Executive Summary

During the first decade of the 21^st century the six states of the Mountain West — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah — experienced unprecedented political and demographic changes. Population growth in all six states exceeded the national average and the region is home to the four states that underwent the largest population gains between 2000 and 2010. As a consequence, the region is now home to some of the most demographically diverse and geographically concentrated states in the country— factors that helped to transform the Mountain West from a Republican stronghold into America’s new swing region. This paper examines the impact that increased diversity and density are exerting on reapportionment and redistricting in each Mountain West state and assesses the implications that redistricting outcomes will exert both nationally and within each state in the coming decade.  Nationally, the region’s clout will increase due to the addition of three seats in the House of Representatives (one each in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah) and electoral contexts in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico that will result in competitive presidential and senate elections throughout the decade. At the state level, the combination of term limits, demographic change, and the reapportionment of state legislative seats from rural to urban areas will alter the composition of these states’ legislatures and should facilitate the realignment of policy outcomes that traditionally benefitted rural interests at the expense of urban needs.

Introduction

As reapportionment and redistricting plans across the 50 states are finalized and candidate recruitment begins in earnest, the contours of the 2012 election are coming into focus. One region of the country where reapportionment (redistributing seats to account for population shifts) and redistricting (drawing boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts) are likely to have significant consequences in 2012 and beyond is in the six states of the Mountain West: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. Driven by explosive growth during the past decade, the Mountain West is now home to some of the most demographically diverse and geographically concentrated states in the country. As a consequence, the region has increasingly become more hospitable to Democrats, particularly Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico and to a lesser extent Arizona. In this paper, I examine how these changes are affecting reapportionment and redistricting across the region. Specifically, after summarizing some of the key regional demographic and political changes, I offer a brief overview of the institutional contexts in which the maps are being drawn. This is followed by an assessment of outcomes in each state. I conclude with a discussion of the national and state level implications that reapportionment and redistricting are likely to engender across the Mountain West.

A Region in Transition

Between 2000 and 2010 population growth in all six Mountain West states outpaced the national average of 9.7 percent and the region contains the four states that experienced the largest percent population increase in the country (Nevada = 35.1 percent; Arizona = 24.6 percent; Utah = 23.8 percent, and Idaho = 21.1 percent).[i] As a consequence, Nevada and Utah each gained their fourth seats in the House of Representative and Arizona was awarded its ninth. Beginning with the 2012 election, the Mountain West will have 29 U.S. House seats (Idaho has two House seats, New Mexico has three, and Colorado has seven) and 41 Electoral College votes.

Across the Mountain West, population growth was concentrated in the region’s largest metropolitan statistical area (MSA).[ii] Most notably, the Las Vegas metro area is now home to nearly three out of four Nevadans — the mostly highly concentrated space in the region. In Arizona, roughly two-thirds of the population now resides in the Phoenix MSA, which grew by nearly 30 percent. The Albuquerque MSA experienced the largest overall increase as a share of total population (nearly 25 percent) and now contains 44 percent of New Mexico’s population. And while Idaho remains the state in the region with the least dense population, growth in the Boise MSA significantly outpaced that state’s overall population gain and nearly 40 percent of all Idahoans reside in and around Boise. On the other end of the spectrum are the Salt Lake City and Denver MSAs, which as shares of the Colorado and Utah populations decreased slightly from 2000. Still, better than half (50.57 percent) of all Coloradoans live in Denver and its suburbs and around 41 percent of Utah’s population is concentrated in the Salt Lake City MSA.

In addition to further urbanizing the region, the prior decade’s growth continued to transform the region’s demographics as all six Mountain West states are now more ethnically diverse as compared to a decade ago.[iii] The largest changes occurred in Nevada where the minority population increased by over 11 percent and now better than 45 percent of Nevadans are classified as non-white. While the bulk of this growth was among Hispanics, whose share of the population increased by 7 percent and are now 26.5 percent of all Nevadans, the Silver State also recorded large increases among Asian and Pacific Islanders. Arizona experienced similar increases as that state’s minority population mushroomed from 36.2 percent to 42.2 percent with Hispanics now constituting 30 percent of the population. In Colorado, the minority population increased by 3.5 percent to 30 percent. Nearly all of this change was caused by an increase in Hispanics, who now constitute 20.7 percent of the state’s population. New Mexico continues to be the Mountain West’s most diverse state as nearly three out of five New Mexicans are minorities and the state contains the region’s largest Hispanic population (46 percent). And while Idaho and Utah remain overwhelmingly white, both states’ non-white populations grew at levels similar to Colorado. Idaho is now 16 percent non-white (including a Hispanic population of 11.2 percent) and nearly one in five Utahans is a minority. Between 2000 and 2010, Hispanics increased by 4 percent to constitute 13 percent of Utah’s population.

Politically, these changes helped to create competitive electoral contexts across the region. Indeed, with the obvious exceptions of Idaho and Utah, the Mountain West is now more hospitable to the Democratic Party than it was in 2000. In particular, Democrats were able to make significant gains in Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico and effectively flipped those states from Republican leaning in 2000 to Democratic leaning in 2010. In Arizona, the Democratic performance was highly variable and moved in near perfect tandem with the broader national political environment. At the same time, the downturn in Democratic support in 2010 indicates that the party has not yet consolidated its gains. Riding a favorable 2010 macro-environment, Mountain West Republicans gained one governorship (New Mexico), seats in ten of the region’s 12 state legislative chambers, and seven House seats (out of a total of 26 in the region).[iv] Thus, heading into the 2011 redistricting cycle, Republicans control the executive and legislative branches in Arizona, Idaho, and Utah and there are no Mpuntain West states where the Democrats have unified control as the partisan composition of the Colorado legislature is divided and Nevada and New Mexico have Republican governors and Democratic legislatures.

The Institutional Context

Because of variation in the institutional arrangements governing how each state approaches reapportionment and redistricting, the impact that the demographic and political changes outlined above are exerting on map drawing differs across the region. To be sure, there are a number of commonalities across the states such as requirements of equally populated U.S. House districts, minimum population variation for state legislative districts, and boundary lines that are compact, contiguous, and maintain communities of interests. 

Beyond these constraints, mapmakers across the region are afforded different degrees of latitude in how they go about doing their work. For instance, in Nevada and New Mexico, the residency of incumbents can be considered, while Idaho forbids it. Idaho allows for twice as much inter-district population variation for state legislative districts as Colorado and New Mexico, and Idaho only allows state legislative districts to cross county lines if the counties are linked by a highway. Arizona and Idaho mandate that two lower chamber districts be nested within the boundaries of a state senate seat, while Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah do not. Nevada also allows for multi-member member state legislative districts. Lastly, Arizona’s redistricting plans must be pre-cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice. While Arizona is the only state in the region subject to preclearance, protection of minority voting rights also has been a point of contention in prior redistricting cycles in New Mexico.

The Mountain West states also vary in terms of who oversees the redistricting process. State legislators control the process in Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, while Arizona and Idaho use commissions. In Colorado, the General Assembly draws the map for the state’s seven U.S. House seats, while a commission oversees the drawing of state legislative maps. For the three states that use commissions for either all or part of their processes, commission size and composition differs significantly and only the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (AIRC) is charged with drawing maps that are competitive.[v] 

However, the most significant constraint on reapportionment and redistricting in the Mountain West is the small size of the region’s state legislatures.[vi] The mix of small chambers, increased urbanization, and large geographic spaces means very large and increasingly, fewer and fewer stand- alone rural districts. This dynamic also helps to explain the region’s history of malapportionment that often allocated seats by county regardless of population.[vii] 

State Summaries

Based upon the overview presented above, expectations about the general contours of reapportionment and redistricting in the Mountain West are fairly straightforward: the clout of urban and minority interests will increase and to the degree that those factors benefit the Democrats, the Democrats should gain some partisan advantage. Realizing these outcomes, however, has proven to be less than amicable. With the exception of Utah, all other states in the region have had various aspects of their processes litigated, and map drawing for Colorado’s U.S. House seats and all of Nevada and New Mexico’s redistricting is being completed in state courts. Below, I summarize the status of reapportionment and redistricting in each state.

Arizona

Beginning its work amid criticism of its composition, calls for its abolishment, and an investigation by the Arizona attorney general, the voter-initiated Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission (AIRC) has struggled to balance the conflicting demands of drawing competitive districts with the protection of minority voting rights. The commission’s work has been further hindered by Republican Governor Jan Brewer’s unsuccessful attempt to impeach the commission’s nonpartisan chair. In addition, Arizona has filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the state’s preclearance requirement.

Republican attempts to undermine the AIRC stem from the fact that given unified Republican control of the Arizona governorship and legislature, Republicans would otherwise be in a position to implement a partisan gerrymander. At the same time, the GOP’s present dominance is partially an artifact of the 2001 redistricting. To gain preclearance in 2001, the AIRC’s maps created a large number of majority-minority state legislative districts and minority-friendly U.S House seats by packing Democratic voters into these districts. In so doing, Democratic support in the surrounding districts was weakened; allowing Republicans to more efficiently translate their votes into seats.[viii] Thus, despite a slight partisan voter registration advantage (4.35 percent as of July 2011), Republicans presently hold more than two-thirds of the state legislative seats and five of eight U.S. House seats.

Given Arizona’s growth patterns between 2000 and 2010 coupled with the AIRC’s charge of creating competitive district, drawing a map as favorable to the GOP in 2011 is virtually impossible unless the size of the Arizona legislature is increased. Still, in order to protect minority voting rights, Arizona’s final maps are likely to tilt in favor of the GOP — just not to the degree that they have in the past. In particular, the elimination and consolidation of rural state legislative districts and a more urban orientation for Arizona’s nine U.S. House districts should provide the Democrats with electoral opportunities that will only increase as Arizona’s population continues to diversity and urbanize.

Colorado

As noted above, Colorado uses a commission (the Colorado Redistricting Commission) for redistricting state legislative seats and the Colorado General Assembly draws the maps for the state’s seven U.S. House seats. Neither process has gone smoothly. For the state’s seven U.S. House seats, the Democratic-dominated state senate and the Republican-controlled lower chamber failed to find common ground after exchanging two rounds of maps. Because Democratic governor John Hickenlooper refused to call a special session, redistricting of Colorado U.S. House seats was completed in state court. After a good deal of legal wrangling, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld a map favored by Colorado Democrats that creates two safe Republican districts, one safe Democratic district, and four districts where neither party’s registration advantage exceeds 4 percent. As a consequence, Colorado will feature a number of competitive U.S. House elections throughout the coming decade.

Map drawing for state legislative seats by the CRC has also been hindered by partisanship. Hoping to break a partisan stalemate, in late summer the nonpartisan chair of the CRC offered maps that combined parts of prior Democratic and Republican proposals to create thirty-three competitive seats (out of a total of 100) and twenty-four seats with Hispanic populations of 30 percent or more. After being approved by the CRC with some Republican dissents, the plan was rejected by the Colorado Supreme Court, which must sign-off on the CRC’s plans before they can be implemented. By attempting to draw more competitive maps — a criterion that the CRC is not obligated to consider – the CRC’s maps undermined its charge of producing districts that keep communities of interest intact. The CRC’s second set maps, which were widely viewed as favoring the Democrats, were upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court.

Idaho

While partisan considerations have loomed large in the reapportionment and redistricting processes in Arizona and Colorado, in Republican-dominated Idaho the main points of contention have been spatial. Indeed, because of the difficulty of satisfying a constitutional requirement limiting county splits and a state law constraining how geographic areas can be combined, the Idaho’s Citizen Commission for Reapportionment (ICCR) failed to reach an agreement before its constitutionally imposed deadline. After sorting through a number of legal and constitutional questions, a second set of commissioners were impaneled and completed their work in less than three weeks. Given Idaho’s partisan composition, the final maps are a regional anomaly as they benefit the GOP while being somewhat more urban oriented. This was accomplished by moving rural Republican voters into urban Democratic state legislative districts and adjusting the lines of Idaho’s 1st House district to shed roughly 50,000 citizens. At the same time, because of Idaho’s strict constraints on how cities and counties can be divided, the map for the state legislature paired a number of incumbents in the same district and one district contains the residences of five incumbents, setting up a number of competitive primary elections.

While growth patterns and demographic and partisan change in Nevada between 2000 and 2010 insured a redistricting process that would favor Democrats, Nevada Republicans sought to delay this inevitability as long as possible. The state’s Republican governor, Brian Sandoval, vetoed two sets of maps passed by the Democratic controlled legislature and Sandoval refused to call a special session to complete redistricting. Instead, he and his party hoped for a better outcome in state court. Despite drawing a supervising judge who was the son of a former Republican Governor, Nevada Republicans fared no better in state court. Ultimately, the process was turned over to three special masters who rejected Nevada Republicans’ claim that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required a majority Hispanic U.S. House district.[ix] As a consequence, two of Nevada’s U.S. House seats favor Democrats, one is safely Republican, and the fourth is a swing district. In the Nevada legislature the representation of urban interests will increase as parts of or all of forty-seven of the sixty-three seats in the Nevada legislature are now located in the Democratic stronghold of Clark County. 

New Mexico

The 2011 process in New Mexico has essentially been a rerun of the gridlock that engulfed the state’s 2001 redistricting debate. Once again, the Democrats sought to use their control over both chambers of the New Mexico legislature to preserve their majorities and draw the boundaries for the state’s three U.S. House seats in manner favorable to the party. However, because of bickering among Democrats the legislature failed to approve its map for the state’s three U.S. House seats prior to the end of the special session and the plans for the state legislature that were passed on party line votes were vetoed by Republican governor Susana Martinez. Thus, once again, New Mexico’s divided state government coupled with the state’s history of litigating redistricting plans (in 2001 map drawing and court battles cost the state roughly $3.5 million) means that redistricting will be completed in state court. While the Republicans may be able to gain some concessions through the courts, New Mexico is the most Democratic state in the Mountain West and, as noted above, the state’s growth during the prior decade was concentrated in heavily Democratic Albuquerque and its suburbs. Thus, as in 2001, the likely outcome in New Mexico is a redistricting plan that will be favorable to the Democrats and weaken the influence of rural interests.

Utah

Utah is the only state in the region where conditions exist (e.g., unified partisan control in a non-commission state) for the implementation of a partisan gerrymander. However, to accomplish this end required the slicing and dicing of communities and municipalities particularly those in and around the state’s urban center. Most notably, in drawing the state’s four U.S. House seats, Republicans divided the Utah’s population center (Salt Lake City County) into four districts by combining parts of the urban core with rural counties - a plan that, not coincidentally, cracks the only part of the state where Democrats are able to compete. Similarly, maps for state legislative districts increase the number of seats that favor the GOP and, in many instances, protect incumbents from potential primary challengers by dividing communities into multiple districts. Democrats in Utah are so depleted that they were unable to get the Republicans to even agree to include recognition and protection of minority communities of interest to in Utah’s redistricting guidelines. Thus, despite constituting nearly 20 percent of the state’s population, minorities received no consideration in Utah’s 2011 redistricting.

Implications and Conclusions

Reapportionment and redistricting are often regarded as the most political activities in the United States; an expectation that is certainly being realized across the Mountain West. In the swing states where legislators draw the maps (for example, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico) but where state government is divided, partisan considerations loomed large, causing all of these states to conclude all or parts of their redistricting processes in the courts. The conflicts between Arizona’s preclearance requirement and the AIRC’s commitment to drawing competitive districts have partisan consequences as well. In one-party Idaho and Utah, the politics of space were at issue.  Geographic constraints on district boundaries imposed through statute and the Idaho constitution ensured that more rural seats were preserved and that the growing influence of urban interests will be checked. In Utah, Republicans moved in the opposite direction by carving up the very communities from which they are elected in order to implement a partisan gerrymander. 

Another school of thought, however, argues that the most typical redistricting outcome is not partisan gain or loss, but an uncertainty that shakes up the state political environment and facilitates political renewal. In the case of the Mountain West, there is evidence to support that claim as well. The biggest source of uncertainty will continue to be growth. While the economic downturn has slowed migration to the region, the Mountain West states remain poised to keep expanding in a manner that will further concentrate and diversify their populations. A second source of uncertainty is the region’s large number of nonpartisans. While redistricting is often framed as a zero-sum game played between Democrats and Republicans, the electoral hopes for either party hinges on its ability to attract the support of the region’s expanding nonpartisan demographic.[x] 

At the state level, with the exception of Idaho, the most significant consequence will be a reduction in rural influence. The combination of term limits in Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado, small legislative chambers, and fast growing urban populations will continue to decrease the number of entrenched rural legislators and the number of stand-alone rural districts. Consequently, urban interests should be positioned to align state policy with demographic reality. The void created by the demise of rural legislators will be filled by minorities, particularly Hispanics. To date, the increased political activism of Hispanic communities across the region has primarily benefited Democrats; helped in no small part by the hard-line rhetoric and policies championed by some Mountain West Republicans.[xi] More generally, depending on growth patterns, by 2020 Nevada and perhaps Arizona may join New Mexico as states with majority-minority populations. Thus, with or without Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, minority legislators, primarily Hispanics, will increase their ranks significantly. The only question is whether all of these politicians will be taking office with a “D” next to their names or whether some will be elected as Republicans.  

