Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic
by Michael Scammell
Random House, 689 pp., $35.00

He began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud’s. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish civil war, he met W.H. Auden at a “crazy party” in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco’s prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn’t die (though Benjamin, denied passage into Spain at the French border, took them and did).

Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly’s London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicholson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.

It is difficult, in other words, to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. From progressive education and Freudian psychoanalysis through Zionism, communism, and existentialism to psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era.

Nor were these shallow passions. His belief in communism led him to fight in Spain and travel in the USSR. His Zionism led him to a kibbutz near Haifa. At different times, he advocated the use of violence, whether to bring about a Communist utopia or to create the state of Israel. Even when he turned against his previous causes (and against his previous friends who still believed in them) he did so with real fervor. He is, after all, best known as an anti-Communist, not as a Communist, largely because of his best and most influential book, Darkness at Noon, a fictional account of the interrogation of a leading member of an unnamed Communist party. His involvement with Revisionist Zionism is also probably less well known than The Thirteenth Tribe, a book that argues that modern European Jews are descended from the Central Asian Khazars, and not from the Jews who lived in the Palestine of antiquity—a thesis which, whatever its merits, is hugely popular among the enemies of Zionism. Even so, when in the grip of one particular mania he was incapable of seeing the counterarguments: in the face of all rational argument, he even stuck to his late passion for telepathy and ESP—so much so that he left most of his estate to fund a professorial chair in parapsychology.

Koestler was equally likely to succumb to extreme passions in his personal life—notoriously so. He was variously in thrall to Jabotinsky, to his analyst, and to an extraordinary series of women. He was also consumed by violent hatreds—starting with his mother—and pursued many vendettas, against fellow writers (he was fiercely jealous of Hemingway, loathed Bertrand Russell) as well as romantic rivals (including Edmund Wilson) and ex-husbands. Eventually, he offended almost everyone he knew, but only after getting drunk with them first.

Even his entertainments often went to extremes, as this superb new biography well illustrates. Far and away my favorite Koestler moment—in a book full of amazing Koestler moments—is Michael Scammell’s description of an evening in 1946, during which Koestler and his then girlfriend (and later wife) Mamaine Paget went out drinking with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Camus’s wife, Francine. The festivities began with dinner in an Algerian bistro, continued in a dance hall “lit with pink and blue neon lights,” and then, at Koestler’s insistence, progressed to Schéhérazade, a nightclub filled with “violinists wandering about playing soulful Russian music into the guests’ ears.” There were arguments about communism, and about friendship. “If only it were possible to tell the truth,” exclaimed Camus at one point.

At about 4 AM, Koestler was pried away from the nightclub, and the group “repaired to Chez Victor in Les Halles for onion soup, oysters, and white wine.” Roaring drunk, Koestler threw a crust of bread across the table and hit Mamaine in the eye; Sartre, equally drunk, poured salt and pepper into napkins that he put in his pocket and said he had to deliver a lecture at the Sorbonne in the morning on “The Responsibility of the Writer.” Camus said, “Well, you’ll have to speak without me” (”Alors, tu parleras sans moi “). Sartre said he wished he “could speak without me too” (”Je voudrais bien pouvoir parler sans moi “) and collapsed into giggles.

Scammell, whose fine-tuned sense of irony serves him well here, describes that evening’s conclusion:

They broke up at dawn. Alone with Sartre, Beauvoir sobbed “over the tragedy of the human condition,” then leaned on the parapet of a bridge over the Seine and said: “I don’t see why we don’t throw ourselves in the river.” “All right,” agreed Sartre, “let’s throw ourselves in,” and began to cry himself. In another part of the city, Koestler too burst into tears as he stared into the Seine. Then he disappeared into a pissoir and shouted to Mamaine, “Don’t leave me, I love you, I’ll always love you.” They got home at about eight o’clock and slept all day, except for Sartre, who stuffed himself with pep pills and dragged himself off to the Sorbonne to give his lecture. It wasn’t possible even for an existentialist to address the students “sans moi.”
Leaving aside its entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting questions. We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of things. Yet much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable public behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one, let alone weeping over the human condition and threatening to throw themselves into the Seine at the end of it. Hollywood starlets and pseudo-celebrities behave that way in our culture, not serious people.

More to the point, Koestler was, in our contemporary definition of these things, an alcoholic, as were many of the people around him. He was also, in our contemporary definition of these things, a sexual predator. He was blatantly unfaithful to all of his three wives, as well as to the other women he lived with. He flirted outrageously, and sometimes aggressively, with other men’s wives too. Just a few days before the evening at Schéhérazade and Chez Victor, Koestler actually went to bed with Simone de Beauvoir.

David Cesarani, a previous biographer of Koestler, has even described him as a “serial rapist.”[1] Scammell disputes that accusation at some length. In the end, only one woman—Jill Craigie, the wife of the British Labour leader Michael Foot—ever actually accused him of rape, and there are some ambiguities about her story. She made the charge when she was in her eighties, and Koestler was dead. Others, including her husband, remembered the incident differently. Scammell notes these discrepancies, and convincingly dismisses some of Cesarani’s other accusations as unfounded. He also notes that the charge has nevertheless deeply tarnished Koestler’s posthumous reputation. This is not at all surprising. Even if “rape” is not the right word, some of the sexual behavior Scammell describes would, in the contemporary world, be considered absolutely beyond the pale—and probably illegal as well.

Nor are the rules of public behavior the only things that have changed. The professionalization of literary and intellectual life was underway even in Koestler’s lifetime, and he chafed against it. He disliked the lecture circuit and never had any real interest in teaching. He had very little time for universities in general. He also refused to be categorized as a simple “novelist” or “journalist,” and in the latter part of his career wrote books about science, philosophy, history, and psychology. He understood the term “intellectual” in a much broader sense than we do today, and felt comfortable ranging over a huge number of fields in which he had no professional expertise whatsoever. This approach to the life of the mind, perfectly acceptable in the Vienna of Koestler’s youth, simply looks amateurish from the perspective of the present. As a result, many of his later books have slipped off the radar and are long out of print. Others, notably The Thirteenth Tribe, are considered curiosities that appeal to conspiracy theorists, not scholars.

The most important change, however, is political. To put it bluntly, the deadly struggle between communism and anticommunism—the central moral issue of Koestler’s lifetime—not only no longer exists, it no longer evokes much interest. Thanks to the opening of archives, quite a few Western historians are, it is true, still investigating the history of the Soviet Union and of the international Communist movement. But outside of a few university comparative literature departments, Soviet-style Marxism itself is not a living political idea anywhere in the West. In the wake of the Lehman Brothers crash in the autumn of 2008, there were calls for a government bailout of the auto industry. No one—no major newspaper columnists, no leading politicians, no popular intellectual magazines—called upon the vanguard of the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois capitalist exploiters. In the Europe of 1948, somebody would have done so.

What that means, though, is that the entire political context in which Koest- ler, Sartre, and Camus functioned—and in which Koestler’s most important works were written—is now gone. In the years following their debauched evening in Paris, Sartre and Koestler actually stopped speaking to each other. Partly this was personal: Sartre tried to seduce Mamaine, Koestler did seduce Beauvoir, and there were bad feelings all around. But the more important reason was political. After Darkness at Noon became a best seller in France, Sartre distanced himself from its author, on the grounds that Koestler, by publicizing the crimes of the repressive Soviet regime, was putting himself at the service of American imperialism and blocking the progress of the left. It was not that Sartre did not know about the horrors Koestler described—the prisons, the torture, and the labor camps of the Soviet Union—it was that he did not find them politically convenient. They gave too much encouragement to the bourgeoisie.

What was true of Sartre was true of many, many others, and not only those on the far left. In his superb recent account of the publication of Darkness at Noon and its impact on the Western public, Princeton literary scholar John Fleming writes that any appreciation of the heated international debate about the book “requires the reconstruction of some modes of thought nearly vanished from the earth.”[2] Concepts like “belief” and “faith” do not figure very often anymore in contemporary Western politics—and even when they do (as perhaps they did in the 2008 American presidential election) they are almost always a preface to disillusion. In the 1930s and 1940s, by contrast, belief and faith mattered a great deal, and true Communists and fellow travelers did not become disillusioned. They simply altered their analysis of the current situation, put their trust in the ultimate wisdom of the Party, and progressed onward toward the construction of utopia.

Koestler had an almost unique ability to shake such people to their foundations. Unlike right-wing and even liberal critics of communism, he had a certain status on the cultural left. He was a victim of fascism, an ex-refugee, a familiar face in Comintern circles, a former combatant in the Spanish civil war. His devastating critique of the Soviet Union therefore had to be taken seriously by his former comrades. To some of them, he was a heretic, a defector, a traitor to the cause. To others, he became a hero.

As for Darkness at Noon, it was not just a popular book, it was one of the primary reasons that the Communist Party never came to power in France, a real possibility at the time. Hard though it is for us now to imagine, it was not at all obvious, in 1946 or even 1956, that Western Europe and the United States would remain solidly united for fifty years. Nor did it seem at all inevitable that the West would win the cold war. Along with Orwell’s Animal Farm and Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, Darkness at Noon was one of the books that helped turn the tide on the intellectual front line, and ensured that the West prevailed. But unless one understands all of that, the political and literary achievements of Arthur Koestler are, to a contemporary reader, easily outweighed by the extravagance of his sexual and personal transgressions.

For all of those reasons, Michael Scammell cannot have found this an easy book to write, and indeed it took him a very long time to write it. Scammell is the author of the definitive and deservedly celebrated biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, published in 1984.[3] A few years after it was finished, he set out to follow up with a biography of Koestler. This turned out to be a major feat of endurance scholarship. By his own admission, he “followed [Koestler] to fourteen countries on three continents,” interviewed hundreds of people, and read through many boxes of archives. This effort has certainly paid off.

Because he has looked at all possible forms of documentation, he is able to reconstruct complicated scenes from Koestler’s life with real historical and literary flair. More than once, he tells us what is happening from several perspectives: what Koestler said, what Koestler’s then girlfriend said, what another person at the party remembered twenty years later, and how another writer depicted the event in his diaries. Scammell is also a scholar of Russian literature, and this shows too. Although this is a long book, it feels compact. None of the carefully selected details or quotations seems extraneous. The main characters are shown from every angle, with all of their faults and virtues. Koestler himself seems at times so alive he might leap off the page.

And yet the passage of time is a problem, if not for Scammell then for his readers. An elderly Central European acquaintance recently told me that in his youth, nothing was considered so tacky and outdated as art nouveau furniture. Something similar has happened to Koestler. At the moment, he still seems like yesterday’s man, unfashionable and obsolete. His better qualities might eventually be visible to a younger generation, just as an elegantly restored art nouveau table now appeals to collectors and connoisseurs. But a good deal of historical and literary work will have to be done, and more time may have to pass, before that is possible.

In the case of Koestler, a number of other things are also working against his posthumous reputation. One of these is the nature of his death, a double suicide, carried out in tandem with his wife. Koestler himself was seventy-seven years old and dying of leukemia. But his wife, Cynthia, was fifty-five and healthy. Unlike his previous wives, she was neither beautiful nor accomplished. She had been his secretary—in effect his servant—before they were married. Above all he admired her ability to take dictation. Though it seems that in the last part of their lives the power balance between them evened out, and though it is very clear that she was in full possession of her faculties at the time—she even had the presence of mind to cancel the newspapers—it is impossible to escape the suspicion that somehow, in an effort to achieve a spectacular grand finale, he bullied her into killing herself alongside him.

Cynthia’s death was not only distasteful to the public, it left Koestler’s literary estate without an obvious manager. Having persuaded numerous women to have abortions, he had no children, with the possible exception of one unacknowledged daughter (who had nothing to do with him, or he with her). By the time of his death he had fallen out with those of his contemporaries who were still alive. Most of his later books were financially and critically unsuccessful. His final legacy, that gift of money for the study of parapsychology, didn’t exactly enhance his reputation either. Nor did he have, as Orwell did, an obvious national audience. As a Hungarian Jew and native German speaker who wrote in English, he isn’t a natural part of anybody’s literary canon. There is an Orwell Society at Eton, but I doubt very much that there is a Koestler Society at any school in Budapest.

As a result, Koestler’s reputation has waned dramatically since his death. Although Darkness at Noon remains high on lists of “great books of the twentieth century,” his journalism, which in its time was at least as significant as that of Orwell, is hardly known at all. Before coming to write this review, I had not read Scum of the Earth, Koestler’s autobiographical and journalistic account of the fate of refugees in wartime France. I can’t remember anybody ever telling me to read it either. But because Scammell praises it, and because Scum of the Earth is still in print, I bought a copy. It was a revelation: astonishingly fresh, clear, and relevant, not only explaining the rapid collapse of France in 1940, but also illuminating some of the difficulties that France and other European countries still have in absorbing “foreigners” even today. After I’d finished, I lent the book to somebody else. And this, it occurred to me, is how a literary reputation revives.

Scammell has clearly set out to make this happen, and in that sense, this is more than a biography. It is an argument in defense of Koestler’s literary oeuvre, if not entirely in defense of Koestler himself. Scammell does not make excuses for his subject, and does not gloss over his many faults. But by recreating the historical setting in which Koestler lived and worked, by fitting him squarely in the middle of the great debates of the twentieth century, he makes his achievements much clearer to a contemporary reader—and thus there is a chance, at least, that he will succeed.

Notes
[1]David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: Heineman, 1998).

[2]John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos ( Norton, 2009), p. 65.

[3]Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (Norton, 1984).

What is true of Nyon is true of most of Switzerland, a nation in which there are very few mosques — no more than 150 in the whole country, apparently, including tiny “prayer rooms” — virtually no burqas and hardly any headscarves. The vast majority of Switzerland’s 400,000 Muslims are from Turkey and Kosovo, and women from these countries generally do not follow the conservative dress codes commonly seen in places such as Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, people in places just like Nyon recently voted decisively — 57.5 percent — in favor of a referendum that will ban the construction of minarets on mosques throughout Switzerland. This decision has been interpreted across Europe, and particularly in the United States, as evidence of Swiss bigotry and rising religious intolerance. But it was not — or at least not entirely. More important, it was evidence of fear, though not fear of “foreigners” or “outsiders” as such.

There is very little evidence that separatist, politically extreme Islam is growing rapidly in Switzerland. The Swiss, however, read newspapers and watch television. And in recent years separatist and politically extreme forms of Islam have emerged in every European country with a large Muslim population: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Sweden. In all of these countries there have been court cases and scandals concerning forced marriage, female circumcision and honor killings. There have been terrorist incidents, too: Think of the London Tube bombings, the Spanish train bombs, the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. Remember that the Sept. 11 pilots came from Hamburg.

There are many explanations for this phenomenon (the best is found in Christopher Caldwell’s recent book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe”), but, to put it very crudely, they boil down to one thing: Because of mistakes made by Europeans and by the Muslim immigrants who live beside them, the two groups have, over the past several decades, failed to integrate. Two or even three generations after their arrival, some European Muslims still live in separate communities. They often go to separate schools. And a small but vocal minority openly refuses to respect the laws and customs of their adopted countries.

No European government has found a way to deal with this phenomenon. Those that have tried often find themselves running up against their own civil rights and legal traditions. The Danes, determined to limit the number of foreign spouses entering Denmark through arranged marriages, decided that they had no choice but to make it more difficult for all Danes to marry foreigners. The French, realizing that the headscarf had become a symbol of political affiliation in some French schools, found themselves limiting the rights of all students to wear religious clothing, including yarmulkes, to school.

There is, therefore, nothing especially Swiss, or especially isolationist, about the recent referendum result. A similar question, put in a similar way, might well have led to a similar result anywhere in Europe. In fact, fear of Islamist extremism shapes all European politics far more than anyone ever acknowledges. The growth of the “far right” parties in the recent past is almost always connected to fear of Islamist extremism. The opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union — which would mean that Turks could eventually work freely in any member state — stems from the same set of fears, though almost no one ever says this.

The referendum on the construction of minarets is no different. No one quite says what the real issue is, but everybody knows: As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban minarets may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Muslims, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don’t have much Islamic extremism — and they don’t want any.

Over the centuries, some societies have been more susceptible to these sorts of swindles than others. Catherine the Great’s Russia, for example, was positively swarming with phony English duchesses and Italian princes: Imperial St. Petersburg was aspirational enough to want the company of “real” European aristocrats but far away enough from London or Naples to make it difficult to check their pedigrees. One also thinks of Edith Wharton’s New York, for similar reasons: Her characters are precisely the sort who would fall into a mésalliance with a dodgy Polish aristocrat, just off the boat, who invariably turns out not to be what he seems.

To that notable group of societies we can now add 21st-century Washington. Like 18th-century Russia, it is a world of neophytes, a society whose members have only recently “made it” into an elite magic circle and who don’t necessarily know the other members all that well. Like 19th-century New York, it is also a world where appearances matter: You get invited to the event — whether the White House Hanukkah party or the state dinner — not just because of who you are but because of what you represent, which costume you wear, which ethnic group you come from.

Above all, it is a world that seems to offer wealth and fame to those outsiders who manage to enter it. And it was in pursuit of both that Tareq and Michaele Salahi bamboozled their way into last week’s White House dinner for the Indian prime minister. Just like all charlatans and swindlers over the centuries, they managed it by looking and acting the part. He appears as if he could be South Asian, which seemed right; he also wore black tie and what looks, in the photographs, like a state decoration or medal. She is a striking, professionally coiffed blonde and wore a sari — a glamorous, red, expensive sari. Having managed to get previous meetings with Prince Charles and Oprah Winfrey (Michaele even finagled her way into Redskinettes alumni parties), they knew how to behave around the contemporary aristocracy: Simply act as if you belong, don’t stare too hard at the celebrities, don’t eat or drink too much, and do engage your neighbors in light chit-chat about the Kashmir conflict and the Indian gross domestic product. Since hardly anyone knows anyone else at this kind of party, you can get away with it.

But there are differences between the Salahis and, say, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, a self-described “Spanish aristocrat” who set himself up as a glamorous “faith healer” in 1770s St. Petersburg, made his living by borrowing money from gullible courtiers (and possibly by renting out his wife, the “Princess di Santa Croce,” to Prince Potemkin).

The Salahis are hoping to cash in faster — a lot faster. It has been less than a week since they crashed the president’s party, and already they are demanding six figures for the exclusive television appearance in which they will either declare themselves to be be offended, on the grounds that they “thought” they were invited to the White House — or else will boast of having pulled off the social-climbing coup of the century.

They also have a lot more help than did the swindlers of yesteryear. Michaele had a television crew film her preparations for the party at a Georgetown beauty salon, so there is footage ready for whoever has the money to pay. A publicist has been booked and is prepared to negotiate. Plenty of “legitimate” news outlets are ready to play: According to The Post, a CBS reporter has already slipped a note under their door, offering an interview with Katie Couric. Next will come the book contract, the movie rights and — who knows? — maybe the television talk show. I can just see it: “Famous for Being Famous: At Home With the Salahis.”

