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The Atlantic
Trump’s Ideas Are Deeply Unpopular
The paradox of running a campaign against Donald Trump is that you have to convince voters that he is both a liar and deadly serious.On the one hand, much of what the Republican presidential nominee says is patently false. Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not eating cats and dogs; President Joe Biden is not dodging calls from the governor of hurricane-stricken Georgia; crime is not, in fact, on the rise.And yet, on the other hand, Trump is not bluffing when it comes to his plans to radically shift the federal government and change the fabric of American life. These include a huge expansion in political-patronage jobs, campaigns of retribution against political adversaries, and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants—all things that Trump has placed at the center of his campaign and that he tried to do in his first term. Trump’s critics talk about these plans not just because of an abstract commitment to democracy—it’s also good politics. Many of these ideas are deeply unpopular, and will motivate voters to oppose Trump.[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]That’s the theory, at least. But Trump exists in a strange zone where voters hear what he’s saying and then largely discount it, perhaps as a result of his past dissembling, or perhaps because the ideas just seem too extreme to be real. Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer turned Trump critic who now works for the nonprofit Protect Democracy, has dubbed this the “believability gap.”“[These ideas] are out in public. They’re on video. They’re very easy to see and understand,” she told me. “What a lot of people are failing to comprehend is how he would turn that rhetoric into a reality.”One way to think about the believability gap is to consider Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation–coordinated blueprint for a second Trump term. Such external planning documents are not unusual, I noted in August, and even given that many of the details in this one are far out of the mainstream, Democrats’ success in turning Project 2025 into a campaign liability is surprising. An NBC News poll late last month found that 57 percent of voters viewed Project 2025 negatively; almost all of this group viewed it very negatively. Even a third of Republicans dislike it. A recent survey from the progressive pollster Navigator found 50 percent disapproval and just 9 percent approval for Project 2025.[Read: The mistake that could cost Trump the election]But the trick is that even though Project 2025 is deeply unpopular, Trump is somewhat immune to the effects if people think he won’t really do the things in it. Lake Research Partners (LRP), a Democratic firm, recently polled swing-state voters about Project 2025. When respondents were asked about specific policies within the document, an important split emerged between how they felt about each idea versus how likely they thought it was to happen. For example, 57 percent were very concerned about cutting programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, but only 33 percent thought that was very likely. Similarly, 46 percent would be very concerned about Trump deploying troops against American citizens, yet only a quarter thought Trump would ever do such a thing—even though Trump showed enthusiasm for doing just that in 2020, including in public statements.But the believability gap nearly disappears when it comes to two of the most traditional GOP policy priorities. Even though Trump in 2024 is the most aberrant major-party nominee in American history—outdoing even earlier Trump iterations—the LRP polling finds that voters are very concerned about tax cuts for the wealthy and restrictions on abortion, contraception, and infertility treatments and also think Trump would be very likely to implement those policies.[David Frum: The danger ahead]Voters’ dismissal of the likelihood of Trump pursuing his most extreme ideas, Carpenter told me, represents “a failure of imagination and inability to think about how his words could really become operable with the right people around him. It’s sort of unfathomable to a lot of Americans that that’s not exaggerated rhetoric.”For the Kamala Harris campaign, the believability gap is a challenge: Get people to believe that Trump will pursue the ideas that the public hates. The evidence available to them is substantial. Some of the most extreme ideas in Project 2025, such as liquidating much of the civil service and politicizing the federal government, are things that Trump has already tried to do. As president, he attempted to use the Justice Department to punish political adversaries, closed down investigations into allies, and sought to punish Amazon for negative coverage in The Washington Post, owned by Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos. (Carpenter has also pointed to actions taken by Republican state governments as proof of what Trump could achieve.)That helps explain a major shift in Democratic campaign strategy that has become apparent in recent months. When President Joe Biden was the party’s nominee, he frequently spoke about the election as an existential threat to democracy, using high-flown rhetoric. Since replacing him atop the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has not stopped talking about democracy, but she’s made it much less of a focus, instead emphasizing issues such as abortion and tax cuts—and, yes, Project 2025. People already hate it. The Harris campaign needs them to believe it.
theatlantic.com
The New York Race That Could Tip the House
On a rainy Saturday late last month, Mondaire Jones was doing his best to convince a crowd of supporters that his campaign was going great. “We’ve got so much momentum in this race,” Jones said. “It has been an incredible week.”It was a tough sell—not only for the dozens of Democrats listening to Jones in Bedford, New York, but also for the many others who have spent millions of dollars to help him defeat a first-term Republican, Representative Mike Lawler, and win back a district he gave up two years ago. The suburbs surrounding New York City have become a central battleground in the fight for Congress, and Jones’s race against Lawler is among the most competitive in the country—one that could determine which party controls the House next year.Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the majority, and New York has four of the country’s most vulnerable Republicans, who are all newly representing districts that Joe Biden carried easily in 2020. Yet the traditionally blue bastion is proving to be rough terrain for Democratic candidates, who must distance themselves from the deeply unpopular Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City’s recently indicted mayor, Eric Adams.[Read: Don’t assume that Eric Adams is going anywhere]Jones’s curious claim to momentum was based on a poll his campaign released that had him trailing Lawler by four points—not exactly a strong showing in a district that has 80,000 more Democrats than Republicans. As for his incredible week: It began with him apologizing to Hochul for telling a reporter that he didn’t want his state’s governor to be “some, like, little bitch.” Jones said he was not referring to Hochul and told me that his comments were “taken out of context.” (Jones’s prospects did brighten the following week, when it was Lawler’s turn to apologize after The New York Times uncovered photos of the Republican wearing blackface in college as part of a Michael Jackson Halloween costume.)Democrats are hoping that the enthusiasm Kamala Harris’s campaign has generated will help them reverse the gains Republicans made in New York in 2022. Hochul’s victory that year was so underwhelming—she won by fewer than seven points, a margin that her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in his three elections—that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed her performance for costing Democrats the House.Pelosi’s successor as Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, has prioritized the purple districts in his home state as he seeks to become the nation’s first Black speaker. But Democrats’ prospects in New York aren’t looking much better than they did two years ago. Hochul’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, and the federal corruption charges against Adams—who runs the city where many of Jones’s would-be constituents work—won’t help. Polls show Harris beating Donald Trump by fewer than 15 points statewide; in 2020, Biden won by 23.Lawler has hammered Jones on the same issues that helped get him elected two years ago—the high cost of living and the influx of migrants straining local government resources—while appealing to the district’s large Jewish community by championing Israel and criticizing pro-Palestinian campus protesters. He’s supporting Trump for president while vowing to stand up to him—at least more than most Republicans have. (He’s refused, for example, to parrot the former president’s 2020 election lies.) “I’m not going to be bullied by anybody,” Lawler told me.Key to the Democrats’ strategy against Lawler—as with many Republicans—is abortion. Party strategists believe that after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, GOP candidates fared better in blue states such as New York and California because voters there did not see a legitimate threat to abortion rights. Hoping to spur greater turnout, state Democrats have placed a measure on the ballot this year that would further enshrine abortion rights into New York law, and they’re warning that victories by Lawler and other swing-district Republicans could empower the GOP to enact a national ban. “I think people see the threat. They’re taking it much more seriously,” says Jann Mirchandani, the local Democratic chair in Yorktown, a closely divided town in New York’s Hudson Valley. But she wasn’t sure if Lawler could be beaten. “It’s going to be tight.”Jones’s first stint in Congress was cut short, in part, by an electoral game of musical chairs. Because New York’s population growth had flatlined, the state lost a seat in 2022, two years after his election. In response, a newly vulnerable senior Democrat, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, decided to run in Jones’s district, so the freshman moved to Brooklyn in hopes of holding on to office there. He didn’t make it out of the primary, and then a few months later, Lawler beat Maloney by only about 1,800 votes.To try to reclaim the seat he once held, Jones is shedding some of his past progressivism. He’s renounced his support for defunding the police and no longer champions Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. His biggest break with the left came in June, when he endorsed George Latimer, the primary opponent of Jones’s former colleague, Representative Jamaal Bowman, a member of the left-wing “Squad,” because of Bowman’s criticism of Israel after October 7. In retaliation, the progressives’ campaign PAC rescinded its endorsement of Jones. When I asked him whether he would try to rejoin the Congressional Progressive Caucus if he won in November—he was a member of the group during his first go-round in the House—he said he didn’t know. But he told me he was planning to join the more moderate and business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. Do you still identify as a progressive? I asked. “I am a pragmatic, pro-Israel progressive.”