Nationally, the impact of reapportionment and redistricting is mixed. Certainly, the addition of three U.S. House seats after the 2010 census will give more voice to regional issues in Washington D.C. At the same time, because the Mountain West’s House delegation will continue to be split along partisan lines and many of the region’s competitive House seats will rotate between the parties throughout the decade, it may be difficult for any but the safest Mountain West representatives to accrue the requisite seniority to become players in the House. Also, because of pending retirements in Arizona and New Mexico, a successful 2010 primary challenge in Utah, and a resignation in Nevada, the region’s influence in the U.S. Senate is likely to decline in the near term. Indeed, after the 2012 election the only senators from the region who will have served more than one term will be Nevada’s Harry Reid, Arizona’s John McCain, Idaho’s Mike Crapo, and Utah’s Orrin Hatch (presuming a successful 2012 reelection).

Thus, the arena where the region is likely to garner the most attention is in the coming decade’s three presidential elections. Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico were all battleground states in 2004 and 2008, with Republican George W. Bush narrowly winning all three in 2004 and Democrat Barack Obama flipping them blue in 2008 by wider margins. Obviously, Idaho and Utah will remain out of reach for the Democrats in statewide contests for some time.  However, Arizona is likely to become the region’s fourth swing state in the near future. Thus, continued investment in Arizona and throughout the region will allow the Democrats to further expand the number of Mountain West states in play while forcing the GOP to spend resources to defend turf that it once could safely call its own.

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The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) adopted by Iran and the P5+1 partners in July 2015 was an effort not only to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons but also to avert a nuclear arms competition in the Middle East. But uncertainties surrounding the future of the Iran nuclear deal, including the question of what Iran will do when key JCPOA restrictions on its nuclear program expire after 15 years, could provide incentives for some of its neighbors to keep their nuclear options open.

In their Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Series monograph, “The Iran Nuclear Deal: Prelude to Proliferation in the Middle East?,” Robert Einhorn and Richard Nephew assess the current status of the JCPOA and explore the likelihood that, in the wake of the agreement, regional countries will pursue their own nuclear weapons programs or at least latent nuclear weapons capabilities. Drawing on interviews with senior government officials and non-government experts from the region, they focus in depth on the possible motivations and capabilities of Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates for pursuing nuclear weapons. The monograph also offers recommendations for policies to reinforce the JCPOA and reduce the likelihood that countries of the region will seek nuclear weapons.

On May 31, the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative hosted a panel to discuss the impact of the JCPOA on prospects for nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Brookings Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of Foreign Policy Suzanne Maloney served as moderator. Panelists included H.E. Yousef Al Otaiba, ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States; Derek Chollet, counselor and senior advisor for security and defense policy at the German Marshall Fund; Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Einhorn; and Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Richard Nephew.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #IranDeal

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• The Iran nuclear deal: Prelude to proliferation in the Middle East?

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In last summer’s congressional debate over the Iran nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—one of the more hotly debated issues was whether the deal would decrease or increase the likelihood that countries in the Middle East would pursue nuclear weapons.

Supporters of the JCPOA argued that, by removing the risk of a nuclear-armed Iran, it will reduce incentives for countries of the region to acquire nuclear arms. Opponents of the deal—not just in the United States but also abroad, especially Israel—claimed that the JCPOA would increase those incentives because it would legitimize enrichment in Iran, allow Iran to ramp up its nuclear capacity when key restrictions expire after 10 and 15 years, and boost the Iranian economy and the resources Iran could devote to a weapons program.

I strongly believe the JCPOA will significantly reduce prospects for proliferation in the Middle East (and as my colleague Richard Nephew explains in another post out today, there are things the United States and other powers can do to help reduce that prospect further). But uncertainties about the future of the JCPOA and the region will persist for quite some time—and these uncertainties could motivate regional countries to keep their nuclear options open. They may ask themselves a variety of questions in the years ahead: Will the JCPOA be sustainable over time? Will it unravel over concerns about compliance? Will it withstand challenges by opponents in Tehran and Washington? Will it survive leadership transitions in the United States and Iran? Will Iran ramp up its fissile material production capacities when key restrictions expire? Will it then break out of the JCPOA and seek to build nuclear weapons? Will Iran continue to threaten the security of its neighbors in the years ahead? And will the United States maintain a strong regional military presence and be seen by its partners as a reliable guarantor of their security?

I strongly believe the JCPOA will significantly reduce prospects for proliferation in the Middle East.

Richard and I studied how these and other questions might affect nuclear decision-making in the Middle East. In particular, we evaluated the likelihood that key states will pursue nuclear weapons, or at least enrichment or reprocessing programs that could give them a latent nuclear weapons capability. We focused on four states often regarded as potential candidates to join the nuclear club: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Turkey.

Saudi Arabia

Of the four, Saudi Arabia is the most highly motivated to pursue nuclear weapons. It sees Iran as an implacable foe that is intent on destabilizing its neighbors, achieving regional hegemony, and upending the Kingdom’s internal order. At the same time, the Saudis have lost much confidence in the U.S. commitment to the security of its regional partners. In part as a result, the new Saudi leadership has taken a more assertive, independent role in regional conflicts, especially in Yemen. But despite their reservations about the United States, the Saudis know they have no choice but to rely heavily on Washington for their security—and they know they would place that vital relationship in jeopardy if they pursued nuclear weapons.

The Saudis clearly have sufficient financial resources to make a run at nuclear weapons. But acquiring the necessary human and physical infrastructure to pursue an indigenous nuclear program would take many years.

Given the Kingdom’s difficulty in developing an indigenous nuclear weapons capability, speculation has turned to the possibility that it would receive support from a foreign power, usually Pakistan, which received generous financial support from Saudi Arabia in acquiring its own nuclear arsenal. But while rumors abound about a Pakistani commitment to help Saudi Arabia acquire nuclear weapons, the truth is hard to pin down. If such a Saudi-Pakistani agreement was ever reached, it was probably a vague, unwritten assurance long ago between a Pakistani leader and Saudi king, without operational details or the circumstances in which it would be activated. In any event, the Saudis would find it hard to rely on such an assurance today, when Pakistanis are trying to put the legacy of A.Q. Khan behind them and join the international nonproliferation mainstream. 

United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE believes Iran poses a severe threat to regional security and has become more aggressive since the completion of the JCPOA. And like the Saudis, the Emiratis have lost considerable confidence in the reliability of the United States as a security guarantor. But also like the Saudis, the Emiratis are reluctant to put their vital security ties to the United States in jeopardy.

[L]ike the Saudis, the Emiratis have lost considerable confidence in the reliability of the United States as a security guarantor.

Moreover, the Emiratis are heavily invested in their ambitious nuclear energy program—with efforts currently underway, with the help of a South Korean-led consortium, to construct four nuclear power reactors—and they know this project would be dead in the water if they opted for nuclear weapons.

The Emiratis have also been a leading regional supporter of nonproliferation. In their bilateral agreement for civil nuclear cooperation with the United States, they formally renounced the acquisition of enrichment or reprocessing capabilities (the so-called “gold standard”), effectively precluding the pursuit of nuclear weapons. After the JCPOA permitted Iran to retain its enrichment program, the UAE, faced with criticism domestically and from some Arab governments for having given up its nuclear “rights,” said it may reconsider its formal renunciation of enrichment. But subsequently, Emirati officials have made clear that their nuclear energy plans have not changed and that they have no intention to pursue enrichment or reprocessing.

Egypt

Egypt is on everyone’s short list of potential nuclear aspirants—in part because of its former role as leader of the Arab world and its flirtation with nuclear weapons in the Gamal Abdel Nasser years. But while Egypt and Iran have often been regional rivals, Egypt does not view Iran as a direct military threat. Instead, Egypt’s main concerns include extremist activities in the Sinai, the fragmentation of Iraq and Syria, disarray in Libya—and the adverse impact of these developments on Egypt’s internal security. The Egyptians recognize that none of these threats can be addressed by the possession of nuclear weapons.

Although Russia is committed to work with Egypt on its first nuclear power reactor, Cairo’s nuclear energy plans have experienced many false starts before, and there is little reason to believe the outcome will be different this time around, especially given the severe economic challenges the Egyptian government currently faces. Moreover, although Egypt trained a substantial number of nuclear scientists in the 1950s and 1960s, its human nuclear infrastructure atrophied when ambitious nuclear energy plans never materialized.

Turkey

Because of its emergence in the last decade as a rising power, its large and growing scientific and industrial basis, and its ambition to be an influential regional player, Turkey is also on everyone’s short list of potential nuclear-armed states. But Turkey has maintained reasonably good relations with Tehran, even during the height of the sanctions campaign against Iran. Although the two countries have taken opposing sides in the Syria civil war, Turkey, like Egypt, does not regard Iran as a direct military threat. Indeed, Ankara sees instability and terrorism emanating from the Syrian conflict as its main security concerns—and nuclear weapons are not viewed as relevant to dealing with those concerns.

Current tensions with Russia over Turkey’s November 2015 shoot-down of a Russian fighter jet are another source of concern in Ankara. But the best means of addressing that concern is to rely on the security guarantee Turkey enjoys as a member of NATO. While Turkish confidence in NATO has waxed and waned in recent decades, most Turks, especially in the military, believe they can count on NATO in a crisis, and they would be reluctant to put their relationship with NATO at risk by pursuing nuclear weapons.

Former nuclear aspirants

For the sake of completeness, our study also looked at regional countries that once actively pursued nuclear weapons but were forced to abandon their programs: Iraq, Libya, and Syria. But we concluded that, given the civil strife tearing those countries apart, none of them was in a position to pursue a sustained, disciplined nuclear weapons effort.

Bottom line

Our study found that the Iran nuclear deal has significantly reduced incentives for countries of the Middle East to reconsider their nuclear options. At least for the foreseeable future, none of them is likely to pursue nuclear weapons or even latent nuclear weapons capabilities—or to succeed if they do. 

Editors’ Note: Bob Einhorn and Richard Nephew spoke about their new report at a recent Brookings event. You can see the video from the event here.

      

When Iran and the P5+1 signed a deal over Tehran’s nuclear program last July, members of Congress, Middle East analysts, and Arab Gulf governments all warned that the agreement would prompt Iran’s rivals in the region to race for the bomb.

In a report that Bob Einhorn and I released this week, we assessed this risk of a so-called proliferation cascade. We look at four states in particular—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Turkey—and Bob briefly explores each case in another blog post out today. In the paper, we argue that although the likelihood of a proliferation cascade in the Middle East is fairly low, and certainly lower than a number of critics of the Iran deal would have you believe, it is not zero. Given that, here are eight steps that leaders in Washington should take to head off that possibility:

1. Ensure that the JCPOA is rigorously monitored, strictly enforced, and faithfully implemented;
2. Strengthen U.S. intelligence collection on Iranian proliferation-related activities and intelligence-sharing on those activities with key partners;
3. Deter a future Iranian decision to produce nuclear weapons;
4. Seek to incorporate key monitoring and verification provisions of the JCPOA into routine IAEA safeguards as applied elsewhere in the Middle East and in the global nonproliferation regime;
5. Pursue U.S. civil nuclear cooperation with Middle East governments on terms that are realistic and serve U.S. nonproliferation interests;
6. Promote regional arrangements that restrain fuel cycle developments and build confidence in the peaceful use of regional nuclear programs;
7. Strengthen security assurances to U.S. partners in the Middle East; and
8. Promote a stable regional security environment.

Taken together, these steps deal with three core challenges the United States faces in shoring up the nonproliferation regime in the region.

The first is that the central test of nonproliferation in the Middle East will come from how the JCPOA is believed to be meeting its core objective of preventing Iranian nuclear weapons development and Iranian establishment of regional hegemony. It cannot be stressed enough that the decision to pursue nuclear weapons by any state, including those in the region, starts with a sense of vulnerability to core security threats and an inability to address those threats through any other means. The history of nuclear proliferation is one of tit-for-tat armament in the face of overriding security imperatives. Both finished and aborted nuclear programs bear the hallmarks of a security dilemma impelling states to make the political, economic, and security investments into nuclear weapons.

This is no less true for countries across the region than for Iran. To the extent that the overall security environment can be stabilized, there will be less impetus for any Middle Eastern state to develop nuclear weapons. The United States should focus on:

• Fully implementing and enforcing all sides of the JCPOA (nuclear restrictions, transparency, and sanctions relief);
• Creating a strong sense of deterrence toward Iran, manifest most clearly in the passage of a standing Authorization to Use Military Force if Iran is determined to be breaking out toward acquisition of a nuclear weapon;
• Providing security assurances and backing them up with the mechanisms to make them actionable like joint exercises, logistical planning, and cooperation with a range of regional and extra-regional actors; and,
• Working to promote a more stable regional environment by seeking the resolution of simmering conflicts.

But, these latter two factors also point to another resonant theme in our research: the need for the United States to be a player. After decades of involvement in the region, the United States has yet to settle upon the right balance between involvement and remove. Yet, establishing this equilibrium is essential. States in the region need predictability in their affairs with the United States, including knowing the degree to which our assurances will stand the test of time.

States in the region need predictability in their affairs with the United States, including knowing the degree to which our assurances will stand the test of time.

In part for this reason, the United States should not only pursue deeper security relationships, but also civil nuclear cooperation with interested states throughout the region. Such a relationship both ensures a closer link between the United States and its partners and discourages the spread of enrichment and reprocessing technology by disincentivizing countries from “going it alone.” In the Middle East, the United States would need to find a formulation that offers some flexibility (such as by building in language that would permit the United States to terminate any nuclear cooperation arrangements in the face of sensitive fuel cycle development by the other side).

The United States should also share intelligence more closely with its partners in the region. This is helpful in the short term, of course, but also helps the United States understand the mindset of and intelligence picture of its regional partners in a broader sense. It also helps leaders in Washington address concerns brought about by unfounded rumors or speculation as to Iran’s intentions or capabilities.

Changing how we do business

Even more important than how the JCPOA was negotiated will be how we transition from its restrictions and transparency mechanisms into a new world in 15 to 20 years. 

The United States seek to incorporate elements of the JCPOA into normal international monitoring practices and should negotiate new arrangements to help govern the future development of nuclear technology in the region. 

To achieve the former, the IAEA will need to make some changes to how it does business. For example, the IAEA determines how best to implement its monitoring mission, contingent on acceptance by the country being inspected. The United States and its partners should work with the IAEA (and other countries with significant nuclear activities) to make some parts of the JCPOA standard operating practice, such as online monitoring of enrichment levels. Other elements of the JCPOA may require agreements at the IAEA and beyond for how nuclear-related activities, including those that could have value for nuclear weaponization, are handled. It might be hard to get agreement, not least because there is clear language in the JCPOA that states that it will not be seen as a precedent for future nuclear nonproliferation efforts. However, it should still be the ambition of the United States to make such steps part of the norm. 

A far more difficult lift would be organizing a regional approach to the nuclear fuel cycle. This is not the same as creating a multilateral fuel cycle, though some elements that approach would be helpful. Rather, the United States should find ways to craft regional agreements or, failing that, moratoria on aspects of the fuel cycle that others in the region would find threatening. It would be easier to negotiate constraints some aspects than others. For example, spent fuel reprocessing is rare in the Middle East, with only Israel having been known to do it to a significant degree. It may therefore be an attractive first place to begin. Enrichment would be altogether more difficult, but it may be possible to convince states in the region to forego the expansion of their enrichment programs beyond their status quo. For Iran, it would continue to possess uranium enrichment but with constraints that limit the utility of this program for weapons production; its incentive would be to avoid creating the rationale for regional competition. For other countries in the region, it would involve holding off on enrichment, but also on the financial and political investment enrichment would involve—as well refraining from creating a security dilemma for Iran that could produce miscalculation in the future.

While some of these recommendations are more challenging (and may prove impossible), others are potentially easier. By taking a multifaceted approach, the United States increases the chances that no further weapons of mass destruction proliferate in the Middle East down the road. 

Editors’ Note: Richard Nephew and Bob Einhorn spoke about their new report at a recent Brookings event. You can see the video from the event here.

      

Was the Iran nuclear deal, signed last summer, a prelude to proliferation across the Middle East? This is a question that Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Einhorn and Non-resident Senior Fellow Richard Nephew explore in a new report. At an event to discuss their findings—moderated by Brookings Deputy Director of Foreign Policy and Senior Fellow Suzanne Maloney and with panelists Derek Chollet and H.E. Yousef Al Otaiba—Einhorn and Nephew argued that none of the Middle East’s “likely suspects” appears both inclined and able to acquire indigenous nuclear weapons capability in the foreseeable future. They also outlined policy options for the United States and other members of the P5+1.

Einhorn described the incentives and capabilities of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates for acquiring nuclear weapons. He argued that, while both Saudi Arabia and the UAE a) consider Iran a direct military threat, b) have concerns about the U.S. commitment to the security of the region, and c) have sufficient financial resources, they recognize that they have no choice but to rely on the United States for their security and are unwilling to jeopardize that relationship by seeking nuclear weapons. Einhorn also said that both Egypt and Turkey do not view Iran as a direct military threat and are more preoccupied with instability on their borders and internal security, concerns that cannot be addressed by possession of a nuclear weapons capability.