Unless, of course, they meet the same fate as their many predecessors. The Spanish Count Cagliostro was eventually expelled from St. Petersburg, after the empress learned that he was neither Spanish nor a count. The “King” and “Duke” in “Huckleberry Finn” were tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.

A century ago, the Salahis, too, would be shamed, embarrassed and finally banished from the elite world that they had contrived to enter. Even now, they ought to expect to be under arrest, for lying to the Secret Service, if nothing else — unless the rules of polite society have changed so much that there are no longer any rules at all.

Like comets hurtling at one another from opposite points in outer space, two different phenomena in different parts of the world soared into public awareness last week. Separately, they might not have had cosmic importance. Put together, however, they could prove an interesting harbinger of things to come.

In China, President Obama met his counterpart, President Hu Jintao. He also met the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. The former got more attention, but the latter was more interesting: According to Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, Wen told Obama that “China disagrees to the suggestion of a ‘Group of Two.’ ” China is “still a developing country,” Wen said, and “we must always keep sober-minded about it.” China is delighted to continue its economic relationship with the United States, but China “pursues the independent foreign policy of peace and will not align with any country or country blocs.”

Translation: China will not cooperate in placing sanctions on Iran; China will not hinder North Korea’s nuclear missile program; and China will not help solve the problems of Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else. China has decided that, in short, it will not become America’s full partner in foreign policy.

At approximately the same time, the leaders of Europe were locked in proverbial smoke-filled rooms (nowadays empty of smoke) arguing over who should be granted the job of “president” of the European Union and who should become Europe’s new “high representative,” or foreign minister. These talks represented the culmination of a decade’s worth of diplomacy, debate and national referendums, all designed to produce a more united European foreign policy and to give Europe a single phone number, so that Obama can call when he wants to chat. The result: The president of Europe will be Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, a politician unknown outside his own country. The foreign minister of Europe will be Britain’s Catherine Ashton, a bureaucrat unknown even inside her own country. Candidates of far greater experience and influence — including the former British prime minister Tony Blair and the Swedish foreign minister, Carl Bildt — were rejected, apparently for fear they would have more experience and influence than the powers that be. Germany’s Der Spiegel heralded this news with the headline “Europe Chooses Nobodies.”

Translation: Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. “Europe” will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America’s full partner in foreign policy.

And thus we are left with a curious situation: America no longer wants to be the sole superpower. The American president no longer wants to be the leader of a sole superpower. Nobody else wants America to be the sole superpower and in fact America cannot even afford to be the sole superpower. Yet America has no obvious partner with which to share its superpowerdom, and if America were to cease being a superpower, nothing and no one would take its place.

This might not be the end of the world — there are quite a few trouble spots that could do with a long period of benign neglect — and it might not last forever. Europe, when counted as a single entity, is still the world’s largest economy. China, whatever else it might be, is still the world’s fastest-growing economy. Sooner or later the simple need to defend their economic interests might persuade one or both to start taking the outside world more seriously.

This does mean that the Obama administration has a problem, however: Having come to office promising to work with allies, it may soon discover that there are no allies with which to work. Europe is still our best hope, because Europeans share most of our values. But organizing sanctions with a divided Europe — never mind a military operation — will continue to be a major chore. China, meanwhile, is acquiring vast foreign interests, trading in Africa and South America as well as Asia, along with a vast army to match. But China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation or anything else.

Global military and security thus look set to remain in the hands of the United States, whether the United States wants it or not. Halfway through his presidency, George W. Bush found he had to drop unilateralism in favor of diplomacy. Now one wonders: At some point in his presidency, will Obama find he has to drop diplomacy in favor of unilateralism, too?

How did we get to this point? That is, how did we get to a point where outbreaks treated with the utmost seriousness by the World Health Organization — swine flu has been officially declared a “pandemic” — receive vastly different levels of respect in different countries, different cities and even among different social groups within them? Some seem convinced that the current flu epidemic is a modern version of the Black Death. Others — including a number of elected politicians and health bureaucrats — suspect a hoax perpetrated by Swiss drug companies. Although the wide variety of reactions has been present since the virus first appeared in the spring, the subsequent failure to come to any global consensus about how swine flu should be treated is producing as many medical reactions as there are national governments.

Look at Ukraine, for example, where public awareness went from “zero” this summer to “panic” this autumn. Late last month, politicians began to speak of mass illness and mass death. The government quarantined several provinces, shut down parliament and banned mass gatherings. When the dust began to settle last week, it appeared that, yes, there had been a small outbreak of swine flu, but also that, no, most of the people who got sick didn’t have the H1N1 virus. Swine flu death rates in Ukraine are no higher than those for flu or pneumonia in other years.

None of this has stopped the flu panic from spreading westward faster than the virus itself — though, again, all of Ukraine’s neighbors have behaved differently. Slovakia closed most of its border crossings with Ukraine. Hungary did not close its borders but launched a campaign for mass vaccination. Poland did neither and has so far bought no vaccine, on the grounds that swine flu is actually more benign than ordinary flu and that the vaccine might therefore do more harm than good.

Each of these countries has produced different medical explanations for its actions, and each medical explanation is widely perceived to be a cover for political machinations, at least by the opponents of the relevant government. In Ukraine, a second wave of rumors has it that the flu panic was spread by one or more presidential candidates (elections are scheduled for January), seeking to gain an advantage; the current president has accused the prime minister, who is seeking the presidency, of spending more on her election campaign than on flu response. In Hungary, widespread distrust of a very unpopular government has led to mass refusal to use the expensively purchased vaccine. In Poland, some accuse the health ministry of plain stinginess.

The politicization of disease response is not unique to Eastern Europe; nor are arguments about who gets which treatment. In the United States, an outcry followed the news that employees of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup got their vaccines before others; a similar scandal erupted in Germany when it emerged that two kinds of vaccine are available — and that the one perceived as “safer” is going to government officials and the military. Few of the world’s democracies will avoid a partisan debate over disease response this flu season, while few of the world’s autocracies will avoid wild rumors.

I’ve written before that a touch of media panic never hurts — at least it teaches people what the disease in question might be — but what we’re seeing is something different: Not media panic but official panic, inconsistent information and rapid policy changes that seem inspired by political demands, not medical need. It turns out that hardly anyone, anywhere, has thought through the logistics or the morality of rapid vaccine distribution. And hardly anyone knows what to make of the WHO or its Web site. Is the word “pandemic” just medical bureaucratese for a cough and a sore throat? Or does it mean that everyone who isn’t vaccinated will die?

Presumably the answer lies somewhere in between, but the WHO hasn’t figured out how to explain that. Neither have most national governments. You can train all the doctors you want, but if they can’t explain to the public concepts such as “high-risk groups” and “probability” and “some people really need this vaccine but most don’t,” then every epidemic, severe or mild, will become a public relations disaster. So far, swine flu is not a medical emergency, though no one says that very clearly. And if it becomes one, how will we know?

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

By Christopher Caldwell

(Doubleday, 422 pp., $30)

As its subtitle makes clear, this is a book about immigration, Islam, and the West. But at the same time this is also a book about a particular moral culture, a set of attitudes, habits, and beliefs that has developed in Western Europe over the past sixty years. There isn’t a good shorthand way to describe this moral culture. Sometimes it is called “political correctness,” though politics as such does not define it. Sometimes it is called “the culture of tolerance,” though at times it is not tolerant at all. Christopher Caldwell mostly winds up calling it the “European project,” which is not bad, since it implies that it is something that Europe is still building, an ongoing but incomplete enterprise, a “project” for the future.

The focus on the future is correct, for the source of these attitudes, habits, and beliefs–the European mentality that is Caldwell’s subject–is a deep desire both to forget and to atone for the past. At the heart of the European project lies a set of memories: of the vast physical destruction left in the wake of World War II, of the cycles of hatred and violence that followed the Nazi invasion of most of the continent, of the tyrannies of communism, and above all of the Holocaust. The primary task of this project is to purge these memories. This may be done in two ways: by rejecting anything reminiscent of traditional nationalism and traditional religion, and by promoting a halcyon form of cultural relativism. Early in his book, Caldwell explains:

The war supplied European thinkers with all their moral categories and benchmarks, whether the issue at hand was the progress of civilization, criteria for ethical statesmanship, or rationales for military intervention. Avoiding another European explosion meant, above all, purging Europe’s individual countries of nationalism, with “nationalism” understood to include all vestiges of racism, militarism, and cultural chauvinism–but also patriotism, pride, and unseemly competitiveness. The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans. 

Raymond Aron inquired into the same phenomenon back in the 1970s, observing that Europeans “would like to exit from history, from la grande histoire, from the history that is written in letters of blood.” The most obvious achievement of this project, the European Union itself, is explicitly designed to do just that. Indeed, it is no accident that among the EU’s original founders–Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy–were nations whose elites felt deep guilt about their wartime aggression or collaboration. For some, the sacrifice of a part of their sovereignty seemed a small price to pay for the chance to become “European” instead of, say, “German.”

Caldwell is not the first to describe this culture, though he does so in a blessedly objective way–his interest, he says, is “neither to defend it as common sense nor to reject it as claptrap,” and his book lives up to this stringent standard. This is important, in this context. For many of the arguments about Islam in Europe are really arguments about the European project–and about racism, militarism, cultural chauvinism, patriotism, pride, and competitiveness–which is why they often become so quickly inflamed. Frequently they deteriorate into name-calling, as one side accuses the other of different forms of fascism. I am not sure that Caldwell has avoided all of the pitfalls of this difficult debate, but at least he has tried to do so. This is a book written in good faith.

What does all this have to do with Islam? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Caldwell’s central argument is that the European project, which was never designed with immigration in mind, let alone Muslim immigration, became the foundation upon which millions of Muslims came to live permanently in Europe. Certainly the European project shaped the conditions under which Muslims and others were initially invited to the continent. In the past this would not have happened, if only because immigration officials would never have allowed so many people, and certainly not from such foreign cultures, to settle permanently in their countries. In postwar Europe, however, bureaucrats did not allow themselves to take into account cultural differences, even when considering immigration requests in large numbers: cultural differences were not supposed to matter anymore, because that way lies fascism and its corpses.

Postwar guilt was also closely related to post-colonial guilt, and post-colonial guilt was the reason why some countries, notably France and Britain, initially opened their doors so widely to Algerians, Tunisians, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis, among others. Surely, the argument went, their former imperial rulers owed something to the inhabitants of the British Commonwealth and the Francophone world. This argument even worked in countries that had never possessed any colonies, as all immigrants coming from ex-colonial countries were automatically classed as members of oppressed cultures who deserved the assistance of modern, anti-racist, anti-colonial, secular Europeans. In this sense, the postwar European project represented an admirable attempt to transcend Europe’s old and ugly anxieties about sameness and otherness. The European project also nurtured an admirable instinct to welcome asylum-seekers–people who had a justifiable fear of persecution in their own countries. Some European Jews had been saved during the war, after all, because they had successfully sought asylum elsewhere–and many had died because they had been refused.

Over time, however, European enthusiasm for the offering of asylum was dampened by the exponential expansion in numbers of asylum seekers, not all of whom, as it turned out, were truly suffering from political persecution. Still, the real problem for European immigration services was never the “bogus asylum-seekers,” as the British tabloids call them, but the real ones. At the end of 2008, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees counted more than sixteen million legitimate refugees, all of whom technically have a right to European asylum. Particularly when the humanitarian need to reunite them with their spouses, parents, and children is taken into account, along with the need to make amends for colonial cruelty, this is potentially a very large number of people.

Indeed, a very large number of people–in fact, an unprecedented number–arrived, and are still arriving. Some 1.5 million of the nine million people who live in Sweden are immigrants or the children of immigrants, as are some three million of the sixteen million inhabitants of the Netherlands. At current rates, one-quarter to one-third of the population of most Western European countries will be of non-European origin by the middle of this century. In many major cities–Rotterdam, Marseille, Leicester–Muslims may soon be in the majority. In some districts of major cities, including London and Amsterdam, they already are.

Once the immigrants had arrived, the complicated morality of the European project also made it hard, rather paradoxically, for Europeans to absorb the newcomers, especially those from the Muslim world. Europeans who were trying to abandon their own national identities were not going to thrust those identities on immigrants. After all, who was to say whose culture was better? No one saw the need to promote assimilation–to teach Turks to be German, or Moroccans to be Dutch. The very idea was embarrassing. Strangely, in retrospect, very few Europeans even felt that it was necessary to induct newcomers into the European project itself. No one explained to them that being “Dutch” now meant respecting womens’ rights, or that being “German” was incompatible with Holocaust denial, or that open distaste for homosexuals would be considered socially unacceptable. No one felt comfortable inflicting any moral or historical lessons upon them at all. This led to a great deal of mutual incomprehension. As Caldwell writes, 

Just because they were migrating to Europe did not mean immigrants accepted, understood, or even noticed the European project to leave behind “the history written in letters of blood.” On the contrary, many immigrants, and many children and grandchildren of immigrants, considered it a duty to shout from the rooftops their wish for a Palestinian state or a Kurdish homeland or an Islamist Algeria. They kept alive dreams of cultural, national, and even racial glory that were beyond the reach of Europeans’ universalism because they were beyond the reach of Europeans’ understanding. The misunderstanding was mutual.

Worse, when some European governments belatedly came to the conclusion that they would have to make active efforts to assimilate their immigrants, they often found that it was too late. The immigrant communities had taken the rhetoric about cultural relativism to heart, and immediately perceived any such efforts as “racist.” When David Blunkett, the British home secretary in the late 1990s, began for the first time to criticize the practice of forced marriages among some British Asians and to advocate the mandatory teaching of English, his remarks were considered biased and beyond the pale. Shahid Malik, a former member of the British Commission for Racial Equality, accused him of “unsettling hundreds of thousands of non-white Britons.” Blunkett’s remarks, Malik said, “felt like a kick in the teeth.”

But if the immigrants were not going to be German or Dutch or British, but were no longer Turkish or Moroccan or Pakistani, what were they going to be? The answer, as it turned out, was that many of them were going to live in ghettos, where their identity as “Muslims” would matter far more to them than it might ever have done in their country of origin, and where many of them would begin to practice the politics of fundamentalism. Finding the fuzziness of the European project unappealing, they returned to–or, among the young, discovered–their Islamic roots. And here is the tragedy of the story: for all its well-meaning secular earnestness, for all its determination to avoid the mistakes of the past, the European project wound up creating an angry and alienated religious minority where none had existed before.

 Caldwell’s account of how we got to where we are today is elegant and accurate, and I am sorry to simplify some of his arguments here. His discussion of the continually evolving explanations that European politicians have given their countrymen about the necessity of maintaining a continually growing immigrant population–the explanations are sometimes economic, sometimes moral, sometimes gastronomic–is particularly splendid. He also goes through many familiar controversies–veils, cartoons, the interpretation of September 11–adding both amusing and telling details to all of them. There is a lot of hypocrisy in the debate about the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, and he exposes all of it.

I suspect, though, that the strongest objections to Caldwell’s book are not going to lie in his description of the status quo ante, but in his discussion of “where we go from here.” For the essence of the second part of his argument–stripped, again, of Caldwell’s subtleties–is not merely that European Islam is now incompatible with European culture, but that it always will be. Having explained why no efforts at assimilation were made in the 1960s and 1970s, and why such efforts are not succeeding now, he goes on to predict that they will never work at all. This line of argument is aimed directly at those Europeans and Americans who have fondly and naïvely placed their hopes in “moderate Islam,” and who assume that Islam will eventually evolve into something more compatible with contemporary secular Europe–something, perhaps, like European Christianity, which in fact plays only a minor role in public life.

Caldwell’s is a complicated argument, with both religious and social elements, not all of which I am qualified to judge. Among other things, he notes that Muslim dislike of European attitudes to women and sex leads Muslim men–even second-generation Muslim men–to import wives from their home countries. The imported wives, who often do not speak European languages, in turn tend to preserve the customs of the home countries in their adopted countries for another generation. He also observes a phenomenon that historians of American immigration would certainly recognize: in practice, contact with European culture has tended to make Muslims more conservative, not more liberal, about the culture they remember from the past. Their children and grandchildren, meanwhile, are able to keep in touch with that culture in a way that previous generations never could, through the easily manipulated world of satellite television. Back in Bangladesh, young people may long to be “modern” and go to nightclubs, but in the Bangladeshi enclaves of London, one sees a much different sort of Islamic world on Al Jazeera. As Fouad Ajami recently remarked, in connection with Caldwell’s book,

In its original habitat, there could be an honest reckoning with Islam. Men and women could wrestle with the limits it places on them; they would weigh, in that timeless manner, the balance between fidelity to the faith and the yearning for freedom. But it isn’t easy in Amsterdam or Stockholm. There, the faith is identity, and the faith is complete and sharpened like a weapon. 

Caldwell also analyzes the writings of Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic philosopher often hailed for his advocacy of “European Islam.” Although Ramadan does speak of finding ways for the two cultures to become compatible, Caldwell believes that he means something different from what many of his admirers think he means. In Caldwell’s reading, Ramadan argues that Islam will be a force for the purification of a spiritually bankrupt and materialist civilization. The cultures will thus one day become compatible–because Islam has changed Europe, and not the other way around.

In different places in different ways, this transformation of Europe is already under way, made more difficult by the fact that the rules of the European project make the discussion of this fact taboo. When the Danes decided that they wanted to limit the ability of Muslim immigrants to import wives from abroad, they passed a law making it difficult for any Danish citizen to marry anyone from outside the EU. The law did indeed reduce the number of immigrants entering the country by marriage. It also stripped all Danes of some of their historic civil liberties.

France’s notorious decision to ban headscarves in schools followed a similar pattern. The decision was taken because authorities feared that the veil was becoming a symbol of an international political movement. But in order to avoid accusations of racism–in free societies, it is not easy to ban a scrap of cloth–they banned not only headscarves but other religious symbols as well, including “large crucifixes,” whatever that means, and yarmulkes. “Again,” writes Caldwell, “over the long term, the price of managing immigration is paid by the broader society in the form of rights. Jews attending violent public schools may have considered the loss of the right to wear a yarmulke a small price to pay for some sign of state action against the Islamization of institutions. … The non-Muslim public understood that this was the best deal it was likely to get.”

And now, of course, a real fear of immigrant violence–as witnessed in Madrid, London, Berlin, and Paris in recent years–plays a role as well. A Berlin opera house set off a passionate debate a few years ago when it decided to cancel a performance for fear of terrorism. The director had decided to illustrate the “death of the Gods” by placing the heads of Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and, yes, Muhammad in the final scene. This was not political correctness, it was fear. (The same was true, incidentally, of Yale University’s recent decision to omit the offending images from a book about the controversy over Danish cartoons.) If police are afraid to enter certain parts of Paris or Birmingham, it follows that the people who live in those areas are going to feel less pressure to assimilate over time, not more. Second-generation, even third-generation immigrants are growing up far more radical than their parents.

In effect, Caldwell is saying that things are bad, and they are going to get worse, and there is nothing to be done about it. He does hint that it might help if Europeans went back to their Judeo-Christian roots, and became more robust about religion. He suggests that a more unified European approach might help. He implies that Europeans ought to think about having more children. But since neither a revived Christianity, nor European unity, nor a demographic boom, is in the cards, the logic of the situation seems unalterable: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter.”

