Source Analysis Custom Essay

Source Analysis

To complete this assignment, you must first read the following sources that are in the attachment.

“Michael Barone, U.S. News and World Report, December 27, 1999″

“William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, April 9, 2002″

“Robert Kagan, Washington Post, May 26, 2002

“Thomas Sowell: Cultural Diversity”

After reading these sources, write a compare/contrast essay based upon the following questions/topics:

Identify the main ideas in each of the first three sources and compare and contrast them.Where do they agree?Where do they disagree?

After reading the selection on cultural diversity, consider whether the ideas suggested by Barone, Pfaff and Kagan in regards to U.S. foreign policy are supportive of or in contrast to the main theme argued by

Sowell about global civilization.

The essay should be typed (MLA Formqat,Times new roman, in a font size 12) and should be at least three full pages long.
The American century: by Michael Barone 12/27/99
On Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt stood before Congress and called for a declaration of war. “The American people in their righteous might,” the president

proclaimed, “will win through to absolute victory.”
Absolute victory: No compromise, no deals with the enemy. Righteous might: Not just a strong America–a virtuous one. The American people: A people united, not just the military, or a few elected leaders.
With those 13 words, FDR sketched a history of the 20th century that, if exceedingly short, was also disarmingly accurate. In February 1941, Henry Luce, in his famous “American Century” editorial in Life,

called on Americans to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world . . . to exert upon the world the full import of our interests.”
And so we have. The most riveting story of the 20th century is the rise of totalitarianism and its defeat at the hands of America. But there are other stories, other chapters. Luce could have no way of knowing it

when he penned his editorial, but Americans literally took him at his word, thrusting upon the world the full import of their interests and energies over the course of these hundred years. At the dawn of a new

millennium now, one may look back at the old and find it impossible not to recognize an indelible American imprint in virtually every area of human endeavor–in science and medicine, business and industry, arts

and letters–it has been Uncle Sam’s century. Over the years, America has been criticized by friend and foe for a dominance both real and perceived. But there is no gainsaying the fact that, if nations were

people, Uncle Sam would be the man of the century.
The American legacy is impressive–but it is one no one could have predicted at the dawn of the now departing century. A hundred years ago, America was the largest of the great powers. Its economy had

surged ahead of those in Europe. For all of America’s sweep and swagger, however, Britain was the dominant world power, with the largest empire and Navy, rivaled only by Germany, with its huge Army and

strength in science.
America, for many reasons, was unwilling and unready to inherit the mantle of leadership. The United States was united in name only, the wounds of the Civil War still far from healed. Though wages in the

North were twice those in the South, few Southerners deigned to cross the Mason-Dixon line. On both sides of the divide, racial segregation was the order of the day. On the borders, meanwhile, immigrants

were pouring in–17 million between 1890 and 1914. The new arrivals gave cold comfort to America’s elites. The Poles, Jews, Italians, they feared, couldn’t possibly become true Americans.
Happily, the elites were wrong–dead wrong. Before too long, an America that had been “a nation of loosely connected islands,” as historian Robert Wiebe called it, was becoming a more cohesive and unified

whole. The building blocks of the civic life we take for granted today soon began falling into place. The medical profession standardized the curricula of the nation’s medical schools. The practice of law, once

open to anyone, was limited to those who had passed state bar exams. Teachers worked from a common curriculum that emphasized English and civics. Education became a transforming engine. The number

of kids enrolled in high schools quadrupled from 1890 to 1910. At more rarefied levels, dozens of great research universities were formed.
A new order. The way America worked changed, too. Businesses were transformed from buccaneering, seat-of-the-pants outfits run by ragged eccentrics into professionally managed organizations. Factories

were increasingly run according to the precepts of “scientific” management. The concept was pioneered by Frederick W. Taylor. His time-and-motion studies reduced each task to single steps, allowing

managers to maximize production, even by unskilled laborers. Suddenly, the chaotic and unstable economy of the 19th century was a thing of the past.
Nowhere was change so pronounced as in the military. “We are a great nation,” Theodore Roosevelt said in 1898, “and we are compelled, whether we will or not, to face the responsibilities that must be faced

by all great nations.” This was not just rhetoric. In February 1898, as Americans protested Spain’s suppression of a revolt in Cuba, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt ordered the Pacific fleet to stand

ready to attack the Philippines if war came. It did, and before American forces could roust the Spaniards from Cuba, Admiral Dewey sailed into Manila Harbor and destroyed the Spanish fleet. To the surprise

and delight of TR, the “splendid little war” sparked enthusiasm among Southerners and Northerners alike. Americans were suddenly possessed of a swaggering new confidence: They could project power far

beyond their borders to achieve good ends.
That confidence swelled when Roosevelt, as president, won a treaty to let America build the Panama Canal. American engineers succeeded where the French had failed, bridging jungles and mountains with an

elaborate system of interlocking channels; at the same time, Dr. Walter Reed conquered yellow fever. The lesson, taught in textbooks for years after, was simple–and breathtaking: American expertise could

make the world a better place.
But the world was an increasingly perilous place, too. No sooner had the Panama Canal opened, in August 1914, than Europe was plunged into war–which leveraged its own kind of change. President Wilson

nationalized the railroads and the shipyards. Newspapers were censored. War critics were jailed. In the meantime, Wilson raised a military of nearly 3 million men, and Americans took pride in helping to win

“the war to end wars.”
After, America boomed economically. But still it declined to take up the mantle of Britain, now exhausted by wartime costs and slaughter. At home Americans disagreed furiously about Prohibition and, in the