Nephew outlined policy recommendations, including measures to ensure strict implementation of the JCPOA, greater intelligence sharing and security cooperation with Middle East allies, and means of fostering IAEA-supervised regional arrangements that would encourage peaceful nuclear energy development and limit potentially destabilizing nuclear activities. Nephew also asserted that some elements of the JCPOA, such as online monitoring of nuclear facilities, could be applied to other nuclear energy programs in the region to enhance transparency. 

Derek Chollet of the German Marshall Fund argued the United States must deter Iran and reassure U.S. allies by maintaining a robust military presence in the region, planning a range of U.S. responses to destabilizing Iranian activities, and ensuring that U.S. forces have the weapons systems and personnel required for scenarios involving Iran. He suggested that the United States and its Middle East allies continue regular summit meetings on security and broader partnership issues, and possibly formalize security cooperation by establishing a dedicated regional security framework. 

Emirati Ambassador to the United States Yousef Al Otaiba emphasized that, to many of the countries in the region, Iran poses a threat wider than just its nuclear activities. He suggested that the JCPOA will be judged on the degree to which the United States and its allies address Iran’s destabilizing behavior outside of the nuclear file, such as Tehran’s support for Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as its ballistic missile activities. Al Otaiba said that, though he has seen some efforts by the Obama administration to push Iran on its regional behavior, it has sent a mixed message overall, with senior U.S. officials also encouraging European banks to invest in Iran. The ambassador asserted that rigorous enforcement of the JCPOA will be critical to convincing Iran not to eventually proceed to build nuclear weapons.

On Saudi Arabia, Einhorn noted that although the Obama administration supported the Saudi military campaign in Yemen, there was a risk that the Kingdom would overreact to its regional security challenges. He suggested that the United States pursue a dual-track approach: counter provocative Iranian behavior and defend the security interests of its regional partners, while at the same time seeking a resolution of regional disputes and encouraging Saudi Arabia and Iran to find ways of reducing tensions between them.

On the possibility that Iran would rapidly scale up its enrichment program, Einhorn acknowledged that while Tehran can legally do so under the JCPOA in 10 to 15 years, it will not have a strong civil nuclear rationale since it will be able to acquire nuclear fuel from Russia and other suppliers. Furthermore, Iran’s progress in centrifuge research and development may not be as rapid as Iran currently anticipates. Moreover, even if Iran elects to ramp up its enrichment program down the line, the JCPOA and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will bar it from pursuing nuclear weapons, and monitoring arrangements still in place will provide warning and enable the United States to intervene and prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.

On reaching a regional accommodation that includes Iran, Al Otaiba indicated that the UAE would have much to gain, especially economically, from a better relationship with Tehran. He said the UAE and others in the region would like to try to engage with Iran to reduce tensions—but Iran, for its part, seems unwilling.

On prospects for a U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear cooperation agreement, Einhorn said that progress on such an agreement has stalled due to Saudi reluctance to formally renounce enrichment, something the United States has so far insisted on. He suggested that Washington should be prepared to relax the so-called “gold standard” (i.e., a formal renunciation of on enrichment and reprocessing) and instead accept an approach that would still discourage Saudi fuel cycle programs, such as giving Riyadh the right to pursue enrichment but allowing the United States to cease its nuclear cooperation if the Kingdom exercised that right. On the UAE’s civil nuclear program, Al Otaiba affirmed that the Emiratis continue to value the “gold standard” barring enrichment which is enshrined in the U.S.-UAE civil nuclear agreement, and have no plans to change their position on enrichment.

       

At a news conference in Seoul today, the United States and the Republic of Korea jointly announced the decision to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system on the Korean Peninsula, with operational deployment planned by the end of 2017. Though many details are still pending, the decision is not a surprise, and the purposes of the deployment are wholly transparent.

As elaborated in the official announcement, the THAAD deployments are intended to defend the infrastructure and citizens of South Korea, and to protect core military capabilities underpinning the U.S.-Korea alliance. It is not a panacea for South Korea’s potential vulnerabilities to North Korean missile attack, but it will appreciably buttress Seoul’s still-limited air and missile defense capabilities, and explicitly link them to the far greater assets of the United States. 

Seoul did not undertake this commitment lightly. In recent years, South Korean strategic analysts have hotly debated the missile defense issue, but the political-military leadership has proceeded very deliberately. It was only in the aftermath of North Korea’s fourth nuclear test in early January and a long-range rocket test that soon followed that President Park Geun-hye’s administration agreed to initiate consultations on the “earliest possible” deployment of a THAAD missile battery. The North’s accelerated missile testing program, evident since April, reinforced the need for a meaningful response to Pyongyang’s actions.

Neither China nor Russia seems mollified by today’s announcement. Beijing and Moscow both perceive a malign U.S. strategic design, purportedly intended to detect and intercept Chinese and Russian strategic missiles, thereby invalidating their respective deterrence capabilities. But these worst-case estimates attribute technical reach and refinement to the Raytheon radar system likely to accompany the THAAD deployment that substantially exceeds even the manufacturer’s claims. 

China and Russia also contend that the THAAD deployment will further complicate the larger goal of denuclearization and threat reduction on the Korean Peninsula. But this places the cart before the horse. Pyongyang’s determination to expand and diversify its nuclear and missile programs has triggered the THAAD decision. Without the North’s accelerated military efforts, it is very doubtful that sentiment in Seoul would favor deployment of THAAD. Beijing and Moscow assuredly know how to connect the dots, but they seem unwilling to do so. 

At a time of increased Chinese wariness about U.S. military strategy along China’s periphery, it is not a surprise that Beijing has paid little heed to American and South Korean assurances.

Beijing also calculates that warning South Korea of unspecified consequences will convince Seoul to forego the THAAD decision. But this underestimates the South’s determination to proceed with missile defense, which will tie Seoul even more integrally to longer-term cooperation with the United States. This decision is unwelcome in China, but it is wholly within Seoul’s sovereign right to defend its vital interests by all appropriate means; China routinely does the same.

In meetings with Chinese counterparts, senior Korean officials have repeatedly stated that the THAAD deployment serves one irreducible purpose: the protection of South Korean vital national security interests. Seoul is keenly aware of Chinese strategic equities, and will remain very mindful of Beijing’s concerns as it moves ahead with this program. 

At the same time, Seoul and Washington have repeatedly conveyed their willingness to impart to officials in Beijing the limited purpose of the THAAD deployment. It will be directed entirely towards the North’s threats against the South; it will be exclusively bilateral in design; and it will not be targeted against the capabilities of any other party. 

At a time of increased Chinese wariness about U.S. military strategy along China’s periphery, it is not a surprise that Beijing has paid little heed to American and South Korean assurances, at least publicly. But officials and analysts in China must quietly grasp the reasons for the THAAD decision. The North’s nuclear and missile programs worry China deeply, as well. 

The need for a quiet, private conversation about the risks to stability on the peninsula has never been greater. The United States and South Korea are surely ready for this conversation. Whether China is ready remains to be seen.

       

The Pentagon is embarking on a modernization of U.S. strategic nuclear forces that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Much of it makes sense, as key elements of the strategic triad age out and require replacement. As long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States should maintain a robust triad. However, the long-range stand-off weapon (LRSO), a new nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missile, does not make sense.

The U.S. strategic triad consists of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and strategic bombers. This mix gives the Pentagon the ability to hold at risk things that a potential adversary values. The inherent ability to destroy those things provides the basis for deterrence.

ICBMs can hold at risk targets 6,000 miles away. As they are based on mobile ballistic missile submarines, SLBMs can reach targets anywhere on earth. The same is true for weapons carried by the B-2 and B-52 and, in the future, the B-21. With aerial refueling, U.S. strategic bombers have global reach.

So the question arises: What unique target set could the LRSO hold at risk that cannot be threatened by ICBMs, SLBMs, or gravity bombs delivered by stealthy strategic bombers? At a recent panel discussion on the LRSO, the best answer to this question was “certain things”—but the proponent could not articulate what those “things” were. That explains much of the questioning about the LRSO. No one seems able to offer a plausible explanation for what the LRSO could do that other strategic nuclear systems cannot.

The weapon’s justification often seems to boil down to: The Pentagon is replacing other strategic systems because they are old, so it should replace the old nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missile (ALCM) as well. Does that logic hold?

The Air Force developed nuclear-armed ALCMs in the 1970s because the B-52 presented a big target on radar screens. Concern grew that the B-52 could not penetrate Soviet air defenses. A B-52 armed with ALCMs could launch its missiles from well beyond the reach of those air defenses.

Today, however, the Air Force has the stealthy B-2 bomber. It is in the process of procuring 80 to 100 B-21 bombers, which reportedly will incorporate stealth and advanced electronic warfare capabilities. The Department of Energy is already well along in the program to modernize the B61 nuclear gravity bomb. The modernized bomb will be highly accurate and have a variable yield. B-2 and B-21 bombers that can penetrate advanced air defenses and deliver B61 bombs against targets make the LRSO redundant.

Some suggest the LRSO hedges against a compromise of the B-21’s stealth. If that argument has merit, Congress ought to reexamine the wisdom of spending $60 to $80 billion—or perhaps $100 billion—on the bomber. Converted KC-46s (military refueling variants of the Boeing 767) with LRSOs would offer a far cheaper option. The Pentagon, however, seems to believe the B-21 will be capable of defeating advanced air defenses.

That being so, the case for the LRSO is weak. It will cost taxpayers $20 to $30 billion. True, that is a relatively small cost compared to what the Pentagon will pay to replace the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines or build the B-21. But it is not chump change.

Some LRSO proponents cite the relatively “small” cost to argue that the defense budget can afford it. Current Pentagon officials, however, say they have no idea how to pay for everything they want for strategic modernization. Given the rising cost of mandatory spending such as social security and Medicare, and the pressure to hold down the deficit, the budget problem will not become easier in the 2020s, when the “bow-wave” of strategic modernization spending arrives. The Air Force will likely find itself having to choose between B-21s, KC-46 tankers, F-35 fighters, and the LRSO. It also wants to buy a new ICBM then. It is hard to see how all of that will be affordable.

Funding the LRSO now contributes to a budget time-bomb that the current administration and Congress will leave to their successors. The LRSO seems a redundant weapon without a mission. Shelving the program would defuse part of that time-bomb.

       

One year after its conclusion, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) remains controversial in Tehran and Washington, with opponents unreconciled to the deal and determined to derail it. Republican attacks against the deal will keep the controversy alive for most of this election year.

But opponents have had to scale back their criticism, in large part because the JCPOA, at least so far, has delivered on its principal goal—blocking Iran’s path to nuclear weapons for an extended period of time. No one can dispute that Tehran has sharply reduced its capacity to produce fissile materials for nuclear weapons and would need at least a year to rebuild enough capacity to produce a single bomb.

Iran’s positive compliance record has not given opponents much ammunition. The IAEA found Iran in compliance in its two quarterly reports issued in 2016. True, Iran temporarily exceeded the agreed ceiling on heavy water but quickly rectified the infraction, which most observers attributed to the practical difficulty of ensuring that production overages are exported in a timely way rather than to an intention to circumvent the limit. Critics have also pounced on a German report that Iran’s illicit attempts to procure nuclear and missile items continued in 2015. But Tehran’s requirement to import all nuclear items for its permitted civil nuclear program through the JCPOA’s procurement channel—and stop procuring items outside the channel—did not kick in until January 2016, and neither Washington nor Berlin has information that illicit efforts continued after that time.

Murky missile issue

Iran’s ballistic missile tests present a more complicated compliance issue. Due to a compromise reached in the negotiations, missile activities are not covered in the JCPOA and Security Council resolution 2231 simply ”calls upon” but does not legally require Iran to cease those activities (as did the U.N. Security Council resolutions replaced by 2231). As a result, Iranians argue they are not legally bound to cease missile testing, and Russia and China essentially support their argument. 

The administration and Congress are right to oppose Iran’s provocative and destabilizing missile activities. But they are not on strong legal or political grounds to treat the issue as a compliance violation. Rather than invoking the Iran nuclear deal, Washington and its partners will need to counter Iran’s missile programs with other policy tools, including interdictions of procurement attempts, Missile Technology Control Regime restrictions, U.S. diplomatic efforts with suppliers, missile defenses, and sanctions.

An uncertain path ahead

So, from the standpoint of Iran implementing and complying with its nuclear commitments, the JCPOA has operated well for its first year. But challenges to the smooth operation and even the longevity of the deal are already apparent.

A real threat to the JCPOA is that Iran will blame the slow recovery of its economy on U.S. failure to conscientiously fulfill its sanctions relief commitments and, using that as a pretext, will curtail or even end its own implementation of the deal. Iranians are understandably frustrated that the benefits of sanctions relief have not materialized as quickly as expected. But international banks and businesses have been reluctant to engage Iran not because they have been discouraged by the United States but because they have their own business-related reasons to be cautious, including the inadequate regulatory standards of Iran’s financial system, low oil prices in an oil-dependent economy, and fear of running afoul of remaining U.S. sanctions. In an effort to ensure that Iran will reap the economic rewards it deserves, the Obama administration has bent over backwards to inform foreign governments, banks, and businesses of what sanctions relief measures entitle them to do, but Iranian officials continue to complain that it is not doing enough.

[W]e can say the nuclear deal is off to a promising start...[s]till, it is already clear that the path ahead will not always be smooth.

Legislation proposed in Congress could also threaten the nuclear deal. Many proponents of new sanctions legislation genuinely seek to reinforce the deal—for example, by renewing the Iran Sanctions Act without attaching poison pills. But for some other members of Congress, the bills are designed to undercut the JCPOA. In a July 11 statement of policy, the administration threatened to veto three House bills, stating that they “would undermine the ability of the United States to meet our JCPOA commitments by reimposing certain secondary economic and financial sanctions lifted on ‘Implementation Day’ of the JCPOA.” For now, the administration is in a position to block new legislation that it believes would scuttle the nuclear deal.

But developments outside the JCPOA, especially Iran’s regional behavior and its crackdown on dissent at home, could weaken support for the JCPOA within the United States and give proponents of deal-killing legislation a boost. So far, however, there are no clear indications that the JCPOA has contributed either to more moderate or more provocative behavior. Indeed, consistent with statements by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, there have been few changes in Iran’s behavior toward its neighbors in the last year.

A potential wildcard for the future of the JCPOA is upcoming governing transitions in both Washington and Tehran. There will be more continuity in policy toward Iran and the JCPOA if Hillary Clinton becomes president, although she is likely to take a harder line than her predecessor. Donald Trump now says he will re-negotiate rather than scrap the deal, but in practice that could produce the same result because a better deal will not prove negotiable. With President Hassan Rouhani up for re-election next year and the health of the Supreme Leader questionable, Iran’s future policy toward the JCPOA cannot be confidently predicted.

A final verdict on the JCPOA is many years away, not just because of the challenges mentioned above but also because of the crucial uncertainly regarding what Iran will do when key restrictions on its ability to produce weapons-grade nuclear materials expire after 15 years. However, we can say the nuclear deal is off to a promising start, as even some of its early critics now concede. Still, it is already clear that the path ahead will not always be smooth, the longevity of the deal cannot be taken for granted, and keeping it on track will require constant focus in Washington and other interested capitals. 

       

One unintended but very important consequence of the Iran nuclear deal has been to aggravate and intensify Saudi Arabia's concerns about Iran's regional goals and intentions. This fueling of Saudi fears has in turn fanned sectarian tensions in the region to unprecedented levels.

Of course stoking Saudi angst and perhaps even paranoia was not the intention of the deal’s negotiators. They sought to reduce tensions and prevent a nuclear arms race. A combination of circumstances outside their control exacerbated the problem of Saudi-Iranian rivalry that dates back before the Iranian revolution. But the results are likely to haunt the region for years to come.

An array of worries

Riyadh's concerns about Iran have never been primarily focused on the nuclear danger. The Saudis have long calculated the risk of Iranian use of nuclear weapons as low. They also believe the American nuclear umbrella protects them. The key Saudi concern is their belief that Iran seeks regional hegemony and uses terrorism and subversion to achieve it.

The deal deliberately does not deal with this issue. In Saudi eyes it actually makes the situation worse, because lifting sanctions removed Iran's isolation as a rogue state and gives it more income. Iran's ambition to be the region's hegemon is fueled not reduced by the deal.

The debate over the deal that ended a year ago coincided with two key developments in the Kingdom in early 2015. First was the succession of King Salman Abd al Aziz. His predecessor and half-brother Abdullah was a hardliner on Iran, but he was also risk-averse and cautious by nature. He had experimented with detente with Iran in the 1980s, even sending a Saudi Shiite as ambassador to Tehran. He wanted American soldiers to deal with Iran, not Saudis, a posture that greatly irritated Americans like former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates who likened it to using his soldiers as mercenaries. King Abdullah sought to avoid confrontation not embrace it.