 Perhaps because I belong to the group of people who fondly and naïvely imagine that Islam may evolve–every other monotheism has–I am not entirely persuaded by Caldwell’s elegant pessimism. There are multiple examples–many multiples of examples–of Muslim immigrants who have integrated seamlessly into Europe. I am thinking of the secular and sophisticated Iranians of Paris, the Pakistani shopkeepers on British high streets, even individuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of Europe’s most fervent exponents of Enlightenment values. All have succeeded because some elements of European life–the entrepreneurial tradition and the blandishments of capitalism; the cosmopolitan cultural scene; the large role given to public intellectuals, particularly those who have something new to say–are well suited to the absorption and the cultural adaptation of outsiders. I do not see why Muslim immigrants will remain magically immune to all the integrationist influences that have shaped other immigrants into contented citizens of Western societies.

There are also some historical precedents. As noted above, the habit of importing spouses from the old country was also practiced by American immigrants–Jewish, German, Irish–some of whom also remained isolated in their own communities into two, three, or more generations. But these groups were finally integrated, partly through the lure of prosperity–in the end you had to speak English in order to get on–and partly through schools and peer pressure. Caldwell is right when he notes that Europeans always underestimate how deeply conformist American society is, and how much overt pressure there has always been to assimilate; but it is not impossible to imagine that a few changes in Europe could make a big difference. Indeed, that ban on the veil in schools in France is now widely perceived as an enormous success, precisely because it has tended to accelerate the assimilation of Muslim girls (and thus it might eventually be possible to drop it). Nor is it impossible to imagine that Europe could recover from the current recession–from which, with the exception of Britain and Ireland, it has suffered less drastically than the United States–and that a subsequent burst of economic growth could pull immigrants into the mainstream.

At times Caldwell underestimates the power of the European project itself, which for all its frequent stupidity, hypocrisy, and fluffiness does have some cultural and even moral attractions. The very mildness of modern Europe, the absence of extremes, the irony and the distance from national symbols, the low-key and humble attitude to the past: all of this has an appeal. And over time, as the consequences of rampant ethnic and religious passion become clearer, that appeal may grow. It is true that Christianity in Europe is anemic, and it is possible that a religious revival might be good for the souls of many Europeans. But I am not so sure it would be a useful “response” to Muslim immigration. Who wants a renewal of religious conflict in Europe?

I remember once flying into Heathrow airport on my way back from a dusty and fatiguing trip to the Middle East. As we were landing, I looked down and saw suburban London–green, rainy, boring, polite, agnostic–and felt a kind of relief. I was living in England at the time, and I suddenly felt a rush of happiness to have returned to precisely this culture of mildness and moderation, to those damp hedgerows. The chances are, of course, that Christopher Caldwell is right; and Bernard Lewis has predicted that Europe will be Islamic by the end of this century. But I wonder whether the liberal order is really quite so weak and inept, whether the story is quite over just yet.

Here in Berlin, there are conferences, books and dignitaries in abundance: Everyone who is anyone is in town, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Hillary Clinton, and plenty of kitsch is in evidence as well. A Berlin culture committee has set up a “long line of oversize dominoes” — painted in graffiti-style designs — that also will be knocked down, symbolizing “the power of people to bring change.” Traffic doesn’t pose the cosmic problem in Berlin that it does in Los Angeles, so this event was scheduled to take place during working hours.

Myself, I celebrated the anniversary Sunday, on the day before the great events, simply by doing something that would have been impossible on Nov. 8, 1989: I walked down Unter den Linden — a street I first visited on a freezing cold day back when it was still the dark and deserted centerpiece of East Berlin — and through the Brandenburg Gate, which once stood stranded in the no man’s land between East and West. I passed people sitting in cafes, eating lunch, window shopping. And I thought about what an extraordinary, almost unbelievable success it has all been.

This view — that the past two decades have been, in a friend’s words, the “best in Central Europe for 300 years” — is not universal. On the contrary, the majority of those books and conferences have focused on the many unsolved problems, the mistakes that were made and the resentments that are still felt all across the former Eastern bloc. The majority of the news focus — in Germany, Poland and Hungary, as well as in the United States — has been on the persistence of Eastern poverty, on the perception of Western indifference, on the “invisible walls” that still divide people.

But what did we think Central Europe would look like 20 years after Nov. 9, 1989? I can promise you, having been in Berlin then myself, that no one had the slightest idea. Angela Merkel herself has said that she thought it was ridiculous even to speculate on the possibility of a united Germany, so absurd did that idea seem — even after the fall of the wall. Indeed, so outlandish did the notion of NATO expansion seem that when officials in the new democratic government of Poland first raised the idea, American diplomats in Warsaw angrily told them to forget about it.

Back then, most of those who did make predictions saw a dark future. The rise of virulent, angry nationalism was forecast by more than one expert. Others foresaw the rise of anti-Semitism and the growth of neo-Nazism; Germany was going to become “the Fourth Reich.” Many in the West protested, preemptively, against the “witch hunts” that might be conducted against former communists. Now that he is a revered symbol of freedom, nobody remembers that the Polish Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, was tapped as a potential right-wing demagogue, too.

Some truly awful things did happen: In Yugoslavia there was a bitter war. In Russia, revanchism has returned. Authoritarian dictators run several of the former Soviet republics. But the heart of Central Europe — Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Romania and Bulgaria — is peaceful and democratic. More than that: The inhabitants of Central Europe are healthier, more prosperous and more integrated with the rest of the continent than they have been for centuries.

This, then, is what I think was bothering me about the commemorations: Too many of them treat too much of the past two decades as a foregone conclusion, focusing on what didn’t happen rather than what did. Too many have taken the achievements for granted. Too many of us forget that there are few historical precedents for the past two decades. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” When Wordsworth wrote those words about the French Revolution, the post-revolutionary terror was a recent memory, the Napoleonic wars were still raging and his poem was an ironic comment on the naivete of youth. But we are now as far from the events of 1989 as Wordsworth was from 1789, and here in Central Europe there is no need for irony at all: Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

The Eitingnons

Mary-Kay Wilmers
Faber, 476pp, £20

Freudian analysis, Soviet communism and the garment industry: what do all of these things have in common? If your answer has something to do with central and east European Jews born at the end of the 19th century, you wouldn’t be far off. That generation formed an important part of the intellectual and mercantile elite of Europe, but not the political elite — which is partly why some of them wound up in the radical communist anti-elite instead.

In some families, various members dabbled in all of these worlds. The Eitingons were precisely that sort of family, albeit unusual in that they achieved real status in all of the professions open to them. Max Eitingon was an actual protégé of Freud, and can be seen in photographs peering out from behind the great man’s head. Motty Eitingon was a millionaire fur trader, not just rich but very, very rich, partly because of an exclusive import contract with the Soviet Union. Leonid Eitingon, meanwhile, was a notorious KGB assassin and killer. On the scene in Mexico when Trotsky was murdered, in Spain during the civil war, Leonid had a hand in some of the most notorious crimes of the 20th-century — before ending up in a Soviet prison himself.

As fate would have it, Mary-Kay Wilmers, the mild-mannered editor of the London Review of Books, is also an Eitingon on her mother’s side: Leonid, Motty and Max are all, one way or another, her great-uncles or cousins. Part of a later, luckier generation, she grew up in a world with ‘no wars, no revolutions, no civil unrest or military coups, no famines or tidal waves’. Clearly, she would have preferred something more exciting, and so delved into the lives of her relatives. Over the years, she hunted them down, piece by piece and story by story. This book — which describes both her search and what she found — is the result.

And Wilmers is very good at conjuring up the atmosphere of their world, with its periodic, earth-shattering events, its sudden runs of luck and its equally rapid falls from grace. She is particularly good at evoking the various double games her relatives were playing and the odd ways in which cash, ideas, and espionage were exchanged in Moscow, New York and Vienna in the 1920s. (‘You can do anything with the Bolsheviki if you have money’, someone says at one point). Even Max, the psychoanalyst, had a habit of going on suspiciously long vacations and leaving no traces. He has been retrospectively accused of spying for the Soviet Union, as has Motty. As for Leonid — that was his profession. 

Along with the well-evoked ambience, there are some marvellous stories here too, such as the one about Leonid’s mother denouncing him in the synagogue after hearing that he had rounded up the prosperous citizens of his native city, Gomel — many Jews among them — and shot them all. Later, however, when he went off to spy in China, she had no qualms about living in his presumably well-appointed Moscow flat. There are also some excellent contrasts: Motty in front of the House Committee on Un-American activity, and Motty enthusiastically promoting his new company, Bonmouton (which, as the name implies, involved lambskin). I also liked Wilmers’ encounters with her living Moscow relatives, two of whom she brought to London — not that they fully appreciated the Euston hotel she arranged for them:

If you spent a good part of your life fantasising about Western abundance it only made you more resentful of the moral and economic rationing to which you were likely to be subjected once you were within physical reach of Bond Street or the King’s Road.

I feel more ambivalent about this book than I would like to feel. This is possibly because the story of Wilmers’ elaborate hunt for information — in Moscow, Washington, Tel Aviv— is simply less interesting than the stories of Leonid, Motty and Max, and it seriously distracts from the plot. Still, The Eitingnons is an honest book. Wilmers isn’t trying to hide any flaw or moral errors — not her own, and not anybody else’s. It took a lifetime’s effort to pull these stories out of mountains of contradictory bits of evidence. And even so, she winds up admitting that she doesn’t know everything that happened. On discovering from a Swiss undertaker that her mother had faked the date of her birth, she concludes that ‘you’re not really an Eitingon without one last trick up your sleeve.’

And yet, partly by default and partly by design, Merkel is now the de facto leader of Europe. Over in Britain, Gordon Brown’s Labor Party is self-immolating. Over in France, President Sarkozy’s attention-deficit issues propel him from one project to the next, to the irritation of everybody. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is under endless investigation, and everyone else is too small or too preoccupied to compete. Even when the European Union chooses its new president later this year, he (and it will almost certainly be a he) will find it extremely difficult to do anything that contradicts the wishes of Merkel, who regularly tops lists of the world’s most powerful women.

In fact, the more I watch her, the more I am convinced that her femaleness holds the key to her success. Under her watch, Germany has continued to grow more powerful, more influential, and more dominant than ever before. Yet not only has no one noticed, they applaud and ask for more. If a bull-necked Helmut Kohl or a flashy Gerhard Schröder were running Germany, there would be rising anxiety and mumbling about the Fourth Reich—just as there was at the time of German reunification 20 years ago, when Kohl was still in charge. But Merkel provokes no jealousy or competitiveness among the alpha males who run large countries, and she inspires no fear among the citizens of smaller ones.

On the contrary, Germany even has good relations with most of its neighbors to the east, many of whom are inclined to distrust Germans as a matter of principle. This is partly because she is so willing to show up when asked and offer mild-mannered words of friendship and apologies for World War II. After which she returns home and works to make Germany stronger and more dominant in the region. And everyone smiles.

This is not to say that she has been an entirely successful chancellor or that she has fulfilled everyone’s expectations. Though she has kept Germany on a relatively even keel throughout the current recession—among other things by refusing to spend what the U.S. administration wanted her to spend—she hasn’t been nearly as forceful about economic reform as she once said she would be. Nor has she fulfilled her foreign-policy promise. At the moment, she is probably the only politician capable of uniting Europeans behind a common energy policy and a common Russia policy. So far, she hasn’t even tried.

Until now, Merkel’s various failings have often been attributed to the fact that she was in a “grand coalition,” one of those dysfunctional, only-in-Europe parliamentary governments, the result of a coalition between the socialist left and the Christian Democrat right—somewhat as if the White House were shared out evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Every tiny issue had to be negotiated between the two major parties, every step in foreign or domestic policy elaborately discussed. But as of October, her coalition partner is another center-right party, the Free Democrats, and she has no more excuses. Perhaps that is why she has suddenly started talking about cutting taxes, which in Germany counts as genuinely radical.

If, in the coming months, she wants a bigger, louder role outside Germany, she can probably have that too. Though I’m not sure that “big and loud” is quite her style. It’s equally possible that she will take over European foreign policy—but so quietly and so politely that no one will notice.

Just a week before, a parallel scene had unfolded across the Channel: In Paris, a soldier wounded in Afghanistan this summer died at a hospital. French Prime Minister François Fillon paid homage to the sergeant, speaking of “the courage of our soldiers, their devotion and their professionalism,” which he said merited the recognition of “the nation.” In the United States, meanwhile, CNN featured the story of an American mother who flew home with the body of her son, another soldier killed in Afghanistan this summer. He died in what was described as “the deadliest battle for U.S. troops since July 2008.”

When Polish, Dutch or German soldiers die, the stories are often much the same. Politicians, and frequently the national media as well, salute their heroism and express the thanks of the nation. Patriotic songs are played at the funerals, which are sometimes featured on the news. Usually a number is mentioned: the 221 British troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001, the roughly 850 Americans, 131 Canadians, 36 French soldiers, 34 Germans, 21 Dutch, 22 Italians, 26 Spaniards, 15 Poles and others.

Sometimes, a political outburst follows, too. In recent days Prime Minister Brown has been attacked by an opponent on the grounds that British soldiers are “fighting and dying for an Afghan government that is deeply corrupt.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy has just been forced to declare that while French soldiers will for the moment stay in Afghanistan, “not one single more” will be sent in the future. Rising summer casualties have led to an intensifying debate in the Netherlands. And of course the American argument rages on.

Only very rarely do the casualties of one country make it into the media, the political debates or the prime ministerial speeches of another country. There has been an international coalition operating in Afghanistan since 2001. NATO has been in charge of that coalition since 2003. Yet to read the British press, one would think the British are there almost alone, fighting a war in which they have no national interest. The same is true in France and in the Netherlands. American media outlets hardly note the participation of other countries, even though some — Britain and Canada — have endured casualties at a higher rate than that of the U.S. military, relative to the size of their contingents.

There is almost no sense anywhere that the war in Afghanistan is an international operation, or that the stakes and goals are international, or that the soldiers on the ground represent anything other than their own national flags and national armed forces: Most of the war’s European critics want to know why their boys are fighting “for the Americans,” not for NATO. Most of the American critics dismiss the European contribution as useless or ignore it altogether. As Jackson Diehl pointed out Monday, the central debate about future Afghanistan policy is taking place in Washington without any obvious contributions from anybody else. I’m not going to blame the U.S. administration alone for this: It’s not as if Europe has put forward a different plan — and there was certainly a moment, back at the beginning of this administration, when that would have been very welcome.

The fact is that the idea of “the West” has been fading for a long time on both sides of the Atlantic, as countless “whither-the-Alliance” seminars have been ritually observing for the past decade. But the consequences are now with us: NATO, though fighting its first war since its foundation, inspires nobody. The members of NATO feel no allegiance to the alliance, or to one another. On its home continent, NATO does precious little military contingency planning, preferring to hold summits. Above all, there is no recognizable alliance leader who is willing or able to engage in the national debates of the various member countries, to argue in favor of the Afghan mission or any other. President Obama could in theory do this, but I’m guessing the idea doesn’t fill him with inspiration.

None of this might matter much in Afghanistan, since the outcome of current deliberations may well be some version of the status quo. But the next time NATO is needed, I doubt whether it will be there at all.

Yet by far the most interesting thing about the Italian prime minister is this: Italians keep voting for him. The somewhat ragged coalition he leads — Il Popolo della Libertà, the People of Freedom — won a decisive general election victory in 2008 and trounced the opposition in European parliamentary elections in June 2009. Whether or not you agree with his daughter, who says he “will go down in the history books as the longest-serving and most loved leader in the history of the Italian republic,” you cannot argue with the fact that he has been the dominant force in Italian politics since he first became prime minister in 1994. But why?

There seem to be several answers, some of which are connected to the weird impasse that brought him to power in the first place. In the early 1990s, Italy’s political system unraveled following a series of judicial investigations that revealed profound corruption permeating the entire Italian political class. As a result, all of the major political parties and all of the leading political figures vanished overnight, sometimes literally: Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian socialist party for nearly 20 years, fled to Tunisia to escape prison and eventually died in exile.

Berlusconi stepped into the vacuum, promising to talk about issues no one else had dared touch — notably mass immigration from North Africa — and to deal with problems no one else could solve, including the convoluted tax laws and notorious bureaucracy. But in retrospect it is clear that Berlusconi (whose record on actually carrying out any of his reforms is pretty slim) has also brought the counterrevolution: He had made his career under the old system — as had many other people — and, once in power, he brought an end to the judicial purge. Italians, journalist Beppe Severgnini told me, “were afraid of their own bravery.” They were also afraid of chaos, and in a country that has had, on average, a different government every year for the past six decades, Berlusconi, a familiar figure for many years, has come to represent a kind of stability. The Italian left is disorganized, the center-right is paralyzed, and a lot of people prefer the devil they know.

Of course, Berlusconi also has at least one tool that none of the others have: popular television. He controls three mainstream channels and various digital channels because he owns them. He also in effect controls state television because he is the prime minister. There are newspapers, magazines and late-night talk shows that criticize him, but they don’t reach the same numbers of people: Much like his friend Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, he doesn’t try to exert influence over all of the media, just the media that reach most of the voters.

That may not determine the outcome of elections, but it sure helps. It has also made Italy the center of the largest movement for press freedom outside the former Soviet Union.

But in the end, even that dominance can’t explain all of his votes. There has to be something appealing about Berlusconi himself as well. Severgnini has called him a “mirror” of modern Italy, and one sees what he means: Nouveau riche (like almost everyone in the country) and not afraid to show it off (remember that Sardinian villa); a lover of women and soccer (he owns the team A.C. Milan); loyal to his friends (even protecting them from the law); and clearly enjoying himself at those parties and on his yacht, Berlusconi leads a kind of caricature version of the ideal Italian life. And precisely because he is a caricature, he gets away with things that other people can’t. One hears Italians regale one another with Berlusconi stories and then howl with laughter.

Besides, with Berlusconi as your prime minister, you don’t have to take yourself too seriously. You don’t have to trouble yourself with geopolitics or the state of the planet, or poverty and failed states. You can stay at home, remain unserious and argue about the latest legal scandal. And maybe that, too, is part of the Italian prime minister’s appeal.

Both had changed their minds because they were tired of hearing politicians endlessly urging them to do so. Some also felt that, during the worst recession in recent memory, they might need Europe’s help. Not many Irish seem to have been inspired by the high ideals and lofty aspirations of what is sometimes called “the European project”: Although a whopping two-thirds of Irish voters said yes to the treaty, there wasn’t much audible or visible enthusiasm. A few politicians in Ireland and across the continent hailed the referendum as a “great victory for Europe,” but no one believed them. And thus did Europe take another, limping step toward the creation of a unified foreign policy apparatus, complaining bitterly all the way.

Which is not a bad thing: If Europe is to have a single apparatus to make its foreign policy, it is important that nobody has too many illusions about it. When the referendum failed last year, I wrote that it was for the best, since “European” foreign policy has always been most successful when it represents the wishes of the national governments of at least two or three large countries plus several small ones, and has always been most disastrous when carried out by bureaucrats in Brussels who don’t represent anyone in particular. I hesitate to use the tainted expression “coalitions of the willing,” but actually they work very well, in diplomacy as well as in military conflicts.

