Heirs to Fortuyn? by Bruce Bawer, City Journal Spring 2009.
In 2001, 65 percent of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’s police call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly of Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of that country’s population. In 2005, 82 percent of crimes in Copenhagen were committed by members of immigrant groups, the majority of them Muslims.
The Atlantic Online | April 2009 Unbound | Do the Palestinians Really Want a State? | Robert D. Kaplan.
Statehood is no longer a goal, he writes. Many stateless groups “do not aspire to have a state,” for they are more capable of achieving their objectives without one. Instead of actively seeking statehood to address their weakness, as Zionist Jews did in an earlier phase of history, groups like the Palestinians now embrace their statelessness as a source of power.
New communication technologies allow people to achieve virtual unity without a state, even as new military technologies give stateless groups a lethal capacity that in former decades could be attained only by states. Grygiel explains that it is now “highly desirable” not to have a state—for a state is a target that can be destroyed or damaged, and hence pressured politically. It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in the Gaza Strip that made it easier for Israel to bomb it. A state entails responsibilities that limit a people’s freedom of action. A group like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the author notes, could probably take over the Lebanese state today, but why would it want to? Why would it want responsibility for providing safety and services to all Lebanese? Why would it want to provide the Israelis with so many tempting targets of reprisal? Statelessness offers a level of “impunity” from retaliation.
But the most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space.
Becoming France-- Gildea's artful irony.
In retrospect, Emperor Louis-Napoleon may well appear reckless, erratic, and not overly bright, but just four months before he fell, Leon Gambetta, the future founder of the Third Republic, could declare that "the Empire is stronger than ever." Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir may now stand as one of the greatest triumphs of French fiction, but at the time of its publication the public and the critics alike considered it a disaster, and in its first year it sold barely 1500 copies. On learning in 1831 that Simon Bolivar had died, Stendhal wrote to a friend: "Do you know from what? From envy at the success of the Rouge." The playwright Sylvain Marichal has a reputation as one of the most radical defenders of Revolutionary republicanism, but in 1801 he could still publish a pamphlet entitled Bill to Prohibit Teaching Women to Read. And who was it that attacked Russian Jewish immigrants in 1890 as "these despicable people [coming] into a country that is not theirs"? None other than the wealthy, assimilated Sephardic Jewish literary critic Bernard Lazare.
If by "scientific conventions" you mean the liberal-utilitarian habits of mind of the educated elite, endowed with the force of law through the political process, and called "scientific" in an illegitimate effort to wrap them in the prestige of empirical investigation
He did not refer to it, but there is conflict between Catholic dogma and scientific conventions on several fronts, including the medical definition of brain death, the legal definition of the beginning of human life and the ethics of embryonic stem cell research.
RealClearPolitics - Mainline Protestants' Dead End.
And here the press reports missed the one really big, obvious headline: Mainline Protestants are dying out.
The study's authors summarize:
"Ninety percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations, including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians/Anglicans and the United Church of Christ. These groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7 percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, all experienced sharp numerical declines this decade and now constitute just 12.9 percent."
Overall Christianity has been holding its own in recent years. But since 2001, the liberal mainline Protestants have lost a third of their adherents.
"It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism -- mainline versus evangelical -- is collapsing," said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. "A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States."
Of course, Islam, a religion of peace, has nothing whatsoever to do with the practice of piracy and hostage-taking, no more than it did in the days of Adams, Jefferson, and Bainbridge
One pirate radioed the Navy destroyer and demanded to know how far they were from the sanctuary of Somalia's coast.
"Very far," came the reply from the Bainbridge.
"Thank you," the pirate negotiator responded, according to a U.S. military timeline, his politeness masking menace. "If we cannot [reach the] Somali coast, we will kill the infidel."
Only in America: Families in the Six- or Seven-Television-Household Bracket Accelerate Climate Change, Whine About Bills, Expect Nothing But SympathyThe house, built in 1953, has central air-conditioning to ward off the heat and humidity of Mississippi River summers, a double-door refrigerator, a washer and dryer, six televisions, three computers and an iron (“We iron all the time,” Ms. Daniels-Hanner said). The family’s monthly electric bill averages $160 in winter and $250 in summer.
[...]
About 130 miles to the northwest, Wendi Wood, a teacher, and her husband, Lee Wood, a fourth-generation farmer, live near the small town of Clarence with their three teenagers. Their six-bedroom house is four years old, and they, too, have many appliances, including seven televisions.
Electricity costs them about $280 in winter, $360 in summer. After the fall harvest, they dry grain in a silo; then the bills run $600 a month.