[Read: Why Jamaal Bowman lost]Jones’s rift with the left has hurt him in other ways as well. Lawler and Jones are the only candidates actively campaigning in their district, but they won’t be the only people on the November ballot. A relative unknown named Anthony Frascone stunned Democrats by beating out Jones for the nomination of the left-leaning Working Families Party after earning just 287 votes.Democrats say they were the victims of a dirty trick by the GOP, pointing to two seeming coincidences. Frascone, a former registered Republican, has ties to powerful conservatives in the district, including his longtime lawyer, who serves as a county chair. And, as Gothamist reported, nearly 200 voters registered with the party in conservative Rockland County just days before the deadline. Few residents are eligible to vote in the WFP primary, which typically rubber-stamps the Democratic candidate. So when Frascone got on the ballot at the last minute, the Jones campaign didn’t have many supporters it could even attempt to turn out.If it was a ploy by Republicans, it worked brilliantly. In a close race, Frascone might siphon enough votes from Jones for Lawler to win. “The combination of the surprise primary and us having a very public fracture with Mondaire created a perfect storm,” Ana María Archila, a co-director of the New York Working Families Party, told me.Now the WFP has the awkward task of telling supporters not to vote for its nominee. Meanwhile, state Democrats are suing to get Frascone off the ballot, and the Jones campaign is devoting time and money to ensuring that a ghost candidate won’t cost his party a crucial House seat. A poll released yesterday by Emerson College found Lawler ahead of Jones, 45–44, with Frascone taking three percent of the vote, suggesting that he could play the role of spoiler.Lawler told me he had nothing to do with Frascone’s candidacy. “He has no ties to me,” he said. “If Mondaire couldn’t win a Working Families Party primary with 500 voters, that’s on him.”Democrats appear to be in a stronger position in other New York swing districts. Representative Brandon Williams, a first-term Republican, is seen as a slight underdog to retain his seat around Syracuse after Democrats redrew his district in 2022. In a Long Island district that Biden carried by double digits, the Democrat Laura Gillen’s campaign got a boost when The New York Times reported that her opponent, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, had given congressional jobs to both his lover and the daughter of the woman he was cheating on. Farther upstate, in New York’s Nineteenth District, which is currently the most expensive House race in the country, an early-September poll by a Republican-leaning firm found that the GOP incumbent, Representative Marc Molinaro, was three points behind his Democratic challenger, with a larger group of voters undecided.Elsewhere on Long Island, Representative Tom Suozzi is favored to win again after his special-election victory in February, when he flipped a GOP-held seat by talking tough on the border and assailing Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill at Trump’s behest—a message that Democrats from Harris on down are adopting this fall.But Suozzi also benefited from his being the only race on the ballot; Democrats bused in canvassers from across the New York metropolitan area to knock on doors for his campaign, and he won by nearly eight points. Now the same organizations that powered Suozzi’s win are trying to convince party activists and volunteers that their local elections are just as important as the one for the White House. “One of those races gets more attention than the other, but it turns out that Kamala Harris is going to need a Democratic Congress,” Jones told the supporters gathered at the event I attended in Bedford.[Read: What Tom Suozzi’s win means for Democrats]I met two Democrats there who said they would vote for Jones but not canvass for him. One of them, Joe Simonetti, said he was still “deeply, deeply, deeply disappointed” by Jones’s effort to unseat a Black progressive in Bowman. “I just can’t get out there with full-throated support,” Simonetti, a retired social worker, said. Roger Savitt, a 70-year-old retiree and former Republican, told me that he was hoping to get on a bus to Pennsylvania to volunteer for Harris for a day. Why not knock on doors for Jones too? I asked. Savitt had nothing against Jones, he said, but “I have a less strong view of the congressional race.”Indeed, part of Jones’s dilemma is that some Democrats in the district have a grudging admiration for Lawler. “Lawler’s done a halfway-decent job,” Rocco Pozzi, a Democratic commissioner in Westchester County, told me. “But we need to get the majority back.” A former political consultant, Lawler is visible both in the community and on cable news, where he tries to position himself as a reasonable voice amid the warring factions in Congress. “You have seen him on Morning Joe, where he never gets asked tough questions,” Jones complained to the Bedford crowd at one point.As their party embraced Trump, moderate Republicans in blue states have occasionally found a receptive audience among Democrats looking to reward politicians willing to criticize their own party. In Vermont, the Republican Phil Scott has for years been among the nation’s most popular governors. Massachusetts twice elected the moderate Republican Charlie Baker as governor, and in Maine, Senator Susan Collins won reelection in 2020 even as Biden easily carried the state.Lawler is eyeing that same path to statewide office in New York; if he wins reelection, he told me, he might run for governor against Hochul in 2026. “It’s certainly something I’ll look at,” Lawler said.Yet despite his image, Lawler is more conservative than the Republicans who have demonstrated cross-party appeal in nearby Democratic strongholds. Although he has vowed to vote against a national abortion ban, he opposes the procedure except in cases of rape or incest and told me he would not vote with Democrats to restore Roe v. Wade. Lawler also said he’d vote against the bipartisan immigration bill that Harris has promised to pass if elected.Those positions offer openings for Jones, who needs the Democrats that still dominate the district to recognize the importance of his race to the national balance of power. Lawler isn’t making it easy for him. A couple days after Jones’s rally in Bedford, I saw Lawler speak a few miles northwest in Yorktown at a commemoration of the October 7 attacks. The event wasn’t partisan, and Lawler spoke for only a few minutes, but attendees in the largely Jewish audience came away impressed.Nancy Anton, a 68-year-old retired teacher and artist, said she had “definitely” been planning to vote for Jones before she came, but now she was leaning the other way. She supports Harris for president and wants Jeffries to be speaker, she told me, but she might vote for Lawler anyway. “I’m hoping in these other districts the Democrats win so we retake the House,” Anton said. I asked her if she’d have any regrets come November if a Lawler victory allowed Republicans to retain the majority. “Oh yes,” she replied. “That’s a terrifying thought.”
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theatlantic.com
In Defense of Marital Secrets
Is bad behavior in marriage back? In fictional marriage, I mean. For years, heterosexual matrimony in American novels has seemed rather like it’s become a trap for the female protagonist: Unhappy or misunderstood by her spouse, she may act out or seek retribution; whatever her behavior, though, readers are meant to see that it’s attributable to her environment—in other words, that she’s not really in the wrong. For this plotline to work, the wife must be attuned, sometimes newly so, to herself, her unhappiness, her desires—a fictional extension of the powerful, if reductive, idea that women can protect themselves from harm by understanding their own wants and limits.In daily life, of course, human desires and boundaries are changeable. The feminist philosopher Katherine Angel writes, “Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal.” Self-awareness has certainly killed sex (and sexiness) in a lot of novels; it’s killed a lot of novels, in fact. A story without badness isn’t much of a story, and a story whose hero has perfect self-knowledge is a story utterly devoid of suspense.Stories about marriage are no exception to this rule. There’s an unbearable flatness to any book whose protagonist is always justified in her actions—or, for that matter, always able to justify them to herself. After years of reading such dead tales, I found both delight and hope in the critic and memoirist Lauren Elkin’s debut novel, Scaffolding, a tale of two slippery adulterers who consider understanding oneself an impossible—or, at best, incompletely possible—task. Its protagonists, Anna and Florence, are psychoanalysts who live in the same Parisian apartment nearly five decades apart, in the 2010s and 1970s, respectively. Both women have crises of faith in language, in intellectualism, in their role as a therapist and as a wife. Neither wants to leave their marriage, but both launch intense, clandestine affairs.Anna and Florence don’t totally understand their motivations for cheating. They act on impulse—in Anna’s case, for what seems like the first time in her life—and yet each seems to recognize that her affair is a voyage of discovery. Elkin writes these events as complicated adventures in wrong decisions—which, crucially, she neither justifies nor condemns. She lets her characters be bad yet ordinary, bad yet sympathy-inducing, bad yet worthy of a good life. In a sense, their badness improves their situation. Their lack of self-awareness, their tendency or ability to submit to their id, gets them closer to what they consciously want: some privacy within their marriage. Just as Scaffolding argues that we can’t know ourselves fully, it makes plain that we can never completely know one another—and that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that, even when it leads to bad behavior; even when it breaks our hearts.Scaffolding is about feminism as much as it is about marriage. Florence, its ’70s protagonist, is a psychoanalysis student who spends her free time with consciousness-raising groups. She commits herself to flouting convention, even though her marriage is fairly traditional: She cooks and cleans, and is busy redecorating the apartment that she and her husband, Henry, inherited from her grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. Elkin swiftly makes apparent to readers that Florence’s feminist rebellion is also a rejection of the (largely Christian) “Franco-Français” society that deported her family—something Florence herself seems not to notice. She’s too busy thinking about the affair she’s having with one of her professors. Anna, in the 21st century, is less rebellious and much less happy. She’s suffering from depression after a miscarriage, spending hours immobile in bed, “as if a large sheet of cling film were pinning me in place.” Sexually, she’s shut down; her husband, David, is working in London, and she declines to go with him and struggles to engage in any intimacy when he visits her in Paris. Her only live connection—very live, it turns out—is with Clémentine, a feminist artist in her 20s who grows determined, and successfully so, to draw Anna out of herself and into the world.[Read: How should feminists have sex now?]But even as Anna begins recovering from her depression, its effect on her career is devastating. Formerly devoted to her analysis practice, she’s now stopped valuing her profession. “Why look in other people’s narratives for the metaphors, the gaps, the gaffes, the subtexts, that point you to what they themselves may or may not realise?” she asks herself. “Maybe the words merely point to themselves.” Readers see her apply this feeling to her own life, expending less and less effort on making sense of her behavior. Florence follows a similar trajectory, though as a result not of trauma but of going to Jacques Lacan’s lectures and having an affair with a Lacanian psychology professor. (Don’t worry: Although Lacan famously deconstructed language, which led, in his case, to highly abstruse writing, Scaffolding does not. Elkin’s prose is elegant and straightforward, with just enough experimentation to suit its ideas.) “We have to absorb what we’re learning without passing it through language,” she tells a friend—no easy job for a shrink. But both Florence and Anna learn to see conscious thought as a scaffold, with impulse and desire as the real, substantial building it encases and supports.Florence tries and fails to explain the intensity of her feelings for the professor she’s having an affair with; she tells herself he’s a stand-in for something but has no idea what. At the same time, she’s mystified by the fact that the affair is a “big, big deal” to her when she’s out and about in the daytime, but the moment she returns to her “evening life” with Henry (a cheater himself, not incidentally), thoughts of her lover either vanish or fuel the sex life that is the core of her marriage. Secrecy and deception as aphrodisiac—this may not be moral, and yet, Florence decides, it’s “exactly how [marriage] should work, and exactly not how it is supposed to work.”Anna, for her part, keeps more secrets from herself than from David. She nurtures an attraction to her neighbor Clémentine without permitting herself to notice, though the reader can’t miss it: Anna, otherwise cut off from her body, is so physically attuned to her friend’s presence that she describes her as “her own charged atmosphere.” It’s through Clémentine, in fact, that Anna reencounters an ex whom she desires so intensely, she sleeps with him almost instantly, even though doing so means betraying both David and Clémentine. Unlike Florence, Anna doesn’t attempt to explain her feelings or actions to herself. She knows her behavior is wrong, yet she also knows how alone she’s been, how solitary and isolated from her husband her depression has made her. Having an affair punctures her cling film. It might be bad, but it also returns her to her marriage and her life.Scaffolding isn’t really suggesting that adultery and secrecy are good for a marriage. Rather, the novel treats these things as bad but normal and manageable—and preferable to a total loss of connection. When Clémentine cheats on her boyfriend, she tells Anna the cheating is a disruption that can be “absorbed back into the relationship.” Novels that leave wrongdoing out of their worlds imply that no transgression, marital or otherwise, could be that small, and that for a character to do something genuinely harmful would bring their whole life crashing down. Our broader cultural impulse toward hyperconsciousness is rooted in the same idea. It reflects an inability or unwillingness to tell the difference between big bad things and the small bad ones—and, by extension, to forgive the latter.[Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it]Elkin puts some big badness in Scaffolding to draw out this distinction. Clémentine is part of a brigade of women who graffiti anti–domestic abuse messages on Paris’s walls. Their work presents a vision of feminism very different from the one in Florence’s consciousness-raising groups, which are all about knowing oneself: For Clémentine, protest is the only way women can resist misogyny. Anna’s first positive emotion in the novel is a response to the graffiti: “Aren’t they incredible?” she says, pointing one out to David on one of his visits from London. Florence, meanwhile, isn’t just involved in raising her own consciousness. She also keenly follows the Bobigny trial, France’s equivalent of Roe v. Wade. Both characters are highly aware of how dangerous life can be for women. Compared with unsafe clandestine abortions or spousal violence, some cheating means nothing; but compared with the flatness of Anna’s day-to-day life and the conventionality of Florence’s marriage, their affairs have immensely high stakes.Scaffolding strikes this balance well. Elkin is deft but clear in reminding readers that there’s a distinction between badness and evil, or badness and hate. She writes Florence’s and Anna’s marriages as immensely loving ones, despite their holes and wobbles; in such relationships, the novel seems to argue, it is conceivable—though not guaranteed—that almost anything can be forgiven or absorbed.Neither Florence nor Anna knows why they cheat on their husband. Perhaps more important, neither of them knows why they love their husband. In a novel less invested in psychological mystery, this would signal crisis for the fictional marriage. In life, it’s the most normal thing there is. Complete self-awareness is both an unattainable standard and a false promise, as is complete transparency with someone else, no matter what your wedding vows say or suggest. Accepting this fact is terrifying. It turns commitment into suspense. In reality, many of us prefer not to acknowledge that, which is more than reasonable: Who goes into their marriage wanting deception and drama?Novels, though, are built to let us test-drive uncertainty—to feel it without living it. Where marriage is concerned, this is an important option for many of us to have. Marriage stories whose protagonists never slip up don’t give readers this option; if anything, they flatten our views of intimacy rather than letting us expand them through imagination.
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theatlantic.com
The Mistakes Israel Can’t Afford to Repeat
“They’re cheering us now,” I said to the soldier next to me in the jeep, as we drove through Beirut to applause and showers of rice. “But soon they’ll be shooting.” It was June 9, 1982, four days after Israel had invaded Lebanon. The war followed years of Palestinian rocket fire on northern Israel, but the proximate trigger was a Palestinian gunman’s attempt to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. The goal of Operation Peace for Galilee, as then–Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called it, was to push the terrorists out of rocket range, but Defense Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the army to advance farther north and besiege Beirut. After evicting the terrorists and the Syrian troops occupying the country, Israel hoped to install a Christian, pro-Western government that was committed to peace.I was serving in a reserve reconnaissance unit of the Israel Defense Forces at the time, but in civilian life, I was studying Middle East history. I’d learned that the Lebanese had often cheered invading armies but later turned on them. Previous efforts to pacify the country had uniformly failed. Sharon’s plan, I thought, was reckless. “We’ll never get out of here,” I said to the soldier as we drove, rice-pelted, through Beirut’s suburbs. “We’re stuck.”Stuck we were, both militarily and diplomatically. President Ronald Reagan at first backed the operation, but then, appalled by the number of civilian casualties, forced Israel’s troops to fall back to southern Lebanon. The U.S. Marines who replaced us also abandoned Beirut after 243 of them were killed by a suicide bomber from a previously unknown Shiite group named Hezbollah. Those same Iranian-backed terrorists relentlessly attacked IDF positions in the south, until finally, a full 18 years after they’d invaded Lebanon, the last Israeli soldiers withdrew.[Gal Beckerman: A naked desperation to be seen]Though Israel succeeded in freeing Lebanon of Syrian troops and evicting many Palestinian terrorists, and a peaceful Christian government emerged, that progress proved fragile. The new president was soon assassinated, and the country gradually came to be dominated by Hezbollah. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah terrorists ambushed an IDF patrol, killing eight soldiers and capturing two. Israel responded with the Second Lebanon War.The conflict raged for 34 days, during which Hezbollah rockets pummeled Israeli cities and towns and IDF jets bombed strategic targets in Lebanon. President George W. Bush initially supported Israel’s right to self-defense, before recoiling from the high civilian casualty rate and demanding a cease-fire. A last-minute thrust by Israeli ground forces succeeded only in further antagonizing the Americans. Their response was United Nations Resolution 1701, which ended the fighting and instructed Hezbollah to withdraw to north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone in the south of Lebanon.In this second war, I served as an IDF spokesperson, rather than a combat soldier. But on its last night, I volunteered for battlefield duty. My assignment was to help transport the remains of fallen soldiers out of the combat zone and back over the border to Israel. Their comrades watched us as we worked, their faces grim with disappointment and fatigue. More than 100 soldiers had died, yet none of us could say exactly for what.Although Israel managed to inflict a toll on Hezbollah—its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, publicly regretted ambushing that patrol—it gained little in the long term. In defiance of Resolution 1701, Hezbollah deployed along Israel’s northern border and burrowed multiple attack tunnels beneath it. Directly opposite the frontier fort where I served after 2006, Hezbollah erected a huge billboard on which a laughing terrorist hoisted an Israeli soldier’s severed head.Israelis deluded ourselves by thinking that the war had deterred Hezbollah when, in fact, the war had deterred us. We remained largely passive while, over the next 17 years, Hezbollah expanded its rocket arsenal tenfold and grew to become one of the region’s most formidable military forces.Israel’s indifference ended after October 7, 2023. We now know that 3,000 terrorists of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit had been planning to smash through the border and ravage Israel’s north much as Hamas had in the south. Timely bombing by the Israeli air force preempted that attack, but Hezbollah compensated by shelling the Galilee. Nearly 100,000 Israelis became refugees in their own country, their fields and houses scorched.Historically, Israel has never done well with wars of attrition, yet Hezbollah was waging one that steadily crept south, toward the Sea of Galilee in the east and toward Haifa in the west. Israel’s return fire failed to deter Hezbollah and, by its very ineffectiveness, may have egged it on. Throughout, Hezbollah declared its readiness to agree to a cease-fire if Hamas did, but Hamas wanted a war in the north that would relieve the pressure it faced in Gaza. It was only a matter of time before Israel, assured that Hamas was sufficiently degraded, would turn its attention to Hezbollah. On September 19 of this year, after the pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives simultaneously exploded, seriously wounding thousands of people and killing at least 37, the Third Lebanon War began.Though also launched in response to terrorist attacks from Lebanon, the Third Lebanon War differs from its predecessors in several crucial ways. For Israel, Lebanon is now just one front in a year-long, multifaceted struggle with Iranian proxies throughout the region, as well as with Iran itself. Unlike the previous two wars, both of which were perceived by many Israelis as wars of choice, the current conflict is seen by almost all Israelis as fully justified. We know that Israel cannot lose the north and survive.For that reason alone, Israelis need to consider how the Third Lebanon War can succeed where the first two failed.Success will depend principally on setting clear and realistic objectives. Israel cannot, as it did in 1982, seek to remake Lebanon into a Middle Eastern Belgium or, as in 2006, merely retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression. Rather, Israel’s limited goals must be to drive Hezbollah beyond the Litani and to end the rocket fire on the north. Israel must deny any intention of permanently occupying southern Lebanon and declare its openness to any diplomatic means of implementing and reliably enforcing Resolution 1701.[Dara Horn: October 7 created a permission structure for anti-Semitism]The United States must also avoid its former mistakes, committing instead to supporting Israel and allowing it to complete its military mission. Israel began this war with a series of brilliant strikes against Hezbollah’s leaders and military infrastructure, but the fighting ahead is likely to remain brutal. The U.S. must desist from imposing premature cease-fires or sponsoring UN resolutions that the terrorists can handily violate. But the United States should also insist that Israel honor its pledge not to occupy Lebanon, and that it engage earnestly with diplomatic envoys.Although I recently volunteered for reserve duty guarding a Galilean kibbutz, I will not take part in this Lebanon war. For the young Israeli soldiers engaged in close combat, I can only offer one older veteran’s advice: You are fighting to restore security to your people, not to refashion Lebanon or to remain indefinitely on its soil. Your job is not to punish Hezbollah for any specific act of aggression, but to deter it and its Iranian sponsors from further attempts to destroy us. Your job is to fight with all the skills you’ve been taught, the superior gear you’ve been issued, and the values you learned at home, in order to complete your mission—and then to return to help lead Israel into the future.The third time—so the colloquialism goes—is always a charm. The Third Lebanon War can yield positive and perhaps transformative results. Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons can be defeated, Israel can reinforce its security and revive its deterrence, and the United States can reaffirm its superpower status. But all of that will require a consistent effort to study the mistakes of Israel’s first two wars in Lebanon, and to avoid repeating them.