Scopes trial of 1925, science and religion. Mass immigration was ended in 1924, but the melting pot kept bubbling. Millions of workers bought cars and fled the teeming tenements on new highways. For a

brief, shining moment, Americans seemed freed from the workaday worries of the rest of the world.
So they were thoroughly unprepared for the shocks of the second third of the century–worldwide depression and the rise of totalitarianism. Between 1929 and 1933, the nation’s economy shrank by nearly

half; 1 in 4 workers was unemployed. Abroad, the wounds of World War I festered, the result, Lenin’s Soviet Russia in 1918, Mussolini’s Fascist Italy in 1922, Hitler’s Nazi Germany in 1933.
Instead of dividing the nation, however, these shocks forged new bonds of common purpose. Popular culture helped. Despite the Depression, radio ownership doubled between 1929 and 1932. Americans

went mad for movies. In 1930, in a country of 130 million people, movie attendance hit 90 million a week. The big screen created the strongest popular culture since Dickens and defined for the world a

characteristic American style–breezy, friendly, open, optimistic.
All the way. But war clouds soon gathered again. The Sudetenland, Austria, Czechoslovakia–Nazi belligerence knew no bounds. Most Americans, however, were unmoved. It would require another president

named Roosevelt to change that. In June 1940, as France surrendered to Hitler and Britain prepared for invasion, FDR started selling arms to Britain and boosted defense spending. Facing re-election, he took

the politically risky steps of supporting a military draft, then dispatched 50 destroyers to Britain. Americans supported the moves, and Roosevelt was re-elected. Almost immediately, he won more aid for

Britain. After Nazi forces attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Roosevelt sent arms to Moscow and blocked oil sales to Japan. Again, Americans applauded: If it required war to stop

totalitarianism, so be it.
Then came Pearl Harbor. “We are all in it together–all the way,” FDR said in his fireside chat, two days later. “Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking in our

American history.” Roosevelt built his war effort on cooperation between big government, big business, big labor. America became “the arsenal of democracy,” its industrial might churning out the awesome

tools of victory: 7,333 ships, 299,000 aircraft, 634,000 jeeps, 88,000 tanks. The top-secret Manhattan Project, which cost $2 billion–the nation’s total economic production in 1940 was $99 billion–

produced the atomic bomb. The result was victory over Germany and Japan, confirming America’s status as the world’s dominant military and economic power.
Just as the first World War had, the war against the Axis powers wrought extraordinary change at home. Americans got used to working productively, and even creatively, in large organizations. Big business,

big labor, and big government–with occasional friction–produced a bounteous economy, not another depression. Postwar America’s “organization men” and “conformists” produced the baby boom, the habits

of the burgeoning middle class reflected in the new universal culture of 1950s television. Church membership reached new highs. Crime fell to record lows. Confidence in major institutions surged. Americans

were bound together by common experiences–the comprehensive high school, the military draft, large corporations, suburbia.
This was also Cold War America. In March 1946, Winston Churchill, now out of office, went to Fulton, Mo., with Harry Truman and proclaimed that, because of Joe Stalin, “an iron curtain” had fallen across

Eastern Europe.
Americans responded boldly. The Truman Doctrine promised to protect all “free peoples of the world.” The Marshall Plan provided vast economic aid to Europe. The NATO treaty of April 1949 was

America’s first peacetime military alliance. In June 1950, Truman sent troops to Korea to stop the Communist invasion. Defense spending increased, and stayed high for years. America was engaged in a “long,

twilight struggle,” John Kennedy said. And her people paid for it with high taxes for defense and foreign aid, a military draft, air-raid drills, and listening to Soviet threats of nuclear war over Berlin and Cuba. All

that is taken for granted today, but in historic perspective it was extraordinary. “Only a society with enormous confidence in its achievements and in its future,” as Henry Kissinger wrote later, “could have

mustered the dedication and the resources to strive for a world order in which defeated enemies would be conciliated, stricken allies restored, and adversaries converted.”
Doubts set in. It didn’t last. Halfway around the globe, a commitment that started with just a few hundred Pentagon advisers escalated into a war with more than half a million American troops–a war that could

not be won. Aides to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had devised a military strategy in Vietnam that was incapable of working. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara scornfully dubbed it, “the social

scientists’ war.”
It was a war many affluent Americans did not find important enough to draft their sons for. McNamara’s draft system allowed college students to avoid service. Antiwar movements on elite campuses produced

a generation of academics and professionals who regarded the United States and the Communists as morally equivalent. By 1968, many of the planners and supporters of the Vietnam War saw it as deeply

immoral. They no longer believed, as the Roosevelts did, in American exceptionalism–the belief that this country was uniquely strong and uniquely good.
In other ways, the postwar system was breaking down. Congress had passed civil rights laws in response to the nonviolent movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. But black protesters called for violence in

response to white oppression.
Big government produced not only war and riots, but also stagflation–high inflation and low economic growth. Big businesses grew less supple and creative, turning out gas guzzlers with “planned

obsolescence.” Big labor unions stagnated, then lost membership. And the cultural unity of postwar America was splintering. Families with two television sets and several radios no longer watched the same

shows and listened to the same music. The universal popular culture of midcentury soon gave way to rival countercultures, many hostile to old values. Starting in the late 1960s, birth rates fell and divorce and

births to unwed mothers rose: “the great disruption,” as Francis Fukuyama calls it. Crime and welfare dependency tripled from 1965 to 1975.
As the elites lost confidence in America, the American people lost confidence in the elites. Richard Nixon’s rhetorical appeals to “the silent majority” rallied only some Americans, and his cool pursuit of

geopolitical advantage, the opening to China, and withdrawal from Vietnam failed to engage Americans’ yearning for moral purpose, even before his own moral authority was destroyed by Watergate.
Foreign policy elites increasingly saw American strength as malevolent, and were pleased to see it reduced. This was symbolized by the 1977 treaty to relinquish the Panama Canal. Elites, guilty about how

America obtained the canal, saw this as necessary to prevent violence in Panama. But most voters still felt pride in this great American achievement, and opposition to the treaty energized Ronald Reagan’s

nearly successful challenge of President Gerald Ford in 1976.
American pride sank even lower when Iran refused to release 52 Americans held hostage in the U.S. Embassy in November 1979. Under international law, this was an act of war. But for months President