Dalrymple Considers the French Welfare State.
Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man’s “friends,” and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before others.
Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity.
But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning—the only possible meaning—to their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.
The Unconscionable Public-Employee-Union Swindle
In public-sector America things just get better and better. The common presumption is that public servants forgo high wages in exchange for safe jobs and benefits. The reality is they get all three. State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33% higher than the private sector's $19, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42%.
For New York City's 281,000 employees, average compensation has risen 63% since 2000 to $107,000 a year. New Jersey teaching veterans receive $80,000 to $100,000 for ten months' work. In California prison guards can sock away $300,000 a year with overtime pay.
Four in five public-sector workers have lifetime pensions, versus only one in five in the private sector. The difference shifts huge risks from government to private-sector workers.
NYC socked away $20,000 per employee last year for pension benefits. Since 2000 its pension funding bill has risen ninefold, from $615 million to $5.6 billion in 2008. That's more than the city spends on transport, health care, parks, libraries, museums and City University of New York combined, says the Citizens Budget Commission.
These benefits are so sacrosanct, and such a source of union power, that labor bosses have turned them into the third rail for NYC politicians--touching them is suicide. That goes for the benefits not only of existing workers but of future ones as well.
"We have far less to spend on core services, such as public safety, education, parks and senior centers," Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote in December of the city's pension costs. "That defies common sense, and it's hurting our city."
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - JUI-F minister terms Swat flogging a Jewish plot.
KARACHI: Federal Minister Senator Azam Khan Swati of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) said on Saturday that the flogging of the 17-year-old girl in Swat was a Jewish conspiracy aimed at destroying peace in Swat and distort the image of those Islamists who sport beards and wear turbans.
The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Autumn 2002.
Three youths—Rumanians—were attempting quite openly to break into a parking meter with large screwdrivers to steal the coins. It was four o’clock in the afternoon; the sidewalks were crowded, and the nearby cafés were full. The youths behaved as if they were simply pursuing a normal and legitimate activity, with nothing to fear.
Eventually, two women in their sixties told them to stop. The youths, laughing until then, turned murderously angry, insulted the women, and brandished their screwdrivers. The women retreated, and the youths resumed their “work.”
A man of about 70 then told them to stop. They berated him still more threateningly, one of them holding a screwdriver as if to stab him in the stomach. I moved forward to help the man, but the youths, still shouting abuse and genuinely outraged at being interrupted in the pursuit of their livelihood, decided to run off. But it all could have ended very differently.
Several things struck me about the incident: the youths’ sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation, though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone younger than they thought something like: “Refugees . . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the world with their cars?
And how much of that would be saved by better diet and lifestyle choices?
A handful of chronic ailments, including heart disease, diabetes and hypertension, account for up to 80 percent of health care costs, according to medical experts, and 7 of 10 deaths in the United States.
WONDERFUL NEWS!!! Arne Duncan brings genuine 'hope and change' to ossified educational establishmentTo qualify for a second phase of financing later this year, however, governors will need to provide reams of detailed educational information.
The data is likely to reveal that in many states, tests have been dumbed down so that students score far higher than on tests administered by the federal Department of Education.
It will also probably show that many local teacher-evaluation systems are so perfunctory that they rate 99 of every 100 teachers as excellent and that diplomas often mean so little that millions of high school graduates each year must enroll in remediation classes upon entering college.
Such information, Mr. Duncan’s letter said, “will reveal both strengths and underlying challenges.”
Steven Pearlstein - In Hollywood, Reshaping a Business Model That Emerged With the Talkies.
"Certainly if this didn't exist, we couldn't afford to build it today," said Credle as we walked through the studio's back lots and manicured gardens. "The models for this business are being challenged every day in every imaginable way, and nobody knows where it ends up. . . . What you see here is going away, and it's not obvious what is going to replace it."
The world will always need entertainment, and Southern California is the odds-on favorite to produce it. It has the history, the people, the infrastructure and the creative energy. But as Detroit automakers and New York's financiers have learned, these natural advantages can disappear when an arrogant and insular industry comes to view its dominance as inevitable and its outsized compensation as an entitlement.
No Paycheck, New Plans - WSJ.com.