Still, since I don’t feel like railing against the inevitable this week, and since I suspect that there really will be a European president and a European foreign minister in the near future, it’s worth contemplating what that might mean. Clearly, the real test of whether Europe’s most powerful countries are taking this new treaty seriously wasn’t the Irish referendum. The question of whether the recalcitrant Czech president will finally be browbeaten into signing the thing is irrelevant, too (and if he does, it will certainly not represent a “triumph of the European ideal,” whatever they say in Brussels).

But do watch closely, over the coming months, to see who is selected to fill these jobs, and, more important, how they are chosen. Traditionally, leaders of multilateral institutions are selected through a process of elimination: The person who is the least interesting, least opinionated and least influential gets the job, precisely because nobody else objects. Yet this is not how the president or prime minister of a country is selected: He gets the job because he has convinced the electorate that he is better than somebody else. I’m not saying that democracy always produces the most gifted leaders, but it does frequently produce politicians who are willing to argue loudly in favor of some things and against others. By contrast, people often wind up running multilateral institutions — and not just European ones — because they are not willing to argue about anything at all.

Here, then, is how to evaluate the Lisbon Treaty: If there really is a coalition of the willing in favor of a common European policy, then it will support the selection of forceful and opinionated leaders. Europe will then have, in Henry Kissinger’s immortal phrasing, a phone number to call when America (or Russia, or China) wants to talk. And if there is no such coalition? Then you won’t hear much about the president or the foreign minister of Europe again, so it doesn’t really matter.

At the same time there is another Iran — a completely different country, as it were. This is the Iran of the democracy movement, the Iran analyzed by human rights activists, the Iran covered by the sort of journalist who takes covert photographs with a cellphone. This is the Iran that made the news more than a week ago when protesters turned a government-controlled anti-Israel march into a spontaneous anti-government demonstration.

The people who care about this second Iran are rarely much interested in the first one, and vice versa. The two groups sometimes seem almost antagonistic. When demonstrations exploded across Iran after the June elections, for example, many well-meaning people urged the American president to distance himself from both the riots and the rioters, at least partly on the grounds that any involvement might affect his ability to deal with the nuclear issue. Indeed, that choice seemed to suit President Obama, a highly rational man who clearly dislikes fuss, mess and emotional upheaval. At that time, the White House made a choice: It would deal with the Iran described by security experts and leave the other Iran to sort itself out. Iranian human rights issues, Iranian democracy — these were domestic matters, the president’s advisers concluded. They repeated their offer to meet Iran’s leaders.

Nothing came of that offer, of course, because Iran is not two countries. And the people who make decisions about Iran’s nuclear program are the same people who order the arrests, tortures and murders of dissidents. Indeed, one can learn quite a lot about how these Iranian decision-makers will behave abroad by observing their behavior at home. It is, for example, unlikely that a regime that publicly and repeatedly describes its opponents as American stooges and British spies is going to change its tune and cooperate with America or Britain any time soon. At the same time, a regime under immense political pressure and losing its legitimacy is not in a good position to break any new diplomatic ground and is therefore unlikely to end its nuclear program any time soon.

If that sounds bleak, it doesn’t have to. For the observation that Iran is one country also suggests that the West has some foreign-policy tools in Iran that it has not yet seriously tried to use. Many, many security experts have pointed out again over the past several days that we don’t have many good options once we officially declare that Iran plans to build a nuclear bomb. There are sanctions, which probably won’t work; there are bombing raids, which might not hit all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, given how many appear to be hidden in mountains; and there is war, which would be a catastrophe.

Very few security experts point out that there is another option. What do Iran’s rulers truly fear? I’ll wager that the answer is not sanctions and that it might not be a bombing raid, either. An economic boycott can be circumvented, after all, with the help of Venezuela or maybe the Russian mafia, and an attack on Iranian soil might help the regime once again consolidate power. By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a terrifying prospect. So what if we told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice but to increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country, bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television and, above all, to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic? What if President Obama held up a photograph of Neda, the young girl murdered by Iranian police last summer, at his next news conference? What if he did that at every news conference? I bet that would unnerve President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, far more than the loss of some German machine tool imports or Dutch tomatoes.

I do realize that many will roll their eyes at these suggestions and argue, as the Obama administration did over the summer, that an aggressive focus on Iran’s massive human rights violations would allow the regime to cry “foreign meddling” and attack its opponents as spies. But so what? They do that already. Given the potential for disaster lurking behind almost every other policy option, we have nothing to lose by trying.

Let’s be even franker: President Obama’s decision to attend the 65th anniversary observance of the D-Day landings in France in June was mystifying. Why 65th? It’s not even a round number. He was not originally expected to come and, indeed, his presence meant that the guest list — the queen of England wasn’t even on it — had to be rapidly expanded at the last minute. It was nice for the veterans that he was there, particularly as he gave a terrific speech, lauding the ordinary men who, “At an hour of maximum danger, amid the bleakest of circumstances . . . found within themselves the ability to do something extraordinary.” But the political impact was limited, and no more troops for Afghanistan materialized then, either.

Let’s be franker still: It is impossible to escape the impression that, at least in its relations with Europe, the Obama administration is following directly in the footsteps of the Bush administration. For the past decade, the old continent has been treated as a great photo opportunity — the Obama campaign even used the Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop for a speech last summer — and as an excellent place to talk about stirring deeds of the past. But neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to consider Europe worthy of experienced ambassadors — Obama, like Bush, has sent a notable number of campaign donors — or of serious diplomacy.

As for Central Europe, it isn’t considered worthy of any diplomacy at all. Last week, the Czech prime minister was roused from his bed after midnight to be informed by the White House of a non-urgent decision many months in the making: the cancellation of the missile defense program. The Polish prime minister refused to take a similar call (and the foreign minister, to whom — full disclosure — I am married, was asleep). But this is nothing new, either: The Bush White House’s original decision to place the missile shield and radar in Central Europe was made before any Central Europeans were consulted — not at midnight and not at mid-day. The official letter from the Pentagon in 2007 arrived with a suggested “response”: The governments in Prague and Warsaw were supposed to sign on the dotted line and send it back.

In fact, missile defense was unpopular then and is unpopular now, all across Europe. Poles and Czechs favored the American bases only because they would bring American troops to their territory. But they favor American troops on their territory only because two successive American presidents have refused to invest in NATO’s presence in Central Europe and haven’t seemed much interested in doing anything else in Europe. This has led some to fear that Americans aren’t as committed to the basic precepts of the NATO Treaty — an attack on one member state is an attack on all — as they used to be. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has gone out of her way to deny that this is the case, but at a time when Russia and others are making heavy military investments, it is a widespread perception all the same.

All of which makes for a paradox: In Europe, President Obama is still the most popular American leader in recent memory. Yet he has failed to capitalize on this popularity, in part because he has failed to use it. His only message in Europe so far — “send more troops to Afghanistan” — has been clouded by his own ambivalence about the Afghan mission. He has not tried to convince anyone that he’s rethought Afghanistan, and he hasn’t come up with any other joint security tasks for the world’s largest and most powerful democracies. Just for starters, he could tell his European friends that he won’t appear in any more photographs with them unless they agree to talk about the contingency plans and NATO joint exercises that the alliance abandoned years ago.

Europeans are to blame, too. The beginning of a new administration was a chance for them to make a fresh start, to bring ideas to the White House instead of waiting for the White House to speak first. Poleaxed by recession and still unable to speak with anything resembling a unified voice, though, Europeans remain as placid and passive about their defense as always. Yes, it is possible that even the most popular U.S. president in living memory can’t make them sit up and pay attention to the potential threats of energy blackmail from Russia, of a nuclear Iran or of international terrorism in their own back yards. But it would be far more reassuring if he were at least trying.

Item Two: Pick up a copy of the September issue of GQ magazine. Buried deep inside is an article titled “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power,” by Scott Anderson. The article, based on extensive reporting, argues that Russian security services helped create a series of bomb explosions in Moscow in 2000 — explosions that were blamed on Chechen terrorists at the time. But you will not find this article in GQ’s Russian edition. As of this writing, you will not find this article on GQ’s Web site either: Conde Nast, the media company that owns GQ, has ordered its magazines and affiliates around the world to refrain from mentioning or promoting this article in any way.

Item Three: If your knowledge of written Chinese characters is up to it, type the word “Tiananmen” into Google.cn (www.google.cn). I do not know Chinese myself but am reliably informed that your search will retrieve little or no useful information on this subject, nor will it tell you much about Taiwan or Tibet or democracy. This is not an accident: In 2006, Google agreed to a modicum of censorship in China, in exchange for being allowed to operate there at all.

These three incidents are not identical. Yale Press refused to print the cartoons because the university fears retaliatory violence on its campus. Conde Nast refused to promote an article on the Russian secret service because it fears a loss of Russian advertisers. Google refuses to let its Chinese users search for “Tiananmen” and other taboo subjects because Google wants to compete against Chinese search engines for a share of the huge Chinese market. All three companies exhibit greatly varying degrees of remorse, too, from Conde Nast (none) to the Yale Press (a lot) to Google (ambivalent: Google founder Sergey Brin initially argued that the company would at least bring more information to China, if not complete information).

Nevertheless, the three stories lead to one conclusion: In different ways, the Russian government, the Chinese government and unnamed Islamic terrorists are now capable of placing de facto controls on American companies — something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. In a world that seems more dangerous and less profitable than it did in the past, either greed or fear proved stronger than these companies’ commitment to free speech.

By caving to pressure, they have not made the world a safer place, however, either for themselves or for anyone else. Google’s submission to Chinese censorship in 2006 has not prevented the Chinese government from continuing to harass the company, allegedly for distributing pornography. On the contrary, it may have encouraged China to attempt, quite recently, to force companies to place filters on all computers sold in the country. By the same token, Conde Nast’s climb-down will only encourage Russian companies — many of which are de facto state-owned — to exert pressure on their Western partners, making it harder for others to publish controversial material about Russia in the future. The fact that Yale’s press, one of the most innovative in the country, will not publish the Danish cartoons only makes it harder for others to publish them, too. [Declaration of interest: I am editing an anthology for Yale University Press and have long admired its commitment to opening Soviet archives.]

In fact, each time an American company caves to illiberal pressure, the atmosphere is worse for everyone else. Each alteration made in the name of placating an illiberal group or government makes that group or government stronger. What seems a small lapse of integrity now might well loom larger in the future. All of these companies are making it much harder for everyone else to continue speaking and publishing freely around the world.

There is no law or edict that can force these companies, or any American company, to abide by the principles of free speech abroad. But at least it is possible to embarrass them at home. Hence this column.

Given how different the political cultures of North America and Europe are sometimes alleged to be, the similarity of the arguments is striking. In the States, George Will has just pointed out that U.S. involvement in Afghanistan has lasted longer than its participation in World Wars I and II combined. In Germany, the defense minister caused an uproar by predicting that German troops might be in Afghanistan for another decade; opposition leaders immediately started calling for a much faster withdrawal. Faced with public disapproval, the Canadians have had to promise to withdraw troops by 2011. The Dutch are supposed to pull out in 2010. At a conference I attended in Amsterdam last weekend, a large audience cheered when a panelist denounced the war. Demands for a time frame — “two more years and then out” — can be heard almost everywhere.

Equally universal (and bipartisan) are complaints that the war’s aims are unclear or unrealistic. A British defense official resigned last week, saying he no longer believed the nation would accept the government’s justifications for the war, which have ranged from “fighting terrorists” to controlling heroin exports. Tom Friedman this week demanded to know “what it will cost, how much time it could take, what U.S. interests make it compelling.” Others grumble that we should be focused on the “real” problems, such as Pakistan, or on an “achievable” solution, whatever that may be.

Which is, if you think about, all rather strange, since the goals of the war have never been in doubt in any European or North American capital. “Winning” means we leave with a minimally acceptable government in place; “losing” means the Taliban takes over and al-Qaeda comes back. No one has ever pretended it would be easy. But this is a war that has never been properly explained to most of the populations fighting it. For years it has simply been the “good war,” as opposed to the “bad war” in Iraq, and no one felt the need to argue further.
The results of this silence are most visible in those European countries whose people have been conned into believing that their troops aren’t really fighting in Afghanistan but, rather, participating in an extensive armed charity operation. Germans, for example, were deeply disturbed to learn that a German commander called for the NATO airstrike that killed some 90 Afghans in Kunduz last week. This news surprised those Germans who thought their troops in Afghanistan were doing reconstruction work. Americans seemed shocked to discover that Marines were fighting this summer to retake previously safe areas, that the election was not going smoothly and that the government of President Hamid Karzai was corrupt. All of that has been clear for some time. But who was talking about it?

Following the lead of one of the region’s most clairvoyant experts, Ahmed Rashid, I would argue that the situation in Afghanistan is not yet hopeless. As I wrote on the eve of the election, there is still a definite Afghan majority that wants not only peace but also some version of democracy. The central government still has a modicum of legitimacy, though it may not last long. The plan to increase troop levels in the near future to give the Afghan army time to grow stronger in the long term is not naive, particularly if accompanied by sensible investments in roads and agriculture. But such a plan cannot be carried out without public support, and public support will not be forthcoming unless politicians agitate for it.

This, then, is the moment for Barack Obama to demonstrate that he knows how to persuade. One or two quick trips to Europe and another behind-the-scenes plea for “more troops” aren’t going to do it: Europeans may like Obama better than George W. Bush, but they don’t yet believe he is any more committed to Afghanistan than his predecessor was. Nor will Americans be convinced by a speech or two, however soaring the rhetoric or elegant the turns of phrase.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Obama needs to cajole and convince, to produce plans and evidence, to show he has gathered the best people and the most resources possible — to campaign, in other words, and campaign hard. If the health-care debate will determine his domestic fortunes, the outcome in Afghanistan will make or break his foreign policy. He has said many times that he supports the Afghan war in principle. Now we’ll see whether he supports it in practice.

None of these basic facts is in dispute. And two generations have passed since the war ended. Nevertheless, all of its signature events continue to be remembered, contested and commemorated in every anniversary year ending with 5 or 0. I remember joking with a friend on May 8, 1995, the 50th anniversary of the Nazi capitulation, that now, finally, we had reached the end of the anniversaries. But we had not. On Tuesday, the chancellor of Germany and the prime ministers of Russia, Poland, France, Britain and 20-odd other European countries will meet near Gdansk to launch the cycle of 70th anniversaries — with those of the 65th barely over. Why?

The answer cannot lie in the personal experiences of any of the statesmen involved, since none was alive at the time. It lies, rather, in the way that memories of the war have come to be central to the national memory and, therefore, to the contemporary politics of so many of the countries that fought in it.

Certainly everything about modern Germany is the way it is because of the war, from its devotion to the European Union and its pacifism to the architecture of its capital city. War guilt is built into the political system, and it only becomes controversial when some Germans seem to want to abandon it: The new wave of interest in the fate of Germans who fled or were expelled from Central Europe after the war, for example, or the popularity of books about Allied bombings of German cities, worries many in the region. Hence, Angela Merkel’s presence in Gdansk (and she was the first to confirm): No German chancellor wants any of Germany’s neighbors to doubt that Germany is still very sorry about 1939 (even if some are rather indifferent). And none wants Germany’s neighbors to fear German aggression today.

For Poles, this 70th anniversary has a different significance: It’s the first time this particular event has been commemorated by a Polish government that is firmly a member of both the European Union and NATO. The British and the French will be there for the same reason — Central Europe in general and Poland in particular now have a large number of votes in European institutions. By and large, they have to be taken more seriously than they used to be. Senior U.S. politicians presumably will be absent because they, by contrast, have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously and increasingly don’t mind demonstrating that fact. Generally speaking, the former Allies prefer to remember the bits of the war — D-Day, for example — that contribute to their memory of the 1945 Triumph of Democracy, preferring to forget that the war’s initial raison d’etre, the independence of Poland and the freedom of Central Europe, was not really achieved until 1989.

The Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, seems to have rather different reasons for attending. Last weekend, Russian state television ran a long documentary essentially arguing that Stalin was justified in ordering the 1939 invasion of Poland and the Baltic states — and in making a secret deal with Hitler — on the grounds that Poland itself was in a “secret alliance” with the Nazis. Putin will probably not defend this startling and ahistorical thesis himself — judging from an article he has written for the Polish media — though he may well try to “contextualize” the pact between Hitler and Stalin by comparing it to other diplomatic decisions. Lately other Russians have expressed similarly positive views of the events of 1939 in a well-coordinated attempt to justify the Hitler-Stalin pact. (That is, if they have any views: The majority of Russians, a recent poll shows, do not know that the Soviet Union invaded anybody that year.)

But from the perspective of the Russian ruling elite, such interpretations make sense: By praising Stalin’s aggression toward the Soviet Union’s neighbors 70 years ago, they help justify Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors today, at least in the eyes of the Russian public. Certainly they serve to make Russia’s Central European neighbors anxious — precisely the opposite of the effect Merkel hopes to achieve. Thus can the same event have multiple meanings, thus do Germans and Russians express their radically different feelings about their place in Europe — and thus do the anniversary celebrations carry on, every five years, without fail.

It was a stark message, but in one sense a very useful one. Sometimes, when one stares too long at Afghanistan, all one sees are tangled webs of complexity: hundreds of ethnic groups; dozens of languages; political clans pulled in different directions by corruption, drugs and billions of dollars of Western aid. As a result, even people who have been there a long time have trouble defining who, exactly, we are fighting against. The Taliban is sometimes described as an ideological force, sometimes as a loose ethnic coalition, sometimes as a band of mercenaries — men who fight because they don’t have anything else to do. But perhaps with this election, we can start to use a narrower definition: The Taliban is the organization that wants to blow up polling stations.

The threat is useful in another sense: It reminds us of what we are fighting for — by which I don’t simply mean “democracy.” We are not trying to create some kind of Jeffersonian idyll in the rugged heart of Central Asia, after all, but an Afghan government that is recognized as legitimate by the majority of Afghans — a government that can therefore prevent the country from turning back into a haven for terrorist training camps. If there were someone acceptable to all factions, we might presumably consider helping the Afghans restore the monarchy. For that matter, if the Afghans were willing to accept an appointed American puppet, we might, I suspect, consider that, too, at this point. But there isn’t, and they won’t. Which means that democratic elections — which the majority of Afghans support — are the only means of establishing any Afghan government’s legitimacy. It isn’t that we are setting the bar “too high” by holding elections in Afghanistan; it’s that we don’t have anything better to offer.

And that is why the Taliban is trying to scare Afghanistan’s voters. It won’t be able to stop the elections altogether, and it won’t be able to shut down all the polling stations. But that isn’t the Taliban’s intent: Its goal is to make the elections appear illegitimate, so that doubts about the president’s right to rule will haunt the winner throughout his term of office. If it can lower the turnout dramatically in the southern part of the country; if it can intimidate women and prevent them from voting; if it can cast a shadow over the fairness of the counting; above all, if it can convince Afghans that the election was inconclusive, it will have achieved a great deal.