The second coincidence was the takeover of the Yemeni capital Sanaa by the alliance of Zaydi Shiite Houthi rebels and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh early last year. The rebels opened direct air links to Tehran and proposed other concessions to Iran. They marched on the southern port of Aden, Sunni territory. Iran hailed their victories. The Saudis and other Gulf states saw an Iranian foothold emerging in the Achilles heel of the Arabian Peninsula.

The new king and his young Defense Minister Prince Muhammad bin Salman reacted angrily and firmly. An Arab coalition was created rapidly to intervene and fight the rebels. The result, Operation Decisive Storm, was distinctly unlike anything in recent Saudi history. Bold and aggressive in design, it stopped the rebels’ advance and prevented any Iranian intrusion into Yemen—but it also created a humanitarian disaster and a bloody stalemate. The United States and United Kingdom, eager to quiet Saudi objections to the nuclear deal, provided crucial support to the Saudi war. Pakistan, a longtime ally with a large Shiite minority, voted unanimously in parliament to stay out because it was worried about intensified sectarianism. 

A year ago Saudi intelligence renditioned Ahmed Mughassil after he debarked from a flight from Tehran to Beirut. The Saudi Shiite Mughassil was the mastermind of the Khobar attack twenty years ago in Saudi Arabia that killed nineteen American airmen. He was also involved in the assassination of several Saudi diplomats in the 1980s. He is the epitome of Iranian support and direction of terror. No doubt his interrogation has underscored Saudi concern about Iran's clandestine actions in the Gulf.

In January this year, the Saudis executed a prominent Shite dissident for allegedly supporting terrorism. An Iranian mob attacked the Saudi embassy—probably encouraged by regime hardliners—and then the Saudis broke diplomatic relations. Since then, Riyadh has encouraged its allies to follow suit. Iranian pilgrims will not attend this year's Hajj.

Saudi concern about Iranian conspiracies is reaching new heights. At least one prominent Saudi commentator has argued the terrorist attack on the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina on July 4th was a false flag operation controlled by Iranian intelligence to discredit the king's standing as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. His column is getting wide attention.

Former intelligence chief and Ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al Faysal last weekend attended a large demonstration in France sponsored by the Mujahideen e Khalq group and called for the regime to be overthrown. Turki's backing for the MeK and his open call for regime change escalates the rivalry even further.

Entrenched position?

The combination of a new leadership in Riyadh that is more prepared to take firm action and the crisis in Yemen have added to Saudi disagreement over the Iran deal. As the Pakistanis feared, it has polarized an already deeply divided Muslim world. The Islamic State and al-Qaida benefit from the Muslim Cold War and the escalating sectarian violence.

Washington has tried hard to reassure the Saudis that they are not alone in their legitimate concerns about Iran's terrorist activities and destabilizing subversion. President Obama has wisely sought to build confidence with the king and his young son. The Iran deal is a good one, and I've supported it from its inception.

But it has had consequences that are dangerous and alarming. In the end, Riyadh and Tehran are the only players who can deescalate the situation. The Saudis show no sign of interest in that road. 

       

How has the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—signed between the P5+1 and Iran one year ago—played out in practice? Several Brookings scholars, many of whom participated prominently in debates last year surrounding official congressional review, offered their views.

Strobe Talbott, President, Brookings Institution: At the one-year mark, it’s clear that the nuclear agreement between Iran and the major powers has substantially restricted Tehran’s ability to produce the fissile material necessary to build a bomb. That’s a net positive—for the United States and the broader region.

Robert Einhorn, Senior Fellow, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Senior Fellow, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, Foreign Policy program: One year after its conclusion, the JCPOA remains controversial in Tehran and Washington (as I describe in more detail here), with opponents unreconciled to the deal and determined to derail it. But opponents have had to scale back their criticism, in large part because the JCPOA, at least so far, has delivered on its principal goal—blocking Iran’s path to nuclear weapons for an extended period of time. Moreover, Iran’s positive compliance record has not given opponents much ammunition. The IAEA found Iran in compliance in its two quarterly reports issued in 2016. But challenges to the smooth operation and even the longevity of the deal are already apparent. A real threat to the JCPOA is that Iran will blame the slow recovery of its economy on U.S. failure to conscientiously fulfill its sanctions relief commitments and, using that as a pretext, will curtail or even end its own implementation of the deal. But international banks and businesses have been reluctant to engage Iran not because they have been discouraged by the United States but because they have their own business-related reasons to be cautious. Legislation proposed in Congress could also threaten the nuclear deal.  For now, the administration is in a position to block new legislation that it believes would scuttle the deal. But developments outside the JCPOA, especially Iran’s regional behavior and its crackdown on dissent at home, could weaken support for the JCPOA within the United States and give proponents of deal-killing legislation a boost.  A potential wildcard for the future of the JCPOA is coming governing transitions in both Washington and Tehran. Hillary Clinton would maintain the deal but perhaps a harder line than her predecessor. Donald Trump now says he will re-negotiate rather than scrap the deal, but a better deal will not prove negotiable. With President Hassan Rouhani up for re-election next year and the health of the Supreme Leader questionable, Iran’s future policy toward the JCPOA cannot be confidently predicted. A final verdict on the JCPOA is many years away. But it is off to a promising start, as even some of its early critics now concede. Still, it is already clear that the path ahead will not always be smooth, the longevity of the deal cannot be taken for granted, and keeping it on track will require constant focus in Washington and other interested capitals.

Suzanne Maloney, Deputy Director, Foreign Policy program and Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program: The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has fulfilled neither the worst fears of its detractors nor the most soaring ambitions of its proponents. All of the concerns that have shaped U.S. policy toward Tehran for more than a generation—terrorism, human rights abuses, weapons of mass destruction, regional destabilization—remain as relevant, and as alarming, as they have ever been. Notably, much the same is true on the Iranian side; the manifold grievances that Tehran has harbored toward Washington since the 1979 revolution continue to smolder. An important truth about the JCPOA, which has been wielded by both its defenders and its detractors in varying contexts, is that it was transactional, not transformational. As President Barack Obama repeatedly insisted, the accord addressed one specific problem, and in those narrow terms, it can be judged a relative success. The value of that relative success should not be underestimated; a nuclear-armed Iran would magnify risks in a turbulent region in a terrible way.  But in the United States, in Iran, and across the Middle East, the agreement has always been viewed through a much broader lens—as a waystation toward Iranian-American rapprochement, as an instrument for addressing the vicious cycle of sectarian violence that threatens to consume the region, as a boost to the greater cause of moderation and democratization in Iran. And so the failure of the deal to catalyze greater cooperation from Iran on a range of other priorities—Syria, Yemen, Iraq, to name a few—or to jumpstart improvements in Iran’s domestic dynamics cannot be disregarded simply because it was not its original intent.  For the “new normal” of regularized diplomatic contact between Washington and Tehran to yield dividends, the United States will need a serious strategy toward Tehran that transcends the JCPOA, building on the efficacy of the hard-won multilateral collaboration on the nuclear issue. Iranians, too, must begin to pivot the focus of their efforts away from endless litigation of the nuclear deal and toward a more constructive approach to addressing the deep challenges facing their country today.

Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and Director, Intelligence Project, Foreign Policy program: As I explain more fully here, one unintended but very important consequence of the Iran nuclear deal has been to aggravate and intensify Saudi Arabia's concerns about Iran's regional goals and intentions. This fueling of Saudi fears has in turn fanned sectarian tensions in the region to unprecedented levels, and the results are likely to haunt the region for years to come. Riyadh's concerns about Iran have never been primarily focused on the nuclear danger. Rather, the key Saudi concern is that Iran seeks regional hegemony and uses terrorism and subversion to achieve it. The deal deliberately does not deal with this issue. In Saudi eyes, it actually makes the situation worse because lifting sanctions removed Iran's isolation as a rogue state and gives it more income.  Washington has tried hard to reassure the Saudis, and President Obama has wisely sought to build confidence with King Salman and his young son. The Iran deal is a good one, and I've supported it from its inception. But it has had consequences that are dangerous and alarming. In the end, Riyadh and Tehran are the only players who can deescalate the situation—the Saudis show no sign of interest in that road.

Norman Eisen, Visiting Fellow, Governance Studies: The biggest disappointment of the post-deal year has been the failure of Congress to pass legislation complementing the JCPOA. There is a great deal that the legislative branch could do to support the pact. Above all, it could establish criteria putting teeth into U.S. enforcement of Preamble Section III, Iran's pledge never to seek nuclear weapons. Congress could and should make clear what the ramp to seeking nuclear weapons would look like, what the triggers would be for U.S. action, and what kinds of U.S. action would be on the table. If Iran knows that, it will modulate its behavior accordingly. If it does not, it will start to act out, and we have just kicked the can down the road. That delay is of course immensely valuable—but why not extend the road indefinitely? Congress can do that, and much more (e.g. by increasing funding for JCPOA oversight by the administration and the IAEA), with appropriate legislation.

Richard Nephew, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative, Foreign Policy program: Over the past year, much effort has gone into ensuring that the Iran deal is fully implemented. To date, the P5+1 has—not surprisingly—gotten the better end of the bargain, with significant security benefits accruing to them and their partners in the Middle East once the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) verified the required changes to Iran's nuclear program. Iran, for its part, has experienced a natural lag in its economic resurgence, held back by the collapse in oil prices in 2014, residual American and European sanctions, and reluctance among banks and businesses to re-engage. But, Iran's economy has stabilized and—if the deal holds for its full measure—the security benefits that the P5+1 and their partners have won may fall away while Iran's economy continues to grow. The most important challenge related to the deal for the next U.S. administration (and, presumably, the Rouhani administration in its second term) is therefore: how can it be taken forward, beyond the 10- to 15-year transition period? Iran will face internal pressure to expand its nuclear program, but it also will face pressure to refrain both externally and internally, should other countries in the region seek to create their own matching nuclear capabilities.  The best next step for all sides is to negotiate a region-wide arrangement to manage nuclear programs –one that constrains all sides, though perhaps not equally. It must ensure—at a minimum—that nuclear developments in the region are predictable, understandable, and credibly civilian (something Bob Einhorn and I addressed in a recent report). The next White House will need to do the hard work of convincing countries in the region—and beyond—not to rest on the victory of the JCPOA. Rather, they must take it for what it is: another step towards a more stable and manageable region.

Tamara Wittes, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program:  This week, Washington is awash in events and policy papers taking stock of how the Iran nuclear deal has changed the Middle East in the past year. The narratives presented this week largely track the positions that the authors, speakers, or organizations articulated on the nuclear deal when it was first concluded last summer. Those who opposed the deal have marshaled evidence of how the deal has "emboldened" Iran's destabilizing behavior, while those who supported the deal cite evidence of "moderated" politics in the Islamic Republic. That polarized views on the deal last year produce polarized assessments of the deal's impact this year should surprise no one. In fact, no matter which side of the nuclear agreement’s worth it presents, much of the analysis out this week ascribes to the nuclear deal Iranian behavior and attitudes in the region that existed before the deal's conclusion and implementation. Iran has been a revisionist state, and a state sponsor of terrorism, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Saudi-Iranian rivalry predates the revolution; Iran's backing of Houthi militias against Saudi and its allies in Yemen well predates the nuclear agreement. Most notably, the upheavals in the Arab world since 2011 have given Iran wider opportunities than perhaps ever before to exploit the cracks within Arab societies—and to use cash, militias, and other tools to advance its interests and expand its influence. Iran has exploited those opportunities skillfully in the last five years and, as I wrote last summer, was likely to continue to do so regardless of diplomatic success or failure in Vienna. To argue that the nuclear deal somehow created these problems, or could solve them, is ahistorical.  It is true that Iran's access to global markets might free even more cash for these endeavors, and that is a real issue worth tracking. But since severe sanctions did not prevent Iran from spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support and supply Hezbollah, or marshaling Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and militia fighters to sustain the faltering regime of Bashar Assad in Syria, it's not clear that additional cash will generate a meaningful difference in regional outcomes. Certainly, the nuclear deal's conclusion and implementation did not alter the trajectory of Iranian policy in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon to any noticeable degree—and that means that, no matter what the merits or dangers of the JCPOA, the United States must still confront and work to resolve enduring challenges to regional instability—including Iran's revisionist behavior.

Kenneth M. Pollack, Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy, Foreign Policy program:  When the JCPOA was being debated last year, I felt that the terms of the deal were far less consequential than how the United States responded to Iranian regional behavior after a deal was signed. I see the events of the past 12 months as largely having borne that out. While both sides have accused the other of "cheating," the deal has so far largely held. However, as many of my colleagues have noted, the real frictions have arisen from the U.S. geostrategic response to the deal. I continue to believe that signing the JCPOA was better than any of the realistic alternatives—though I also continue to believe that a better deal was possible, had the administration handled the negotiations differently. However, the administration’s regional approach since then has been problematic—with officials condemning Riyadh and excusing Tehran in circumstances where both were culpable and ignoring some major Iranian transgressions, for instance (and with President Obama gratuitously insulting the Saudis and other U.S. allies in interviews).  America's traditional Sunni Arab allies (and to some extent Turkey and Israel) feared that either the United States would use the JCPOA as an excuse to further disengage from the region or to switch sides and join the Iranian coalition. Their reading of events has been that this is precisely what has happened, and it is causing the GCC states to act more aggressively. I think our traditional allies would enthusiastically welcome a Hillary Clinton presidency. She would likely do all that she could to reassure them that she plans to be more engaged and more willing to commit American resources and energy to Middle Eastern problems. But those allies will eventually look for her to turn words into action. I cannot imagine a Hillary Clinton administration abrogating the JCPOA, imposing significant new economic sanctions on Iran, or otherwise acting in ways that it would fear could provoke Tehran to break the deal. Our allies may see that as Washington trying to remain on the fence, which will infuriate them.  So there are some important strategic differences between the United States and its regional allies. The second anniversary of the JCPOA could therefore prove even more fraught for America and the Middle East than the first.

       

At the time that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran was being debated here in Washington, I felt that the terms of the deal were far less consequential than how the United States responded to Iranian regional behavior after a deal was signed. I see the events of the past 12 months as largely having borne out that analysis. While both sides have accused the other of "cheating" on the deal in both letter and spirit, it has so far largely held and neither Tehran nor Washington (nor any of the other signatories) have shown a determination to abrogate the deal or flagrantly circumvent its terms. However, as many of my colleagues have noted, the real frictions have arisen from the U.S. geostrategic response to the deal.

I continue to believe that the Obama administration was ultimately correct that signing the JCPOA was better than any of the realistic alternatives—even if I also continue to believe that a better deal was possible, had the administration handled the negotiations differently. However, its regional approach since then has left a fair amount to be desired:

• The president gratuitously insulted the Saudis and other U.S. allies in his various interviews with Jeff Goldberg of The Atlantic. 
• After several alarming Iranian-Saudi dust-ups, administration officials have none-too-privately condemned Riyadh and excused Tehran in circumstances where both were culpable. 
• Washington has continued to just about ignore all manner of Iranian transgressions from human rights abuses to missile tests, and senior administration officials have turned themselves into metaphorical pretzels to insist that the United States is doing everything it can to assist the Iranian economy. 
• And the overt component of the administration's Syria policy remains stubbornly focused on ISIS, not the Bashar Assad regime or its Iranian allies, while the covert side focused on the regime remains very limited—far smaller than America's traditional Middle Eastern allies have sought. 

To be fair, the administration has been quite supportive of the Gulf Cooperation Council war effort in Yemen—far more so than most Americans realize—but even there, still much less than the Saudis, Emiratis, and other Sunni states would like. 

To be blunt, the perspective of America's traditional Sunni Arab allies (and to some extent, Turkey and Israel) is that they are waging an all-out war against Iran and its (Shiite) allies across the region. They have wanted the United States, their traditional protector, to lead that fight. And they feared that the JCPOA would result in one of two different opposite approaches: either that the United States would use the JCPOA as an excuse to further disengage from the geopolitical competition in the region, or even worse, that Washington would use it to switch sides and join the Iranian coalition. Unfortunately, their reading of events has been that this is precisely what has happened, although they continue to debate whether the United States is merely withdrawing or actively changing sides. And as both Bruce Reidel and I have both stressed, this perception is causing the GCC states to act more aggressively, provoking more crises and worsening proxy warfare with Iran that will inevitably aggravate an already dangerously-unstable Middle East and raises the risk of escalation to something even worse.

U.S. President Barack Obama walks with Saudi King Salman at Erga Palace upon his arrival for a summit meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia April 20, 2016. Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque.

Looking to year two

All that said, I wanted to use the first anniversary of the JCPOA to think about where we may be on its second anniversary. By then, we will have a new president. Donald Trump has not laid out anything close to a coherent approach to the Middle East, nor does he have any prior experience with the region, so I do not believe we can say anything reasonable about how he might handle the region if he somehow became president. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has had considerable experience with the region—as first lady, senator, and secretary of state—and she and her senior aides have discussed the region to a much greater extent, making it possible to speculate on at least the broad contours of her initial Middle East policy. 