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theatlantic.com
What Really Fueled the ‘East Asian Miracle’?
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe transformation of several East Asian countries from developing, agrarian economies to highly developed, industrialized economies is one of the great success stories of the 20th century. According to one World Bank report, almost a billion people were pulled out of poverty as a result of fast growth in the region. But the questions of why this happened and how it can be replicated by other countries remain essential to answer for the roughly 700 million people trying to survive on less than $2.15 a day.In today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Oliver Kim, an economist working at Open Philanthropy, whose recent paper co-authored with Jen-Kuan Wang, a Ph.D. student at Penn State, investigates one country that was part of the “East Asian miracle”: Taiwan. In the 1950s, Taiwan pursued a series of land reforms that were widely credited for transforming its economy. Other countries in the region had pursued similar reforms—including mainland China, Japan, and South Korea—adding to the sense that these specific changes were important for understanding the region’s development. In broad terms, the story went like this: Taiwan redistributed land to the peasantry, which significantly increased the nation’s agricultural productivity and helped finance the country’s industrialization.But Kim and Wang’s research casts doubt on this story. Diving into the data reveals a far more complicated picture of how land reforms spurred development in Taiwan, with implications for developing nations around the world.“It is definitely true that Taiwan got richer during this time period,” Kim explains. “But you also have to remember from a critical historical perspective that this is playing an important propaganda role. And so a lot of Taiwanese historians, though they didn’t have the data that we have, have been questioning this narrative.”He adds, “And actually, if you think about the experience of land reform more broadly in a global sense, I think our results actually bring the Taiwanese experience closer to the global experience, which is generally defined that land reform actually has been fairly disappointing in terms of its productivity impacts.”The following is a transcript of the episode:[Music]Jerusalem Demsas: How does a nation pull its residents out of poverty and into the developed world? I think this is the most important question in economics, and it’s one researchers have struggled to answer.To development economists, the rise of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, among others—what’s often called the East Asian miracle—has been a source of deep fascination. How did these countries so quickly enter the ranks of the global elite?On today’s episode, we’re going to focus on Taiwan. How did this country go from a Japanese colony to an advanced industrial economy? And what lessons does it hold for other developing nations?Over the course of the 1950s, Taiwan’s agricultural productivity took off, setting the stage for its transition to an industrial economy. Over essentially one decade, rice yields grew by more than 40 percent, unlocking a period of rapid economic growth. The traditional narrative is that land reforms are the key to development, particularly a set of reforms that redistributed land from wealthy landlords to the disaffected peasantry and thereby increased productivity.It’s a nice story, one that puts equity and efficiency on the same side. But a new study casts doubt on whether this story is actually true.[Music]This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. My name is Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and today I’m joined by Oliver Kim. He recently co-authored a paper that is challenging deeply held beliefs about how development works.His white paper shows that while redistribution of the land might have been a great policy on its own terms, when you dig into the data, it doesn’t explain Taiwan’s sudden burst of productivity. Other explanations make a lot more sense. We’re going to dig into them today.All right. Oliver, welcome to the show.Oliver Kim: Thank you for having me.Demsas: So we’re here to talk about a very interesting new paper you wrote, but because it’s quite specific, I want us to step back a bit. There’s fundamentally one big question that development economics is trying to answer, and it’s: Why do some countries grow into developed nations where their residents are able to access high standards of living, and why do other nations fail to do so?And one of the most important debates is centered on the divergence of East Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and places like Taiwan from places in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. I’m hoping you can just situate us for a second back in the early 1960s. What was the state of these countries that we now think of as highly developed nations, at par or ahead of many Western nations, relative to what we consider developing nations today?Kim: Sure. At the end of the Second World War—outside of basically Europe, North America, some other European offshoots—the basic condition in most of the world was poverty. And since then, in the present day, outside of basically if you’re lucky enough to find yourself sitting on a giant pool of oil, the only countries to really sustainably grow their economies to high-income status are really the East Asian tigers—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and then Singapore and Hong Kong.So I think one of the central questions in development is, Why did this miracle happen? And one of the primary reasons that’s been put forward by economists and economic historians is land reform, which is basically redistributing land from landlords to peasant farmers. Right around the end of the Second World War and the beginnings of decolonization, all these major East Asian economies had large, sweeping land reform. Japan had one around 1947 under American occupation. South Korea, similarly, had one in 1950. And Taiwan had perhaps the largest and most sweeping land reform, which occurred from 1950 to 1958.And the logic behind land reform is fairly simple. If you think about what most developing countries do—if you go and visit a developing country or area, what most people do to survive is: they farm, right? So I think in the present day—I think the latest stat’s from 2022—something like 40 percent of the world’s population are farmers. And this is where most of the extreme sort of poverty is.In Asia, immediately in the postwar period, agricultural productivity went up in the 1950s and early ’60s. The most famous example is that in Taiwan, rice yields went up by 40 percent over the course of the 1950s. And if you think about the rural poor, this is a huge increase to their incomes. And so a very influential sort of view in economics is to try and connect these two things and say that land reform had something to do with the growth in agricultural productivity.And so this was famously articulated by Joe Studwell in his book, How Asia Works. And the idea is that if you basically redistribute land—you take it away from landlords who happen to own a lot of it, and you give ownership to the peasants who actually work on it—you can improve productivity. And so you can get something that’s actually very rare in economics: You can get something that’s good for both equity and efficiency. And so the idea is that East Asia had these large, sweeping, major land reforms, and other developing areas in the world didn’t. And so this was a major contributor to the East Asian divergence.Demsas: Okay. This story then is about landlords, and by that we’re talking about landlords of agricultural land. And so essentially, at the base, it’s just redistribution, right? You’re talking about redistributing land from these large landholders to people who are farming small hectares of land.I’m hoping you could actually walk us through, more specifically, what this is, because I know land reform looks very different in different places, and we’re largely going to be talking about your research in Taiwan. So what was land reform there? What were the three phases? And which is the important one?Kim: Yeah. Land reform is this big, amorphous term in development, and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But I think most people would agree that the most sort of meaningful form of land reform is what you described, which is redistribution.I guess the model you can have in your head is that in a lot of developing countries, there are these landlords who own a lot of the land, but they don’t necessarily work it themselves. And in the worst case, you have absentee landlords, who don’t even live on the land that they farm, and they have poor, oppressed peasants who are basically doing all the work and tilling the land. And the idea behind land reform—which I think is pretty compelling, at least on the face of it—is that you take that land, and you give the peasants who actually work it rights to that land. And in the most sweeping case, you give them ownership of that land.And so in Taiwan, as you mentioned, there were several different phases of this. Just to set the historical background, Taiwan has this very unique political history. The government that runs Taiwan, the Republic of China, is basically an exile regime. And so you had Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Party, the KMT regime, that basically lose the civil war to Mao Zedong on the mainland of China, and they fled to Taiwan with something like a million of their supporters. And so this was a very sort of foreign regime that is almost a neocolonial setup, where they actually had very little ties to the local Taiwanese population, and they’ve just been kicked out by what was essentially a peasant revolution on the mainland of China.And so you have this foreign regime coming into Taiwan, and they need to build their own domestic base of support. And they had this very recent experience where they were not very popular amongst the peasants. The KMT’s base on mainland China had been amongst landlords. It had been under urban elites. And so they needed to do something different, basically, to avoid getting thrown out a second time.The first thing that they did was that they capped rent. So this happened in 1949. This is almost like rent control in a modern sort of rental sense. They capped the amount that these tenant farmers had to pay to the landlords. This is actually a fairly limited form of land reform, and it didn’t really do that much.So the second thing that they did was: They just kicked out the Japanese, who had previously been the colonial overlords of Taiwan. And they took all the land that had previously been held by the Japanese, and they redistributed it to the peasant farmers. And that redistributed something around 20 percent of all arable land in Taiwan.This still didn’t go far enough from a political perspective. And so the last stage, which ran from 1953 to the ’60s, is that they took any privately held land that was over a certain cutoff—this varied a little bit in terms of the quality of the land, but the most common cutoff was around three hectares for rice-paddy land—and they basically said, Any holding that is over that is going to get split up. So the landlord can retain up to three hectares, and then anything above that gets redistributed to the tenants who farm it. And these three phases collectively basically redistributed about a quarter of all arable land in Taiwan. And this ended up being, I think in a global sense, one of the most sweeping land redistributions in terms of the share of land that was redistributed.Demsas: Yeah. You find that in all three stages—the three stages of land reform redistribute over 215,000 hectares of land. And for people like me who had to Google what a hectare was, that’s almost 2.5 acres per hectare. So that’s over 500,000 acres of land redistributed. So this is pretty massive. This is not some small amount of shift that’s happening here.I appreciate you brought the historical perspective here, because part of the question that I had when I was learning about this is: Why didn’t the landholders become a political problem for the government, as well? There’s a lot of power that’s held by landholders. What did they compensate them with?Kim: Yeah. So part of this has to do with the elite split that I was describing, where the KMT regime that comes over with a million followers—a lot of them who are soldiers with guns—they don’t feel a lot of connection to the local Taiwanese elites, the landlords there. And the KMT regime pretty quickly turns out to be very unpopular.And so the Taiwanese actually rise up in 1947. It’s this deeply traumatic event in Taiwanese history called the 228 Incident. Local Taiwanese rise up. There’s a huge uprising throughout the island. They take over major cities. And the