Without doubt, whoever wins carries baggage. Hamid Karzai, the current president, has many detractors (who accuse him of corruption) and a few admirers (who think he is a conciliator). Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister, is a brilliant economist but somewhat remote from ordinary Afghans. Abdullah Abdullah, the former foreign minister, Ramazan Bashardost, the former planning minister, and all of the other 41 candidates have their pluses and minuses, but that isn’t the point: It doesn’t matter who wins. It matters how the victor wins and that the outcome is accepted by most Afghans.

The American and NATO troops who will guard polling stations this week are crucial to that outcome. So are the efforts of Radio Free Afghanistan, which co-sponsored the country’s first live, televised presidential debate this week. (The station director, Akbar Ayazi, described the process of persuading candidates to participate as so difficult that “I could take people to Mars probably by now.”)

All of that, however, pales next to the importance of what we do after the voting. Our policy — meaning, that of the Western world and the United Nations — must be to endorse and support whichever candidate emerges the legitimate winner, lending the victor further credibility and weakening further the Taliban leaders who opposed the election. We should do what we can (not much, I realize) to encourage Afghanistan’s neighbors — Iran, Russia, Pakistan — to do the same. And if, for any reason, a legitimate president does not emerge? Then the tangled webs will once again unfurl themselves, the clans and the tribes and the paid mercenaries will start choosing sides, the people who blow up polling stations will have gained credibility — and we will have to think hard about whether to stay in Afghanistan at all.

Yes, nothing happens in August — except, as we all know, when something really terrible happens in August. World War I began in August, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait began in August, al-Qaeda was preparing to bring down the World Trade Center in August. Nor is this an accident: If you want to surprise any American administration, do something nasty while the president is on vacation.

August, in other words, is the time when all of us should prepare our backup plans, chart our reversals of course, think through possible paradigm changes — which no one does, because they are all at Martha’s Vineyard or at least Ocean City. So for the interns who are manning the shop while everyone is out of town, here is a list of crises that are simmering on the back burner, one (or more!) of which could bubble over this month:

 – Iran. There are show trials going on right now in Tehran. The revolution is devouring its children.   Dozens of mid-level opposition leaders, many of them members of the former elite, are acting out an extraordinary piece of public theater, begging forgiveness and admitting impossible crimes. A former vice president of the Islamic Republic has asked a jury to give him the maximum punishment. French and British “spies” are in the dock as well, perhaps as a “test” of the West: Maybe the mullahs want to gauge how we might react to another, imminent wave of arrests, this time to include top-level opposition leaders such as Mir Hossein Mousavi, the “failed” presidential candidate, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president. And how will we react, exactly? Plan A was to talk to the Iranians in a reasonable tone of voice. What is Plan B?

– Russia and Georgia, again. It’s been a year since Russian tanks crossed Georgia’s borders and traveled within a few hours’ striking distance of the capital, Tbilisi. To mark the anniversary, South Ossetian “separatists” threw grenades into both Georgian and Russian border checkpoints while mysterious hackers, presumably Russian, temporarily shut down Twitter and Facebook all over the world, apparently in an effort to block a single Georgian blogger. Both Georgia and Russia are accusing one another of stoking a new conflict, which is exactly what happened before the last round of hostilities broke out. What if Russia invades again? Plan A was to press the “reset button” in relations with the Kremlin. What is Plan B?

 – Afghanistan. The surge is underway, and elections are scheduled for Aug. 20. Although the Taliban melted away into the hills when new waves of American troops poured into the southern provinces, they are taking their revenge in other ways, moving into the cities now as well as the previously peaceful north and western parts of the country. Some think the Taliban’s main goal, at the moment, is to disrupt the elections and therefore discredit whoever wins: Stability in Afghanistan requires a legitimate government, and everybody knows it. In Kandahar, three female parliamentary candidates have been forced out of their homes; another woman’s home was burned down because she dared to run for office. Insurgent attacks are increasing, not decreasing, nationwide and are expected to get worse just before and just after the voting. Plan A was to rout the Taliban, once and for all, with a single, massive infusion of troops, leave some kind of more or less acceptable government in place — and then go home. What is Plan B?

 – Iraq. I’m not going to belabor this one, since it’s been simmering on the back burner for years, and there’s no particular reason this August is any different from those past. But since I’ve already ruined your day on the beach by listing all of these dire scenarios, why not throw Iraq in the mix? After all, our current policy is to hand over power to Iraqi troops and go home. But what will we do in the event of a spectacular incident — say, the bombardment of one of the remaining American bases, or the kidnapping of American troops? Will we retake command? Go home anyway? Has anyone thought about it? I hope so.

At least, I hope someone was thinking about it before they went on vacation. Happy August.

As it happened, Bloom did have some ideas. He is a classically trained pianist who can mix a rap song, a composer whose work has been performed by the Israel Chamber Orchestra, Def Jam records and everything in between. Tinkering with musical instruments is the kind of thing he does for fun. Bloom went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, met the drummer and rigged up a drum set. Then he went back — again, and then again — until finally he founded a program, Musicorps, designed to teach music to disabled soldiers. It wasn’t just the appeal of “helping veterans” that drew Bloom in. It was also what he learned about what one of his proteges has memorably described as “the healing power of death metal.”

As that phrase perhaps conveys, Bloom’s project isn’t standard music therapy. On the contrary, after working with a few patients at Walter Reed, he realized that a severely injured person doesn’t need just a few guitar lessons or some soothing sounds but, rather, what he calls “real” music: serious, one-on-one, customized training; ongoing collaboration; and professional mentors who can give their co-musicians a sense of purpose, of moving forward. In pursuit of this idea, he persuaded donors to give him instruments, got Apple’s Steve Jobs to donate computers and set up what looks like a mini-recording studio in one of the residential houses at Walter Reed. Bloom started hanging around the house, ready to teach, practice or produce original music with the vets — or, if so required, to rewrite a piece of piano music so that a one-armed veteran could play it with his artificial hand.

The result? Well, there are halls of residence at Walter Reed where depressed young men sit in their rooms and stare at the walls. And then there is the music session I watched recently, during which a young soldier with an artificial leg, shrapnel wounds and no prior musical training practiced complex electric guitar riffs to the pace of an electronic drumbeat. A visiting guitarist kept setting that beat faster and faster, forcing the vet to play faster and faster, until all broke out in howls of laughter. Meanwhile, another soldier, who also has an artificial leg, tinkered with his rap lyrics. He hopes to get one of his songs, mixed and recorded at Walter Reed (”it’s about being blown up in Iraq”), played on the radio.

It was a cheerful scene, but it was more than that, too. Many of the soldiers at Walter Reed sustained some level of brain damage in the explosions that ripped off their arms or legs. Allen Brown, director of brain research and rehabilitation at the Mayo Clinic — and a Musicorps adviser — reckons that because the process of learning to play music requires using so many different parts of the brain, it may literally help the brain recover, to compensate for severe injury. Brown is working with Bloom, he told me, to devise a way to “clinically evaluate this process,” not least so that it can be repeated elsewhere. So far more than a dozen veterans have been helped by Musicorps; dozens more want to join. Thousands more could benefit. The word is spreading — the country singer John Rich visited last week — but nothing involving professional musicians can run on volunteer energy forever.

The project is extraordinary on its own — look on the Musicorps Web site  http://musicorps.net for more details — but it carries a constellation of implications. In the spring of 2007, Congress agonized over the fate of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, following a Washington Post investigation into shabby buildings and shabbier bureaucracy at the nation’s main military hospital. The fresh paint and better services that resulted from that scandal are only the beginning of what needs to be done.

It’s been a long, long time since there have been so many wounded Americans to care for, and neither our military nor our government are good at inventing customized recovery programs like Musicorps. Entrepreneurs like Bloom can come up with new solutions; the question is whether our health-care system, and our philanthropic organizations, have become too ossified to support them. In its narrow way, the fate of Bloom’s program will tell a lot about how well we are going to care for the thousands of men and women severely wounded in the wars of the past decade, men and women who will go on needing care for many decades to come.

“I don’t pay a lot of attention to what is said,” she told an interviewer before setting off on a trip to Asia, during which she seemed deliberately to court media attention and to care a lot about what was said. “I broke my elbow, not my larynx,” she pointed out. And then, defensively, “I have been deeply involved in the shaping and implementation of our foreign policy.”

 Hillary take off her burqa. Yes, it was memorable. And yes, it reflected just how hard it is to understand how, exactly, foreign policy gets made in this country. If only President Obama really were sitting in the White House, scheming with his inner circle, dreaming up diabolical plots, sending out detailed instructions to Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and the director of the CIA—issuing metaphorical burqas—then at least we’d all find things easier to analyze. But that’s how foreign policy gets made in North Korea, not the United States.
The fact is that the post of secretary of state is a fabulously ill-defined job. If she so desires, Clinton can engage the world in multiple ways. She can visit, she can write, and she can speak, knowing full well that everyone will hang onto her every word. She can hold town hall meetings in the countries she visits, and indeed she has done so. She has also done TV interviews, both in the United States and abroad. One presumes that she consults with the president on major speeches and key issues, but other than that, she sets her program.

Not only has she not been kept forcibly silent, in other words, but she possesses an extraordinary number of ways to set the agenda, and she has done so on several occasions. She created a small fuss in February by declaring that human rights debates with China aren’t very important, because “we already know what they are going to say.” Since then she’s gone out of her way to talk about human rights and its central importance to Americans. Last week in Asia, she caused a fuss by discussing a “defense umbrella” that the United States could theoretically create to protect the Middle East, in case Iran gets nuclear weapons. Since then, she—and others—have backpedaled: Leaving aside any implications for Iranian nuclear policy, her comments surely came as a surprise to other members of the administration who have been telling other people that missile defense programs are all on hold.

Buried on Page 21 of the same newspaper was another story. “Ill winds blow for clean energy” was the headline; the picture was of oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who has just decided to postpone, until further notice, an investment in a big Texas wind farm. Natural gas prices have fallen so low, it seems, that once-promising investments in alternative energy no longer make sense. Banks that once might have financed such large-scale investments are now unwilling to do so. And thus are business leaders also failing, once again, to halt climate change through technology and entrepreneurship.
Is taxation the answer to climate woes?Let me be clear: I do not doubt the reality of climate change. I have long accepted that human use of fossil fuels has caused it, and I agree that great efforts should be made to reduce carbon emissions, as well as our politically risky dependence on oil and gas. But I do doubt the wisdom of assuming that eight or 10 politicians will ever solve this problem during a meeting at an Italian conference center—or any conference center, for that matter. I also question whether even several hundred politicians—plus their scientific advisers, assorted environmentalists, and lobbyists—will solve this problem at the Copenhagen climate super summit due to be held in December. At that time, the original signatories of the Kyoto Protocol are supposed to renew their vows, and the U.S. delegation is supposed to bow its head and rejoin the club. If everyone can agree, new emissions targets will be set. And they will be just as unenforceable as the emissions targets in existence right now.

The truth is that carbon emissions will not be reduced by international bureaucrats, however well-meaning, sitting in a room and signing a piece of paper. Nor will they be reduced by public relations campaigns or by Oscar-winning documentaries. Above all, they will not be reduced by a complex treaty that neither the United Nations nor anyone else can possibly supervise, particularly not a treaty that effectively punishes those countries that abide by it and ignores everyone else. They can be reduced, however, by the efforts of entrepreneurs like Pickens. If he and others can find economically viable ways to produce clean energy, the problem will solve itself without the aid of a single international conference. To put it differently, the first solar-power billionaire will have many, many imitators.
American politicians who really care about climate change—I’m assuming this includes our president, as well as a congressional majority—should therefore skip the summits and ask themselves instead why the oil and gas prices that started rising a couple of years ago (creating a boom in alternative energy research) have once again dropped to an artificial low. Why artificial? Because the price of fossil fuels has never reflected their true cost, either environmental or political. It doesn’t reflect the cost of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. It doesn’t reflect the cost of treating asthma. And, of course, it doesn’t reflect the cost of rescuing bits of the Florida coast that will be submerged by rising sea levels. Raise the taxes on fossil fuels to reflect those costs, and Pickens’ project—along with many others—will once again be viable.

Almost anywhere else in the world, this sort of thing would be a matter of protocol. Generally speaking, the American head of state spends most of his time with other heads of state when traveling abroad. Exceptions are made for those countries whose heads of state are monarchs or some other figurehead, in which case our president pays a courtesy call and then hangs around with the chancellor or prime minister. If Obama were following that pattern in Russia, he would have spent most of his time with Putin.

Yes, Medvedev is the president and, yes, the Russian constitution gives the president the lion’s share of power. But ever since his profoundly undemocratic election last year (following his selection by Putin and an orchestrated parody of a campaign), it has been abundantly clear that the Russian president is not in charge. After the invasion of Georgia last August, it was Putin, not Medvedev, who appeared on television and negotiated behind the scenes. And during the Ukrainian gas crisis this winter it was Putin, not Medvedev, who spoke for Russia. Those who have watched the two men together generally come away impressed by Medvedev’s exceptional deference to the prime minister. Someone who took part in a meeting with them some months ago told me afterward that Putin did all the talking while Medvedev took notes.

In recent months, Medvedev has chosen to play a kind of “good cop” to Putin’s “bad cop,” giving an interview to the last remaining opposition newspaper; saying nice things about democracy and electoral reform; even smiling, on occasion, in photographs with foreign leaders. But none of this has resulted in profound changes in foreign policy, economic policy or human rights, leaving most observers inside and outside the country to assume that Medvedev is playing his part in an elaborate public relations campaign.

The decision to focus the American president’s visit on Medvedev instead of Putin could therefore be what British civil servants call “very brave,” not least because if you don’t talk to the person who’s really in charge, you can’t expect to get much done. As I understand it, this decision was made at least partly on pragmatic grounds: Meetings with Putin nowadays tend to turn into extended rants about Russia’s grievances (this week’s breakfast between Putin and Obama apparently being no exception), which doesn’t leave much time to pursue productive conversation. Putin wasn’t going to get into the subject of Russia’s recent military maneuvering on the Georgian border (thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks began exercising there at the end of June), and Medvedev can’t do anything about it anyway, so the Obama administration seems to have figured that there wasn’t much point in dealing with the issue. Instead, it dealt with less controversial subjects — such as nuclear arms reductions (which were mostly going to happen anyway) and rights for U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan to fly over Russian areas (nice, apparently, but not crucial) — that Medvedev might actually be able to sort out.

The upside of this policy is that it might make Medvedev more powerful, though this is a rather naive and forlorn hope. The downside is that Putin might take offense at being ignored. But given that Putin appears to be generally offended all the time, no matter how often or how sweetly U.S. presidents talk to him, this latter concern seems rather beside the point.

In any case, this sort of chilly calculation is preferable to the carefully staged walks in the woods, bear hugs and holiday outings that characterized the Clinton-Yeltsin and Bush-Putin relationships. It also beats the lame “let’s press the reset button with Russia” metaphor that the Obama administration was using in its first few months in office. It’s absolutely true that the worst problems were not resolved this week and that everything hard — from Georgia to missile defense to Iran — has been left aside until further notice. But at least no one is pretending otherwise.

Let’s take those comments one by one. Was the media reaction to Palin’s resignation “predictable”? It’s hard to see how it could have been: No one can react “predictably” to a total surprise, and in fact the initial comments were all over the place. What about “ironic”? As I say, most of the “reaction” involved wild speculation: Was she leaving politics for good? Was she launching her 2012 presidential campaign? Or could there be a looming scandal? No one knew, since Palin herself used vague and enigmatic phrases to justify her decision — “because it’s right,” because “sacrificing my title helps Alaska most,” because she has a “higher calling.” But what is that higher calling? If you don’t tell us, we have to guess — or make jokes about it.

Palin’s third charge — namely that the media are “detached from the lives of ordinary Americans” — is more serious, since it implies that she is “ordinary,” whereas people who formulate opinions about her are not. Given the numbers of people who work for the “media” nowadays, not all of whom can possibly be non-ordinary, and the fact that Sarah Palin’s life is pretty far from “ordinary,” this seems well off the mark. I do concede, however, that there is something to her fourth point, namely that the army of writers, broadcasters, bloggers and Twitterers who now constitute the opinion-making classes — and with whom she also communicates directly — has indulged heavily in the politics of personal destruction since her announcement Friday. Though here I should note that the reaction among “non-mainstream” commentators was far more personally destructive than that of the ever fewer, ever less influential and ever more badly paid mainstream professionals.

The mainstream Washington Post, for example, published a rather straightforward account of Palin’s resignation ["Gov. Palin Says She Will Quit, Citing Probes, Family Needs"], but reader comments on The Post’s Web site responding to yesterday’s follow-up ranged from nasty (”Palin is addicted to attention and displays all the signs of a hopeless addict” . . . “If she can’t handle the job of Alaskan Governor what makes anyone think she could handle anything more demanding”) to nastier (”good riddance to bad rubbish”) to unprintable in a family newspaper. There were reactions of enthusiastic support, too, but Palin does have a point: No ordinary political resignation would inspire the veritable tsunami of scorn that has poured into cyberspace the past few days.

But perhaps the explanation for this lies in the final part of one of Palin’s statements: that “Washington and the media” cannot understand her decision because “it’s about country.” In other words, for the past nine months, Palin has avoided difficult questions, preferring Runner’s World to another Katie Couric interview; she has dragged her family into the spotlight when it suited her (baby Trig was in Runner’s World, too) and grown angry when the spotlight became too strong; she has eschewed reason and logic (not to mention spelling and grammar), yet reacted in horror when her critics were unreasonable and illogical in response. Then, after all that, she smugly asserts the right to decide who is a patriot and who is not. It’s not about “country,” in other words, it’s about hypocrisy. And Sarah Palin is full of it.

The Bloody White Baron:The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia

 by James Palmer, Basic Books, 274 pp., $26.95

Like a contemporary reincarnation of Adela Quest, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, James Palmer was both attracted and repelled by his first encounter with the grotesque, grimacing, wooden gods of Inner Mongolia:

“I entered the shrine of a gruesome god, his sharp teeth grinning and his head festooned with skulls. I wasn’t certain who he was, since the Tibetan pantheon inherited by the Mongolians is replete with such figures. In a small dark room, with incense burning and other gargoyles looming, it seemed capable of an awful, twitching animation; I felt it might lick its lips at any moment. A rural Mongolian couple were kneeling on the floor before it, chanting and kowtowing; they’d brought oranges to feed the god and cash to bribe him. Even after the pilgrims had left, I didn’t want to stand in front of the thing, let alone examine it closely; it was the first time I’d had any concrete sense of the word “idol.” 