Jimmy Carter refused to use force and tried to negotiate, and his half-hearted seven-helicopter rescue attempt in April 1980 failed. Each Carter policy was approved in the polls. But in the end, voters wanted

results. Carter was beaten soundly by Reagan, whose threats to use force resulted in the hostages’ release just as he was sworn into office.
Reagan embodied the characteristic American style of the 1930s and 1940s movies in which he himself had been a star. He shared most Americans’ pride in their country and rejected the guilt complex of the

elites. His tax cuts led to two decades of solid economic growth and low inflation, interrupted by recession briefly in 1990-91. Complacent corporate executives were ousted by leveraged buyouts and

directors seeking more profits. Big corporations were challenged by tiny start-ups: IBM was replaced as the major high-tech firm by Microsoft. American computers and high-tech–the latest manifestation of

20th-century Americans’ scientific and technological expertise–led the world. The peacetime expansions of the 1980s and 1990s produced 40 million new jobs, while the sputtering economies of Europe and

Asia produced virtually none. Ordinary Americans’ incomes surged and widespread stock ownership resulted in a stock market boom and real gains in wealth for the masses.
Unmatched prowess. Abroad Reagan, despite scorn from the elites, pursued an assertive policy like Harry Truman’s. He increased defense spending, sent American troops to Grenada, and supported anti-

Communist forces in Central America and Afghanistan. The defense buildup and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative convinced Soviet leaders that they could never match the economic and technological

prowess of the United States.
Like the two Roosevelts, Reagan insisted on proclaiming the superiority of the American system. In London in 1983, he predicted the demise of the Soviet Union. In Berlin in 1987, he demanded, “Mr.

Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By October 1989 the wall was history. The Soviet empire soon followed.
Today, at century’s end, America is unquestionably the world’s dominant military, economic, and cultural superpower. This has been the work of the American people. The 76 million of 1900 are now the 273

million of 2000. The descendants of the immigrants who choked the slums in 1900 are now firmly interwoven into the American fabric. The descendants of the blacks who were excluded by segregation in

1900 now have full civil rights and are surging into the middle classes and upper ranks of society. The new immigrants from Latin America and East Asia who have arrived since the 1965 immigration reform are

progressing as their counterparts did a century ago.
The American traditions of excellence fostered by the elite of the first third of the century and the characteristic American openness depicted in the popular culture of the second third of the century gave the

American people the strength and the confidence to forge ahead in the last third of the century when so many in the elite lost confidence in their country. Sharing with Ronald Reagan the belief that this country is

“a city on a hill,” they have won through to absolute victory over totalitarianism, as Franklin Roosevelt promised, and have made this the American century that Henry Luce envisioned

CULTURAL DIVERSITY: A WORLD VIEW
by Thomas Sowell

“Diversity” has become one of the most often used words of our time– and a word almost never defined. Diversity is invoked in discussions of everything from employment policy to curriculum reform and

from entertainment to politics. Nor is the word merely a description of the long-known fact that the American population is made up of people from many countries, many races, and many cultural

backgrounds. All that was well known long before the word “diversity” became an insistent part of our vocabulary, an invocation, an imperative, or a bludgeon in ideological conflicts.
The very motto of the country– E Pluribus Unum– recognizes the diversity of the American people. For generations, this diversity has been celebrated, whether in comedies like Abie’s Irish Rose (the

famous play featuring a Jewish boy and an Irish girl) or in patriotic speeches on the Fourth of July. Yet one senses something very different in today’s crusades for “diversity”– certainly not a patriotic

celebration of America and often a sweeping criticism of the United States, or even a condemnation of Western civilization as a whole.
At the very least, we need to separate the issue of the general importance of cultural diversity– not only in the United States but in the world at large– from the more specific, more parochial, and more

ideological agendas which have become associated with that word in recent years. I would like to talk about the worldwide importance of cultural diversity over centuries of human history before returning to

the narrower issues of our time.
The entire history of the human race, the rise of man from the caves, has been marked by transfers of cultural advances from one group to another and from one civilization to another. Paper and printing, for

example, are today vital parts of Western civilization– but they originated in China centuries before they made their way to Europe. So did the magnetic compass, which made possible the great ages of

exploration that put the Western Hemisphere in touch with the rest of mankind. Mathematical concepts likewise migrated from one culture to another: trigonometry from ancient Egypt, and the whole

numbering system now used throughout the world originated among the Hindus of India, though Europeans called this system Arabic numerals because it was the Arabs who were the intermediaries through

which these numbers reached medieval Europe. Indeed, much of the philosophy of ancient Greece first reached Western Europe in Arabic translations, which were then retranslated into Latin or into the

vernacular languages of the West Europeans.
Much that became part of the culture of Western civilization originated outside that civilization, often in the Middle East or Asia. The game of chess came from India, gunpowder from China, and various

mathematical concepts from the Islamic world, for example. The conquest of Spain by Moslems in the eighth century A.D. made Spain a center for the diffusion into Western Europe of the more advanced

knowledge of the Mediterranean world and of the Orient in astronomy, medicine, optics, and geometry. The later rise of Western Europe to world preeminence in science and technology built upon these

foundations, and then the science and technology of European civilization began to spread around the world, not only to European offshoot societies such as the United States or Australia but also to non-

European cultures, of which Japan is perhaps the most striking example.
The historic sharing of cultural advances, until they became the common inheritance of the human race, implied much more than cultural diversity. It implied that some cultural features were not only different

from others but better than others. The very fact that people– all people, whether Europeans, Africans, Asians, or others– have repeatedly chosen to abandon some feature of their own culture in order to

replace it with something from another culture implies that the replacement served their purposes more effectively: Arabic numerals are not simply different from Roman numerals, they are better than Roman

numerals. This is shown by their replacing Roman numerals in many countries whose own cultures derived from Rome, as well as in other countries whose respective numbering systems were likewise

superseded by so-called Arabic numerals.
It is virtually inconceivable today that the distances in astronomy or the complexities of higher mathematics should be expressed in Roman numerals. Merely to express the year of American independence–