KMT, which still controls part of the mainland at this time, has to rush troops over, and they basically end up killing tens of thousands of people. This basically massacres a lot of the traditional Taiwanese elite. So that’s an important feature here, where there was very strong political and military coercion that essentially crushes what would be the nascent elite in Taiwan.And so the split between the fact that you had this almost carpetbagger regime that came over, that had very little connection to the local Taiwanese—that enabled it. And there was some compensation that the KMT did. They did pay the landlords, in theory, for the land that they redistributed. But these payments actually, I guess, were not that economically significant in the final analysis.Demsas: And so politically, this helps pacify the population. But that’s not the main mechanism by which most people think of land reform as having helped lead to the East Asian miracle, right? And it’s not just in Taiwan. As you mentioned, in the late 1940s, Japan and South Korea have similar land reforms. And in the 1970s, mainland China also has land reform.And the mechanism is usually that land reform leads to greater agricultural productivity, right? So then you get a ton more productivity. That kind of output growth spurs the ability for people to move into manufacturing sectors. Is that the story? Can you break that down for us?Kim: Yeah. The traditional story, which was famously articulated by Joe Studwell, is that land reform boosts agricultural productivity. And there’s a number of different mechanisms by which this can be true. But the most common one is that as you shrink the sizes of farms, paradoxically, yields—which is agricultural productivity over a unit of area, so the amount of stuff that you can grow over a hectare of land—that tends to go up.And this is a deeply disputed sort of relationship in economics. There are a lot of advocates on one side. There are advocates on the other. But the historical view is—at least, in East Asia, in Taiwan and Japan—breaking up these land holdings that the landlords previously held and giving them to tenants had this effect of raising agricultural productivity.And what my research basically finds with Jen-Kuan Wang (we’ve recently released this working paper) is that if you actually digitize the data—and this hadn’t been done before—but if you actually go into the Taiwanese archives, and you look in a very straightforward way at what actually happened in townships where there was more land reform, do you see more agricultural productivity growth? Do you see rice yields go up more?We actually don’t really find a lot of strong evidence that was the case. So what we find, basically, is that in areas where there was more of phase two of the land reform—so remember, that’s where you redistribute the previously Japanese-held public land—in areas where there was more of that public land redistribution, you actually do find some small effect on rice yields. So rice yields go up by around 6 percent over 10 years as a result of this phase two of land reform.Demsas: Is that because they’re converting things from sugar to rice?Kim: Yeah. The idea there, basically, is that these are previously colonially held lands. The Japanese were previously mandating that you grow sugar. This was essentially feeding the Japanese empire, in a large sense. And once you lift that constraint, and you make farmers free to grow what they want, they choose to plant rice instead of sugar. And this is a classic economically liberal argument, but: You give people the freedom to choose, and they make more efficient decisions.But the reform that everyone tends to focus on more—because it’s very rare, actually, that you have a case where you have a colonial overlord that gets kicked out, and you can redistribute their property. That can only usually happen once. The case that people typically fixate on in the case of Taiwan is phase three of land reform—this redistribution. And this obviously has a lot of resonance in present-day debates whenever there’s a lot of inequality in the world.And the idea was that, basically, by taking land away from these landlords who own these larger estates, and you give them to these peasants, you boost agricultural productivity. But when we look in the data, when we go into the township-level data, and we run regressions on the stuff, we actually really can’t find this effect.Demsas: So much really good economics is just in the data, right? It is in finding and cleaning data, actually going and testing theories. And one of the things that you make clear in your white paper is that this theory had not been tested by looking at the actual records on the ground in Taiwan. So can you walk us through what you did there and how you found that? Did not have access to this before?Kim: Actually, it is a little surprising that this hadn’t been done before, because a lot of this was actually just sitting there. My co-author—I mentioned who I wrote this paper with, Jen-Kuan Wang—is Taiwanese, and he did a lot of digitization work, going into the government data archives. But the basic work, the initial regressions that we ran, actually it was just a book I pulled from the UC Berkeley library.Demsas: What was the book?Kim: The book was—they actually had, at the township level, the land-distribution statistics. So they had for each township in Taiwan, you know, How many people own plots that are between, like, zero and 0.5 hectares? Between 0.5 and 1 hectare? etc.And so this very sort of commonly held story that this phase three of redistribution, that land-to-the-tiller reforms boost agricultural productivity—it doesn’t actually seem to be the case. And one reason that we hypothesize is, basically, that the farms that this created were just too small, actually, to be economically viable.And so if you actually think about the context here—Taiwan is actually a pretty small place—the initial land holdings held by these landlords were just relatively small, and they just got broken down to an even smaller extent, to something like 0.2 hectares, which is, I think, less than an acre.And these are just too small to support a growing family. And this had the perverse effect, basically, of pushing labor out of agriculture and into industry because these farms are just too small to support the families that were living on them. So this is very different.Demsas: So people sold their land and moved to the city?Kim: They often kept it, basically. In a lot of developing societies, I think there’s a lot of attachment to the land as a form of security, but it was just not enough to provide enough income to support a whole family. And so you had people leaving agriculture and starting to pursue part-time or even full-time employment in manufacturing, and that’s maybe related to the broader sort of transformation of Taiwan that people typically think of when they think of the East Asian miracle.Demsas: And I want to ask you first: Were you surprised by the results of your study? Or did you expect to find productivity growth?Kim: Yeah, I did. I mean, people on Twitter and stuff have been like, Oh, there’s been a lot of fighting, over, like, Oh, what this means for the Joe Studwell book, but like, Oh, this was an attempt to take down How Asia Works.But I actually really like that book. And I was motivated to do this because I really did believe the story that land reform is good for productivity, and it had all these sort of positive effects on East Asian development. So yeah, I did go into this expecting to find a very strong result of land reform. So it was surprising to say the least.Demsas: Okay, cool. I also enjoyed the Studwell book, so I’m glad I don’t have to throw that one out.So there’s this question about whether small farms would be more productive than big farms, which is actually really, really important. In general, you would expect there to be economies of scale that come with bigger farms: You’re able to diversify your crops more in case of a problem. You’re able to invest in productivity-enhancing technology, whether that’s irrigation or whatever it is.At some level, do you feel like the original land-reform story felt suspicious on face?Kim: Yeah. So one thing that’s very interesting, particularly if you dive into the Taiwanese literature, is that local Taiwanese scholars are very skeptical of this story. And I brought up this political context, right? There’s a split—the KMT come in; they’re this foreign regime. This was a very brutal authoritarian regime. In a modern sense, this was an autocracy, right? And they need to build their local base of support, and so they play up this idea of land reform being this benevolent policy that was so good for the Taiwanese people, because it suits their interests, right?Part of that might be true. It is definitely true that Taiwan got richer during this time period. But you also have to remember, from a critical historical perspective, that this is playing an important propaganda role. And so a lot of Taiwanese historians, though they didn’t have the data that we have, have been questioning this narrative and have been pointing to examples of the fact that, Hey, a lot of these farms were actually really small. A lot of people were actually pushed off the farm. Maybe the sort of miracle doesn’t have actually that much to do with KMT policy.And so, yeah. I think adopting this critical historical perspective and saying, Hey, something about the story doesn’t seem quite right. And actually, if you think about the experience of land reform more broadly in a global sense, I think our results actually bring the Taiwanese experience closer to the global experience, which is generally defined that land reform actually has been fairly disappointing in terms of its productivity impacts.Demsas: And I think that brings me to this broader observation that I’m hoping you can expand on, which is that so many debates about development, especially development—these are obviously developing nations—are being shoehorned into debates that are happening in Western countries about what sorts of economic policies are better.And so in some ways it seems like there’s this larger debate about whether industrial policy, whether the government intervention in the market is an appropriate way to get to development. And then you have folks on the other side— the Washington Consensus, the more neoliberal economists—who are saying, No. We want free and open trade. We don’t want government intervention. And the industrial-policy people really, really like this land-reform story because it shows that there is a role for government to be intervening in the market. Is that how you see it, too?Kim: Yeah. I think there’s always a bit of a danger from trying to transpose lessons in developing contexts to developed contexts, right? They’re deeply different in very fundamental ways. On the industrial-policy stuff, the example that everyone likes to bring up is: South Korea did a ton of industrial policy and experienced this massive developmental miracle, right? So there was massive intervention. The state heavily subsidized certain sectors—like steelmaking, like auto production, like shipbuilding—and then created these very successful industries and very successful firms that were able to compete on the global marketplace.And I think there’s a real strong sort of temptation to try and take that logic and apply it to things like CHIPS [and Science Act] in the United States. I’m not saying, necessarily, that’s wrong. But you have to remember that the context in which Korea is implementing these policies is very different than what the United States is trying to do. Like, Korea when it was trying to build its domestic steel industry, or if you want to lump agricultural policy, so like Taiwan when it’s trying to develop its local agriculture—these are not new, frontier industries. These are not at the technological frontier.You broadly know that you should be growing more food. You broadly know that a developed country, at least in the ’60s or ’70s—the hallmark of being a rich country is that you make your own steel, right? It’s not a mystery. Especially in Korea and Taiwan, which were former Japanese colonies, you can look over the water, and you can see your former colonial overlord, Japan, that’s doing pretty well economically by developing its domestic industries, doing all this industrial-policy stuff. And so it’s fairly simple to mimic that policy recipe and try to develop an industrial mix that catches up to countries that have already reached the frontier.With things like CHIPS and modern industrial policy or things like electric cars, it’s much more difficult to have a guide in that sense. It’s unclear what the hallmarks of a highly rich society in the 21st or 22nd century is going to look like. So I think there’s a fundamental difference there. When you have the playbook and you have clear sort of historical examples—economists call these demonstration effects—when you have a demonstration effect that you can point to, the problem of what industrial sectors to prioritize becomes a lot easier.