Although he was “raised Anglican, which takes most of the fear out of religion,” that temple—dim and shadowy, echoing with the sound of distant chanting—awakened Palmer’s religious awe. Outside the entrance, he bought some oranges and sticks of incense, and then returned. He placed the incense in front of the most horrifying god, and left the oranges and a five-yuan note at its feet. “Better safe than sorry, after all.”
This story, like most of the other personal stories in Palmer’s extraordinary book, is not here by accident: he uses it to give the reader some hint of what originally intrigued him, horrified him, and drew him to write about one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of Mongolia. It also helps explain the motives of the subject of his story, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a White Russian fanatic who briefly terrorized the region in the early 1920s:”Such a temple, with its close, fearful atmosphere, would surely have made a deep and lasting impression on Ungern.” He had not come to it a blank slate—he was a cruel and ruthless man long before his arrival in Mongolia—but the images of Mongolian Buddhism, filtered through the perspective of the equally murky world of Russian mysticism and its fascination with the “Orient,” had shaped his thinking and his actions.
Indeed the baron eventually came to regard himself not only as “the last khan of Mongolia” but as one of the gods himself. The story of his evolution—from failed, rejected, and ousted Russian nobleman to a member of the Mongolian pantheon—is the central drama of Palmer’s book. And drama is the right word here: though The Bloody White Baron is a work of history based on archives and memoirs, it also resembles, in its style and themes, the classic British Central Asian travelogues, from Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana and Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches to Colin Thubron’s The Silk Road —not to mention Rudyard Kipling’s fictional tales of the same region. Palmer shares those writers’ penchant for wry anecdote. More to the point, he shares their fascination with the extraordinary things that can happen when impressionable and easily unhinged Europeans encounter the ancient cultures of Central Asia.
As a young man, it has to be said, Freiherr Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg showed no sign of being remotely extraordinary. He was born in Graz, Austria, into a family descended from the Teutonic Knights, the German monastic order that conquered the Baltic coast in the Middle Ages. By the time of his birth in 1885, the Baltic German nobility were thoroughly integrated into the Russian aristocracy. Though he probably spoke German at home in Estonia, Ungern grew up fluent in Russian and French, and, like other Russian noblemen, used a patronymic.

A grim and violent child, he was expelled from his gymnasium in Reval (now Tallinn), then expelled from the Marine Academy in St. Petersburg. Later, he would be expelled from his regiment too—for dueling. Much of his career was spent on the outer fringes of empire, in obscure Central Asian garrisons where there was nothing to do except drink, drill, and race horses, in the almost exclusive company of other equally bored and drunken men. In such places, even the whorehouses could be several days’ ride away.
At an earlier point in Russian imperial history, Ungern might well have finished in deep obscurity, gambling his fortune away like other failed aristocrats, or drinking himself to death in the barracks. But he grew from sullen adolescence into sullen adulthood just as the cracks in the empire were beginning to show. He was deeply marked by the revolution of 1905, during which the Estonian peasants on his parents’ estates smashed windows, broke furniture, and burned down a number of manor houses. Ungern, disgusted by the behavior of people he disdained as inferiors, described them as feral animals, “rough, untutored, wild and constantly angry, hating everybody and everything without understanding why.” He could not accept that the peasants—beaten down by his family for centuries—might have any genuine grievances. On the contrary, he raved that they had been misled by Jews and revolutionaries, people who would bring “famine, destruction, the death of culture, of glory, of honour and of spirit” to holy mother Russia.

Like his rough contemporary Adolf Hitler, he was an outsider, a man from the border region of a great empire—a flaw for which he compensated by being more of a Russian chauvinist than many Muscovites.
Along with others in his generation—including, again, Hitler—Ungern was also profoundly marked by the experience of fighting in World War I a decade later. The brutality, the sudden lifting of social norms, the mechanized destruction—all of this suited him very well. General Petr Vrangel, later to become one of the most important White leaders during the Russian civil war, met Ungern at about this time and described him thus:
“War was his natural element. He was not an officer in the elementary sense, he knew nothing of system, turned up his nose at discipline, and was ignorant of the rudiments of decency and decorum…. He was dirty and dressed untidily, slept on the floor with his Cossacks and messed with them. When he was promoted to a civilized environment, his lack of outward refinement made him conspicuous.”
Fighting in East Prussia, the Carpathians, and on the almost forgotten Turkish-Russian front, he won himself a reputation for cruelty and a kind of unthinking bravery. At the time of the war’s end, the revolution’s beginning, and the tsar’s abdication, he was well prepared to continue fighting. It seems, in fact, that he was totally unsuited to any other kind of life.
Ungern was not unique among White officers, of course, either in his brutality or in his hatred of revolutionaries and Jews. Yet he was unique, or at least unusual, in his susceptibility to mysticism. Though raised a Lutheran, he was surrounded by Russian Orthodoxy, a far more mystical creed, from early childhood. As a young man, he was also exposed to the garbled theosophical theories of Madame Blavatsky, a charlatan who preached a made-up version of “Hinduism” and was wildly popular in the aristocratic salons of late tsarist Russia.
The end of the empire saw a flowering of interest in the occult, in prognostication, in predictions of the end of the world, and in communication with the spirits of the dead. This was also the era of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fake tract that purported to describe a vast Jewish conspiracy and plan for world domination. Nietzsche’s critique of Judeo-Christian decadence was in the air too, along with Spengler’s Decline of the West. Ungern, with his innate penchant for violence, his natural paranoia, and his fondness for conspiracy theory, was inspired by all of it.
What sealed his religious madness —or so Palmer believes—was his encounters with the Eastern mystics he met during his years in eastern Siberia. Though related to Tibetan Buddhism, Mongolian Buddhism was, at the time, a creed that revolved almost entirely around sacrifice and elaborate attempts to ingratiate angry, unmerciful gods. While Tibetan legends tell of Buddhist saints who had persuaded local demons and spirits to convert to their higher faith, the Mongolian version included local gods who had not yet converted and could not be worshiped, but had to be appeased. Their visages were terrible, not peaceful: “severed heads and flayed skins, desecrated corpses blossoming into gardens of blood, eyeballs dangling from sockets, bones poking from mangled limbs.”
A violent man since childhood, Ungern seems to have been pushed over the edge by these images—many of which he would eventually recreate in reality. He may also have been mesmerized by a local myth which told of a “white god” or an “Ivan from the North” who would come to save the Mongolians from their Chinese overlords—a Superman, in other words, come to rescue a decaying culture. At times, he seemed actually to believe himself to be the fulfillment of a prophecy (much like the hero of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King —played brilliantly by Sean Connery in the movie version—who comes to imagine himself as the genuine reincarnation of Alexander the Great). Ungern would eventually surround himself with a retinue of soothsayers, and would talk of creating a powerful new Central Asian kingdom—Mongol, Buriat, Tibetan, Uighur—that would stand up to the Bolsheviks, fight back against Western decadence, eliminate the Jews, and reconquer Europe in the name of ancient imperial values.
Whatever his psychological or mystical motivation, Ungern’s rise to power was accompanied by a vast wave of torture and murder that was sickeningly real. Effectively stranded by the Russian Revolution in 1917, he made his way to Siberia, where former tsarist army officers were planning to fight back against the newly powerful Red Army. Following a rift with the White generals who were leading the resistance—his politics were far too reactionary even for them—he traveled further east to Dauria, his former garrison town on the Manchurian border. There, he began recruiting not only Russian soldiers and Cossacks who had fled the Bolsheviks, but Mongol, Tibetan, and Buriat troops who had only recently been liberated from centuries of Chinese domination. Over the next two years he would make them into faithful followers, creating a “near-medieval polity” in the region, a kind of fortress kingdom in the steppe.
In the beginning, Ungern offered his followers many benefits, most notably the chance to rob the many travelers who had to pass through Dauria on their way east or west. He also personally took charge of murdering anyone passing through whom he thought might be either a Bolshevik or a Jew. As time went on, other White leaders came to use his outpost at Dauria as their execution camp, trusting in the baron to dispense with Communist prisoners in a rapid fashion. At one point, Ungern dumped so many dead bodies into a local river that the peasants complained it had become polluted, and the officers were forced to burn them instead.
But the height of Ungern’s madness was still to come. In the summer of 1920, probably under pressure from the Red Army, he took his men over the Mongolian border where they successfully invaded and occupied Urga—modern Ulan Bator—ridding the Mongols, finally, from the domination of China. At last, he could give free rein to his sadistic, imperialist, quasi-religious fantasies.
During his short reign as “khan” of Mongolia, Ungern freed the local Buddhist lama from Chinese house arrest, dressed himself in Mongol costume, and drove around the country in a Fiat, its horn madly honking. To maintain discipline, wrote one fellow officer, he invented a gruesome system of penalties, in which a hundred strokes with a bamboo lash counted as a “mild reminder,” and real punishment involved being beaten to death. He had a weird fixation with trees: he would force miscreants to remain at the top of them through freezing nights, until they fell and were shot or died of exposure. Alternatively, he would tie prisoners to tree trunks and burn them to death. He left men stranded in the middle of frozen rivers, to be eaten by wolves; he buried “Communists” alive, and crucified suspected traitors with rusty nails.
He also inspired the officers around him to compete with one another in devising other sorts of bizarre punishment.

Like the Nazis who, a generation later, would lose all sense of morality upon entering what they perceived to be the wild “East,” the Russians in Mongolia behaved notably worse than White soldiers and officers further west. Outside of “civilization,” in this land of bloody and vengeful gods, anything was possible. Later, the Russians would justify themselves by mumbling about the “madness of war” or referring vaguely to “the atmosphere” of the place. As for their leader, the man now known widely as the Bloody Baron, he justified his behavior, both at the time and afterward, in a quite straightforward manner: as the reincarnation of the god of war, he had full license to do anything he pleased.
Thankfully, Ungern’s reign was brief. A series of skirmishes with the Red Army devastated his troops; others, horrified by his bloody discipline, began slipping away into the desert. By the summer of 1921, his stronghold in Mongolia looked precarious, and he began contemplating a last, desperate escape, across the Gobi Desert into Tibet. His few remaining Russian officers were having none of it. They plotted an assassination attempt, which failed. But the following day, his Mongolian troops revolted too. According to legend, they abandoned him in the desert, just as he had abandoned so many others; in reality, they probably gave him up when they ran into a Red Army detachment.
In any case, he was captured, put on a train, and taken back to Russia to stand trial. His prosecutor was a Siberian Jew—which, Palmer writes, “must have given Ungern a certain resigned satisfaction.” Thoroughly unrepentant, he seemed to relish the chance to defend his radical views in public. When asked whether he often beat people, he replied, “not enough.” Sentenced to death, he was executed immediately after the trial. The Bolsheviks were taking no chances.
The Bloody White Baron is not, in the end, an uplifting tale. There is no happy ending, and no moral of the story either. Things didn’t even end well for Mongolia: occupied by the Red Army after Ungern’s fall, it became the first Soviet satellite state. Commissars forced the nomads to give up their herds, in the name of “collectivization.” Atheists smashed the temples. During World War II, the Japanese invaded; after Hiroshima, the Soviet Union reconquered the country in a mere two weeks. So horrific was life in Communist Mongolia, in fact, that the era of Baron Ungern’s rule still remains a positive memory for some. While carrying out his research for this book, Palmer encountered a Mongolian woman—the granddaughter of a prominent religious leader—whose family had continued to worship Ungern as a god until the 1970s.

Yet Ungern’s Mongolian adventure was more than a gruesome sideshow, and it deserves more than the footnote it has hitherto been granted in the histories of the twentieth century. In fact, when set against the background of other events in Europe and Asia at that time, Ungern’s story is remarkably mainstream. That he shared some of Hitler’s qualities and proclivities is certainly not coincidental: Nazi ideology emerged from a similarly bizarre mix of hocus-pocus, damaged pride, conspiracy theory, oversimplified interpretations of Nietszche, resentment, and anti-Semitism. Lenin’s Bolsheviks also shared Ungern’s contempt for the decadent West, for Jewish merchants, for traditional religion, and for the “backward” peasantry. European extremists of all kinds experienced World War I as a kind of apocalypse, an event that proved that Christian morality had failed, and that something totally new had to be put in its place. As a result, violence and radicalism were more common in 1920s and 1930s Europe than we often remember.

Ungern’s story also demonstrates, once again, the depth of the vacuum left by the collapse of traditional societies, not only in Europe but in Asia as well. Too often, we in the West remember only the European victims of communism and fascism, forgetting that the same ideologies, promoting the same kinds of mass violence, battered other parts of the world too. The genocidal impulses of Imperial Japan, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia were all reactions, in their way, to the rapid onset of modern trends and new military technologies, just like the genocidal impulses of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Baron Ungern’s Mongolia was simply a smaller incidence of a widespread phenomenon.
Even Ungern’s vision of a Central Asian khanate ruled by himself, a “white Ivan” from the north, was not, in the end, any more bizarre than Hitler’s vision of himself as the dictator of Europe. Stalin also dreamed of world domination, and Chairman Mao created a quasi-religious cult around himself too. In the end, the strangest aspect of the half-forgotten story of Ungern’s bloody reign over Mongolia is not how bizarre it will seem to future students of the twentieth century, but how eerily, horribly familiar.

Welcome to the kingdom of Morocco, a place which, in the light of the past two week’s events in Iran, merits a few minutes of reflection. Unlike Turkey, Morocco is not a secular state: The king claims direct descent from the prophet Mohammed. Nor does Morocco aspire to be European: Though French is still the language of business and higher education, the country is linguistically and culturally part of the Arabic-speaking world. But unlike most of its Arab neighbors, the country has over the past decade undergone a slow but profound transformation from traditional monarchy to constitutional monarchy, acquiring along the way real political parties, a relatively free press, new political leaders — the mayor of Marrakesh is a 33-year-old woman — and a set of family laws that strive to be compatible both with sharia and international conventions on human rights.

The result is not what anyone would call a liberal democratic paradise. One human rights activist painted for me a byzantine portrait of electoral corruption, involving “mediators” who “organize” votes on behalf of candidates. Others point out that if the demonstrators I saw at the parliament had been Islamic radicals or Western Saharan guerrilla leaders, rather than trade unionists, the police might not have been quite so blasé. Though women have legal rights, cultural restraints remain. A tiny fraction of the population reads newspapers, even fewer have Internet access, and somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the country is illiterate; as a result, election turnout is very low. Political posters feature symbols, not words.

Yet in at least one sense, Morocco truly stands out: Alone in the region, the Moroccan government has admitted to carrying out political crimes, and it has set up a  “Truth Commission” along South African and South American lines. Beginning in 2004, the commission investigated crimes, held televised hearings and paid compensation to some 23,000 victims and their families. The crimes in question — arbitrary arrests, “disappearances,” torture, executions — occurred during the reign of King Hassan II, who died in 1999. The Truth Commission is the creation of his son, King Mohammed VI. But although this acknowledgement of wrongdoing was made possible by a generational change, it did not require a regime change. There was no revolution, no violence. The king is still the king, and he still has his collection of antique cars.

The result of the Truth Commission’s work is a kind of social peace. Not everybody likes the monarchy, but even its opponents concede that the break with the past is real: If nothing else, people feel it’s safe to speak openly, safe to form civil rights groups, safe to criticize the electoral process, even safe to complain about the king. Saadia Belmir — a Moroccan judge and the first female Muslim member of the U.N. Committee on Torture — told me that despite obstacles, “we can now build the future on the basis of our good understanding of the past.” Controversially, perpetrators were allowed to fade into the background. But the crosscurrents of anger and revenge that might otherwise have marked the young king’s reign have subsided.

Is this a model for others? The Moroccans think so, and they have quietly “shared their experiences” with African and Middle Eastern neighbors. Belmir told me that an informal group had been working on setting up a Truth Commission in Togo; others hint at Jordan, though of course that’s unofficial. They all hasten to point out that their formula — slow transformation under the aegis of a (so far) popular king — doesn’t apply everywhere. One thinks wistfully of the shah of Iran and of what might have been.

Still, watching the extraordinary range of clothing and skin colors on the Moroccan streets, one takes away at least one thought: Transformation from authoritarianism to democracy is possible, even in an avowedly Islamic state, even with an ethnically mixed population, even with the presence of a jihadist fringe. More importantly: It is possible to acknowledge and discuss human rights violations in this culture, just as they can be discussed elsewhere. Just because much of the Arab world lacks the political will to change doesn’t mean that change is always and forever impossible.

I don’t know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution’s symbolic martyr, as some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran over the past week and the women’s rights movement that has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past several years.

In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the Bush administration. Still others want to call this a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook revolution,” as if zippy new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women’s groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.

Since 2006, the One Million Signatures Campaign has been circulating a petition, online and in print, that calls for an end to laws that discriminate against women and the enactment of laws that provide equal rights for women in marriage, equal rights to divorce, equal inheritance rights and equal testimony rights for men and women in court. Though based outside the country, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, founded by a pair of sisters, translates and publishes online fundamental human rights documents; it maintains an online database of the names of thousands of victims of the Islamic Republic as well. In the past decade, Iranian women have participated in student strikes as well as teachers’ strikes, and in organizations of Bahai, Christian and other religious groups whose members are deemed “heretics” by the regime.

Not Obama, not Bush and not Twitter, in other words, but years of work and effort lie behind the public display of defiance and, in particular, the number of women on the streets — and their presence matters. Their presence could strike the deepest blow against the regime. For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic Republic is its claim to divine inspiration: Its leadership is legitimate, as is its harsh repression of women, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of women, not just over the past weekend but over the past decade, has to weaken the Islamic Republic’s claim to invincibility, in Iran and across the Middle East. The regime’s political elite knows this well: It is no accident that the two main challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian presidential campaign promised to repeal some of the laws that discriminate against women, and it is no accident that the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, used his wife, a political scientist and former university chancellor, in his campaign appearances and posters.

The Iranian clerics know that women pose a profound threat to their authority, too: As the activist Ladan Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to brutally repress dissidents unless it feared them deeply. Nobody would have murdered a peaceful, unarmed young woman in blue jeans — unless her mere presence on the street presented a dire threat.

The regime may succeed. Violence usually succeeds, at least in the short term, in intimidating people. In the long term, however, the links, structures, organizations and groups set up by Iranian women, not to mention the photographs of the past week, will continue to gnaw away at the Iranian regime’s legitimacy — and we should take note. I cannot count how many times I’ve been told in recent years that “women’s issues” in the Islamic world are a secondary subject: Whether the discussion is of the Afghan constitution or the Saudi government, the standard line among most commentators has always been that other things — stability, security, oil — matter more. But regimes that repress the civil and human rights of half their population are inherently unstable. Sooner or later, there has to be a backlash. In Iran, we’re watching one unfold.

The result: A backlash, if not exactly against democracy, then against its promotion. In part because it intuitively disdains anything President Bush admired, in part because it doubts the efficacy, the Obama administration has deliberately stayed away from the whole idea of promoting democracy in general and elections in particular. In discussing Afghanistan, it initially spoke about “clear and attainable goals,” not democracy. In his Cairo speech, President Obama himself — speaking to an audience that included Egypt’s undemocratic leaders — prefaced his short comments on democracy with the enthusiasm-killing phrase, “I know there has been much controversy . . . .” Within the White House and State Department, I am reliably informed, jobs with “democracy promotion” in the title are not eagerly sought after.

