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Negative Article: “CSIS Commission on Smart Power”
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- Negative Article: “Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy”
Negative Article: “CSIS Commission on Smart Power”By Richard Armitage, president of Armitage International, and Joseph Nye, distinguished service professor at Harvard. Published in 2007. Available at http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/071106_csissmartpowerreport.pdf Despite America’s status as the lone global power and concerns about the durability of the current international order, America should renew its commitment to the current order and help find a way for today’s norms and institutions to accommodate rising powers that may hold a different set of principles and values. Furthermore, even countries invested in the current order may waver in their commitment to take action to minimize the threats posed by violent non-state actors and regional powers who challenge this order. The information age has heightened political consciousness, but also made political groupings less cohesive. Small, adaptable, transnational networks have access to tools of destruction that are increasingly cheap, easy to conceal, and more readily available. Although the integration of the global economy has brought tremendous benefits, threats such as pandemic disease and the collapse of financial markets are more distributed and more likely to arise without warning. The threat of widespread physical harm to the planet posed by nuclear catastrophe has existed for half a century, though the realization of the threat will become more likely as the number of nuclear weapons states increases. The potential security challenges posed by climate change raise the possibility of an entirely new set of threats for the United States to consider. The next administration will need a strategy that speaks to each of these challenges. Whatever specific approach it decides to take, two principles will be certain: First, an extra dollar spent on hard power will not necessarily bring an extra dollar’s worth of security. It is difficult to know how to invest wisely when there is not a budget based on a strategy that specifies trade-offs among instruments. Moreover, hard power capabilities are a necessary but insufficient guarantee of security in today’s context. Second, success and failure will turn on the ability to win new allies and strengthen old ones both in government and civil society. The key is not how many enemies the United States kills, but how many allies it grows. States and non-state actors who improve their ability to draw in allies will gain competitive advantages in today’s environment. Those who alienate potential friends will stand at greater risk. China has invested in its soft power to ensure access to resources and to ensure against efforts to undermine its military modernization. Terrorists depend on their ability to attract support from the crowd at least as much as their ability to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. Negative Article: “Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy”Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and astrophysics research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Published March 13, 2012. Available at http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degrasse-tyson-invest-in-nasa-invest-in-u-s-economy/ Question: You can look at the 1960s, the peak of space exploration, and I think many people would characterize that period as the peak of the attitude that you’re talking about. So why is there this disconnect now? Why do people think of space exploration as an academic pursuit? Answer: Because they don’t think of it the same way. They just don’t. I think I understand why – I didn’t do the tests on this, but it’s plausibly correct that we live in an era where we think of the solutions to problems by applying money directly to that problem. For example, we need more scientists; let’s improve our science teachers. OK, we’re done there. We need more jobs; let’s create more factories so we have more jobs. We want more innovation; there are companies that do innovation, let’s fund those more. The idea is that somehow these are all separate problems and we go over and just fix them one by one. But in fact, by my read of history, by my read of human behavior, by my read of government funding streams, these efforts amount to no more than Band-Aids on sores that have opened up in our society caused by a much deeper absence – the absence of an innovation culture. So when you say “NASA creates jobs,” people think it’s because tax money buys the jobs that NASA pays directly for. The direct A-to-B thinking again. It takes more than a few steps of reasoning to see how NASA influences a culture and how that culture innovates, creates the economies of tomorrow, stabilizes and then grows your economy. That’s a multi-step exercise that certainly economists understand easily. To writers for Forbes, it’s self-evident. But everybody else, apparently not. When you put money directly to a problem, it makes a good headline. It makes a good campaign slogan. You get to claim that you’ve engaged in these activities within an election cycle. But certain investments take longer than an election cycle. Those that take longer than an election cycle tend to be susceptible to people wanting to redirect them to immediate problems that they see sitting right in front of them. This manifests itself even at the highest levels. The America COMPETES Act emerged from Congress – and the President signed a version of it – the President extols the value of NASA, back in that era, as the engine of economic innovation, of scientific and technological innovation leading to a booming economy. He says this. And then says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Given that we’re in the doldrums now, we’re going to re-invest in our science and technology.” And he talks about increasing the budget for the National Science Foundation and for the Department of Energy Science, which is the physics labs, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a little-known agency of the government that is very important. NASA is barely mentioned. Actually, he tops up NASA for one year, gives a 5% increase to NASA for one year, and then takes it back a year later. Meanwhile, NASA formed the substance of the rhetoric that led to the speech that announced this plan. The America COMPETES Act put those same three agencies on a doubling path for their budget, and NASA went unmentioned. So there seems to be a disconnect. People say, “We need more basic science? Let’s fund basic science research agencies like the National Science Foundation.” But who’s going to do that research? Doesn’t somebody have to be motivated to do it in the first place? Doesn’t there have to be some dream that people have, and reach for and feel compelled to participate in? 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