[Music]Demsas: All right. We’ll have more with Oliver after this break.[Break]Demsas: I want to step back broader and talk about why this really even matters. One mechanism that you guys are really undermining in your paper is the idea that land reform led to the East Asian miracle by increasing agriculture productivity.But you hinted at this already, but there are other ways in which land reform could have helped propel Taiwan, South Korea, all these other countries into becoming a developed nation, into these high-GDP-per-capita countries. I’m hoping we can talk through some of those, because the elimination of that one causal pathway doesn’t actually mean we can say land reform isn’t important for understanding Taiwan’s or other countries’ pathway to development.So I guess one pathway, which you hinted at, is a sort of political pathway, that you’re able to pacify the population of peasants who have already had this really, as you mentioned, traumatic uprising, have martial law now imposed, but you need to actually make sure that they’re not going to overthrow you. And so it staves off political demands for communism. Is that a pathway that you think is super valid for understanding what happened here?Kim: Yeah. I think that’s central. I think you can’t really understand the history of East Asian development without understanding the fact that this all is happening in the context of the Cold War, right?So I mentioned that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan all had these land reforms. These are all non-communist countries. But if you look at the map of East Asia, and you put the dates of land reforms across all countries—not just these three—on a map, you’ll notice there’s this kind of mirroring pattern. Japan has a land reform in ’47, but China also has one from ’45 to the ’50s, as Mao’s Communists take over. South Korea has one in 1950, but that’s because North Korea has one a couple years earlier.And so the motivations, I think, are fairly obvious, which is that these are poor societies where most of the people are farmers, and across the border, in a lot of cases, you have very viable military threats, which are doing actually fairly popular programs of land redistribution that build up the support among the peasantry.And so this is a very unique circumstance where the United States supports a lot of these very strong redistributionary measures in order to basically forestall the possibility of communist takeover. And this is not the kind of thing that’s very easy to do in a regression, like a formal statistical sense, but just knowing the historical context and the narrative of this history, it’s hard to see how these regimes could have survived without at least doing some form of land redistribution, at least building up some support amongst the farmers that made up the majority of their population. If these regimes had failed to survive, and they’d been swallowed up—let’s say Taiwan had been consumed by mainland China—you wouldn’t be talking about an East Asian miracle, probably.And the exception that proves the rule is South Vietnam. So people forget that there was this other kind of American proto-colony in Southeast Asia. Just like Korea, Vietnam gets divided into two. There’s a communist northern half. There’s a capitalist southern half. And for particular reasons, the South Vietnamese regime basically avoids doing systematic land reform. And the American government very famously spends a lot of effort, blood, and treasure in this horrific and tragic war, which is called the Vietnam War, basically, trying to solve through coercive means what ultimately, I think, is an agrarian and a peasant sort of revolt. And part of the problem is that the South Vietnamese regime is beholden to the landlords. It’s a landlord-led government. And they’re not particularly interested until very late in the war in doing large-scale redistribution, because that’s where their wealth is tied up.And what basically happens, of course, is that the South Vietnamese state gets hollowed out. It ultimately falls to a conventional invasion from the North, but it’s hard to argue, I think, that if they hadn’t done land reform earlier, they might have continued to exist. And failing to have done systematic land reform basically results in the regime failing to survive. And I think the East Asian states that did successfully do land reform avoided this fate.Demsas: Okay. It sounds like you place a lot of value in that story. But as you mentioned, Joe Studwell, who writes How Asia Works—he has a few other pathways that he also theorizes. One is that landlords are forced to go do more productive things than just rent seeking. Previously before land reforms, you’re a landlord, you have a bunch of money, you have peasants working the farm, you get to raise your rents really high, and you have no incentive to really invest in that land and to increase productivity, because you’re just making a lot of money by just collecting those rents and not having to do anything else. Once your land is forcibly redistributed, in order to—you want to still be rich? You want to make money? You have to go do something more productive. Do you find that to be a valuable way of thinking about this?Kim: Yeah. We’ve tried to find evidence for this. So the story in Taiwan is that, in compensation for the land reform, the landlords were compensated by the state, either in the form of land bonds, which basically is a claim on agricultural output. So I don’t know—you’re entitled to some number of kilograms of sweet potatoes in the next five years or something like that. My understanding is that those actually turned out to be fairly worthless.And then the second thing that landlords were compensated with were shares of industrial companies. So Taiwan had a little bit of industry that had been leftover by the Japanese. The KMT state claims it, and they give shares to the landlords. And I think this is a little bit of what Joe Studwell is gesturing at. I’m a little bit more skeptical that this is as developmentally important, because one of the things that happens in Taiwan is that a lot of the growth in manufacturing—there is growth on the state-led sector, but the really most dynamic kind of growth-leading sectors of the economy are small-scale manufacturing.And so these don’t really have much to do with the former—like, these lumbering, large-scale industrial enterprises that the government had redistributed these shares of. It’s more these new enterprises that sprout up in the countryside. And so that, I think, is maybe evidence against this view that it’s the landlords, in particular, who are the importance of entrepreneurs in development.Demsas: Okay. To recap land reform: Your belief is that it largely is operating positively for growth by staving off communism and, potentially also, the low yields lead people to work more manufacturing. But you don’t really believe that there is some large productivity increase that comes from redistributing the land to the peasantry.Kim: Yeah. That’s right. And I think this helps reconcile a little bit Taiwan with the global historical experience, right? It wasn’t unknown that South Korea and Taiwan did this. Throughout the ’70s, there were actually a lot of attempts at land reform in Latin America, elsewhere in Southeast Asia.Now, there are a host of different reasons that this didn’t work. Often, as I mentioned, as I alluded to, in the case of South Vietnam, for political reasons, a lot of these land reforms ended up getting co-opted. But even in the instances where there was genuine redistribution, there just never were sort of the claimed productivity effects that you saw, or at least you claim to see, in South Korea and Taiwan.And at least in the Taiwanese case, the study brings Taiwan back into line, I think, with the rest of historical experience. It’s not to say that agricultural productivity didn’t go up. Clearly, Taiwan got richer. Rice yields went up. But I think the balance of explanations and how much explanatory power you want to put on land reform versus more prosaic things—like the fact that there were, you know, improvements in fertilizer use, the fact that there were the development of higher-yield varieties sort of presaging the Green Revolution—these sort of more prosaic, technical developments probably are more important than this sort of very flashy, large-scale institutional change of land reform.Demsas: But I also want to take a step back from land reform in particular, because in general, if you are downgrading the importance of one explanation for East Asian development, then you should be upgrading other explanations for East Asian development, right?So I wanted to talk about some of the other reasons people often have for why nations develop or why nations fail, to quote Acemoglu, and see what you think of it now that you’ve done this study. Okay, let’s start with export discipline. Can you explain what that is and whether you feel more confident that it’s a reason for East Asian development?Kim: Yeah. The idea there, basically, is that when you think of the East Asian countries, you typically actually think of manufacturing development. There’s actually this Calvin and Hobbes comic, I think from 1980s, where Calvin asked Hobbes to check the tag of his shirt because it says where he comes from. And Hobbes checks the shirt, and it says made in taiwan. It’s like he came from Taiwan.I mean, the idea that Taiwan was making shirts back in the ’80s and now is doing things like TSMC and making microchips—that’s a tremendous transformation. But the common thread throughout this stuff is that it’s about making physical goods, industrial production that gets exported abroad. And the idea with export discipline is that there was a lot of industrial policy throughout the developing world throughout the ’60s and ’70s. And it was actually the policy consensus that the state has to do things to foster development.And Joe Studwell’s argument in How Asia Works is that the differentiating kind of factor for the East Asian economies was the fact that they actually forced their big sort of industrial champions to export. And this basically disciplines the firm when a firm can just stay in the domestic market. So imagine you’re surrounded by big, tall tariff barriers; there’s really no incentive to innovate or to try and become more efficient.Demsas: You have a captive audience.Kim: You have a captive market. You have a captive audience. And in the comparative sense, this is what a lot of scholars view happened, for instance, in South Asia and India, in a lot of Latin American countries, where you had initially very well-intentioned policies, where it’s like, Okay. We want to foster an infant industry. We want to get industrialization going. To support that industry, to prevent it from just being strangled in the cradle, we need to have all these supports. We need to put up tariff barriers. We need to subsidize credit, all this kind of stuff.Demsas: To make it easier for these industries not to have to compete with—Kim: Yeah, to make these industries grow and to get them to a sufficient size that economies of scale kick in.This is a very standard kind of economic argument, and it’s actually fairly sound. The problem is the political stuff, which is that once that firm is born and grows a little bit, it starts to create a constituency that actually really likes to have these barriers. It’s really nice to not have to compete with all these scary, big foreign firms that are potentially more efficient than you are.And so the view is that what happened in South Asia and Latin America is, like, a lot of these controls and these barriers stayed up, and the firms are never forced to export—unlike, for instance, the Hyundais and Kias of the South Korean experience. In other countries, they never developed the productivity enhancements to become globally competitive, and so you didn’t have the sort of miraculous growth. I think this view is basically still pretty sound.Demsas: So I think the more-popular ones that people generally tend to hear when they think about development and why it happens are these temperature and education explanations for development. So: Hotter places don’t develop well. And also, people should just invest in education. That’s why the East Asian tigers do so well, is because they have such well-educated populations. How do you think about those explanations?Kim: Yeah. The temperature one is interesting. I think that goes back to Montesquieu or whatever.Demsas: Yeah. It’s an old one.Kim: Yeah, like, tropical. There’s always a little bit of, That’s a little suspect, in there.Demsas: Oh, yeah.Kim: I mean, Taiwan is pretty hot. Singapore, which I grew up partly in, is really hot. I don’t think there are very many economists who would seriously defend it. In a more analytical