MDCCLXXVI– requires more than twice as many Roman numerals as Arabic numerals. Moreover, Roman numerals offer more opportunities for errors, as the same digit may be either added or subtracted,

depending on its place in the sequence. Roman numerals are good for numbering Kings or Super Bowls, but they cannot match the efficiency of Arabic numerals in most mathematical operations– and that is,

after all, why we have numbers at all. Cultural features do not exist merely as badges of “identity” to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of

human life. When they are surpassed by features of other cultures, they tend to fall by the wayside or to survive only as marginal curiosities, like Roman numerals today.
Not only concepts, information, products, and technologies transfer from one culture to another. The natural produce of the Earth does the same. Malaysia is the world’s leading grower of rubber trees–

but those trees are indigenous to Brazil. Most of the rice grown in Africa today originated in Asia, and its tobacco originated in the Western Hemisphere. Even a great wheat-exporting nation like Argentina

once imported wheat, which was not an indigenous crop to that country. Cultural diversity, viewed internationally and historically, is not a static picture of differentness but a dynamic picture of competition in

which what serves human purposes more effectively survives while what does not tends to decline or disappear.
Manuscript scrolls once preserved the precious records, knowledge, and thought of European or Middle Eastern cultures. But once paper and printing from China became known in these cultures, books

were clearly far faster and cheaper to produce and drove scrolls virtually into extinction. Books were not simply different from scrolls; they were better than scrolls. The point that some cultural features are

better than others must be insisted on today because so many among the intelligentsia either evade or deny this plain reality. The intelligentsia often use words like “perceptions” and “values” as they argue in

effect that it is all a matter of how you choose to look at it.
They may have a point in such things as music, art, and literature from different cultures, but there are many human purposes common to peoples of all cultures. They want to live rather than die, for

example. When Europeans first ventured into the arid interior of Australia, they often died of thirst or hunger in a land where the Australian aborigines had no trouble finding food or water. Within that particular

setting, at least, the aboriginal culture enabled people to do what both aborigines and Europeans wanted to do– survive. A given culture may not be superior for all things in all settings, much less remain

superior over time, but particular cultural features may nevertheless be clearly better for some purposes– not just different.
Why is there any such argument in the first place? Perhaps it is because we are still living in the long, grim shadow of the Nazi Holocaust and are understandably reluctant to label anything or anyone

“superior” or “inferior.” But we don’t need to. We need only recognize that particular products, skills, technologies, agricultural crops, or intellectual concepts accomplish particular purposes better than their

alternatives. It is not necessary to rank one whole culture over another in all things, much less to claim that they remain in that same ranking throughout history. They do not.
Clearly, cultural leadership in various fields has changed hands many times. China was far in advance of any country in Europe in a large number of fields for at least a thousand years and, as late as the

sixteenth century, had the highest standard of living in the world. Equally clearly, China today is one of the poorer nations of the world and is having great difficulty trying to catch up to the technological level of

Japan and the West, with no real hope of regaining its former world preeminence in the foreseeable future.
Similar rises and falls of nations and empires have been common over long stretches of human history– for example, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the “golden age” of medieval Spain and its decline

to the level of one of the poorest nations in Europe today, the centuries-long triumphs of the Ottoman Empire– intellectually as well as on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East– and then its long

decline to become known as “the sick man of Europe.” Yet, while cultural leadership has changed hands many times, that leadership has been real at given times, and much of what was achieved in the process

has contributed enormously to our well-being and opportunities today. Cultural competition is not a zero-sum game. It is what advances the human race.
If nations and civilizations differ in their effectiveness in different fields of endeavor, so do social groups. Here there is especially strong resistance to accepting the reality of different levels and kinds of skills,

interests, habits, and orientations among different groups of people. One academic writer, for example, said that nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants to the United States were fortunate to arrive just as the

garment industry in New York began to develop. I could not help thinking that Hank Aaron was similarly fortunate– that he often came to bat just as a home run was due to be hit. It might be possible to

believe that these Jewish immigrants just happened to be in the right place at the right time if you restricted yourself to their history in the United States. But, again taking a world view, we find Jews prominent,

often predominant, and usually prospering, in the apparel industry in medieval Spain, in the Ottoman Empire, in the Russian Empire, in Argentina, in Australia, and in Brazil. How surprised should we be to find

them predominant in the same industry in America?
Other groups have also excelled in their own special occupations and industries. Indeed, virtually every group excels at something. Germans, for example, have been prominent as pioneers in the piano

industry. American piano brands like Steinway and Schnabel, not to mention the Wurlitzer organ, are signs of the long prominence of Germans in this industry, where they produced the first pianos in colonial

America. Germans also pioneered in piano-building in Czarist Russia, Australia, France, and England. Chinese immigrants have, at one period of history or another, run more than half the grocery stores in

Kingston, Jamaica, and Panama City and conducted more than half of all retail trade in Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Other groups have dominated retail trade in other parts of the

world– the Gujaratis from India in East Africa and in Fiji or the Lebanese in parts of West Africa, for example.
Nothing has been more common than for particular groups– often a minority– to dominate particular occupations or industries. Seldom do they have any ability to keep out others– and certainly not to

keep out the majority population. They are simply better at the particular skills required in that occupation or industry. Sometimes we can see why. When Italians have made wine in Italy for centuries, it is

hardly surprising that they should become prominent among wine-makers in Argentina or in California’s Napa Valley. Similarly, when Germans in Germany have been for centuries renowned for their beer-

making, how surprised should we be that in Argentina they became as prominent among beer-makers as the Italians were among wine-makers? How surprised should we be that beer-making in the United

States arose where there were concentrations of German immigrants– in Milwaukee and St. Louis, for example? Or that the leading beer producers to this day have German names like Anheuser-Busch or

Coors, among many other German names?
Just as cultural leadership in a particular field is not permanent for nations or civilizations, neither is it permanent for given racial, ethnic, or religious groups. By the time the Jews were expelled from Spain in

