why do we care about presidential holidays? I don't know for certain, but I'm blaming the Kennedys, whose photogenic touch football games and elegant yachts set a standard to which later presidents could only aspire. They did have precursors: Franklin Roosevelt was photographed fishing in Florida, riding horses, even swimming at a pebbly beach. And there are many, many pictures of his cousin Theodore holding up his hunting trophies in exotic forests.

Of course, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts had a huge advantage in the holiday stakes. Like the Bushes and the Reagans, they owned beautiful, tasteful country properties, to which they could retire in serene elegance. Better still, these properties reflected their personalities in an electorally advantageous way. John F. Kennedy's passion for sports established him as youthful and energetic. Ronald Reagan's California ranch lent him a cowboy gloss. Bush Senior's retreat echoed his New England roots. Bush Junior's house in Crawford firmed up his link to Texas — as opposed to New England — and gave him the good-old-boy credentials he lacked.

Only two presidents in recent memory have not had vacation homes of their own: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Not coincidentally, it is their vacation choices that have been most heavily criticized. When he was down in Crawford, George W. Bush surrounded himself with like-minded friends and admirers. Away from the cameras, he had a break from constant public surveillance and the Washington rat race. But when Clinton went to Martha's Vineyard to surround himself with likeminded friends and admirers (and to enjoy a break from constant public surveillance and the Washington rat race), he was damned as an elitist. So was Obama, who went there last summer for exactly the same reasons.

Why, exactly, is borrowing or renting someone's house more elitist than owning one? Why is Martha's Vineyard snobbier than Kennebunkport, Hyannis Port or even a private Texas ranch? I don't know, but that's what everyone said, and thus were the Clintons forced to take a pretend "vacation" in Jackson Hole, Wyo. During this "vacation," they had to provide photo opportunities to the press to prove that they really were normal Americans — which, of course, they were not. Once elected, no president is ever a normal American again.

The same fate has now befallen Obama, whose lack of a permanent country residence has also made him inexplicably appear more elitist. Having done the Martha's Vineyard thing last year, and been duly criticized, he has made up for it with visits to Maine, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and North Carolina, all places where "average" Americans like to go.

But then, a few weeks ago, Michelle slipped off to Spain and had lunch with the king. I suspect this was a rather jolly affair, especially for 9-year-old Sasha, who was traveling with her mother, but it went down badly with Americans who used to like it when their first ladies had lunch with kings but don't any longer. In penance, the Obamas set off last week for Panama City, Fla., where they played mini-golf in front of the cameras and talked about the clean water. Golly, that must have been relaxing — about as relaxing as appearing on prime-time television, making a speech to a vast audience or otherwise performing onstage for a large crowd.

Yes, it's good for the Obamas to tour the Gulf Coast and to be photographed on beaches that are not covered with black oil slicks. It's great that they are promoting tourism in a region that needs it. But why do they have to pretend they are on vacation? Why do Americans now demand that they "relax" in politically acceptable surroundings?

We all know that the situation is phony, that it's not really a vacation and that it's not really fun to play mini-golf on TV. Yet so addicted have we become to orchestrated "reality" — reality television, cooked-up celebrity stories, Hollywood's fictionalizations of historical events — that we now want our president to play along with a made-up narrative, too. Not only are our leaders supposed to run the country, they have to pretend to be average. This is ridiculous.

Let the Obama family go on vacation. Let them go wherever they want. Let them do whatever they want. Let the president work out, play basketball, whatever. Let the first lady read a good novel and have lunch with whomever she pleases. Let's not talk about them for a few weeks. This is what mid-August is for: Why do we need to think about them when we're on vacation, too?