sense, Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, which is growing very quickly—they’re tropical climates, essentially. And so I don’t think that climate can necessarily be, like, the best explanatory sort of variable there.The second one that you mentioned is education, right? Which I think is still very live as a hypothesis, right? And so the idea is that maybe because of cultural factors, like the sort of legacy of Confucianism, this legacy of meritocratic exams in these Confucian regimes, East Asian cultures valued a lot of education. And so that carried over to the modern period, where the educational attainment was relatively high. I think that education is obviously really, really important. I think it’s important from a rights basis. As an individual, it improves your earnings.It’s a little bit more unclear to me how this works out at a societal level. So when you move from the specific, the micro, to the macro and the aggregate, this is a huge live debate in the development literature—how much, actually, educational attainment has gone up in the developing world.Clearly, actual growth experience has been kind of disappointing, especially over the past four or five years. At least on paper, there have been a lot of reforms—understanding the East Asian experience, trying to apply it—there have been a lot of reforms trying to promote free primary education, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. There’s at least a lot of rhetoric from governments that they should be prioritizing education. Whether that has actually translated into increases in learning—like the actual test scores, for instance—that is a huge open question. And I don’t think there’s very good sort of international data, particularly from these very poor, developing countries, to understand how much these test scores have gone up.There is also a lot of political incentives. I think Justin Sandefur from the Center for Global Development has an interesting paper showing that when Western donors attach a lot of conditions, basically, to—let’s say you want to hit certain targets in vaccination rates or something like that—the official government data goes up a lot, but when you actually do a survey, it doesn’t show that much of an increase.So there’s a lot of reporting incentives, also, to say that educational attainment goes up a lot. So that’s just a very long tangent to say that I think there’s a strong case to be made that this was an important component of success in East Asia. Whether it’s on its own enough to explain stuff, and whether it can explain growth in development more broadly, in a global sense, the jury is still out on that.Demsas: And then, the last one is sort of—I mean, the Why Nations Fail is the big developmental econ book that gets popular amongst noneconomists, too. And to oversimplify Acemoglu’s thesis here, there are these inclusive institutions that make development possible. Part of why I think that framework can be helpful here is that when you think about why a country is able to pursue or willing to pursue land reforms or is not able to or willing to pursue it—even if they have a lot of the information, there’s a level at which it’s almost like, Yeah. There are places where people can pursue good economic policy for kind of amorphous institutional reasons. And that’s very, very hard to isolate as a thing that you can tell countries to do.Kim: Yeah. This is sometimes phrased a little bit pejoratively as the “get a better history” kind of view. Which is that, Oh, there are these long-standing, almost fundamental historical differences that determine your economic destiny. And there’s very little that you can do about that. Obviously, history matters. Countries don’t just drop out of coconut trees. They exist in the context that came before them, right? But history is not everything.There was scholarly work, for instance, done about China and Confucian societies in the 1950s with the view that’s very different from today, which is that Confucian societies are actually not compatible with modern economic development.So if you’re taking the vantage point of somebody from the 1950s, you just see in Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime collapse on the mainland, it’s not even like Korea and Taiwan are doing particularly well in a global sense. Like, the miracle stuff is sort of very nascent. And so it’s a very rational kind of response, as a sociologist, to say, Hey. Maybe these Confucian regimes are just not very good at adapting to the modern world.Fast-forward 30 years, you have Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister of Singapore, making a very forceful case globally, going around to different countries and saying, Hey. The reason you’re not doing well is because you don’t have Confucian values. Confucian societies—we value education. We’re more respectful of the government. We’re more organized, all this kind of stuff.And so I think a lot of these more-ingrained cultural and institutional factors are actually not so ingrained when you take a broader view of history. They’re more malleable than people can make them out to be. And so there’s always this game that you can play about, Are institutions inclusive? Or are they exclusive?So a first approximation looking at Taiwan in the 1950s, this period, which we’ve been describing as the period where the miracle is laying down roots, this is an autocracy. This is an authoritarian, right-wing, military dictatorship. This is not like a democracy where—actually, the other famous example in How Asia Works and in the history of development is South Korea, which we know is the example of a miraculous country.One of the first things that happened under the dictator Park Chung Hee was that he took a lot of the prominent capitalists, and he threw them in prison. And he basically threatened to confiscate their property unless they started to dedicate their resources to the goal of national development. And throughout this period, there was a lot of state intervention in the economy. And so this just, prima facie, does not sound like inclusive institutions in the “democracy is good” kind of sense.This is not to condone dictatorship and autocracy as a route to development, but it’s just saying that history is complicated, and, like, our views of this stuff kind of change depending on our vantage point. And I think it’s, maybe, a little bit of a blind spot to think of these things as too fixed, and they can move around, and there are opportunities I think that exists for nations to reshape their economic destinies.Demsas: And so what’s really important about your paper—and I was reading through some of the other economists that have really focused on land reform in explaining East Asia’s divergence from Latin America or other countries or Southeast Asia—it’s almost like other countries have this template. They need to do land reform, and then they can develop. I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about: Why wasn’t it possible for other countries to pursue this? And do you think that if they had, they would have gotten the benefits? Or is it kind of like, this is not the one-trick pony for development?Kim: Yeah. So I think the political factors are really important to foreground here. There’s a scholar, I believe at the University of Chicago, called Michael Albertus who has a great book called Autocracy and Redistribution, which I think of as the canonical theory of, Why does actual, large-sweeping instances of land reform happen? And the answer that he basically gives is that land reform occurs when there’s a split in the elites, right? So as I mentioned, this is a fact you should always bear in mind.What Albertus basically posits is that what you need to happen is that there’s a split in the elites. And so you have one group that advocates for reform and then separates from the landed class. And so this is what happened in East Asia, right? So I mentioned Japan and South Korea had these land reforms. Well, who actually implemented the land reforms? It was the American Army, in essence, occupying these countries in the aftermath of the collapse of Japan after World War II. In Taiwan, it was less an American military presence, but it was actually, again, this foreign KMT regime that didn’t have very close ties with the local elites that was free, basically, to impose a land reform through this essentially autocratic, authoritarian means.And so there’s this weird kind of thing where, actually, authoritarian regimes—Albertus points out—are actually, in a lot of cases, more likely to engage in land reform because they have the capacity and the willingness to disempower and remove property from the main political class, who in a democracy might actually have more of a voice.Demsas: Yeah. That reminds me of my favorite economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen, who has a book called Development as Freedom. There’s this larger debate where people talk about whether or not democracy or authoritarianism is going to lead to economic growth. And what Sen points out is that the ends of economic growth are freedom, whether it’s freedom from hunger or thirst or whatever it is, but those are just basic political freedoms.People are wanting to have access to these basic goods—whether you’re disrespected inside, or you’re not going to be murdered on the basis of immutable characteristics or treated differently by your government—and so not treating democracy as, Oh. Well, authoritarian government might get you closer to having a higher GDP. But people also care about basic freedoms. And so I always think that that’s an interesting—Kim: Yeah. That’s right. And also, Sen has this view of—it’s called the capabilities approach. What matters, basically, is, you know—it’s not necessarily just wealth or income; it’s what that wealth or income enables you to do and what sort of agency it gives you.And I think that’s also a framing with which to view the land-reform stuff, which is that even if it didn’t necessarily have the claimed productivity impacts—so both having this equity boost but also this efficiency boost, so having your cake and eating it too—it’s enough just to have the equity boost.Demsas: Yes. Exactly.Kim: You made society more equitable. You gave a lot of very, very poor peasant farmers a little bit more security. You gave them control over their land. This is something that, politically, they’d been advocating for and fighting for for a very long time.I think a lot of people on Twitter and elsewhere have been trying to read the paper as, Land reform is bad, or, Joe Studwell is wrong. I think that’s maybe too much of a simplification. Giving the poor more land is, I think, a pretty good thing in itself, and you didn’t actually lower productivity as a result. So I think the view is maybe a little bit more ambivalent than the triumphalist sort of narrative. But I think land reform should still be on the table.Demsas: Well, we have one final question for you, which is: What is an idea that you initially thought was a good one but ended up only being good on paper?Kim: Like a lot of people—maybe who are listening to this podcast—I got pretty involved in political-betting markets around 2016 or so. And I was peak econ brain at this point in time. One of the first things you learn if you’ve taken a little bit of intermediate micro[economics] theory is that conditional on the probabilities, you want to equalize your marginal utility across different states of the world. And that’s just a very nerdy, complicated way of saying that you want to hedge your bets, right?And so when it comes to political-betting markets, I imagine like a lot of people listening to this podcast, I have very strong preferences about the outcomes. And so in the 2016 election, I put it as a small bet—like $25 or whatever—and Donald Trump as, like, as an emotional hedge, basically.Demsas: So that if Hillary Clinton loses, at least you have some money.Kim: Yeah. Exactly. You feel a little bit better about yourself. And in Homo economicus logic, this makes a whole lot of sense on paper. And I fully expected Hillary Clinton to win, just like a lot of people did. And of course, she loses. And I get my little, dinky payout, and I don’t really feel a lot better about myself. In fact, I feel a little bit dirty in having—Demsas: How much money did you win?Kim: I don’t remember. It was on the order of $30 or $40. It was not a whole lot of money. But yeah, it just didn’t feel good relative to how horrible those months were. So I think, yeah, there’s a sense in which the Homo economicus model is missing something. So that’s something that’s maybe better on paper than it actually is in reality.Demsas: Well, we would need a randomized controlled trial here to see if you would have felt even worse if you hadn’t had the $30. So it seems unclear.Kim: Yeah. Maybe. Maybe.Demsas: Thank you so much for joining the show, Oliver.Kim: Yeah. Thanks. This was a lot of fun.[Music]Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.