In particular, Clinton has been at pains to emphasize a willingness to commit more resources to deal with the problems of the Middle East and a fervent desire to rebuild the strained ties with America's traditional Middle Eastern allies. From my perspective, that is all to the good because an important (but hardly the only) factor in the chaos consuming the Middle East has been the Obama administration's determination to disengage from the geopolitical events of the region and distance itself from America's traditional allies. The problem here is not that the United States always does the right thing or that our allies are saints. Hardly. It is that the region desperately needs the United States to help it solve the massive problems of state failure and civil war that are simply beyond the capacity of regional actors to handle on their own. The only way to stop our allies from acting aggressively and provocatively is for the United States to lead them in a different, more constructive direction. In the Middle East in particular, you can't beat something with nothing, and while the United States cannot be the only answer to the region's problems, there is no answer to the region's problems without the United States.

My best guess is that our traditional allies will enthusiastically welcome a Hillary Clinton presidency, and the new president will do all that she can to reassure them that she plans to be more engaged, more of a leader, more willing to commit American resources to Middle Eastern problems, more willing to help the region address its problems (and not just the problems that affect the United States directly, like ISIS). I think all of that rhetorical good will and a sense (on both sides) of putting the bad days of Obama behind them will produce a honeymoon period. 

[T]he second anniversary of the JCPOA could prove even more fraught for America and the Middle East than the first.

But I suspect that that honeymoon will come to an end after 6 to 18 months, perhaps beginning with the second anniversary of the JCPOA and occasioned by it. I suspect that at that point, America's traditional allies—the Sunni Arab States, Israel, and Turkey—will begin to look for President Clinton to turn her words into action, and from their perspective, that is probably going to mean doing much more than President Obama. I suspect that they will still want the United States to join and/or lead them in a region-wide war against Iran and its allies. And while I think that a President Clinton will want to do more than President Obama, I see no sign that she is interested in doing that much more. 

Syria is one example. The GCC wants the United States to commit to a strategy that will destroy the Assad regime (and secondarily, eliminate ISIS and the Nusra Front). Clinton has said she was in favor of a beefed-up covert campaign against the Assad regime and that she is in favor of imposing a no-fly zone over the country. If, as president, she enacts both, this would be a much more aggressive policy than Obama's, but as I have written elsewhere, neither is likely to eliminate the Assad regime, let alone stabilize Syria and end the civil war—the two real threats to both the United States and our regional allies (and our European allies). 

Even more to the point, I cannot imagine a Hillary Clinton administration abrogating the JCPOA, imposing significant new economic sanctions on Iran, or otherwise acting in ways that it would fear could provoke Tehran to break the deal, overtly or covertly. That may look to our traditional allies like Washington is trying to remain on the fence, which will infuriate them. After Obama, and after Clinton's rhetoric, they expect the United States to stand openly and resolutely with them. At the very least, such American restraint will place further limits on the willingness of a Clinton administration to adopt the kind of confrontational policy toward Tehran that our regional allies want, and that her rhetoric has led them to expect. 

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (C) speaks with Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh (L) and United Arab Emirates Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash as they participate in the Libya Contact Group family photo at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi June 9, 2011. Photo credit: Reuters/Susan Walsh.

Reconcile, or agree to disagree?

Let me be clear, I am not suggesting that the United States should adopt the GCC analysis of what is going on in the region wholeheartedly. I think that it overstates Iran's role as the source of the region's problems and so distracts from what I see as the region's real problems—state failure and civil wars—even if the Iranians have played a role in exacerbating both. 

Instead, my intent is simply to highlight that there are some important strategic differences between the United States and its regional allies, differences that are not all Barack Obama's fault but reflect important differences that have emerged between the two sides. If this analysis is correct, then the second anniversary of the JCPOA could prove even more fraught for America and the Middle East than the first. The honeymoon will be over, and both sides may recognize that goodwill and rousing words alone cannot cover fundamental divergences in both our diagnosis of what ails the region and our proposed treatment of those maladies. If that is the case, then both may need to make much bigger adjustments than they currently contemplate. Otherwise, the United States may find that its traditional allies are no longer as willing to follow our lead, and our allies may discover that the United States is no longer interested in leading them on the path they want to follow.

       

Few issues are closer to President Obama’s vision of the global future than his convictions about reducing the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy. Less than three months after entering office, in a major speech in Prague, he put forward an ambitious nuclear agenda, declaring that the United States (as the only state ever to employ nuclear weapons in warfare) had a “moral responsibility…to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

Seven years later, despite the administration’s having advanced other goals in non-proliferation policy, the larger vision of a nuclear-free world remains very much unfulfilled. But President Obama apparently hasn’t given up. In late May, he became the first American president to visit Hiroshima, where the United States first employed a nuclear weapon in warfare. In his speech, the president declared that “nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles…must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.” Moreover, as President Obama approaches his final six months in office, senior officials are purportedly deliberating additional policy changes that they believe could be undertaken without congressional approval. As Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said in a June 6 speech at the Arms Control Association, the president remains intent on advancing his “Prague agenda” before leaving office.

According to recent press reports, the policy options under consideration include U.S. enunciation of a nuclear “no first use” doctrine. Such a step would represent a profound shift in U.S. policy. Non-nuclear states living in the shadow of nuclear-armed adversaries have long relied on U.S. security guarantees, specifically the declared commitment to employ nuclear weapons should our allies be subject to aggression with conventional forces. They have based their own national security strategies on that pledge, including their willingness to forego indigenous development of nuclear weapons.

Northeast Asia presents a clear contradiction between President Obama’s non-nuclear aspirations and existing circumstances.

These issues bear directly on the credibility of U.S. guarantees to allies in Europe and Asia, with particular relevance in Northeast Asia. Since the end of the Cold War, the content of the U.S. extended nuclear deterrence pledge has already narrowed. Washington has long deemed any use of nuclear weapons a matter of absolute last resort. Since the early 1990s, Washington has also enunciated an unambiguous distinction between employment of conventional and nuclear weapons, including the unilateral withdrawal of all tactical nuclear weapons deployed on the Korean peninsula. 

The Obama administration itself has also moved closer to limiting nuclear weapons use exclusively to deter another state’s first use of such a weapon against the United States, its allies, and partners—in fact, the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review declared that this was a “fundamental role” of the American nuclear arsenal. At that time, it also pledged to “work to establish conditions” under which it was safe to adopt universally a policy where the “sole purpose” of U.S. nuclear weapons was to deter a nuclear attack by an adversary. The implication of such a “sole purpose” policy would be that North Korea need not fear American nuclear retaliation if it mounted only a conventional attack against South Korea. 

Whether it is “no first use” or “sole purpose use,” Northeast Asia presents a clear contradiction between President Obama’s non-nuclear aspirations and existing circumstances. The Republic of Korea and Japan (the only state ever subject to nuclear attack) confront the reality of a nuclear-armed North Korea. Pyongyang continues to enhance its weapons inventory and the means to deliver them. It also regularly threatens Seoul and Tokyo with missile attack, potentially armed with nuclear weapons. 

[A]ny indications that the United States might be wavering from its nuclear guarantees would trigger worst-case fears that the United States, above all, would not want to stimulate.

Both U.S. allies are therefore strongly opposed to a U.S. "no first use" pledge, and would likely have deep concerns about a sole purpose commitment. Though the United States possesses a wide array of non-nuclear strike options in the event of a North Korean attack directed against South Korea or Japan, any indications that the United States might be wavering from its nuclear guarantees would trigger worst-case fears that the United States, above all, would not want to stimulate. At the same time, choosing not to issue a "no first use" pledge should not in any way suggest that the United States favors nuclear use, which would play directly into North Korean propaganda strategy. Rather, the United States should not preemptively remove the nuclear option, especially when North Korea is in overt defiance of its non-proliferation obligations and is single-mindedly intent on a building a nuclear weapons capability.

The Obama administration must therefore balance its clear desire to advance a non-nuclear legacy with Northeast Asia’s inescapable realities. Enunciating a "no first use" doctrine or a sole purpose commitment in the administration’s waning months in office is a bridge too far. Though the United States can and should engage South Korea and Japan in much deeper consultations about extended deterrence, it cannot put at risk the security of allies directly threatened by attack from a nuclear-armed adversary. 

The next U.S. president will have to square this circle. In the meantime, the Obama administration should do all that it can to plan for the road ahead, even if it means policy pledges that might not be as visionary as it would prefer. 

       

       

       

       

       

       

The GOP presidential candidate said he would ban immigrants from sending money home to Mexico.

Donald Trump’s proposal to force Mexico to pay for a Wall guarding against the flux of immigrants into the U.S. made news this week, and rightfully so. Trump’s idea would be to curtail the ability of banks, credit unions, and wire transmission companies to send money abroad — a sharp departure from policy and law whose bipartisan aim has been to bring remittances to all countries into the financial mainstream and out from the shadowy illegal word of people moving cash in suitcases.

Encouraging remittances to go through the financial system benefits everyone: it enhances the ability to combat terrorist finance and money-laundering, it reduces crime in both the U.S. and abroad, it increases economic growth in the U.S. and overseas, and it provides for greater competition and market incentives to allow people to keep more of their hard-earned money to use as they see fit. Moving in the opposite direction would be a major mistake.

This is a big issue that affects a lot more people than one might think – more than just sending money to Mexico. In America today, more than 40 million people were born in other countries, a record number. This translates into just more than 1 in 8 Americans, a sharp increase from 1970 when fewer than 1 in 25 Americans were foreign born. Thus, it is not surprising that many people perceive America to have more foreign-born people than any time in their lifetime. However, that is not the case for the lifetime of America. Between the Civil War and the 1920s, America had as high — or higher — share of foreign born as we do today.

Remittances are not a new phenomenon. Most American families likely sent remittances at some point whenever their family first immigrated. My great-grand father sent money back to what is today the Czech Republic so that his wife and their children (including my grandmother) could come and join him and escape what became the Second World War. Today, remittance flows go toward the new generation of American immigrants and the children of those immigrants. More than $120 billion was sent abroad in 2012 according to the Pew Center and while it is true that Mexico received the largest amount at just under $23 billion, the rest of the top 5 countries may surprise you: China ($13 billion), India ($12 billion), Philippines ($10.5 billion), and Nigeria ($6 billion). And old habits remain as Germany ($2.5 billion) and France ($2 billion) are still among the top 15 countries that receive remittances from the United States.

This money comes in lots of small chunks, which can make sending it expensive. The typical new migrant worker sends money home around 14 times a year, which corresponds to once a month plus Mother’s Day and Christmas. These are usually small sums (less than $300) and represent an extraordinary level of savings given the worker’s income. The money goes through both the formal banking system including banks, credit unions, and wire transmitters who eventually use banks like Western Union and MoneyGram. Some goes through informal means, including “viajeros” who are people that literally carry cash in suitcases on planes that are often breaking the law and outside of the standard anti-money laundering and terrorist finance enforcement system. Why would anyone want to encourage that?

The idea of using this flow of funds to try to implement other policy objectives, such as border control, would be a sharp departure from current practice. The Patriot Act and subsequent federal law governing remittances in financial laws like the Dodd-Frank Act were never intended to be used to threaten to cut off the flow of migrant worker remittances. These laws were intended to track and crack down on the flow of money laundering or support for illegal and terrorist organizations while at the same time providing consumer protections to workers who are sending hard-earned cash back home to their parents, grandparents, and children. In fact, the bipartisan goal of policy concerning remittances has been to encourage the flow of money to come into the official system and to discourage the flow of funds through the underground network.

In 2004, then Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke made clear that, “The Federal Reserve is attempting to support banks’ efforts to better serve immigrant populations, with remittances and other money transfers being a key area of interest.” House Financial Services Chairman Mike Oxley (R-OH) told President Bush’s then-Treasury Secretary John Snow, “Remittances between established and emerging economies foster growth in both types of economies simultaneously. I will be interested in hearing your views on how unnecessary costs can be eliminated in this area.” When Senator Paul S. Sarbanes (D-MD) introduced legislation that became the basis for today’s law that covers remittances, he had the simple goal to “increase transparency, competition and efficiency in the remittance market, while helping to bring more Americans into the financial mainstream.”

The longstanding bipartisan support for bringing remittances into the financial mainstream is based on the fact that most immigrants, regardless of whether they are U.S. citizens, legal residents, or undocumented, send remittances. A system that tried to assert proof of citizenship or legal status upon wiring money overseas would be burdensome, costly, and ineffective at best and if effective, it would simply drive more money into illegal transmission schemes while increasing crime here in the U.S. and abroad. Imagine if an entire community knew that someone would be walking through their immigrant neighborhood with a suitcase full of tens of thousands of dollars in cash.

Thought of another way, if I went to the bank to send money to my mother who lives in France part of the year, how would I prove that I’m a citizen? My driver’s license alone is not proof of legal status. Would I need to bring my passport? What if, like the majority of Americans, (62% according to the State Department) I don’t have a valid passport? Would I have to bring my birth certificate to the local Western Union? I guess the one positive thing from such a system is that it would help stop the email scams asking for money from a Nigerian Prince….

Aaron Klein is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury Department from 2009 to 2012. He also serves as an unpaid member of the Clinton campaign’s Infrastructure Finance Working Group; he has not served as an advisor on any banking or finance issues.

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared on Fortune.

      

When the priestly leaders of the Parsis, fleeing Persia for India after the Arab conquest of the 8th century, came before local ruler Jadhav Rana asking for sanctuary, Rana asked for a bowl of milk. The bowl was filled to the brim.  How could his kingdom accommodate more, asked Rana, without the bowl spilling over? The priestly leaders, the legend goes, slipped sugar in the milk, masterfully suggesting that the Parsis would dissolve into the existing population, sweetening their lives in the process.

As through history, we are once again faced with a situation where millions have left their homes, ravaged by violence and conflict, seeking sanctuary in foreign lands. And once again, the leaders of the promised lands worry about spilt milk.

Ever since labor economist David Card showed that the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which brought Cuban refugees to Miami, had no effect on local wages and employment, the academic wars have raged (for instance, see summaries and rebuttals here and here). People argue that labor demand curves always slope down—a shift in the supply of workers must decrease wages. Therefore, results that show otherwise are incorrect.

To resolve the debate, I find it useful to think of the ideal experiment. Refugees would come to a country and locate in communities chosen at random, so that there is no correlation between the economic characteristics of the community and its refugee population. Data would track the labor market outcomes of each and every “native,” regardless of where they moved. We could then compare the wages of the natives (wherever they are) who lived in communities that received refugees versus those who did not, yielding the causal impact of refugee populations on labor market outcomes of the natives.

For obvious reasons, this is hard to do. Leading researchers instead focus on “natural experiments” and “area-wide” estimates on the impact of refugees. That is, they examine what happens to wages in the communities where refugees settle using a clever way of teasing out the “natural randomness” in settlement patterns. But if the locals move or if the refugee population itself is badly measured, this could lead to a bias towards finding no results. In essence, the results are for the natives who chose to remain behind and therefore presumably had better job options to begin with. In addition, mismeasurement of the refugee population drives results towards zero—the iron law of econometrics.

But a recently published study from Denmark by economists Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri solves all these problems at once:

• They have data on each and every Danish worker between 1991 and 2008, so that they can track people wherever they go.
• The refugees came in two waves. In the first wave, they waited in a queue and as communities opened up spaces, they were allocated in groups from the same country. Since the department managing the transfers had no data on the skills of these refugees, this was like a random allocation. Later, between 1995 and 2003, the refugee flow from Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan increased—but they settled in the same communities that their fellow countrymen had gone to. This created large differences in refugee populations across communities that only grew over time. The authors present a number of very convincing tests that the “like-random” assumption truly holds in their data.
• Because they have fairly long-term data, they can assess both the immediate effects and the cumulative effects over time.

And the results?

Zip. Nada. Nothing. Kuch bhi nahin. No smoking gun showing that natives will be hurt when refugees enter.

More specifically, the authors generally find positive effects on the employment and wages of the natives who looked similar to the mostly unskilled refugees entering at this time. Quantitatively, they find that “a 1 percentage point increase in the share of low-skilled immigrants from refugee-sending countries increased wages for low-skilled native workers by 1 to 1.8 percent.” Nor do they find negative effects on employment—the fraction of the year that natives worked either remained the same or increased slightly, depending on the specification.

To interpret their findings, the authors say:

“The panel regressions suggest that refugee-country immigrants, who specialized mainly in manual, low-skilled jobs, encouraged low-skilled natives to take more complex occupations, decreasing the manual content of their jobs, especially when changing establishment and this contributed to produce a positive effect on their wages and employment. In no specification do we find crowding-out of native unskilled workers or depressing effects on their wages”.

Could it be that this was just because the refugees did not work? Nope. Over the time period of the data, the foreign-born share of employment in Denmark rose sharply, from 3 percent to just over 6 percent.

Could it be that the refugees were “like the Danes” and therefore fitted in better? Unlikely. Their estimates are driven by a surge in immigrants from Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq between 1995 and 2003. Hard to mistake them for Danes.

But the earlier “area” estimates were wrong, right? Nope. Actually it turns out that all the legwork Foged and Peri do pretty much replicates the simpler area estimates that have been saying this all along.