The category killer in the get-a-job bookshelf -- "What Color Is Your Parachute?" -- could stand to be retired. First published 39 years and 10 million copies ago, the book keeps coming out in annual editions. But with its clumsy charts and checklists, its hokey visualization devices and hollow platitudes -- "Job-hunting is not a science; it is an art" -- it feels less like a book than the rummage of a community-college guidance counselor. And dusty rummage at that. You can get a sense of the vintage of "What Color Is Your Parachute?" from the fact that it is illustrated here and there with Ziggy cartoons. You can get a sense of its sloppiness from the fact that, in the 2009 edition of "Parachute," the same Ziggy cartoon runs on page 41 and page 167, without anyone at publisher Ten Speed Press seeming to notice. For that matter, the same Peanuts cartoon appears on page 129 and page 282.
Steven Pearlstein - California's Wipeout Economy.
It is hard to overstate how reliant the Southern California economy has always been on population growth to drive its economic growth -- in oversimplified terms, building houses for the next wave of home builders. In the beginning, the early developers could be pretty confident that if they built it, they would come -- from the Northeast and Midwest, and then from all corners of the globe. But in recent years, this perpetual growth machine has pretty much run out of steam as residents old and new confronted the realities of two-hour commutes, bad air, a shortage of water and a backlash against illegal immigration.
Moreover, without the steady growth in tax revenue that came with population growth, the Ponzi scheme that passes for public finance in California was suddenly and painfully revealed. Much of the blame lies with public employee unions and a handful of other special-interest groups that have essentially hijacked political control of state and local governments. Now, despite decades of high taxes and rapid growth, state and local governments find that they not only don't have the revenue to provide even basic services, but are saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities and infrastructure needs.
James Fenton on Palladio - TLS
But still, what grips us about the old photographs when we can see them (there are none at Burlington House) is the glimpse we have of the functioning rural economy in which these crucial structures played their part, caught in the years when it was coming to an end, when the threshing machines were making their first appearance. Perhaps it is a snapshot of an old peasant squatting in the barn of a villa long since destroyed, but it is immediately instructive how much of the height of the barn he needs for his supplies. Perhaps it is just a carriage seen under an arcade, or a row of men harvesting in a field, or a line of scythed grass waiting to be stacked for hay. One is reminded that if many of these farm complexes were enormous, longer than the Piazza San Marco in Venice, they were long because they needed to be long. There was so much produce to handle.
To sleep, like the nobility, sandwiched between the wine and the grain (the grain in the attic, the wine fermenting on the ground floor) no doubt held its anxieties, for the cheating peasant is a well-established figure in the literature. But it was conventionally held to be bliss itself in comparison with the treasonous pressures of the city. To sleep like the peasantry was to dream of famine – those recurring shortages which brought the peasants into the city, to die outside the Doge’s Palace, or to beg outside the churches, “hunger written on their faces, their eyes like gemless rings”.
Franklin in Paris: an article by Stacy Schiff about Benjamin Franklin's plans with John Adams in Paris after the American Revolution | The American Scholar.
Eight days after his arrival in Paris, Adams registered his disillusionment at the state of Franklin’s French, which he had assumed was fluent. He was startled to note that his colleague’s grammar was inexact, even more surprised to hear Franklin confess, when queried, that he paid no attention to the stuff. That invited some sleuthing on Adams’s part: “His pronunciation too, upon which the French gentlemen and ladies compliment him, and which he seems to think is pretty well, I am sure is very far from being exact.” It is difficult to read in that line which was the greater offense: Franklin’s inadequacy; the high marks French society bestowed on this teacher’s pet; or Franklin’s seeming obliviousness to the preferential treatment. In settling the matter, Adams could not always procure the satisfaction he came increasingly to crave. After the winter of 1778, he began to collect the compliments he received at his colleague’s expense. He was delighted to hear a friend contradicted over a 1779 dinner table, when that friend asserted that Franklin spoke excellent French. He did nothing of the sort, protested a diplomat. Days later that diplomat further endeared himself by elaborating on the subject, to Adams: “You speak slowly and with difficulty, like a man who searches for his words; but you don’t sin against pronunciation. You pronounce well. You do so far better than Mr. Franklin. He is painful to listen to.” The triumph was short-lived. The diplomat’s secretary reminded Adams, as Adams often needed to be reminded, of the uses of flattery. The straight-shooting secretary then leveled with Adams. Both Adams and Franklin spoke French badly.
Op-Ed Contributor - Reading Test Dummies - NYTimes.com.
Students now must take annual reading tests from third grade through eighth. If the reading passages on each test were culled from each grade’s specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts, the tests would exhibit what researchers call “consequential validity” — meaning that the tests would actually help improve education. Test preparation would focus on the content of the tests, rather than continue the fruitless attempt to teach test taking.