1492, Europe had overtaken the Islamic world in medical science, so that Jewish physicians who sought refuge in the Ottoman Empire found themselves in great demand in that Moslem country. By the early

sixteenth century, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire had on his palace medical staff 42 Jewish physicians and 21 Moslem physicians. With the passage of time, however, the source of the Jews’ advantage–

their knowledge of Western medicine– eroded as successive generations of Ottoman Jews lost contact with the West and its further progress. Christian minorities within the Ottoman Empire began to replace

the Jews, not only in medicine but also in international trade and even in the theater, once dominated by Jews. The difference was that these Christian minorities– notably Greeks and Armenians– maintained

their ties in Christian Europe and often sent their sons there to be educated. It was not race or ethnicity as such that was crucial but maintaining contacts with the ongoing progress of Western civilization. By

contrast, the Ottoman Jews became a declining people in a declining empire. Many, if not most, were Sephardic Jews from Spain– once the elite of world Jewry. But by the time the state of Israel was

formed in the twentieth century, those Sephardic Jews who had settled for centuries in the Islamic world now lagged painfully behind the Ashkenazic Jews of the Western world– notably in income and

education. To get some idea what a historic reversal that has been in the relative positions of Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazic Jews, one need only note that Sephardic Jews in colonial America sometimes

disinherited their children for marrying Ashkenazic Jews.
Why do some groups, subgroups, nations, or whole civilizations excel in some particular fields rather than others? All too often, the answer to that question must be: Nobody really knows. It is an

unanswered question largely because it is an unasked question. There is an uphill struggle merely to get acceptance of the fact that large differences exist among peoples, not just in specific skills in the narrow

sense (computer science, basketball, or brewing beer) but more fundamentally in different interests, orientations, and values that determine which particular skills they seek to develop and with what degree of

success. Merely to suggest that these internal cultural factors play a significant role in various economic, educational, or social outcomes is to invite charges of “blaming the victim.” It is much more widely

acceptable to blame surrounding social conditions or institutional policies.
But if we look at cultural diversity internationally and historically, there is a more basic question whether blame is the real issue. Surely, no human being should be blamed for the way his culture evolved for

centuries before he was born. Blame has nothing to do with it. Another explanation that has had varying amounts of acceptance at different times and places is the biological or genetic theory of differences

among peoples. I have argued against this theory in many places but will not take the time to go into these lengthy arguments here. A world view of cultural differences over the centuries undermines the

genetic theory as well. Europeans and Chinese, for example, are clearly genetically different. Equally clearly, China was a more advanced civilization than Europe in many scientific, technological, and

organizational ways for at least a thousand years. Yet over the past few centuries, Europe has moved ahead of China in many of these same ways. If those cultural differences were due to genes, how could

these two races have changed positions so radically from one epoch in history to another?
All explanations of differences between groups can be broken down into heredity and environment. Yet a world view of the history of cultural diversity seems, on the surface at least, to deny both. One

reason for this is that we have thought of environment too narrowly– as the immediate surrounding circumstances or differing institutional policies toward different groups. Environment in that narrow sense

may explain some group differences, but the histories of many groups completely contradict that particular version of environment as an explanation. Let us take just two examples out of many which are

available.
Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italian immigrants from southern Italy began arriving in the United States in large numbers at about the same time in the late nineteenth century, and their large-

scale immigration also ended at the same time, when restrictive immigration laws were passed in the 1920s. The two groups arrived here in virtually the same economic condition– namely, destitute. They

often lived in the same neighborhoods, and their children attended the same schools, sitting side by side in the same classrooms. Their environments– in the narrow sense in which the term is commonly used–

were virtually identical. Yet their social histories in the United States have been very different.
Over the generations, both groups rose, but they rose at different rates, through different means, and in a very different mixture of occupations and industries. Even wealthy Jews and wealthy Italians tended

to become rich in different sectors of the economy. The California wine industry, for example, is full of Italian names like Mondavi, Gallo, and Rossi, but the only prominent Jewish wine-maker–

Manischewitz– makes an entirely different kind of wine, and no one would compare Jewish wine-makers with Italian wine-makers in the United States. When we look at Jews and Italians in the very different

environmental setting of Argentina, we see the same general pattern of differences between them. The same is true if we look at the differences between Jews and Italians in Australia, or Canada, or Western

Europe.
Jews are not Italians and Italians are not Jews. Anyone familiar with their very different histories over many centuries should not be surprised. Their fate in America was not determined solely by their

surrounding social conditions in America or by how they were treated by American society. They were different before they got on the boats to cross the ocean, and those differences crossed the ocean with

them.
We can take it a step further. Even among Ashkenazic Jews, those originating in Eastern Europe have had significantly different economic and social histories from those originating in Germanic Central

Europe, including Austria as well as Germany itself. These differences have persisted among their descendants not only in New York and Chicago but as far away as Melbourne and Sydney. In Australia, Jews

from Eastern Europe have tended to cluster in and around Melbourne, while Germanic Jews have settled in and around Sydney. They even have a saying among themselves that Melbourne is a cold city with

warm Jews while Sydney is a warm city with cold Jews.
A second and very different example of persistent cultural differences involves immigrants from Japan. As everyone knows, many Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. What is less well

known is that there is and has been an even larger Japanese population in Brazil than in the United States. These Japanese, incidentally, own approximately three-quarters as much land in Brazil than in Japan.)