To be sure, more could be said. For instance, the paper could talk about the precise government policies that were put in place to help the refugees when they came and the associated costs. In fact, it would be good to show the per refugee cost to the government and compare this to the taxes that the refugees paid back to the system as they joined the labor force. Since there are no “spillovers” to natives, if the taxes are higher than the initial public costs, refugees are a net gain to the treasury. Bringing them in would actually increase government budgets over time, without hurting native wages. Of course, the wages and lives of the refugees will be immeasurably better, but we have known that for a while now.

When it comes to taking in refugees, there shouldn’t be worry about the effects on wages or employment of natives. On the contrary, refugees sweeten the deal, as the Parsi priests pointed out thirteen centuries ago.

      

Much ink will be spilled analyzing the results of the U.K. referendum on whether to leave the EU. Some will highlight the xenophobic edge to the “leave” campaign, and how the Brexiteers resorted brazenly to a politics of fear to exploit the public’s worries over immigration.

Not surprisingly, Turkey became the natural pick to serve as the Brexit campaign’s boogeyman. According to the “leave” campaign’s material, Turks are inherently prone to violence and criminality. If Britain remains in the European Union, the thinking goes, it will soon be overrun by flocks of Turks. Former Mayor of London Boris Johnson—one of the staunchest advocates of Brexit—remarked cynically that “he [would] not mind whether Turkey joins the EU, provided that the U.K. leaves the EU.” He has unabashedly stoked fears that EU membership means uncontrolled immigration into Britain, and that Turkish membership to the EU would only make that problem worse. 

Stoking fear of Turkey-the-boogeyman is a longstanding pastime in Europe, stretching back centuries. Turkey’s candidacy for the European Union breathed new life into the practice. When Turkey started to undertake reforms that set the country towards accession negotiations, it was met with mighty resistance in Europe—confirming the deep-seated skepticism in Turkey that “objective” criteria, also applied to Central and Eastern European countries, would not apply to it. The image of the “terrible Turk” appeared once again: to warn the European public of an impending Turkish invasion, and therefore to keep Turkey out of the European Union. 

Old habits die hard

It’s ironic that Boris Johnson—a great-grandson of an Ottoman minister and someone who has previously spoken proudly of his Turkish heritage—would succumb to Turkey-the-boogeyman scare tactics. But he has high political ambitions, which include chipping away at Prime Minister David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party, and Johnson now seems to prefer pandering to populist, euro-skeptic forces. In an attempt to secure his right-side flank, Cameron (who had long supported Turkey’s EU membership, as long as the necessary conditions were met) had a sudden conversion just a few days ago and said that Turkey’s prospects for EU membership before the year 3000 were slim. So he too apparently believes, in some sense, that Turkey is a boogeyman—so Turkey has become a punching bag in the internal Conservative Party power struggle too. 

Mirror images?

It goes without saying that Turkey is not in the shape that it was a decade ago. It is no longer the darling of the international community with an enviable growth rate, and its soft power has waned dramatically. Instead, both its democracy and its economy are limping along, at best—though, to be fair, its economy is growing faster than the EU’s. And Turks are no strangers to the kinds of politics of fear we’ve seen in the U.K.—their increasingly authoritarian and repressive leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is adept at stoking fear too. Meanwhile, he’s assumed a defiant posture towards Europe, threatening, for example, to lower the drawbridge on Greece and Bulgaria and unleash a repeat of last year’s migration crisis. These kinds of threats, of course, only bolster voices like Boris Johnson back in Britain. 

It’s quite remarkable that at the same time as prominent figures in both the “leave” and “remain” campaigns are engaging in forms of Turkey-bashing, they apparently borrow lexicon from the Turkish leader himself—employing a language of intolerance and xenophobia. This could not have been—and indeed, was not—what early promoters of European integration like Winston Churchill envisaged for their continent. They had seen the horrors that could come when politics of fear spun out of control. 

Regardless of the British referendum results, there has already been much damage inflicted on the West’s liberal image. This is why when ink is spilled in the coming days, discussing the vote’s results, we must also take a hard look at eroding liberal democratic standards and values. The very foundations of European—including British—democracies are being shaken: What will this mean for the European integration project? It seems surprising today, but there was actually a time when there were European leaders who pushed for Turkish membership in the EU—yes, Turkey the boogeyman—in order to strengthen this very project. Times and sentiments, as well as conceptions of democracy, have obviously changed. Welcome populism, welcome politics of fear, and pity to those Turks that genuinely believed in Europe’s strength as a bastion of liberal democracy and integration.

       

Although a few political analysts have been focusing on the white working class for years, it is only in response to the rise of Donald Trump that this large group of Americans has begun to receive the attention it deserves. Now, thanks to a comprehensive survey that the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) undertook in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, we can speak with some precision about the distinctive attitudes and preferences of these voters.

There are different ways of defining the white working class. Along with several other survey researchers, PRRI defines this group as non-Hispanic whites with less than a college degree, with the additional qualification of being paid by the hour or by the job rather than receiving a salary. No definition is perfect, but this one works pretty well. Most working-class whites have incomes below $50,000; most whites with BAs or more have incomes above $50,000. Most working-class whites rate their financial circumstances as only fair or poor; most college educated whites rate their financial circumstances as good or excellent. Fifty-four percent of working-class whites think of themselves as working class or lower class, compared to only 18 percent of better-educated whites.

The PRRI/Brookings study finds that in many respects, these two groups of white voters see the world very differently. For example, 54 percent of college-educated whites think that America’s culture and way of life have improved since the 1950s; 62 percent of white working-class Americans think that it has changed for the worse. Sixty-eight percent of working-class whites, but only 47 percent of college-educated whites, believe that the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influences. Sixty-six percent of working-class whites, but only 43 percent of college-educated whites, say that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In a similar vein, 62 percent of working-class whites believe that discrimination against Christians has become as big a problem as discrimination against other groups, a proposition only 38 percent of college educated whites endorse.

This brings us to the issue of immigration. By a margin of 52 to 35 percent, college-educated whites affirm that today’s immigrants strengthen our country through their talent and hard work. Conversely, 61 percent of white working-class voters say that immigrants weaken us by taking jobs, housing, and health care. Seventy-one percent of working-class whites think that immigrants mostly hurt the economy by driving down wages, a belief endorsed by only 44 percent of college-educated whites. Fifty-nine percent of working-class whites believe that we should make a serious effort to deport all illegal immigrants back to their home countries; only 33 percent of college-educated whites agree. Fifty-five percent of working-class whites think we should build a wall along our border with Mexico, while 61 percent of whites with BAs or more think we should not. Majorities of working-class whites believe that we should make the entry of Syrian refugees into the United States illegal and temporarily ban the entrance of non-American Muslims into our country; about two-thirds of college-educated whites oppose each of these proposals.

Opinions on trade follow a similar pattern. By a narrow margin of 48 to 46 percent, college-educated whites endorse the view that trade agreements are mostly helpful to the United States because they open up overseas markets while 62 percent of working-class whites believe that they are harmful because they send jobs overseas and drive down wages.

It is understandable that working-class whites are more worried that they or their families will become victims of violent crime than are whites with more education. After all, they are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher levels of social disorder and criminal behavior. It is harder to explain why they are also much more likely to believe that their families will fall victim to terrorism. To be sure, homegrown terrorist massacres of recent years have driven home the message that it can happen to anyone, anywhere. We still need to explain why working-class whites have interpreted this message in more personal terms.

The most plausible interpretation is that working-class whites are experiencing a pervasive sense of vulnerability. On every front—economic, cultural, personal security—they feel threatened and beleaguered. They seek protection against all the forces they perceive as hostile to their cherished way of life—foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas, aided and abetted by a government they no longer believe cares about them. Perhaps this is why fully 60 percent of them are willing to endorse a proposition that in previous periods would be viewed as extreme: the country has gotten so far off track that we need a leader who is prepared to break so rules if that is what it takes to set things right.

       

On June 23, Brookings hosted the release of the Immigrants, Immigration Reform, and 2016 Election Survey, a joint project with the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). The associated report entitled, How immigration and concern about cultural change are shaping the 2016 election finds an American public anxious and intensely divided on matters of immigration and cultural change at the forefront of the 2016 Election.

Dr. Robert Jones, CEO of PRRI, began the presentation by highlighting Americans’ feelings of anxiety and personal vulnerability. The poll found, no issue is more critical to Americans this election cycle than terrorism, with nearly seven in ten (66 percent) reporting that terrorism is a critical issue to them personally. And yet, Americans are sharply divided on questions of terrorism as it pertains to their personal safety. Six in ten (62 percent) Republicans report that they are at least somewhat worried about being personally affected by terrorism, while just 44 percent of Democrats say the same. 

On matters of cultural change, Jones painted a picture of a sharply divided America. Poll results indicate that a majority (55 percent) of Americans believe that the American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence, while 44 percent disagree.  Responses illustrate a stark partisan divide:

74 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Trump supporters believe that foreign influence over the American way of life needs to be curtailed.  Just 41 percent of Democrats agree, while a majority (56 percent) disagrees with this statement. Views among white Americans are sharply divided by social class, the report finds. While 68 percent of the white working class agrees that the American way of life needs to be protected, fewer than half (47 percent) of white college-educated Americans agree.

Jones identified Americans’ views on language and “reverse discrimination” as additional touchstones of cultural change. Americans are nearly evenly divided over how comfortable they feel when they encounter immigrants who do not speak English: 50 percent say this bothers them and 49 percent say it does not. 66 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Trump supporters express discomfort when coming into contact with immigrants who do not speak English; just 35 percent of Democrats say the same.

 

Americans split evenly on the question of whether discrimination against whites, or “reverse discrimination,” is as big of a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities (49 percent agree, 49 percent disagree). Once again, the partisan differences are considerable: 72 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Trump supporters agree that reverse discrimination is a problem, whereas more than two thirds (68 percent) of Democrats disagree.

On economic matters, survey results indicate that nearly seven in ten (69 percent) Americans support increasing the tax rate on wealthy Americans, defined as those earning over $250,000 a year. This represents a modest increase in the share of Americans who favor increasing the tax rate relative to 2012, but a dramatic increase in the number of Republicans who favor this position.

 

The share of  Republicans favoring increasing the tax rate on wealthy Americans jumped from 36 percent in 2012 to 54 percent in 2016—an 18 point increase. Democrats and Independents views on this position remained relatively constant, increasing from 80 to 84 percent and 61 to 68 percent approval respectively.

Finally, on matters of immigration, Americans are divided over whether immigrants are changing their communities for the better (50 percent) or for the worse (49 percent). Across party lines, however, Americans are more likely to think immigrants are changing American society as a whole than they are to think immigrants are changing the local community. This, Jones suggested, indicates that Americans’ views on immigration are motivated by partisan ideology more than by lived experience. 

At the conclusion of Dr. Jones’s presentation, Brookings senior fellow in Governance Studies, Dr. William Galston moderated a panel discussion of the poll’s findings. Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow and research coordinator at the American Enterprise Institute, observed that cultural anxiety has long characterized Americans’ views on immigration. Never, Bowman remarked, has the share of Americans that favor immigrants outpaced the share of those who oppose immigrants. Turning to the results of the PRRI survey, Bowman highlighted the partisan divide influencing responses to the proposition that the United States place a temporary ban on Muslims. The strong level of Republican support for the proposal--64 percent support among Republicans--compared to just 23 percent support among Democrats has more to do with fear of terrorism than anxiety about immigration, she argued.

Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, remarked that many Americans feel that government should do more to ensure protection, prosperity, and security -- as evidenced by the large proportion of voters who feel that their way of life is under threat from terrorism (51%), crime (63%), or unemployment (65%).  In examining fractures within the Republican Party, Olsen considered the ways in which Trump voters differ from non-Trump voters, regardless of party affiliation. On questions of leadership, he suggested, the fact that 57% of all Republicans agree that we need a leader “willing to break some rules” is skewed by the high proportion of Trump supporters (72%) who agree with that statement. Indeed, just 49% of Republicans who did not vote for Trump agreed that the country needs a leader willing to break rules to set things right.

Joy Reid, National Correspondent at MSNBC, cited the survey’s findings that Americans are bitterly divided over whether American culture and way of life has changed for the better (49 percent) or the worse (50 percent) since the 1950s. More than two-thirds of Republicans (68 percent) and Donald Trump supporters (68 percent) believe the American way of life has changed for the worse since the 1950s. Connecting this nostalgia to survey results indicating anxiety about immigration and cultural change, Reid argued that culture—not economics—is the primary concern animating many Trump supporters.

       

My partner was caught at the Istanbul airport during the latest terrorist attack. She hid in a closet with a few people, including a small girl, disconcerted and afraid. And when the attack was over, she saw the blood, desolation, chaos, and tears of the aftermath. This was a horrific moment. Yet, it paled in comparison to what the injured and dead and their relatives had to suffer.

It seems that terrorism and political violence are becoming more prevalent and intense. They have been, however, long brewing and have affected many countries around the world. In the 1980s, my home country, Peru, suffered immensely from terrorism: The badly called “Shining Path” organization, with its communist ideology and ruthless tactics, terrorized first rural communities and then large cities with deadly bombs in crowded places and assassinations of official and civil society leaders.

A few years ago, Phil Keefer, lead economist at the World Bank, and I edited two books on what we perceived to be the main security threats of our time: terrorism and drug trafficking. We thought that the answers had to come from research, and we tried to gather the best available evidence and arguments to understand the links between these security threats and economic development.

After the myriad of recent terrorist attacks—in Istanbul, Munich, Nice, Bagdad, Brussels, and Paris, to name a few—we found it important to recap lessons learned. These lessons are not just academic: Understanding the root causes of terrorism can lead to policies for prevention and for reducing the severity of attacks. To defeat terrorism, a policy strategy should include three components: intelligence, integration, and development.

Intelligence. A terrorist attack is relatively easy to conduct. Modern societies offer many exposed and vulnerable targets: an airport, a crowded celebration by the beach, a bus station at peak hours, or a restaurant full of expats. And the potential weapons are too many to count: a squadron of suicide bombers, a big truck ramming through the streets, two or three comrades armed with semi-automatic guns. It is impossible to protect all flanks, and some of the measures taken to prevent the previous terrorist attacks are, well, frankly silly. For a strategy to have any chance against terrorism, it should be based on intelligence. Intelligence implies understanding the motivations, leadership structure, and modus operandi of terrorist organizations, and developing a plan that can anticipate and adapt to their constantly morphing operations. Importantly, the ideological dimension should not be ignored because it explains the extremes to which terrorists are willing to arrive: A suicide attack requires a person who has muted both his basic survival instinct and all sense of natural compassion for others. It was radical communism in the 1970s and 1980s; it is a perverted and fanatical misrepresentation of Islam nowadays. An intelligence strategy that targets the sources of terrorism, both the perpetrators and the social movements that underlie them, should be the first component of the campaign against terror.

Integration. Foreigners living in the U.S. like to make fun of Hollywood movies and the social rituals that Americans go through each year: Halloween and Thanksgiving are in many respects more popular than Christmas. Yet, thanks to these cultural norms along with widespread economic opportunities and equality under the law, the U.S. has mostly succeeded in what many countries, including some European ones, have failed: the integration of people of different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The U.S. is no paradise of integration, but the social melting pot does work for immigrants: Within a generation or two, Mexican Americans, Italian Americans, Iranian Americans, and so forth are just Americans, with a single national identity and, at least by law, the same rights and obligations. In some European countries, in contrast, many immigrants feel like second-class citizens. There is little that can inflame more hatred than the feeling of being excluded, and a misguided search for a sense of belonging can be the trigger that incites religious, ethnic, and ideological radicalization. This may explain why France has suffered more from terrorist acts perpetrated by their own residents than the U.S. or U.K., that paradoxically are substantially more engaged in the war against ISIS and al-Qaeda. Social integration—especially of immigrants—through explicit and targeted programs from education at an early age to immigration and citizenship reforms is a key component in the fight against terrorism.       

Development. One of the puzzles in the evidence on terrorism is that while it tends to be led (and sometimes even perpetrated) by well-off and educated people, it represents the complaints and grievances of the disenfranchised, the poor, and the unemployed. The hundreds of thousands of unemployed and discouraged young men in places as diverse as Afghanistan, Somalia, South Africa, and Brazil are the potential armies of common and political violence. In South Africa and Brazil, lacking an overriding communal ideology, this violence is expressed in robberies, homicides, and common crime. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the violence is mostly political, taking the shape or at least the cover of religious fundamentalism. Somehow in Somalia, violence has adopted both criminal and political expressions: We worry about Somali pirates as much as we do about Somali jihadists. (On the link between vulnerable youth and violence, it is telling that the name of the main terrorist organization in Somalia, al-Shabaab, means literally “The Youth”) But there is hope. A couple of decades ago, thousands of unemployed young people joined terrorist organizations in Cambodia, Colombia, and Peru, when these countries were fragile. Since their economies started growing and providing employment, these armies for criminal and political violence have started to fade away. Investing in development, conducting economic reforms, and providing (yes, equal) opportunities is the third component of a winning strategy against terrorism.