A 1988 study indicated why this improvement in testing should be instituted. Experimenters separated seventh- and eighth-grade students into two groups — strong and weak readers as measured by standard reading tests. The students in each group were subdivided according to their baseball knowledge. Then they were all given a reading test with passages about baseball. Low-level readers with high baseball knowledge significantly outperformed strong readers with little background knowledge.
The experiment confirmed what language researchers have long maintained: the key to comprehension is familiarity with the relevant subject. For a student with a basic ability to decode print, a reading-comprehension test is not chiefly a test of formal techniques but a test of background knowledge.
Marcia Pally - Die hintergründige Religion.
Die Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen Evangelikalismus und demokratischem Liberalismus in Amerika gehören zu den großen historischen Erfolgsgeschichten. Der Evangelikalismus, Amerikas dominierende Religionskultur von der Kolonialzeit bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, beeinflusst bis heute die Werte und Überzeugungen der Nation. Neben dem ökonomischen Interesse haben diese Überzeugungen die amerikanische Politik mitbestimmt - unabhängig von der jeweils regierenden Partei. Dies traf für Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy und Clinton ebenso zu wie für Eisenhower, Reagan und Bush - und das wird auch für den nächsten Präsidenten gelten. Wenn auch die heutige evangelikale Bewegung in den USA mit konservativer Politik in Verbindung gebracht wird, so war sie doch für die meiste Zeit der amerikanischen Geschichte radikal progressiv.
Ethnic basis of the Union Army - WikipediaMany immigrant soldiers formed their own regiments, such as the Irish Brigade (69th New York, 63rd New York, 88th New York, 28th Massachusetts, 116th Pennsylvania); the Swiss Rifles (15th Missouri); the Gardes Lafayette (55th New York); the Garibaldi Guard (39th New York); the Martinez Militia (1st New Mexico); the Polish Legion (58th New York); the German Rangers (52nd New York); the Highlander Regiment (79th New York); and the Scandinavian Regiment (15th Wisconsin). But for the most part, the foreign-born soldiers were scattered as individuals throughout units.
For comparison, the Confederate Army was not very diverse: 91% of Confederate soldiers were native born and only 9% were foreign-born, Irish being the largest group with others including Germans, French, Mexicans (though most of them simply happened to have been born when the Southwest was still part of Mexico), and British. Some Southern propaganda compared foreign-born soldiers in the Union Army to the hated Hessians of the American Revolution. As well, a relatively small number of Native Americans (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek) fought for the Confederacy.
George Will likes Arne Duncan:
Asked by an impertinent interviewer if education schools are a net subtraction from the quality of teachers, Duncan answers obliquely, which is a good sign: He says only that by the end of his Chicago tenure 20 percent of the new teachers being hired had "alternative certification"—credentials other than those provided by ed schools. Such people had "hitherto been locked out." Asked which he would choose, hiring 100,000 new teachers or firing 100,000 bad teachers, there is a long pause—another good sign—before he says he would take the new teachers because most of the worst teachers are older and are retiring.
He thinks finding talented teachers is more important than reducing pupil-teacher ratios—a third good sign—and he sees a silver lining on today's dark economic clouds
Eduwonk » Blog Archive » Winner!.
Joe Williams for suggesting Caitlin, because everyone is naming things Caitlin these days. The entries “Mind the gap” and “Mental Asset Recovery Plan (MARP)” as well as ”Peter” for two different entries that the judges understandably loved: “We’re Coming For You, Japan (WCFYJ)” and the “Keep Our Daughters Off the Pole Act of 2009 (KODOPA)”, and finally the Hey, Teacher, Leave Those Kids Behind Act also earns a book.
The runner-up, who gets one of those coveted “Obama Loves Charter Schools” buttons that are circulating:
Peter, again, for, These Colors Don’t Run (from Calculus) or TCDRC.
And the grand prize winner, who gets the highly sought-after signed picture of Justin Cohen in a tacky frame:
The Elementary and Secondary Educational Excellence Act. If you’re going to add an ‘e’ it’s hard to beat excellence.
Mark Knopfler's Second Act : Rolling Stone.
The song begins, "I'm going to San Bernardino/Ring-a-ding-ding," nine words that perfectly fix Kroc's tale in the American Fifties of Frank Sinatra. Kroc is flogging milkshake mixers, and he sells to a couple of guys with a successful hamburger stand, which they in fact call McDonald's, and Kroc is overtaken with a blinding vision of what could be:
The folks line up all down the street
And I'm seeing this girl devour her meat
And then I get it, wham clear as day
My pulse begins to hammer and I hear a voice say:
These boys have got it down
Oughta be one of these in every town
These boys have got this touch
It's clean as a whistle and it don't cost much
Wham, bam, you don't wait long
Shake, fries, patty, you're gone.