Which leaves us, however, with the peculiar conundrum of Iran. For Iran is a classic example of managed democracy — if it can be called a democracy at all. Iranians are not guaranteed freedom of speech or of the press. Political parties are heavily restricted. A small group of unelected clerics holds a monopoly on real political power, supervising elections as well as candidates. The latter can be rejected for belonging to the wrong religious group, for “indecent acts” or simply for failing to participate in Friday prayers with sufficient enthusiasm. Over-enthusiastic campaigners can be beaten up by police patrols, and in recent weeks some were. The central purpose of elections is not to choose a president — that is generally done in advance — but to reinforce the clerics’ candidate’s dubious legitimacy. For that reason, Iranian dissidents, both in and outside the country, usually call upon their supporters to boycott elections altogether.

And yet — the elections Iran held Friday also proved just how powerful, and how ultimately uncontrollable, even the most heavily managed elections can be. Iran’s elections might not have been free or fair but they did, as an Iranian friend of mine put it, expose a “serious factional divide that could not be dealt with behind the closed doors of the ruling oligarchy.” They might not have presented society with two radically different candidates (Mir Housein Mousavi, the “reformer” in this election, presided over the mass murder of political prisoners when he was prime minister in the 1980s), but merely allowing the public the chance to vote against the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, inspired the largest turnout anyone can remember. The press might not have been able to report everything that happened, but Iranians did attend electoral events in unprecedented numbers, hissing and cheering. The votes might not have been counted correctly, but the whiff of fraud has sparked the biggest wave of demonstrations Iranians have seen for a decade.

Yes, this was a highly managed, deeply illiberal election, and it didn’t even change the composition of the Iranian government: After all that, Ahmadinejad is still president. But the voting process did open a crack where none had existed, the possibility of choice did inspire what had seemed a passive society to protest, the campaign rallies allowed people to shout political slogans in front of the police without the police reacting. One could argue — and many Iranians do — that the poll was farcical. But Iran goes to show that a bad election is better than none at all.

And what next? As I write, the Internet rumor mill says that Mousavi is under arrest. By next week, he may be president — or he may be in prison. But that, too, is the point: The impact of democracy — even halfway, tentative, incomplete democracy — is unpredictable. Which is of course why dictators try to control it in the first place.

On the contrary: In last weekend’s European parliamentary elections, capitalism triumphed, at least in its mushy European form. Admittedly, these European polls are a peculiar species of election. Far fewer people vote in them than vote in national elections, and those who do cast ballots are far vaguer about what their deputies, once elected to the European legislature, actually do. The European parliament’s gradual accumulation of real power seems to have had no effect whatsoever on its popular image, which is still that of a do-nothing institution composed of clapped-out politicians who cost everybody a fortune in airplane tickets. As a result, fringe parties, including the so-called far right, always attract protest voters and do unusually well.

Nevertheless, European parliamentary elections provide the only cross-continental simultaneous political snapshot currently available. While national elections take place at different times and according to different rules, these most recent (and largest ever) European elections took place over a four-day period, according to the same rules, in 27 countries. This time around they told, with some exceptions, an unusually consistent story.

In France, Germany, Italy and Poland — four of Europe’s six largest countries — center-right governments got unexpectedly enthusiastic endorsements. In the two other large countries, Britain and Spain, left-wing ruling parties got hammered, as did socialists in Hungary, Austria and elsewhere. In some places the results were stark indeed: In London last weekend, I could hardly walk down the street without being assaulted by screaming newspaper headlines, all declaring the Labor government of Gordon Brown weak, corrupt, tired, arrogant and, yes, very unpopular. In some constituencies, European candidates of the ruling Labor Party finished behind fringe parties that normally don’t get noticed at all. So rapidly are British ministers resigning from the cabinet that it’s hard to keep track of them (four in the past week — I think).

But how is it possible that the European right is doing so well — and so much better than its American counterparts — during what is widely described as a crisis of global capitalism? At least in part, the Europeans are winning because their leaders have the courage of their economic convictions. While the European continental welfare states have certainly kicked into high gear over the past six months, there are few equivalents of either George W. Bush’s budget deficits or Barack Obama’s spending binge. And where there have been — in Britain, for example — the high spending has hardly bought popularity. The theoretical version of this Euro-American policy gap is the recent public spat between the economic historian Niall Ferguson and the economist Paul Krugman, both of whom are at least as well known for their newspaper polemics as for their academic writing. Very crudely, Ferguson and the German government think massive deficits and government borrowing will lead to inflation and ultimately the collapse of the currency. Equally crudely, Krugman and the American administration think he’s wrong.

For the record, Ferguson is, at least by origin, a British Tory. For the record, there aren’t any American Republican polemicists making the same arguments in quite as public a way. With a few exceptions, the American center-right’s loudest and most articulate voices have been focused almost exclusively on national security for the better part of the past decade. Lip service was paid to “small government” and “reduced spending” while successive Republican-led Congresses, hand in hand with a Republican White House, enlarged government and spent like crazy. How can they now criticize Obama’s possibly lethal budget deficits when their own were so vast, so recently?

None of this is to say that any of Europe’s conservatives would necessarily go down well in the United States (picture Silvio Berlusconi, paparazzi and teenage mistresses in tow, campaigning in Mississippi), and it’s also true that they don’t necessarily have much in common: Allegedly, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy can hardly stand to be in the same room. But if nothing else, the success of the European center-right during the current crisis proves that there is something to their political formula. They are fiscally conservative. They are, if not socially liberal, then at least socially centrist. They haven’t been swayed by the fashion for big spending. They are trying to keep some semblance of budget sanity. And, at least at the moment, they win elections.

China is the one country that actually has influence over North Korea. Not only is China the only country to maintain frequent diplomatic and security contacts with North Korea, but China could, if it wanted to, topple the North Korean regime tomorrow. China could cut off North Korea’s oil. China could shut the border to trade. Or China could take the opposite tactic and open the border: Refugees would flee and the regime would crumble, much as East Germany did 20 years ago this summer. To put it differently, China has more influence over the North Korean regime than all of the other U.N. Security Council members put together, but it does not use this influence to stop Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Instead, it has maintained trade relations, kept the oil flowing, built up its border fences and paid lip service to the international efforts to block the North Korean nuclear program (the Chinese claimed to have learned about the recent nuclear test an hour in advance, which no one believes), all while hunkering down to watch what happens.

China has ambitions to replace the United States as the dominant power in East Asia. For proof, look no further than the money the Chinese have spent lately on expanding their navy, which now includes at least 70 submarines, 10 of which are thought to be nuclear. By contrast, the United States has between 70 and 80 submarines deployed at any given moment, but they patrol the whole world, not just Asian waters. The Chinese are also now designing aircraft carriers and reportedly now have long-range, anti-ship ballistic missiles — the better to destroy our aircraft carriers — as well.

China knows the rest of Asia is watching this test of the Obama administration. And if, as seems likely, the Obama administration does not come up with a way to stop North Korea’s nuclear program, what conclusions will the South Koreans draw — not to mention the Japanese? Or the Taiwanese? Might some of them not conclude that the American security umbrella no longer seems quite as wide and strong as it used to? Might they not conclude that they are better off under Chinese protection? This would, of course, be a somewhat far-fetched and risky game, if the Chinese were indeed playing it: After all, the Japanese are not known to be enthusiastic about the prospect of Chinese domination, and the Taiwanese are not known to be interested in reunification with the mainland. Rather than falling in line, the Japanese might instead conclude that they need their own nuclear deterrent. The South Koreans might follow, the Taiwanese might add to their own mighty naval fleet, and then a deadly Asian arms race would be underway.

Despite the risks, though, there are good reasons for the Chinese to prod Kim Jong Il to keep those missiles coming. By permitting North Korea to rattle its sabers, the Chinese can monitor President Obama’s reaction to a military threat — without having to deploy a threat themselves. They can see how serious the new American administration is about controlling the spread of nuclear weapons — without having to risk sanctions or international condemnation of their own nuclear industry. They can distract and disturb the new administration — without harming Chinese American economic relations, which are crucial to their own regime’s stability. And if the game goes badly, they can call it off altogether. North Korea is a puppet state, and the Chinese are the puppeteers. They could end this farce tomorrow. If they haven’t done so yet, there must be a reason.

Poland: A History

by Adam Zamoyski

Harper Press, 2009, 426pp.

A couple of years ago, Adam Zamoyski — who is, yes, a friend — told me that he was revising The Polish Way, a history of Poland he had published back in 1987. At first he had thought merely to shorten a few over-long paragraphs and check facts. But as he re-read his work, he decided it needed more dramatic changes. In 1987, Poland had not been a sovereign country: Polish domestic and foreign politics were still directly controlled by the Soviet Union, which itself was still very much in existence. That meant, he explained, that he was writing the history of a country which had failed. His task, as a historian, had been to explain that failure.

Twenty years later, Poland is not only a sovereign country, but one which is growing, economically and politically, with astonishing speed — so much so that one Polish acquaintance describes the last decade as ‘the most successful in three centuries.’ Mistakes have been made since 1989, when Poland held its first democratic elections since the second world war. But the country is a functioning democracy, where power changes hands peacefully, and has a functioning capitalist economy, with some of the highest growth rates in Europe — even now. This success requires some explanations. In Poland: A History, Zamoyski has tried to provide them, rethinking assumptions that he and others made in the past, and along the way retelling the whole story of Poland, from the Slavic tribes of the early Middle Ages, up to the most recent elections in 2007.

Not everything looks different. But, for example, the 19th century does. Back when Poland was still in mourning for its independence, the years between Poland’s partition by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795 and its regaining of statehood in 1918 were invariably described as a series of rebellions against the occupying powers. And it is true that there were two major rebellions, in 1830 and 1863, as well as many minor ones, not to mention a whole series of anti-Russian and anti-German plots and conspiracies.

But the 19th century was also the birth of a political quasi-philosophy called ‘positivism,’ whose adherents in effect instructed Poles to make the most of a bad situation, to build what national institutions and enterprises they could, and to compete, economically, with the partitioning powers. Later nationalists sometimes looked askance at their efforts, since to do anything positive during a foreign occupation required some degree of collaboration with the occupiers, and some of the great achievers of the period were considered semi-traitors. Yet the achievements of the 19th century were impressive. By the 1870s, Polish merchants and industrialists successfully dominated the economy of the Prussian partition, having pushed the Germans to the sidelines, while in Galicia, the Austrian partition, they created self-governing institutions and ruled themselves.

All of this turned out to matter, after 1918, since it helps to explain both why Poland was able to reconstitute itself after the first world war — and even why it is relatively successful now. The fact is that despite the years of occupation, disastrous rebellions, the disenfranchisement of the Polish aristocracy and the deportation of Polish leaders to Siberia, a reservoir of expertise and pragmatism remained. As Zamoyski demonstrates, this is easier to see now, in 2009, than it was in 1987, when the story of Poland still appeared to have ended badly

And there are other changes. Now that they too are independent nations, it is also possible to write about Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Belarussians, Poland’s neighbours to the East, with greater clarity. Zamoyski grapples head-on with the question of ‘who is a Pole,’ not an easy one to answer throughout much of the country’s history, when ‘Poles’ might just as well have spoken Ukrainian and worshipped in an Orthodox church. It is easy to forget that the identification of Poland with Catholicism is relatively recent: indeed it is only possible because Hitler and Stalin together robbed the country, once a multi-ethnic, multi- lingual, multi-national polity, of its eastern territories and, of course, of its Jews.

Parts of this book remain the same — the Middle Ages, for example — but Poland: A History is nevertheless a different animal to its predecessor. It is some 30 per cent shorter, jumps crisply from one era to the next without lingering, and, Zamoyski brags, ‘is not in any sense meant to break new ground.’ The point of this re-writing exercise was, after all, not to do more research, but to re-think the known facts, now that some of the complexes and resentments accrued during long years of Soviet occupation have been shaken off.

The result is fresh, different, and brilliantly readable, a book which feels something like an extensive, chatty letter from an old friend. It is the perfect introduction for those who know nothing about the country, yet will also provide some positive food for thought to those who imagined they knew it all too well.

Which isn’t bad compared with the MP who submitted a claim for interest payments on a mortgage he had already repaid, or those who kept swapping properties in order to avoid taxes. Outrage is genuine. The Daily Telegraph — the newspaper that obtained the expense receipts (and isn’t saying how; most assume the paper bought them) is calling for early elections. So is just about everybody else, except, naturally, the ruling Labor Party.

There is a degree of unfairness about this scandal. With the exception of a handful of real cheaters and tax-dodgers, most politicians were operating within a legal system. According to parliamentary rules, they were allowed to claim for the expenses of maintaining a second home, either in London or in their districts. But only a degree: After all, the reimbursement system was set up and run by the politicians themselves, under the aegis of soon-to-be-retired, yet apparently unrepentant Michael Martin, the first speaker of the House of Commons to be forced out of office since 1695.

Besides, while some MPs charged for the leaky pipes under their tennis courts, others kept their expenses to a bare minimum. And in that fact lies an interesting psychological question: Why did members of the world’s oldest legislative body feel they were entitled to ask the taxpayers to pay for their scatter cushions and their swimming pool maintenance? Though some retained a sense of propriety, most did not. Why not? The explanation seems to me to lie in the declining prestige of the House of Commons and the rise of the outsize-bonus culture in the London financial district down the road.

Both have their origins in the 1980s, when a combination of Thatcherite reforms, the adoption of English as the universal business language, and geography — Britain is in a time zone about halfway between New York and Tokyo — made London the financial capital of Europe. Throughout the decade, everyone in Parliament watched their friends from college get not just rich but very, very rich, while their own salaries remained stagnant. As a result, British MPs came down with a bad case of what columnist David Brooks has called “Status- Income Disequilibrium,” a disease whose sufferers hold badly paying but prestigious jobs, positions that require them to “lunch on an expense account at The Palm, but dine at home on macaroni” — (or, in British terms, “go home every night to beans on toast”).

The problem worsened as the importance of Parliament declined. With the rise of 24-hour television, the importance of substantive debate declined, too. MPs were not only relatively poor but also relatively insignificant. They earned less, and they mattered less, not merely less than bankers but less than journalists and less than their political predecessors. This parliamentary crisis of confidence seemed to climax in the “cash-for-questions” scandal in 1994, when a few conservative MPs were shown to have taken money — in cash, in brown paper bags — from businessmen who wanted them to make official inquiries on their behalf.

Back then, a solution seemed imminent: Crusading against parliamentary “sleaze,” Tony Blair’s Labor Party cruised to victory in 1997, ending 18 years of Conservative rule. This time after 12 years of Labor rule, there are no white knights. All three major British political parties — Conservative, Labor, Liberal Democrat — have been damaged by the expenses scandal, which is unfolding just as Britain enters a deep recession (itself partly the result of the outsize bonus culture). As a result, the next elections may well bring to into office a gaggle of political independents or representatives of the xenophobic British National Party.

Or they may simply reveal new depths of voter apathy. If the declining prestige of Parliament is a part of the source of this scandal, a far more dramatic decline in the prestige of Parliament will be the result. That feeling, so palpable in London — and in New York, and in Washington — that “I’m clever, I work hard, so I deserve to be richer, even at someone else’s expense” helped bring down Lehman Brothers, helped create the Madoff pyramid and has now damaged the ancient House of Commons. Which venerable institution is going to fall next?

Two weeks ago, there was almost nothing else to read about and nothing else to look at either, what with all the photographs of uniformed Mexican police officers, guns and face masks, not to mention the snarling pigs. But as of Sunday, there were 2,532 confirmed cases of swine flu in the United States, mostly mild, and only three deaths — all people with other illnesses. A handful of cases has shown up elsewhere around the world, but outside of Mexico just two, as of this writing, have been lethal. Given that some 200,000 Americans are hospitalized each year for the ordinary flu, and some 36,000 die from complications — up to 20 percent of Americans contract flu annually — these numbers do seem rather low in the context of phrases such as “lethal pandemic” and “deadly virus.”

No wonder the anti-panic backlash started rather quickly, fast on the heels of the panic itself. Already last week, a rather senior former European health official was (privately) declaring the whole thing a crock of nonsense, cooked up by the World Health Organization as a fundraising gimmick. Someone else told me, as if with absolute certainty, that the publicity was in fact a plot by the pharmaceutical companies: Look no further than the massive surge in demand for Tamiflu and Relenza. Face masks never did catch on in most places, so the rumors of a conspiracy by the companies that make them never caught on either. Instead, we’ll surely conclude that the whole thing was a plot by the media, designed to increase Web viewership on sites that featured herds of stampeding pigs.

To which the correct response should be: So what? Before “that panic was ridiculous” becomes the conventional wisdom, let’s be frank about it: Where infectious diseases are concerned, panic is good. Panic is what we want. Without panic, nothing happens. As many as 500 million people will get malaria this year, and more than a million of them will die, mostly in very poor countries. Yet there is no fear of malaria in the rich world, there is no hysterical media coverage, and thus there is still no satisfactory prevention or cure.

By contrast, the design of preventive measures and cures for swine flu are already, after merely two weeks of hyper-attention, well on track. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not only developed a test kit to detect the presence of the H1N1 virus that causes the flu but have already shipped this test kit to all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and numerous other countries. The genetic sequence of the virus has been analyzed and determined, more than once. A vaccine will probably be ready in time for flu season next fall. Boxes of Tamiflu have been transported to guarded warehouses around the globe, where they await distribution.

Should the panic-mongers turn out not to have been crying wolf, and should the virus worsen in the coming weeks, there will still be plenty of potential obstacles to effective prevention. The methods used to make flu vaccine are ridiculously old-fashioned (they involve chicken eggs), and in a truly lethal epidemic, we would certainly run out. No one has really worked out the morality of that Tamiflu distribution either: If the United States and Europe distribute their stockpiles to their citizens, then no one in the developing world will get any. Our hospitals aren’t prepared for massive numbers of flu victims, and our health-care system would probably crack under the strain. Would doctors accept uninsured patients who have a lethal flu virus? Possibly not.

Yes, if the H1N1 virus mutates into something really dangerous, we’ll all be in trouble. But not in as much trouble as we would be if that possibly ludicrous but nevertheless useful moment of mass hysteria that brought us such terrific headlines over the past couple of weeks had never happened.

Yes, Starbucks has come to Warsaw at last. The brand might be out of fashion in the States; the company might be losing money. Its shares might be worth a third of what they were at their peak in 2006; it might have diluted its once-exclusive image through massive overexpansion. (After drinking the watery brew served by a sullen barista in a Starbucks at the Salt Lake City airport recently, I mentally cheered the chain’s decision to shut down 600 U.S. shops.) But here in Central Europe, the arrival of Starbucks has been greeted with undiluted enthusiasm — so much enthusiasm, in fact, that the phenomenon seems to require further explanation.

This is particularly true since Starbucks knock-offs have been available in most Polish cities for the better part of a decade. Older cafes, the kind where you drink coffee out of china cups, have been available for the better part of three centuries. Looking at that line of 20-somethings, all waiting patiently for the chance to pay twice as much for a cup of coffee as they would pay across the street, one had to wonder what was up.

The answer lies partly in the magic of brand names and status symbols but also in the psychology of the post-communist world. The arrival of McDonald’s in Warsaw in the early 1990s signified for many the arrival of capitalism in Poland. The arrival of Starbucks in Warsaw — as in Prague (a few months ago) and possibly Budapest (where it’s been promised for years) — signifies the entry of Central Europe not just into the capitalist world but also into the world of 21st-century-style prosperity.