A sound military and police strategy is undoubtedly important to counter terrorism. However, it’s not sufficient in the long run. If we want to defeat terrorism permanently and completely, we need to tackle it comprehensively, using political and military intelligence, social integration, and economic development.

For more, please see Keefer, Philip and Norman Loayza, Editors. Terrorism, Economic Development, and Political Openness. Cambridge University Press. 2008.

       

For months, Europe has been dealing with the hectic, day-to-day struggles of managing a massive migrant crisis. While those challenges dominate in the short term, European leaders must also start thinking about medium- to long-term reforms to the European Union’s asylum and migration policies.

European governments have made clear that they want to reform the Common European Asylum System. The European Commission has proposed reforms of its own, which to become laws would need to be approved by both the Council and the European Parliament. But while these proposals are certainly steps in the right direction, they don’t go far enough in addressing structural weaknesses in Europe’s migration and asylum policies.

Positive momentum in a number of key areas

There are several areas where the Commission has already proposed good reforms:

1. The Commission is proposing to recast a directive aimed at standardizing the processing of asylum procedures across Europe into a fully-fledged regulation. This is good news. The persistent variation in the implementation of asylum procedures across the EU highlights this necessity. Unlike directives, which need to be transposed into national legislation, regulations are immediately and simultaneously enforceable across all member states. 
2. A directive specifying the grounds for granting international protection is to be replaced by a more stringent regulation, which is also a good thing. It’s problematic that asylum seekers from the same country of origin enjoy dramatically different acceptance rates across EU member states. Combined, these changes should force member states to comply with international standards on asylum procedures and increase opportunities for migrants to get asylum (particularly in countries that have applied more restrictive criteria).
3. The Eurodac system, which establishes a pan-European fingerprinting database, is now likely to be expanded as well. It would store data on third-country nationals who are not applicants for international protection. But implementation is again a challenge, since Croatia, Greece, Italy, and Malta already struggle to fingerprint new arrivals (something over which infringement proceedings are still ongoing). 
4. To attract highly skilled professionals, the Commission is working to make the EU Blue Card scheme more appealing. While member states will retain the right to set their own annual migrants quota, Blue Card procedures and rights will be harmonized across the EU. The minimum length of an initial contract offer will be lowered to six months, salary thresholds will be reduced, and the Blue Card will be offered to migrants granted asylum. Other measures—including a directive aimed at students and researchers and another facilitating intra-corporate transfers—are also steps in the right direction. 
5. Finally, the Commission has proposed making permanent a pan-European resettlement scheme that was launched during last summer’s migrant crisis. That’s also a good thing. The framework would harmonize resettlement procedures and financially incentivizes member states to favor the European framework over national ones. At the same time, it would allow asylum seekers to move to Europe without risking their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean. However, given that member states will still determine how many people to resettle annually, the long-term impact of the scheme remains to be seen. 

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere watches as a migrant from Babel in Iraq has his fingerprints taken, during a visit to Patrick-Henry Village refugee centerin Heidelberg, Germany. Photo credit: Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach.

Far more needed but little appetite among national capitals

There are several policy areas where far more should be done: 

1. There is at least one area where the EU is still planning reforms but of a far more limited nature, and that’s on the current directive on basic standards for housing, healthcare, and employment. In private conversations, EU officials stress that the sheer numbers of migrants make it hard for even the best-performing countries to implement this directive. Put simply, member states do not have the political will to do more than what they are already doing. The EU is therefore, understandably, proposing a more moderate reform: it aims to improve reception conditions throughout the EU without dictating to member states how to do so.
2. Less privileged migrants must be provided with safe avenues to contribute to Europe’s economy. Legislation allowing seasonal workers into the Union for a maximum of between five and nine months within any twelve-month period already goes in this direction. Forums connecting local industry associations and countries of origin to better match labor demand and supply would also be welcome. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cape Verde, Georgia, Morocco, Moldova, and Tunisia—which enjoy mobility partnerships with the EU—would benefit from such an approach. More can be done if the political will amongst European capitals is there.
3. Finally, Europeans must ensure that migrants feel welcome to stay. The EU is aware of the need to adequately integrate third-country nationals, but European capitals are in the driver’s seat when it comes to integration. Directives aimed at facilitating family reunifications, integrating long-term residents, and streamlining administrative processes do what they can in this respect. However, the paths to integration and to welcoming foreigners chosen by European countries are exceedingly different, and for the time being likely to remain so. Because of this and until policymakers put integration at the top of their national agendas, foreign nationals will likely continue to struggle. 

Dublin: Still the elephant in the room

The Dublin regulation, which outlines which member state should be responsible for handling asylum applications, still must be radically revised. This is the elephant in the room and the core of the current asylum refugee framework. Member states should consider the Commission’s proposals for a corrective mechanism in case of migrant surges, a new system for allocating applications across the EU based on a distribution key or, ideally, the centralization of competences to the European Asylum Support Office. 

Informal conversations with top national and European officials suggest that the corrective mechanism is the most likely proposal to be accepted by the member states and therefore adopted. Under such an agreement, Dublin would be maintained, but automatic relocations would start in case of exceptional migrant surges—with hefty fines imposed by the Commission on those member states refusing to play their part. Unfortunately, this is not good enough. Such an approach does not address the underlying structural unfairness and unsustainability of a system that leaves the burden of processing arrivals overwhelmingly on frontline states. 

The current situation exemplifies a significant failure of governance that harms the interests of migrants and member states alike. At present, the Dublin Convention largely ignores the needs of migrants in terms of family reunification, language skills, and cultural integration. Unfortunately, the corrective mechanism for the Dublin Convention does nothing more than provide some relief in case of acute emergencies. Meanwhile, it leaves frontline states to continue facing on their own a crisis that only Europe as a whole could solve. “European leaders” still think and act through national perspectives.

Moving along despite European governments

The European Commission faces both legal and political constraints that limit its scope of action. Whenever it can, it is pushing for a significant overhaul of European asylum and migration policies. However, once more, its initiatives are hampered by the so-called “interests” of the member states. For the time being, we are likely to see some degree of integration in the fields of asylum and migration policies. But because of national vetoes, progress is slow and proposals are often watered down. 

       

       

       

       

       

       

"World class." The term has been bandied about the Puget Sound region for years now. But during the grinding tech and aerospace busts of recent years and the recession that followed, the term became a mocking one.

Despite those setbacks, Seattle nonetheless remains on the cusp of becoming a world-class city and region.

It just doesn't seem to know it sometimes.

Seattle is among the most educated places in the country. From this brainpower spring high median wages paid by good jobs. Despite the price pressure exerted by those wages, Seattle has low rates of childhood poverty and overall poverty, leading to a balanced income distribution, as documented by a recent Brookings study.

Moreover, Seattle has come a long way from the days when gas-station owners would raise prices on Boeing paydays. The University of Washington and a strong network of other research institutions like the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center are continually setting the stage for more diversification of the economy by fostering new ideas and technologies.

Immigrants both foreign and domestic also contribute to the innovative ferment of the region.

In short, Seattle has Boston's high educational attainment without the persistent ghosts of racial animosity and deep poverty. Seattle has the Research Triangle of North Carolina's talent for innovation, but in a still mostly urban-centered environment surrounded by some of the greatest natural amenities and vistas in the world.

With the region slowly emerging from the recession, the technology bust and aerospace industry trouble, more growth is surely on the horizon. What form will that growth take?

Seattle and the Puget Sound like to talk about the sustainability of growth. To its credit, under the Greg Nickels administration, the city of Seattle has been moving toward allowing more density downtown to increase housing choices and, presumably, reduce growth pressures on the urban fringe. And suburban cities throughout the region—such as Bellevue, Renton and Auburn—are working to boost their downtowns in conjunction with transit investments.

Sustainability is also the rationale for myriad shoreline-reclamation and creek-restoration projects.

But regardless of all the respect for the environment evidenced in hundreds of decisions, Seattle, as constituted, is an unsustainable region.

For all of Seattle's and the region's current greatness, failure to address three key issues—transportation, housing and schools—will unravel achievements to date and degrade the quality of growth to come.

Despite employment density and concentration, mobility—partly because of geography and partly because of a lack of a unified transportation strategy—is getting worse. Left unaddressed, the pressure of excessive decentralization will be severe and the impact on quality of life will be brutal.

The innovative nature of the region's economy and its high wages are bidding up real-estate prices, raising three big threats: stunting of middle-class growth as burdens on low-income families become severe and dampen their ascent; acceleration of population decentralization by the search for affordable housing (again impacting quality of life and the environment); and stagnating economic growth.

The other limiting factor to future economic growth is education. Seattle's public schools continue to wrestle with severe budget problems and quality is sadly far too correlated with race and income, disadvantaging the students who need good schools the most.

Additionally, the University of Washington is turning away qualified students for lack of capacity. This especially hurts graduates of the region's successful community colleges such as Seattle Central, a key ladder into the middle class for many low-income and immigrant students. To shunt such potential elsewhere is nonsensical and will eventually hurt the region competitively and economically.

These three challenges threaten the region's current prosperity and undermine its potential to do what few U.S. cities have done—grow sustainably, spread the wealth and preserve natural and environmental assets—becoming truly world class in the process.

As Seattle contemplates its future, it needs to think along these lines:

• On transportation, the region has simply grown too much to have mobility run by a farrago of agencies.

Despite progress by Sound Transit on light rail, the days of multiple competing systems and their redundancies, wasting infrastructure dollars (read taxes), need to end. A coordinated regional transportation strategy is necessary.

Also, the one bidder, price yet-to-be-determined monorail seems a solution in search of a problem. Public dissatisfaction with transportation is understandable. Spending over a billion dollars out of pique on a system with no park-and-rides serving only one of the region's job centers, albeit downtown, is not.

The region, and not just the political leadership, also needs to unite behind a solution, whatever it may be, to replacing the creaky Alaskan Way Viaduct, a highway of not just state but national significance (read federal funding) due to trade and the Port of Seattle.

Though the state and city seem to be united on a tunnel solution, funding remains problematic, and many are still arguing for a new elevated viaduct because of views for drivers, a risible proposition at best. Form needs to follow function both for transportation and land use.

• On housing, the city and region need to embrace density in appropriate locations. But dense housing cannot be the province only of the well-to-do.

Dense, new housing needs to incorporate favorable regulatory treatment for affordable housing and local support not just for the very poor but work-force housing to allow people to live closer to their jobs if they choose.

• On education, Seattle schools and the city have made a start by targeting the latest levy at performance in the most struggling schools. But more needs to be done to spend existing revenues more wisely.

A re-examination of Olympia's long-unchanged local-funding formulas is also overdue.

More broadly, the economic integration fostered by housing redevelopment in the Rainier Valley and White Center can only benefit surrounding schools and their students. High-quality public schools keep middle-class residents close to their jobs, fostering many of the region's goals.

Complicating action on all three of these challenges is the region's sclerotic political culture in which process is valued more than results and Weyerhaeuser is kept in business by the printing of report after report after task force after advisory committee.

Seattle, from the outside, seems blessed with talent, but an overabundance of process compounded by a reflexive populism and anti-elitism leads people to dismiss valuable ideas and proposals. In South Lake Union, for example, many oppose a revamp of the neighborhood solely due to Paul Allen's involvement, despite the huge potential the area has as a new locus of jobs and housing.

Admittedly, in a state where so many people are from somewhere else, it's tough to achieve consensus. And certainly the region's leaders should not make decisions willy-nilly—especially in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods that most need investment—without public input.

But if the city's and region's political culture does not mature enough to leverage its economic strengths, the magnets bringing people to the Puget Sound and keeping them there—be it jobs, outdoor recreation or the sheer diversity of the metropolis—will decline.

Lost will be not just Seattle's opportunity to become the Vancouver, B.C., of the American West Coast, but the chance to become the leading city of the Pacific Rim, with jobs, culture and architecture like the San Francisco Bay Area and Tokyo, but with an ease of living too often only ascribed to the Sun Belt in this country.

And then in the struggle to become truly world class, local civic and political leaders won't have to worry about people being from somewhere else.

They will live there, having either left Seattle or never arrived.

      

Borders and fences, amnesty and enforcement, earned legalization and guest workers—such is the shorthand in debating immigration today.

Yet, we talk little about refugees.

It may be because refugees comprise only about 10 percent of annual immigration to America. It may also be because their entry to the United States is rarely debated. Accommodating refugees represents the best ideals of this nation.

Fleeing war, famine, religious or ethnic persecution, and, in some cases, former American foreign-policy engagement, refugees are the epitome of Emma Lazarus' words, engraved on the Statue of Liberty, of the "tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to be free."

A replica of said statue is set to be returned to its place on the beach at Alki this spring. And it's appropriate, as the Puget Sound region increasingly accommodates many fleeing the worst life has to offer.

From 1983 to 2004, the Seattle region ranked No. 5 nationally in the resettlement of refugees, behind the big immigrant gateways of New York, Los Angeles and Orange County in California, and Chicago. However, Seattle's total foreign-born ranking is only 23rd, as refugees there comprise much more of the immigrant population than most other places around the country.

The region's refugee population is probably more important to the growth of the region than in other places. And it has been growing over the past 20 years.

Of the some 50,000 refugees resettled in Seattle over that period, fully one-third are from Southeast Asia—including Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—and 42 percent come from the remnants of the USSR.

Other sizable populations come from the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Ethiopia.

Metropolitan Seattle—along with Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, Sacramento and Portland—has progressively resettled more refugees over time.

Now, one in five U.S. refugees is initially placed in one of these metropolitan areas, up from only 9 percent in the 1980s and 13 percent in the 1990s.

And these refugees are different than in the past.

Because of changes in the conflicts beleaguering our planet, refugees admitted to the United States in recent years increasingly hail from African countries confronting civil conflict.

Like earlier waves, these newest refugees are determined to pursue, but unprepared for, life and work in the United States and need assistance as they settle into new communities and become active members of local schools, workplaces and neighborhoods.

Like other foreign-born migrants, Seattle's refugees have been quickly plugging into the economic life of the region, from the bustling International District downtown to the polyglot scene that is the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue.

Seattle's healthy local labor market has helped foster their adjustment as many refugees have found foothold jobs in hotels, restaurants, shops, health services, food production and preparation. Perhaps not long term, but these jobs are key steps on the road to economic independence and upward mobility. In any event, they are a far cry from the situations refugees left behind.

Local service agencies and assistance organizations, religious and ethnically based, play a strong role in the resettlement process.

These groups do the local work of connecting refugees to employers, housing, health care and language training and otherwise aid their progress toward self-sufficiency. And they are careful to do it in a linguistically and culturally appropriate way.

And other partners exist.

The Seattle Police Department reaches out to refugee and immigrant communities to deal with the potential downfalls of being a stranger in a strange land, specifically addressing gang and drug problems and launching efforts to prevent violence against refugees and immigrants.

The state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction has a multiyear program to target schools with large numbers of immigrant and refugee families that aims to improve schooling outcomes for high-school students and increase graduation rates. Involving parents is key to that success, as is the specialized training that tutors receive.

Programs like these—involving few tax dollars but reaping considerable economic rewards for all the region—are in the best interest of Seattle's residents, whether they are refugee newcomers or families that have lived in the region for generations.

Though Seattle fights about highways and stadiums, transit and buses, the entire Puget Sound should proclaim itself in the vanguard on this issue, a beacon, like the statue, of what is right.

      

Seattle likes to compare itself to its neighbors. On issues from light rail to cycling-friendly streetscapes to the business climate and innovation, Puget Sound residents look to places like Portland and San Francisco and wonder whether the region needs improvement or is doing it better than others.

Generally, those are matters of political and public will, leavened of course with the realities of public finance.

But in the coming decade, the demographic changes that metropolitan Seattle will face should prompt a look at another set of places more like the region than its West Coast neighbors.

Over the 2000s, the Puget Sound region ranked above the national average on measures of growth, educational attainment and racial and ethnic diversity. The Seattle region faces challenges and opportunities distinct from those in the less-diverse Portland area, or the much slower-growing San Francisco Bay area.

New Brookings research instead counts Seattle among a series of growing, highly educated, diverse "Next Frontier" regions like Austin, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

Despite being bookended by two recessions, the past decade surely counts Seattle, like its demographic peers, as one of the success stories of the 2000s.

The region grew by nearly 10 percent from 2000 to 2008. People are moving and immigrating to Seattle and the number of married couples with children is growing — important factors as the baby boomers begin to retire next year.

As in other Next Frontier regions, however, the Seattle area's overall demographic success masks deeper challenges.

On growth, the Puget Sound region has long grappled with issues of sprawl and density. Yet despite these efforts — and increasing public-transit use — the fastest-growing places in the region are on the suburban fringe, increasing commuting costs for the families that settle there and offsetting efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

On education, although 36 percent of all Puget Sound-area adults hold four-year college degrees — the 11th-highest rate among the nation's 100 largest metro areas — the rate for whites in the region is now twice as high as for blacks and Hispanics. The region continues to import college graduates from elsewhere while its younger, more racially diverse residents are not attaining at anything close to the levels of their elders.