In any event, very few Japanese in Brazil were interned during World War II. Moreover, the Japanese in Brazil were never subjected to the discrimination suffered by Japanese Americans in the decades

before World War II.
Yet, during the war, Japanese-Americans, overwhelmingly, remained loyal to the United States and Japanese-American soldiers won more than their share of medals in combat. But in Brazil, the Japanese

were overwhelmingly and even fanatically loyal to Japan. You cannot explain the difference by anything in the environment of the United States or the environment of Brazil. But if you know something about

the history of those Japanese who settled in these two countries, you know that they were culturally different in Japan, before they ever got on the boats to take them across the Pacific Ocean– and they were

still different decades later.
These two groups of immigrants left Japan during very different periods in the cultural evolution of Japan itself. A modern Japanese scholar has said: “If you want to see Japan of the Meiji era, go to the

United States. If you want to see Japan of the Taisho era, go to Brazil.” The Meiji era was a more cosmopolitan, pro-American era; the Taisho era was one of fanatical Japanese nationalism.
If the narrow concept of environment fails to explain many profound differences between groups and subgroups, it likewise fails to explain many very large differences in the economic and social

performances of nations and civilizations. An eighteenth-century writer in Chile described that country’s many natural advantages in climate, soil, and natural resources– and then asked in complete

bewilderment why it was such a poverty-stricken country. That same question could be asked of many countries today. Conversely, we could ask why Japan and Switzerland are so prosperous when they are

both almost totally lacking in natural resources. Both are rich in what economists call “human capital”– the skills of their people. No doubt there is a long and complicated history behind the different skill

levels of different peoples and nations. The point here is that the immediate environment– whether social or geographic– is only part of the story.
Geography may well have a significant role in the history of peoples, but perhaps not simply by presenting them with more or less natural resources. Geography shapes or limits peoples’ opportunities for

cultural interactions and the mutual development that comes out of that. Small, isolated islands in the sea have seldom been sources of new scientific advances or technological breakthroughs– regardless of

where such islands were located and regardless of the race of the people on these islands. There are islands on land as well. Where soil fertile enough to support human life exists only in isolated patches,

widely separated, there tend to be isolated cultures (often with different languages or dialects) in a culturally fragmented region. Isolated highlands often produce insular cultures, lagging in many ways behind

the cultures of the lowlanders of the same race– whether we are talking about medieval Scotland, colonial Ceylon, or the contemporary Montagnards of Vietnam.
With geographical environments as with social environments, we are talking about long-run effects not simply the effects of immediate surroundings. When Scottish highlanders, for example, immigrated to

North Carolina in colonial times, they had a very different history from that of Scottish lowlanders who settled in North Carolina. For one thing, the lowlanders spoke English while the highlanders spoke

Gaelic– on into the nineteenth century. Obviously, speaking only Gaelic– in an English-speaking country– affects a group’s whole economic and social progress.
Geographical conditions vary as radically in terms of how well they facilitate or impede large-scale cultural interactions as they do in their distribution of natural resources. We are not even close to being

able to explain how all these geographical influences have operated throughout history. That too is an unanswered question largely because it is an unasked question– and it is an unasked question because

many are seeking answers in terms of immediate social environment or are vehemently insistent that they have already found the answer in those terms.
How radically do geographic environments differ– not just in terms of tropical versus arctic climates but also in the very configuration of the land and how that helps or hinders large-scale interactions among

peoples? Consider one statistic: Africa is more than twice the size of Europe, and yet Africa has a shorter coastline than Europe. That seems almost impossible. But the reason is that Europe’s coastline is far

more convoluted, with many harbors and inlets being formed all around the continent. Much of the coastline of Africa is smooth– which is to say, lacking in the harbors which make large-scale maritime trade

possible by sheltering the ships at anchor from the rough waters of the open sea. Waterways of all sorts have played a major role in the evolution of cultures and nations around the world. Harbors on the sea

are not the only waterways. Rivers are also very important. Virtually every major city on Earth is located either on a river or a harbor. Whether it is such great harbors as those in Sydney, Singapore, or San

Francisco; or London on the Thames, Paris on the Seine, or numerous other European cities on the Danube, waterways have been the lifeblood of urban centers for centuries. Only very recently has

manmade, self-powered transportation like automobiles and airplanes made it possible to produce an exception to the rule like Los Angeles. (There is a Los Angeles River, but you don’t have to be Moses to

walk across it in the summertime.) New York has both a long and deep river and a huge sheltered harbor.
None of these geographical features in themselves create a great city or develop an urban culture. Human beings do that. But geography sets the limits within which people can operate– and in some places

it sets those limits much wider than others. Returning to our comparison of the continents of Europe and Africa, we find that they differ as radically in rivers as they do in harbors. There are entire nations in

Africa without a single navigable river– Libya and South Africa, for example. “Navigable” is the crucial word. Some African rivers are navigable only during the rainy season. Some are navigable only

between numerous cataracts and waterfalls. Even the Zaire River, which is longer than any river in North America and carries a larger volume of water, has too many waterfalls, too close to the ocean for it to

become a major artery of international commerce. Such commerce is facilitated in Europe not only by numerous navigable rivers but also by the fact that no spot on the continent, outside of Russia, is more

than 500 miles from the sea. Many places in Africa are more than 500 miles from the sea, including the entire nation of Uganda.
Against this background, how surprised should we be to find that Europe is the most urbanized of all inhabited continents and Africa the least urbanized? Urbanization is not the be-all and end-all of life, but

certainly an urban culture is bound to differ substantially from non-urban cultures, and the skills peculiar to an urban culture are far more likely to be found among groups from an urban civilization. (Conversely,

an interesting history could be written about the failures of urbanized groups in agricultural settlements.)
Looking within Africa, the influence of geography seems equally clear. The most famous ancient civilization on the continent arose within a few miles on either side of Africa’s longest navigable river, the Nile,

and even today the two largest cities on the continent, Cairo and Alexandria, are on that river. The great West African kingdoms in the region served by the Niger River and the long-flourishing East African

economy based around the great natural harbor on the island of Zanzibar are further evidences of the role of geography. Again, geography is not all-determining– the economy of Zanzibar has been ruined by

government policy in recent decades– but nevertheless, geography is an important long-run influence on the shaping of cultures as well as in narrowly economic terms.
What are the implications of a world view of cultural diversity on the narrower issues being debated under that label in the United States today? Although “diversity” is used in so many different ways in so

many different contexts that it seems to mean all things to all people, there are a few themes which appear again and again. One of these broad themes is that diversity implies organized efforts at the

