Masters of None
The practice of interviewing government officials became commonplace in the United States by the 1880s, but was considered uncouth in parts of Europe through the end of the First World War. As American audiences enjoyed a more intimate, and often critical, perspective on their leaders’ decision-making, one French observer disparaged the “spirit of inquiry and ‘espionage’ ” animating the American press.
Thomas Meaney’s dispatch from the Munich Security Conference [“Masters of War,” Letter from Germany, June] is an impressive revival of that spirit. His interviews with David Petraeus, Ben Rhodes, Niall Ferguson, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, and an unguarded Chinese foreign minister whom he chases down are relayed with the familiarity and irreverence of the original “correspondents”—often the friends of an editor whose long-distance correspondence was simply published. Meaney’s own exchanges come together in an incisive, entertaining, and ultimately damning account of official hubris among would-be world changers.
To be fair, Meaney parachuted into a target-rich environment. Assembling diplomats, journalists, and activists from different countries with different interests and understandings of geopolitical dynamics is bound to expose inconsistencies in the dream of a securitized global order—and the hypocrisies of those who try to conjure it. This gets at the major pitfall of summitry. Though summits seek to govern relations among heterogeneous countries, they are tacitly ruled by a homogeneous set of ideologies and incentives. Their bureaucratic logic obscures the anarchic logic of the world as it is.
Such summits can also expose how frequently officials’ priorities diverge from those of the people they represent. My colleagues and I at the Institute for Global Affairs recently found in a survey that majorities in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France want NATO countries to push for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Substantially more people want to avoid escalation and prevent Ukrainian suffering than want to fully restore Ukraine’s prewar borders or deter autocratic invasions. When the summiteers declare that Ukraine’s fight is for democracy itself, they risk both aggrandizing and trivializing Ukraine’s effort, as well as alienating the citizens they serve.
Mark Hannah
Senior Fellow, Institute for Global Affairs
Ebeltoft, Denmark
The world on the brink of omnicide has been mythologized, industrialized, and financialized, but to admit this is to endanger the trillion-dollar racket and to rein in delusions of victory. Whose victory? Aren’t these “masters of war” the same ones who lost in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya? Those who lost time and again to vastly weaker foes, and yet officially declared, in their military doctrine, the nuclear-armed states of Russia and China as enemies—and now engage them in proxy wars? Meaney’s riveting report should fill everyone’s hearts with existential dread at the surreal idiocy of these so-called masters, who hardly seemed to acknowledge—at the Munich Security Conference—that three nuclear states are now on the verge of a global war.
Lena Herzog
Los Angeles
Borrowing Trouble
Andrew Lipstein’s otherwise convincing depiction of a potential index-fund bubble [“What Goes Up,” Report, June] overlooks the role leverage—the use of borrowed funds to buy investments—would have in such a collapse. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed of the dynamics of bubbles: “All crises have involved debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale in relation to the underlying means of payment.” We saw this in the 2008 financial crisis, when investment banks, having increased their exposure to mortgage debt severalfold via leverage, were driven to bankruptcy when property values declined. Such leverage forces losing investors to sell their positions to meet margin calls, i.e., demands from brokers that they raise more cash to cover their losses. This forced liquidation begets more selling as prices of the asset securing the leverage are driven down. A financial crisis can occur when such investors still don’t have enough capital to pay their debts.
Leverage has largely been absent from the index-fund world, especially from the retirement plans Lipstein mentions. If anything, plans that invest in index funds provide market stability as employees buy more of them with each paycheck, buoying the market with every automatic 401(k) payroll deduction. Plan investors remained largely stable during the 2008 crisis, as they didn’t (and still don’t) expect to touch their assets until retirement. They have no margin calls to answer that would force them to sell. The leverage both to inflate and to pop the bubble does not lie with index funds, but with professional money managers like Michael Green. It’s always the financiers who apply tremendous leverage to their investments.
Green’s anti-index crusade reminds me of the old Wall Street expression “talking your book”: promoting your own investment strategy to collect more money-management fees—which Vanguard’s founder, John Bogle, sought to counteract with low-cost index funds. Ironically, there is ample evidence of bubbles in other places—notably Bitcoin, which Warren Buffett correctly dubbed “rat poison squared.” Green’s current employer, Simplify Asset Management, offers the Simplify Bitcoin Strategy PLUS Income ETF with the bubbly ticker symbol MAXI; I’d rather buy an overvalued S&P 500 index fund.
Lewis Braham
Pittsburgh
Prophet Motive
It’s often the case that when a writer attempts to attribute motives to a community of which they are not a part, they fall short of painting a full picture. In “The Prophet Who Failed” [Miscellany, June], it appears that Emily Harnett came in with preconceived ideas of the Church Universal and Triumphant, and therefore did not give a fair review of our community and its leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet. Harnett dismisses the nuance of prophecy, claiming that “prophetic beliefs can be easily rigged to elude disconfirmation.” But prophecy is a warning of what can happen if people or circumstances do not change. When people repent and God forgives, prophecy does not play out. This was true in the case of Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria and longtime enemy of Israel. The prophet Jonah preached its destruction, but the people repented, and Nineveh was not destroyed.
Rev. Bonita Frazier
Silver Springs, Md.