Q&A with 2009 Mellon Lecturer TJ Clark, part two - Modern Art Notes
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If you want a sort of leitmotif of the whole series, it comes down to saying: Cubism now, to me in retrospect, is like an art of a certain kind of interior space, room space, space that's intimate and proximate and in which the world is a world of small things musical instruments, bottles, newspapers, possessable items, that is to say: Possessions.
You won't be surprised to hear that from me, as I'm someone who still certainly wishes to work within the Marxist tradition. I'm very interested in the way in which cubism commemorates and celebrates a certain kind of bourgeois intimacy. That's under threat of course, that bourgeois world. (That is, in the early 20th-century it's under threat.) Massively under-threat.
Why it's a terrible time to be a governor. - By Eliot Spitzer - Slate Magazine
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During my tenure as governor, we sought to restructure New York's $60 billion Medicaid program, per capita the most expensive in the nation, by creating a program focused more on community and preventive care, enrolling all eligible children, and shifting care away from expensive teaching hospitals and emergency rooms. It was the right step from both a health policy and budgetary perspective, and the plan was endorsed by thoughtful voices. As a political matter, it was Armageddon. After what can only be described as a political brawl, we had moderate success at a policy level, saving a bit more than 3 percent of the state dollar allocation to Medicaid. The opposition—all the major teaching hospitals and health care unions—spent about $10 million in negative TV advertising directed at me personally. Not surprisingly, other governors are not rushing to try similar programs.
Genetic surveillance for all? - By Jeffrey Rosen - Slate Magazine
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The legal limits on family searches and DNA databases are murky, but the political implications are explosive for one big reason in particular: race. African-Americans, by several estimates, represent about 13 percent of the U.S. population but 40 percent of the people convicted of felonies every year.
Restoring the Real New Orleans | Newgeography.com .
You see, the lost housing of New Orleans is quite special. Entering the damaged and abandoned houses you can still see what they were like before the hurricane. These houses were exceedingly inexpensive to live in. They were houses that were hand built by people's parents and grandparents, or by small builders paid in cash or by barter.
Most of these simple, and surprisingly pleasant, houses were paid off. They had to be, because they do not meet any sort of code, and are therefore not mortgageable by current standards.
I think that it was possible to sustain the culture unique to New Orleans because housing costs were minimal. These houses liberated people from debt. One did not have to work a great deal to get by. There was the possibility of leisure.
R. R. Reno: The Sledgehammer of Modernism.
Not only is the juxtaposition striking, it is telling. If you approach from the back, the Faculty Club offers an inviting hip-high gateway that opens on to a brick patio and the rear entrance, which gives access to a large, old-style solarium. Visually, the scene is varied, balanced, and above all inviting. The brick, the white-painted wood trim, and the many-paned windows bespeak craftsmanship. Everything is on a human scale. It is the sort of place you could easily imagine wanting to spend a late spring evening drinking gin and tonics with friends.
The Carpenter Center, by contrast, presents a four-story windowless concrete wall. Concrete stairs and an unadorned metal handrail lead down to a sunken expanse of more concrete underneath upper stories supported by concrete pillars. It seems ugly, but the fans of modernism typically wave away such judgments. More important, to their minds, is the fact that the building does not embody Ivy League leisure and privilege, qualities very much celebrated by the design of the Faculty Club. Fair enough. But the scene has all the charm of a parking garage. It is a faceless, empty place. It reminds one of the many sterile urban plazas that we all hurry through on windy wintery days. This does not surprise me. When men are forced to be free and compelled into an imagined state of equality, we invariably end up with grey ugliness—and the vague odor of violence that empties public spaces.
George Washington Patrols the Pacific by Guy Sorman, City Journal Winter 2009.
After some 50 years of “neutrality,” including a long pro-Soviet period, India has become a strong American ally, thanks to the active diplomacy of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “We were surprised to discover our common background,” notes Bird. The American and Indian navies share a British maritime culture, which made joint operations smooth. India now seems as committed as Japan to an alliance with the U.S.—and as uneasy about China; India also finds itself more destabilized daily by domestic Islamic radicals.
For a stark example of what the region would be like without the American presence, look at the piracy occurring these days along the Somali coast, an area that America does not patrol. Pirates hijack and ransom tankers, interrupting the flow of oil, increasing insurance premiums, and ultimately raising the price of gas. In the Pacific, however, pirates act cautiously or not at all because they know that the Seventh Fleet is never far off.
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