It signifies, also, a very real set of economic and psychological changes. After half a century of being told by their communist governments that the future lay in factory jobs and mining (it didn’t), upwardly mobile Poles now aspire to different sorts of jobs: in fashion, courtrooms and computers — jobs that require hardworking employees to drink their coffee on the run; jobs that also leave them with enough leisure to hang out at Starbucks, doing deals. Many already have such jobs. A couple of summers ago, I ran into an American who was doing some scouting for Starbucks on a Polish beach. He was trawling Baltic summer resorts, trying to work out whether there were enough people around willing to pay $3 for a cup of coffee. Obviously, someone has decided that there are.

But even if you haven’t quite attained that financial latitude, you can pretend to have done so at Starbucks. If you are still a student, or if you are just starting out in the stock market or fashion, you might not yet have the money to buy designer shoes or a new car. You are therefore more likely to indulge in small luxuries, such as overpriced coffee. (A Hungarian friend reports that business is booming in Budapest beauty salons, for the same reason.)

By the same token, when you don’t have an especially nice place to live — if you live, for instance, in a dormitory — you might well prefer to spend your afternoons in an attractive coffeehouse. And this is where the Starbucks ethos meshes so well with the cultural history of Central Europe: At the height of their popularity, the coffeehouses of 19th-century Vienna, Warsaw and Budapest were famously frequented by people who didn’t live in particularly lush apartments and thus preferred to spend their time in rooms decorated like the salons of the upper classes. Hence the association of coffeehouses with poets, literati, revolutionaries and other assorted riffraff. Hence the attraction for students today. As for the stockbrokers, they are simply back where they belong: Many of the world’s stock exchanges got their start in coffeehouses, since merchants and traders were once outsiders, too.

In fact, with the opening of a Warsaw Starbucks, one might even say we have reached the end of a cycle. Born in Central Europe, where it embodied an ideal of luxury and a certain set of aspirations; landing in Seattle, where it came to embody a different kind of luxury and a different set of aspirations; now reimported to Central Europe, aesthetically transformed but essentially fulfilling the same function, the coffeehouse appears to have come full circle, at last.

Just about anywhere in the world, in other words, I would have caught a whiff of swine flu panic. I would also have been told what the World Health Organization is doing about it. The Geneva-based WHO is the organization we all turn to at times like this, and rightly so: With more than 60 years’ experience, and real achievements under its belt — it led the successful campaign to eliminate smallpox in the 1970s — the WHO may well be the only international organization that we cannot live without. When infectious diseases are spread rapidly across borders, WHO is expected to coordinate the scientific response of national public health officials, from France to Malaysia, as well as the global information campaign needed to explain it. No national government can do the same.

Fortunately for us, the WHO’s director general, Margaret Chan, is an experienced public health official and one who was responsible for, among other things, the containment of the 2003 SARS epidemic in Hong Kong. Unfortunately for us, Chan’s presence at what could be a crucial moment is, if not a fluke, a stroke of monumental good luck.

For of course the WHO is not a stand-alone organization but a part of the United Nations. As such, it is afflicted by many of the same illnesses — so to speak — as other U.N. agencies. Like them, the WHO is not accountable to voters and is rarely scrutinized by the media. Its leaders are chosen according to the opaque rules that govern top U.N. appointments. (If too many Africans have top jobs, the director general has to be Asian, etc.) Though it does occupy itself most of the time with concerns such as preparedness for flu pandemics, some of its other priorities reflect its members’ political agendas. For example, a large chunk of money is devoted every year to tackling the “social and economic factors that determine people’s opportunities for health,” such as poverty, education and climate change — all worthy issues that would nevertheless seem well beyond the scope of an organization that should primarily be concerned with infectious diseases.

It gets worse: Like their U.N. colleagues, WHO bureaucrats spend much unnecessary time writing papers on legally dubious notions such as the “Right to Health”; others are scheming to create an international bureaucracy that would regulate all drug research and development; still others get sidetracked by issues such as obesity and automotive safety. The WHO’s 2008-13 strategic plan speaks of promoting “programmes that enhance health equity and integrate pro-poor, gender-responsive, and human rights-based approaches,” whatever that means. The organization is not exempt from other aspects of U.N. politics, either: Taiwan’s repeated attempts to join the WHO are always vetoed by China, for example, and U.N. officials (speaking of human-rights-based approaches) routinely refuse Taiwanese journalists permission to cover WHO events. When the next epidemic starts in Taipei, we’ll be sorry.

I am not trying to bash the World Health Organization: My point, rather, is that this is an institution that could easily drift into irrelevance under the influence of the institutional culture of the United Nations in Geneva. Look how much time and money it wastes, even though its director general is competent, and imagine how much more time and money it would waste if she were not — as some of her predecessors were not. Look how little effort is made to ensure that the agency stays focused on the one task — infectious-disease control — that only it can carry out. At the same time, look how much diplomatic energy is also wasted on institutions of far less importance. I am thinking here of last week’s U.N. World Conference on Racism, notable largely for the fact that the president of Iran, a country that openly persecutes religious dissenters, used it to deliver an anti-Semitic diatribe.

The truth is that we tend to treat the really important U.N. institutions the way we treat the local water utility: Most of the time we don’t care who runs it or how well — but in an emergency, we expect a superhuman response. Now, just as we might really be on the brink of an emergency, it is worth reminding ourselves that if we want the WHO to be there when we need it, the organization must be constantly monitored and fully funded. U.N. member governments should make absolutely sure it stays focused: After all, only the WHO is equipped to carry out the international monitoring of the spread of a new infectious disease. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that this time, it hasn’t been distracted by something else.

We’ve been waiting a long time for political upheaval to follow in the wake of technological change, and on April 7, it seemed to have arrived. From Moldova, of all places, came news of the Twitter Revolution: In one of the poorest backwaters in Europe — a place that frequently features in global surveys as the world’s unhappiest country — a group of fresh-faced young people reportedly used Twitter tweets, text messages and Facebook postings to organize a demonstration in favor of democracy and against rigged elections. New technology confronted old autocracy in an almost made-for-the-front-pages storyline: On one side, the Moldovan communist president, Vladimir Voronin, a man who is not only a former Soviet secret police boss but — amazing coincidence! — also the father of the country’s richest man; on the other side, the forces of modernity, youth and social networking. The young democrats expected 1,000 demonstrators. Thanks to technology, more than 10,000 arrived.

It sounded too good to be true — and it was. Alas, it is becoming clear that there was no Twitter Revolution in Moldova, and not merely because there are only a handful of registered Twitter users in the country. The more important point, according to observers there, is that the unexpectedly large demonstration (10,000 to 15,000 is a lot for apathetic Moldova) was not a spontaneous product of technical advance. Nor was it an accident that the demonstrators turned violent, set fire to government buildings or placed a Romanian flag on top of the parliament building.

I don’t want to exaggerate; nor do I want to join the flash-mob of conspiracy theorists who instantly gather whenever a crisis occurs somewhere in the post-Soviet world: This event wasn’t organized well enough to qualify as a conspiracy, and it definitely unnerved the authorities, who surely feared that the violence would get out of hand. But nor did it look, to those present, like a spontaneous crowd of young people trying to build a better future. The Moldovan opposition isn’t well organized or popular enough to inspire a movement like that, with or without Twitter. More to the point, some of the most violent demonstrators were immediately identified, by Western observers and local politicians, as members of the Moldovan security services. One observer told me that it would have been difficult even to get on the roof of that parliament building without tools and preparation, let alone put up a flag.

And it’s worth remembering why the Romanian flag matters: Moldova was created in 1940 when Stalin, under the terms of his pact with Hitler, occupied the Romanian province of Bessarabia, reorganized it into a Soviet republic and, with a perverse flourish of imperial highhandedness, replaced the Latin alphabet with Cyrillic. To this day, Moldovan paranoia about Romanian ambitions in the region has some basis in fact. Some Moldovan opposition politicians do support reunification with Romania. So do some Romanians.

As for the Romanian government, it advocates nothing more radical than closer ties between Moldova and Europe. But Moldova’s communist leaders do not want closer ties to Romania or Europe, largely because their Russian friends do not want them to have closer ties with Romania or Europe. Hence the events of April 7: Just as European Union negotiations with Moldova were moving along nicely, a terrible yet perfectly believable outburst of Romanian nationalism! Not surprisingly, the Moldovan government last week accused the Romanians of revanchism, expelled the Romanian ambassador and arrested the alleged ringleaders of the alleged Romanian coup d’etat, in some cases beating them brutally. Naturally, the president of Russia chimed in to condemn “the mass disorder unfolding on the pretext of disagreement with the election results.” Europe’s stoic envoy to Moldova has tried to calm everyone down, with some success. But his influence has limits: At one point, Voronin told some diplomats that he didn’t care about Europe, muttering darkly that “we have friends elsewhere.”

What we witnessed on YouTube, in other words, was not a new kind of Twitter Revolution but, rather, a new kind of manipulated revolution; not an Orange or a Rose Revolution, but a revolution deliberately led astray. There were special circumstances, of course: It’s relatively easy to make people angry and get them to burn down government buildings in the world’s unhappiest country. Still, I predict this is a sign of more such “revolutions” to come. A scenario like this one is too good to waste on Moldova alone.

New or old, my 8-year-old couldn’t have cared less: He instantly understood the principle of the thing — the pen is attached to a metal contraption, which is itself attached to another pen — as well as why Jefferson called it “the finest invention of the present age.” In an era before Xerox machines, the polygraph automatically made copies of his correspondence. For a man who wrote some 19,000 letters, this was a real time-saver.

When I first visited Monticello 30-plus years ago, there was no polygraph machine to play with. Inside the house, one could gaze, in silence, upon the original. One could also hear the guide’s reverent description of how Jefferson had invented it, along with the seven-day clock in the hall, the dumbwaiter that brought wine from the cellar and the revolving bookstand. Nowadays, the tour guides agree — disappointingly — that Jefferson’s only original invention was a rather dull plow. All of the quirkier gadgets at Monticello were either adapted or copied from somebody else.

Other aspects of the Monticello visit have also changed. Both in the new exhibition halls and on the house tour, a lot more is said about the people whom our guide called the “enslaved residents” of the estate. Some of them, it turns out, hand-built those gadgets. Others helped bring Jefferson’s architectural, agricultural and culinary visions to life. One of them, Sally Hemings, may have been the mother of some of his children. The foundations of slave cabins are clearly marked in the garden, and the remains of slave pottery and tools, recent archeological finds, are prominently displayed.

It makes for a different experience from the one I remember. Nowadays, hagiography is Out. Historical reconstruction is In. Silent contemplation of the great man’s possessions is also Out. Recent scholarship about those possessions is firmly In. Interactive games and objects are In, too. This is not unique to Monticello — Mozart’s house in Vienna has undergone a similar transformation — but it is particularly striking at the home of our third president. The piety that once surrounded all relics of all Founding Fathers has given way to galleries where adults can press buttons to read Jefferson’s quotations and then see the Venezuelan Declaration of Independence that those quotes inspired, as well as a “discovery room” where children can build mini-Monticellos with wooden blocks.

Some people won’t like it, and I understand their skepticism, at least in theory. The words “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” are part of our national DNA: Do we really need to reread that famous preamble on a screen, or hold the polygraph to understand how it works? Actually, we do. Monticello’s longtime curator, Susan Stein, reckons that many Americans who visit the house don’t know Jefferson’s words, let alone the way they have echoed around the world. Besides, as an Easter weekend activity, Monticello now has a lot of competition: amusement parks, “Monsters vs. Aliens,” “Grand Theft Auto.” Every generation rewrites its history books, so why shouldn’t they redesign museums, too?

In practice, the new Monticello exhibitions are superb: The honest discussion of slavery makes Jefferson more complicated, more interesting and more real than he used to be. The displays of his meticulous account books and daily weather records show off his appetite for knowledge, as well as his persnickety love of detail. The high-tech exhibits take some getting used to, but at least they are aimed well above the eighth-grade level to which most American museums aspire. There is something for everybody: In one room, I watched a Muslim woman reading about Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom on one wall while some children gleefully stamped on the floor to make Jeffersonian quotations appear on the wall opposite.

I won’t say “Jefferson would love it” because, given his love of rural peace and quiet, I suspect he wouldn’t. Still, it seems appropriate — and rather a relief in these gloomy times — to report on the successful modernization of a place that was, after all, built as a monument to Progress. Jefferson’s ideas have kept up with the times; it’s great that his house has, too.

Still, someone has to say it: Although some things went well on this trip, some things went badly. The centerpiece of the visit, Obama’s keynote foreign policy speech in Prague — leaked in advance, billed as a major statement — was, to put it bluntly, peculiar. He used it to call for “a world without nuclear weapons” and a new series of arms control negotiations with Russia. This was not wrong, necessarily, and not evil. But it was strange.

Clearly, the “no nukes” policy is one close to the president’s heart. The Prague speech even carried echoes of that most famous of all Obama speeches, the one he made after losing the New Hampshire primary. “There are those who hear talk of a world without nuclear weapons and doubt whether it is worth setting a goal that seems impossible,” he told his Czech audience. (Recall: “We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics.”) “When nations and peoples allow themselves to be defined by their differences, the gulf between them widens,” he continued. (”We are not as divided as our politics suggests.”) He didn’t say “Yes, we can” at the end, but he did say “human destiny will be what we make of it” — which amounts to the same thing.

The rhetoric was Obama’s — and so was the idea. Look at his record: One of the few foreign policy initiatives to which Obama stuck his name during his brief Senate term was an increase in funding for nuclear nonproliferation. One of the few trips Obama managed as a senator was a nuclear inspection tour of Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.

Which is all very nice — but as the central plank in an American president’s foreign policy, a call for universal nuclear disarmament seems rather beside the point. Apparently, Obama’s intention is to lead by example: If the United States cuts its own nuclear arsenal and bans testing, then, allegedly, others will follow.

Yet there is no evidence that U.S. nuclear arms reductions have ever inspired others to do the same. All of the world’s more recent nuclear powers — Israel, India, Pakistan — acquired their weapons well after such talks began, more than 40 years ago.

As for the North Koreans, they chose the very day of the Prague speech to launch (unsuccessfully) an experimental missile. In its wake, neither China nor Russia wanted to condemn the launch, since doing so might set a precedent that would be uncomfortable for them. “Every state has the right to the peaceful use of outer space,” said a Russian envoy to the United Nations. His government does want arms reduction talks, but only because its nuclear arsenal is rapidly deteriorating. By agreeing to start them, we’ve unnecessarily handed Moscow a bargaining chip.

More to the point, nuclear weapons, while terrifying in the abstract, are not an immediate strategic threat to Europe or the United States — even from Iran. Biological weapons are potentially more lethal. Chemical weapons are far cheaper to produce. Within the United States, ordinary bombs and rogue airplanes have already caused plenty of damage.

Conventional weapons, meanwhile, have not gone out of fashion. The most recent use of military force in Europe — the Russian-Georgian conflict last August — involved tanks and infantry, not nukes. Even if Russia sold its remaining nuclear weapons for scrap metal, its military would still pose a threat to the country’s neighbors, just as a China without nukes could still invade Taiwan.

In other words, ridding the world of nuclear weapons would be very nice, but on its own it won’t alter the international balance of power, stop al-Qaeda or prevent large authoritarian states from invading their smaller neighbors. However unsuccessful the promotion of democracy has been, it is, ultimately, the only way to achieve these goals. Plus I’m not sure the French, however much they loved Michelle’s flowery dress, have much interest in giving up their force de frappe. Ditto the British. And since they don’t pose a threat, to us or anyone else, it’s not clear why we should waste diplomatic capital trying to make them do so.

It could be, of course, that the Prague speech represented a holding pattern: Obama will talk about “no nukes” until he finds a more satisfying idea on which to hang his foreign policy. And if not, all of that goodwill, so much in evidence last week, might well go to waste.

The truth, of course, is that nothing that will be discussed at the summit, and nothing that will be discussed at any of the follow-up summits, could not also have been discussed on the telephone. Or by e-mail. Or on a Skype conference call. Indeed, one British writer suggests that “the world’s leaders should have followed their usual platitudes about looking to the future and engaging the young by holding the whole thing on Facebook.”

But then, the purpose of this summit, like all such summits, is not really discussion. It is politics. From the hosts’ point of view, the primary purpose is to rescue Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, whose popularity is at a record low. Brown spent the years between 1997 and 2007 serving as Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer—the equivalent of America’s treasury secretary—and thus cannot, like his American counterparts, blame Britain’s financial crisis on the mistakes of the previous administration. He took credit for Britain’s booming economy during those years and is thus being held responsible for Britain’s unusually deep recession: For weeks now, the British press has been howling for him to “apologize.” If nothing else, those official summit photographs—Brown surrounded by the leaders of the United States, China, Russia, Argentina, etc., against the grim industrial background of London’s Isle of Dogs—will make him feel important again.

Others have different agendas, none of which entails much real discussion. The Obama administration, for example, hopes to use the summit as a tool to bludgeon the Germans and others into spending more money: They want each country present to commit 2 percent of its gross domestic product to a stimulus package, creating a sort of family support structure for the gazillion-dollar American stimulus package. This would, in theory, allow our president to go home and declare victory. And if it doesn’t happen, at least he’ll have a culprit when the international economy does not, in fact, fix itself within a month or two: It will all be the fault of the Europeans, who—typical Continentals!—dither, dissemble, and squabble among one another instead of rallying to the American call.

While I am usually the first to accuse the Europeans of dithering and dissembling, I have some sympathy for the Germans on this point. The reason they, the French, and many others in Europe—the British are an exception—have avoided spending large amounts of money on their economy is not because they are incompetent Continentals. It is because they do not think it will work. Strange though it may sound, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, are leaders who, for better or for worse, came to have some respect for what used to be called Anglo-American capitalism, with what used to be its reputation for fiscal conservatism. More to the point, they are also running up against the limits of what they can borrow and are worried about inflation as well.

This latter worry is even more acute in many smaller European countries, some of whom are actually cutting their budgets and introducing financial austerity packages as a result. Though these policies aren’t popular now, their advocates might well be proved right in the end. There is an analogy here, albeit an unfortunate one, to the recent past. After Sept. 11, the Bush administration, instead of fixing al-Qaida, Afghanistan, and Pakistan for good, decided to invade Iraq. The Europeans balked—and those who didn’t, like the British, are now sorry. After the banking crisis, the Obama administration, instead of regulating the banking system and the mortgage market, decided to devise a massive stimulus package, build a lot of bridges, expand educational spending, and maybe fix health care, too. The Europeans are balking again. Will those who aren’t, like the British, be sorry a few years from now?

At least if that happens, this week’s G20 summit will take on a genuine importance. It won’t be just another summit, producing another pile of documents, containing another bunch of euphemisms, but rather a turning point. It will be remembered forever as the moment when some of the rich world headed off in one direction and the rest headed off somewhere else. Which might mean it has been worth at least a portion of that $75 million.