preservation of cultural differences, perhaps governmental efforts, perhaps government subsidies to various programs run by the advocates of “diversity.”
This approach raises questions as to what the purpose of culture is. If what is important about cultures is that they are emotionally symbolic, and if differentness is cherished for the sake of differentness, then

this particular version of cultural “diversity” might make some sense. But cultures exist even in isolated societies where there are no other cultures around– where there is no one else and nothing else from

which to be different. Cultures exist to serve the vital, practical requirements of human life– to structure a society so as to perpetuate the species, to pass on the hard-earned knowledge and experience of

generations past and centuries past to the young and inexperienced in order to spare the next generation the costly and dangerous process of learning everything all over again from scratch through trial and

error– including fatal errors. Cultures exist so that people can know how to get food and put a roof over their head, how to cure the sick, how to cope with the death of loved ones, and how to get along with

the living. Cultures are not bumper stickers. They are living, changing ways of doing all the things that have to be done in life.
Every culture discards over time the things which no longer do the job or which don’t do the job as well as things borrowed from other cultures. Each individual does this, consciously or not, on a day-to-

day basis. Languages take words from other languages, so that Spanish as spoken in Spain includes words taken from Arabic, and Spanish as spoken in Argentina has Italian words taken from the large Italian

immigrant population there. People eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in Singapore and stay in Hilton Hotels in Cairo.
This is not what some of the advocates of “diversity” have in mind. They seem to want to preserve cultures in their purity, almost like butterflies preserved in amber. Decisions about change, if any, seem to

be regarded as collective decisions, political decisions. But that is not how any cultures have arrived where they are. Individuals have decided for themselves how much of the old they wished to retain, how

much of the new they found useful in their own lives. In this way, cultures have enriched each other in all the great civilizations of the world. In this way, great port cities and other crossroads of cultures have

become centers of progress all across the planet. No culture has grown great in isolation– but a number of cultures have made historic and even astonishing advances when their isolation was ended, usually

by events beyond their control.
Japan was a classic example in the nineteenth century, but a similar story could be told of Scotland in an earlier era, when a country where once even the nobility were illiterate became– within a short time,

as history is measured– a country which produced world pioneers in field after field: David Hume in philosophy, Adam Smith in economics, Joseph Black in chemistry, Robert Adam in architecture, and James

Watt, whose steam engine revolutionized modern industry and transport. In the process, the Scots lost their language but gained world preeminence in many fields. Then a whole society moved to higher

standards of living than anyone ever dreamed of in their poverty-stricken past.
There were higher standards in other ways as well. As late as the eighteenth century, it was considered noteworthy that pedestrians in Edinburgh no longer had to be on the alert for sewage being thrown out

the windows of people’s homes or apartments. The more considerate Scots yelled a warning, but they threw out the sewage anyway. Perhaps it was worth losing a little of the indigenous culture to be rid of

that problem.
Those who use the term “cultural diversity” to promote a multiplicity of segregated ethnic enclaves are doing an enormous harm to the people in those enclaves. However they live socially, the people in

those enclaves are going to have to compete economically for a livelihood. Even if they were not disadvantaged before, they will be very disadvantaged if their competitors from the general population are free

to tap the knowledge, skills, and analytical techniques which Western civilization has drawn from all the other civilizations of the world, while those in the enclaves are restricted to what exists in the subculture

immediately around them.
We need also to recognize that many great thinkers of the past– whether in medicine or from but to advance the human race. Their legacies, whether cures for deadly diseases or dramatic increases in crop

yields to fight the scourge of hunger, belong to all people– and all people need to claim that legacy, not seal themselves off in a dead-end of tribalism or in an emotional orgy of cultural vanity.

Empire isn’t the American way Addiction in Washington
By William Pfaff

PARIS – Ever since communism collapsed, the notion has been put about in
Washington that the United States should exercise its unrivaled power as
an empire. This is held to be the way to bring stability to
international society and solve the problems of terrorism, rogue
nations, weapons of mass destruction and so forth.

.To some in Washington, empire seems a career opportunity. To the
ordinary American, I suspect, it simply looks like trouble. Military
“empire” the United States already has. In the narrow military
dimension, it dominates the world. But this is not readily translated
into political power. The Bush administration has until now been unable
to do anything about the war in the Middle East, where the United States
identifies two of its most important national interests: a strategic
interest in oil and political interest in the security of Israel.

.The administration has let an unchecked Israeli-Palestinian war do
immense damage to the overall American position in the Middle East and
cause much harm elsewhere.

.The “imperial” solution would have been to dictate terms of a political
settlement and enforce them, with military power if necessary, against
one side or the other or against both sides.

.Secretary of State Colin Powell’s coming visit to the region does not
promise an imperial solution. It promises ultimately unsuccessful
efforts to get another cease-fire and to start negotiations anew, on
terms that will fail.

.Afghanistan is slipping backward because of Washington’s reluctance to
assume an “imperial” role there, assuming that the foreign and domestic
political costs would be too high.

.Advocates of American empire are usually seduced by the notion that
Washington’s imperial authority would be accepted as positive, and that
the empire would therefore be consensual. This idea rests on the
uninformed assumption that the United States is generally seen abroad as
benevolent.

.Powell should explain to the president that even in allied Europe,
disposed for more than 50 years to think well of America, Washington’s
exercise of power is seen as a serious international problem.

.American unilateralism, which mostly used to be a containable matter of
congressional egos and petulance, has now been turned into a foreign
policy by the Bush administration. This undermines the fragile
structure of international law and convention built up during the last
three centuries, to which the United States made important
contributions.

.International law, since the 17th century, has rested on two
principles: national sovereignty and the legal equality of nations, both
of which Washington ignores whenever convenient.

.American political, economic and cultural influence is not generally
stabilizing. It uproots stable structures, for good or for ill. It
means to do so. The Bush administration is a crusading government.
There seem to be many in the administration who are convinced that
military force can impose desirable political solutions. They think
that Ariel Sharon has been doing a good job. Brute force can solve
political problems, but it usually creates others. A solution for
Israel’s problem would be to drive the Palestinians into neighboring
countries. One doubts that this is the road to lasting peace in the
Middle East.