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Israel and Hamas Both Think They’re Winning
One year after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, both sides believe they are winning. The war in Gaza appears poised to continue indefinitely and probably expand, to the apparent delight of both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Each must be surveying the wreckage in the region and anticipating the dark days ahead with determination and confidence. Each must think he is playing a sophisticated long game that the other will lose.This is hardly the first time that the designs of right-wing Israeli leaders have coincided with those of Hamas. Netanyahu has long seen Hamas as a useful tool for weakening Fatah, the secular nationalist party that dominates the Palestinian Authority and rules parts of the West Bank. As he allegedly explained at a Likud strategy meeting in 2019: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Netanyahu denies having said this, but it certainly reflects his actions.)As an exercise in divide and rule, Netanyahu’s policy succeeded admirably. The Palestinian national movement was crippled by the disunion that Israel fostered like a hothouse orchid. But by foreclosing the possibility of Palestinian statehood or citizenship, the policy created the conditions for a violent backlash, as many Palestinians concluded that the only way to achieve their national aspirations was through armed struggle. In the months leading up to the October 7 attack, Hamas decided to prove that it, and not its rival on the West Bank, was worthy of leading such a movement.On the evening of October 7, Netanyahu vowed a “mighty vengeance” for Hamas’s killing of 1,139 Israelis and kidnapping of about 250 more. That much Israel has achieved: Israel has now killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled ministry of health, which has published evidence suggesting that most of the dead were civilians, including thousands of children. Yet the war has failed to achieve much else. Netanyahu has vowed that Hamas would be “destroyed.” But this is quixotic; Hamas is more an idea among Palestinians than a collection of individuals or equipment. And Netanyahu’s call for the group’s destruction has allowed Hamas to declare victory simply by surviving.[Read: The choice America now faces in Iran]Israel has ravaged Gaza from north to south and wiped out almost everything of value to Hamas—nearly all of its known facilities, agents, associates, and aboveground assets. But the war is not over. In fact, Hamas has only just begun to get the war it really wants.Hamas is far from being destroyed; its fighters are popping up in areas across the Gaza Strip that months ago the Israeli military had declared pacified and abandoned. Israel is now playing whack-a-mole with militants who emerge for quick attacks before disappearing. When Israel strikes back, it usually leaves a pile of dead civilians behind. Hamas can likely keep this dynamic going for a decade or two—and in doing so, stake its claim to Palestinian leadership by waving the bloodied shirt of martyrdom and preaching the virtues of armed struggle against occupation.Netanyahu is doing his best to ensure that this happens. He has so far refused to discuss the next phase in Gaza, in which the Israeli military might withdraw and leave someone in charge other than Hamas. In the absence of any such plan, the Israeli military has been left to administer Gaza for the foreseeable future—a role it has begun to acknowledge by appointing one of its own to oversee humanitarian relief efforts. Through inaction, silence, and calculated inattention, Netanyahu has ensured the existence of only two possible candidates to run Gaza: Israel and Hamas.Everything Netanyahu has done since October 7 has guaranteed Israel’s continuing presence in Gaza, which is exactly what Hamas was counting on. Israel could have declared victory and left after battling the last organized Hamas battalions in Rafah—but it missed that opportunity. Now it is fighting an amorphous and pointless counterinsurgency campaign, from which it can’t withdraw without appearing to throw away a hard-fought victory and hand power back to the enemy.Hamas hoped for exactly this outcome when it attacked on October 7. It also wished to spark a region-wide, multifront war with Israel, in which other members of the Tehran-led “Axis of Resistance,” especially Hezbollah, would leap into action. The late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah essentially rejected Hamas’s plea, committing only to liberate two small towns still held by the Israelis, and to moderately step up rocket attacks over the border.But Netanyahu decided to call Nasrallah’s bluff with continuous escalations, which culminated in recent weeks with the killing of numerous Hezbollah leaders, including Nasrallah himself. Israel has killed or maimed nearly 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with booby traps; destroyed much of the group’s heavy equipment, including missiles and rocket launchers; and launched its third major invasion of Lebanon, where a potential Israeli occupation would surely face another open-ended insurgency.Iran responded to Nasrallah’s killing by sending a barrage of missiles into Israel on October 1. Most failed to cause damage, but the attack has buoyed Hamas’s hopes for a regional war nonetheless. Even the Biden administration, which has sought to restrain escalation in Lebanon, recognizes that Israel will retaliate against Iran. Washington is trying to persuade Israel not to strike Iran’s oil-production facilities or nuclear installations, but these warnings may be in vain, as Israel feels flush with victory and may imagine that it can reshape the region through force.And so both Israel and Hamas seem to believe that they are on the brink of unparalleled success. Hamas endured the battering in Gaza, and appears confident that it will ultimately assume the Palestinian national leadership. Looking at the same set of facts, the Israeli government apparently believes that it has struck back decisively against the architects of the October 7 attack and reduced Hamas to virtual irrelevancy, beyond being a ragtag nuisance in Gaza. Now Israel is fighting the war it wanted to fight—against Hezbollah in Lebanon—with dramatic early success.[Read: Lebanon is not a solution for Gaza]Some in Israel have begun talking about subduing not just Hamas but the whole Axis of Resistance, including Iran itself. Even if Israel doesn’t strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, it may seek to compel the United States to attack those installations in Israel’s defense, or to finish a job that Israel will have started. Netanyahu has long argued that an American military strike is necessary to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions. If he can’t bring that about today, additional opportunities will surely arise to steer the U.S. into an armed confrontation with Iran, no matter who is in the White House when the time comes.The Israeli leadership imagines a new Middle East—one where Iran’s nuclear program is eliminated and its regional influence greatly reduced; where Israel becomes part of an alliance of pro-American Arab states, including Saudi Arabia; and where, fantasy of fantasies, the Iranian regime is overthrown. Americans should find something familiar both in this vision of a pacified region and in Israel’s post–October 7 doctrine of “peace through strength” and “escalation to de-escalate.” Washington embraced similar ideas after 9/11, and they met a bitter end in Iraq.Both Israel and Hamas are probably kidding themselves. Sooner rather than later, Palestinians will come to resent Hamas’s brutal recklessness, which has led to more Palestinian bloodshed even than the catastrophe of 1948. The attack on October 7 did incalculable damage to the Palestinian national movement and prospects for statehood. And if Hamas dreams that it can ever take over the Palestine Liberation Organization and speak for its people at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, the group has not comprehended how radioactive it has become internationally. Playing the long game of insurgency may win the sympathies of many Palestinians, but overcoming the stigma of October 7 will require renouncing terrorism—something that Hamas can’t do without completely transforming its ideology and leadership.Israel, too, may be facing a rude awakening. Its degradation of Hezbollah, which Iran sees as its forward defense force, may persuade Tehran to sprint toward nuclear weaponization. Attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities could set this process back a year or two, but Iran will surely succeed if that becomes the regime’s single-minded goal. Neither Israel, the United States, nor Arab countries can do much to force regime change in Iran if domestic conditions are not ripe for it—and there’s no sign that they are. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has made clear that it will not normalize relations with Israel, let alone enter into a partnership, unless the Palestinian issue is resolved. No amount of Israeli military success will change that.Netanyahu’s war of vengeance in Gaza has ensured that yet another generation of Arabs regards the Palestinian cause as a collective responsibility—one that may give rise to or strengthen extremist groups. Yet Israel appears more hostile to Palestinian statehood than ever, as it steadily annexes much of the West Bank with no plan for what to do with the Palestinians there.[Read: ’It’s an earthquake’]After October 7, Israel unleashed its military in search of greater security, and many Israelis appear to feel that the project could hardly be going better. But Israel now finds itself fighting one insurgency to its south, in Gaza, and marching briskly toward another such quagmire to its north, if it occupies Lebanon. Its hostility toward the Palestinian Authority and violent clashes with armed youth in Palestinian cities suggest a third insurgency developing to its east. If that’s a formula for security, it’s hard to imagine what insecurity would look like.One year on from October 7, Hamas and Israel both think events are moving in their direction. Any appreciation of the old adage about being careful what you wish for was, perhaps, one of the most significant victims of October 7.
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theatlantic.com