.The statesman Edmund Burke once remarked that no greater calamity can
befall a nation than to break with its past. The American past has been
the rule of law, constitutional order, a free press, suspicion of power
politics, avoidance of foreign entanglements and even hostility to
standing armies.

.The country’s one adventure into imperialism, in 1898, proved not very
satisfactory, and 18 years after fighting a war to acquire the
Philippines, Congress promised the islands independence.

.The Cold War broke America from that past. For a long time one could
think that when the Cold War ended the United States would return to its
better past. It hasn’t happened.

.The proposals for empire offered today are not intellectually serious,
but they are significant. The political class and bureaucracy have
become addicted to international power. They want more. The question
is whether the people will follow.

The U.S.-Europe Divide
By Robert Kagan

President Bush is making a noble effort to pull together the fraying alliance, but the fact is Europeans and Americans no longer share a common view of the world. On the all-important question of power — the

utility of power, the morality of power — they have parted ways. Europeans believe they are moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.

Europe itself has entered a post-historical paradise, the realization of Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian

world where international rules are unreliable and where security and the promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. This is why, on major strategic and international

questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less.
Why the divergent perspectives? They are not deeply rooted in national character. Two centuries ago American statesmen appealed to international law and disdained “power politics,” while European

statesmen spoke of raison d’etat. Europeans marched off to World War I believing in power and martial glory, while Americans talked of arbitration treaties. Now the roles have reversed.
Part of the reason is the enormous shift in the balance of power. The gap between the United States and Europe opened wide as a result of World War II and has grown wider in the past decade. America’s

unparalleled military strength has predictably given it a greater propensity to use force and a more confident belief in the moral legitimacy of power. Europe’s relative weakness has produced an aversion to

force as a tool of international relations. Europeans today, like Americans 200 years ago, seek a world where strength doesn’t matter so much, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all

nations regardless of their strength are protected by commonly agreed rules of behavior. For many Europeans, progress toward such a world is more important than eliminating the threat posed by Saddam

Hussein.
For Americans, the Hobbesian world is not so frightening. Unilateralism is naturally more attractive to those with the capacity to act unilaterally. And international law constrains strong nations more than it does

the weak. Because of the disparity of power, Americans and Europeans even view threats differently. A person armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger — trying

to kill the bear is riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. But a person with a rifle will likely make a
1
different calculation: Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn’t need to? Americans can imagine successfully invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, and therefore more than 70 percent of Americans

favor such action, particularly after the experience of Sept. 11. Europeans, not surprisingly, find the prospect unimaginable and frightening.
But it is not just the power gap that divides Americans and Europeans today. Europe’s relatively pacific strategic culture is also the product of its war-like past. The European Union is a monument to Europe’s

rejection of the old power politics. Who knows the dangers of Machtpolitik better than a French or German citizen? As the British diplomat Robert Cooper recently noted, Europe today lives in a “postmodern

system” that does not rest on a balance of power but on “the rejection of force” and on “self-enforced rules of behavior.” Raison d’etat has been “replaced by a moral consciousness.”
American realists may scoff, but within the confines of Europe the brutal laws of power politics really have been repealed. Since World War II European society has been shaped not by the traditional exercise

of power but by the unfolding of a geopolitical miracle: The German lion has lain down with the French lamb. The new Europe has succeeded not by balancing power but by transcending power. And now

Europeans have become evangelists for their “postmodern” gospel of international relations. The application of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice. If

Germany can be tamed through gentle rapprochement, why not Iraq?
This has put Europeans and Americans on a collision course. Americans have not lived the European miracle. They have no experience of promoting ideals and order successfully without power. Their memory

of the past 50 years is of a Cold War struggle that was eventually won by strength and determination, not by the spontaneous triumph of “moral consciousness.” As good children of the Enlightenment,

Americans believe in human perfectibility. But Americans from Donald Rumsfeld to Madeleine Albright also believe that global security and a liberal order depend on the United States — that “indispensable

nation” — wielding its power in the dangerous, Hobbesian world that still flourishes, at least outside Europe. Especially after Sept. 11, most Americans remember Munich, not Maastricht.
The irony is that this transatlantic disagreement is the fruit of successful transatlantic policies. As Joschka Fischer and other Europeans admit, the United States made the “new Europe” possible — by leading the

democracies to victory in World War II and the Cold War and by providing the solution to the age-old “German problem.” Even today Europe’s rejection of power politics ultimately depends on America’s

willingness to use force around the world against those who still do believe in power politics. Europe’s Kantian order depends on the United States using power according to the old Hobbesian rules.
Most Europeans don’t acknowledge the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Instead, they have come to view the United

States simply as a rogue colossus, in many respects a bigger threat to the pacific ideals Europeans now cherish than Iraq or Iran. Americans, in turn, have come to view Europe as annoying, irrelevant, naive

and ungrateful as it takes a free ride on American power. This is not just a family quarrel. If Americans and Europeans no longer agree on the utility and morality of power, then what remains to undergird their

military alliance?
George W. Bush did not create these problems, and he alone won’t solve them. Indeed, there is no sure cure for this transatlantic divergence. Those on both sides of the Atlantic who implore Europe to

increase its military capabilities are right — though a Europe that has so little belief in power is unlikely to spend the money to get more of it. Those who ask Americans to show some generosity of spirit, what

the Founders called “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” are also right. The United States should honor multilateralism and the rule of law when it can, and try to build some international political

capital for those times when unilateral action is unavoidable. But even if it does, will Europeans show the necessary tolerance for American power?
Whatever else we do, let’s stop pretending that we agree. That pretense has done little for the alliance since the end of the Cold War than create more confusion, misunderstanding and anger. Better that we

should face our differences head on. That is the necessary first step on the road to recovery.