But as the baby boomers retire, what is bemoaned as the minority educational "achievement gap" will rapidly become a competitiveness gap. The result could be more of what we saw in the 2000s in Seattle — increasing wages for the highest earners and overall, masking the falling wages for those at the low end.

These challenges are not entirely new but they are intensifying as the nation goes through its biggest demographic transformation since the massive immigration of the early 20th century. Over the next 15 years, the United States is predicted to add a staggering 43 million residents, most of them minorities. All signs point to the Puget Sound region remaining on the front lines of that transformation.

To make the most of its demographic potential, Seattle's first order of business should be increasing regional cohesion to address what are increasingly regionwide challenges.

For instance, nearly twice as many immigrants and poor people now live in the metro area's suburbs as in its big cities. Older, larger jurisdictions like the city of Seattle and its nonprofits have valuable experience and institutional capacity to build upon in helping the region's low-income families, and meeting the human-services needs of the children of immigrants.

The Seattle region can also look to its demographic peers for innovative strategies to address its challenges. One model is Denver's regional council of governments, which successfully and with regional agreement built a major light-rail system very quickly. Likewise, despite the long tenure of growth management in the state, there are lessons in the Sacramento region's Blueprint, which provides a comprehensive road map for addressing future growth in a fiscally and environmentally sustainable manner.

Seattle can also lead its peers in confronting its large educational disparities by race and geography common in Next Frontier metros as the Community Center for Education Results is attempting.

Similarly, Seattle already has a head start on many other places around the country thanks to the efforts of groups like OneAmerica (on immigrant and refugee communities) and the College Success Foundation. And like other Next Frontier metro areas, Seattle retains an economic advantage from its built-in stocks of human capital, innovative firms and research institutions, and livable urban core that attracts highly educated workers.

The Puget Sound region has made admirable efforts to capitalize on those strengths, but challenges ahead will require a regionwide commitment to maintain Seattle's rank among the nation's most demographically vibrant metro areas.

      

Bruce Katz presented a speech on demographic shifts in the country's largest 100 metropolitan areas and how various leaders, including those in Seattle, will meet the policy challenges of a changing nation.

Introduction:
Today, I would like to present our findings from a major research initiative at the Metropolitan Policy Program, which is accompanied by an interactive website: the State of Metropolitan America. Our report examines the demographic trends that have affected the top 100 metropolitan areas so far this decade, covering the year 2000 through the year 2008. We find a nation in demographic transformation along five dimensions of change.

Watch video of the speech on the Seattle Channel »

We are a growing nation.  Our population exceeded 300 million back in 2006 and we are now on our way to hit 350 million around 2025.

We are diversifying.  An incredible 83 percent of our growth this decade was driven by racial and ethnic minorities. 

We are aging.  The number of seniors and boomers exceeded 100 million this decade.

We are selectively educating. Whites and Asians are now more than twice as likely to hold a bachelors degree as blacks and Hispanics.

We are a nation divided by income. Low-wage workers saw hourly earnings decline by 8 percent this decade; high wage workers saw an increase of 3 percent.  

With this background, I will make three main points today.

First, America’s top 100 metropolitan areas are on the front lines of our nation’s demographic transformation.  The trends I’ve identified—growth, diversity, aging, educational disparities, income inequities—are happening at a faster pace, a greater scale and a higher level of intensity in our major metropolitan areas.  

Second, the shape and scale of demographic transformation is profoundly uneven across metropolitan America.  This variation only partially reflects the traditional division of our country into regions like New England or the Middle Atlantic or the Mountain West. Rather a new “Metro Map” of the nation is emerging that unites far flung communities by their demographic realities rather than their physical proximity. 

Finally, demographic transformation requires action at both the macro and metro scale.  The federal government and the states need to lead where they must to address the super-sized challenges wrought by fast change.  Metropolitan areas must innovate where they should in ways that are tailored to their distinct challenges and opportunities.  And the geography of transformation at the metro scale requires new institutions and ways of governing.

These policy and institutional changes will not be easy.

But let’s remember one thing.  In the global context, the United States is a demographically blessed nation.  Established competitors like Japan, Britain and Germany are either growing slowly or actually declining; rising nations like China remain relatively homogenous. 

In a fiercely competitive world, our growth and diversity may be America’s ace in the hole.

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• Full Speech

      

Over the past two decades, the Puget Sound area’s innovation-driven economy has become a magnet for highly educated people from across the country and around the world. Drawn to the region by some of the nation’s most innovative companies—Microsoft, Boeing, Nintendo, Amazon, Genentech and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, to name a few—the Puget Sound region ranks well on measures of educational attainment. Of the nation’s largest 100 metro areas, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area is 11th in bachelor’s degree holders and 17th in graduate degree attainment.

But for all its brainpower, the region has fallen behind in terms of cultivating homegrown talent, particularly in less affluent school districts located in South Seattle and South King County. Starting from an early age, low-income students and children of color in these communities tend to lag behind on important indicators of educational success. The effects of this achievement gap worsen with time, putting these students at a serious disadvantage that often affects their ability to find jobs and their earning potential. 

In an effort to address this achievement gap, the Community Center for Education Results has teamed up with the city of Seattle, the University of Washington, the Seattle Community Colleges District, the Puget Sound Educational Service District, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others to form the Road Map Project, a coalition working to double the number of South Seattle and South King County students pursuing a college diploma or career credential by 2020.

What’s innovative about the Road Map Project is its focus on collective action and community engagement. By bringing together key stakeholders to collaborate on shared goals, the project is creating a new model for efforts to reduce inequality in educational attainment. Its cradle-to-college-and-career approach aims to improve student outcomes beginning with access to prenatal care and kindergarten readiness all the way through to elementary and secondary schooling and beyond. Through a combination of community outreach and partnership building, data-driven goal-setting and performance management, the project supports area organizations working to boost student success and close the achievement gap in South Seattle and South King County.

In December, the Project released its baseline report, which provides a detailed snapshot of student achievement in the Road Map region during the 2009-2010 school year. With this initial data in hand, the project will be able to work with area organizations to encourage and track progress on a wide variety of indicators, ranging from birth weight and full-day kindergarten enrollment to proficiency in reading, math, and science, parent engagement to graduation rates and postsecondary enrollment. “Demographics should not determine the destiny of children in this region,” says Mary Jean Ryan, executive director of the Community Center for Education Results. “The children who grow up here deserve as good of an education as the people who show up here.”

      

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray recently announced a plan to raise the minimum wage in his city to $15/hour over the next few years. The plan emerged from a special business/labor advisory committee, approved by 21 out of 24 its members, after four months of hearings, academic studies, and debate . The measure awaits approval by the City Council, but the move to $15/hour in Seattle seems well underway.

Seattle may be the first, but it won’t be the last, city to take this bold step. Granted, there were some peculiarities in Seattle’s case, including a $15/hour minimum wage ballot initiative that succeeded in the nearby city of SeaTac in November, and the election of a new Socialist Party Seattle City Council member who campaigned on the issue. But with inequality taking center stage as a political issue in big cities around the country, mayors, businesses, and labor advocates are watching Seattle closely.

However, the focus on big cities shouldn’t obscure the fact that wages are a function of regional economics. Seattle is indeed a big city, with 635,000 residents and (by our count) nearly 500,000 jobs. But it’s only part of King County, Washington, which has roughly 2 million residents and more than 1 million jobs. And King County is just one of three counties that make up the wider Seattle metropolitan area, with a population of 3.5 million and 1.8 million jobs.

While low-wage jobs are prevalent in Seattle, they’re even more prevalent in its nearby suburbs. Using data from the American Community Survey, my colleague Sid Kulkarni and I calculated that between 2009 and 2011, there were on average 149,000 jobs (full-time and part-time) in the city of Seattle that paid less than $15/hour. Over the same period, the remainder of King County had an average of 216,000 jobs that paid hourly wages below that threshold. These low-wage jobs represented 30 percent of all jobs in Seattle, and 34 percent of all jobs in the rest of King County.

It stands to reason that low-wage jobs are more suburban than high-wage jobs. Typically, the highest-value jobs in a region are located in central cities. High-paying sectors like finance, advanced health care, information technology (Redmond notwithstanding), and higher education tend to be more urban than suburban. Yes, cities also have lots of low-paying jobs in hospitality and retail, but so do suburbs. Those jobs tend to follow people, and most people in major metro areas live in suburbs. As my colleague Elizabeth Kneebone has found, as population sprawls, so does low-wage work.

To be sure, many people who live in the King County suburbs of Seattle will benefit from a $15/hour Seattle minimum wage, because they work in the city. According to a University of Washington study conducted for Mayor Murray’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee, fully four in 10 people who earn less than $15/hour working in Seattle jobs—and who would thus presumably benefit from the minimum wage increase—live outside of the city. That’s particularly important in a region like Greater Seattle, where suburbs are home to most of the poor. At the same time, the UW study finds that nearly as many Seattle residents in sub-$15/hour jobs work outside the city limits.

None of this amounts to an argument against Seattle taking the first step toward increasing its minimum wage. Residential and commercial demand is so strong in the city these days that Seattle may have more latitude than its suburbs to boost its minimum wage significantly without encountering negative employment effects. And maybe the city needs to move first in order to convince its neighbors (and itself) that a $15/hour minimum wage won’t make the sky fall.

But these statistics offer an important reminder that the problems of low wages, inequality, and social mobility do not stop at city borders. Ultimately, more cities might try acting in coordination with their surrounding jurisdictions, as the District of Columbia did with two Maryland counties, to boost their minimum wages and ameliorate any “border effects.” And as Seattle contemplates other key policy initiatives, like universal preschool and backfilling state cuts to transit funding (a King County ballot initiative failed last month), it should keep open the lines of communication with its neighbors, and act as one county—or region—where it can.

       

In an increasingly international and interconnected economy, Seattle was global before global was cool.

The region’s competitive global assets include internationally competitive firms, strategically important ports and one of the nation’s largest foreign-born populations.

Still, today’s unique economic moment demands an extra measure of purposeful global engagement.

As cities and metropolitan areas begin to emerge from the Great Recession, leaders are realizing the need to restructure the economy — to move from one based on debt and consumption to one powered by production and innovation.

At the same time, most economic growth over the next decade will occur outside of America’s borders. As of 2009, the combined economies of Brazil, India and China eclipsed that of the United States and now account for more than one-fifth of the global economy. By 2018, their share is expected to surpass one-quarter.

The developing world, with a rapidly rising middle class, represents a huge market opportunity for American firms. China and India alone are expected to increase their urban populations by more than 500 million over the next 20 years, which naturally leads to a rise in their consumer classes. By 2050, Chinese and Indian consumers will account for more than half of all middle-class consumption worldwide, up from just 2 percent in 2000.

These growing metropolises will also require massive investments in infrastructure and face huge challenges as they expand, challenges that U.S. firms have the expertise to solve — in transportation and mobility, in sustainability and clean energy, in information technology and software.

America’s metropolitan areas are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this dual challenge through increased trade and investment. The top 100 metro areas not only produce three-quarters of our gross domestic product, they also concentrate our most innovative firms, our research institutions and universities, and the majority of our skilled workers.

So how does the central Puget Sound region stack up? Recently, I came to Seattle as part of the Global Cities Initiative, a joint project of the Brookings Institution and JPMorgan Chase. This initiative aims to catalyze a shift in economic development priorities and practices that would result in more globally connected metropolitan areas and more sustainable economic growth.

The metro area has a strong platform for trade: firms such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon; world-class research assets including the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; and a strong legacy of globally oriented leadership, with a wide coalition, including public, private and civic leaders, actively promoting a regional strategy for global engagement.

The data bear this out: While Seattle is the 15th largest metro area in the United States, it has the sixth highest export total, sending more than $47 billion in goods and services abroad in 2012. These exports are overwhelmingly driven by globally competitive clusters in aerospace and information technology.

Partly due to this industry specialty, Seattle’s economy is also highly innovative and uniquely oriented toward science, technology, engineering and math: More than one-quarter of jobs in the metro are in STEM occupations, the fourth highest share of any metropolitan area in the country.

Still, in such a competitive and dynamic global economy, no metro area can afford complacency. In order to maintain its position in the global economy, Seattle needs to get serious about global engagement.

First, focus on global trade and investment. Continue the collaborative efforts of your public, private and civic leaders to focus economic development strategies on growth abroad. In Seattle earlier this month, regional leaders committed to expanding these efforts, joining the Global Cities Initiative’s Exchange, through which the metro area will develop a strategy to increase foreign direct investment in key industries.

Second, invest in what matters. To compete globally, metro areas must be strong at home. In Seattle, this means shoring up your workforce-development pipeline so that local residents have a path to good jobs in advanced industries. It also calls for a regional approach to financing and delivering transportation solutions that not only reduce congestion at home, but also improve your connections abroad.

Finally, metropolitan leaders must look beyond their own borders, identify their trading partners, and build relationships to increase both trade and investment. For example, as part of the Global Cities Initiative, Chicago and Mexico City entered into a first-of-its-kind economic partnership that builds on the extensive economic, social, cultural linkages between the two metros to make both more prosperous.

There are promising efforts under way in the region, as the King County Aerospace Alliance has started collaborating with Aéro Montréal so that the two aerospace clusters can be more competitive.

Simply put, in today’s economic landscape, every city is a global city. The success of regional economies hinges on their engagement throughout the global economy. Seattle has an enviable hand to play; but success is not inevitable.

This opinion piece originally appeared in the Seattle Times.

       

The Seattle city council voted to push up the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. If the wage hike is fully implemented, it will guarantee Seattle’s workers the nation’s highest minimum wage. The increase in the minimum wage will be phased in over a number of years. Big employers that do not provide their employees a health plan are the first that will face the $15 per hour minimum, a requirement that will be fully phased in around 2017. Large employers who offer health benefits will have to pay the $15 minimum starting in 2018. Small businesses with employees who receive tip income will have to pay the $15 per hour minimum a couple of years later, but the countable wage will include employees’ tips. By 2021 all employers in the city must offer a minimum wage of $15 an hour, regardless of the employer’s size.

The federal minimum wage is currently just $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009. If Congress does not raise the national minimum wage, Seattle’s minimum will be more than twice the federal minimum wage. Many states currently have a higher minimum wage than the federal one. As it happens, Washington has the nation’s highest state-level minimum wage, $9.32 per hour. Unlike the federal minimum wage law, Washington’s state law increases the state minimum wage every year in line with changes in the consumer price index. By the time Seattle’s $15 per hour minimum becomes effective for large employers in 2017, the Washington state minimum wage will be about $10 per hour, assuming consumer prices continue to rise 2% a year. Thus, large employers in Seattle will have to pay their minimum-wage employees 50% more than minimum-wage employees receive outside the Seattle city limits.

I strongly favor the Administration’s proposal to boost the U.S. minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. It will boost the spendable incomes of millions of poorly paid workers and their families, and I expect it will have only a small adverse effect, if any, on low-wage workers’ job opportunities and work hours. However, I am more cautious about the wisdom of raising a single city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour when nearby jurisdictions leave their minimum wages unchanged.

One reason for my caution is that a big minimum-wage hike can place Seattle’s low-wage employers at a competitive disadvantage compared with employers engaged in the same line of business but located in a nearby suburb. If compensation costs for low-wage workers represent a big percentage of a Seattle employer’s costs, and if the employer faces competition from businesses on the other side of the city limits, companies located in Seattle can lose customers to competitors outside the city.

Consider a business that mainly sells low-cost, fast-food meals. If it must pay $15 an hour to its low-wage employees, while its competitors less than a mile away are only required to pay $10 an hour, the companies outside Seattle can charge lower prices to their customers for shakes, burgers, and fries, and yet still make a profit. The lower cost establishments can capture a larger percentage of the local fast-food trade, reducing fast-food sales inside Seattle’s city limits. The same is true of the goods and services sold by laundry and dry cleaning establishments, inexpensive motels, and other businesses that depend on low-wage workers to stay competitive. The labor cost disadvantage caused by a higher minimum wage can hurt low-wage employment in Seattle and possibly reduce the value of some of the city’s commercial real estate.

To the extent that consumers have the option of buying goods or services from companies that are not required to pay a higher minimum wage, some of the hoped-for gains from a higher minimum wage will be lost. When customers can conveniently buy products or services from firms that face lower labor costs, the new businesses that they patronize will grow and the old, high-cost businesses they abandon will shrink. Low-wage workers may earn higher wages inside the Seattle city limits, but their employment opportunities in Seattle may shrink.

Seattle is a prosperous city, and its mayor was elected in part because of a promise to boost the pay of its most poorly paid residents. If a $15 an hour minimum wage has a chance of working and enjoying broad political support, Seattle is a good place to test the idea. I will be interested to see whether low-wage Seattle businesses continue to prosper even after they are required to pay a minimum wage that is 50% higher than the one faced by competitors in nearby suburbs. The risk of a big minimum-wage hike at the city level is that the city’s low-wage employers will be harmed in their competition with out-of-town businesses that sell the same products or services. The risk of this kind of harm is vastly smaller when the minimum wage is increased at the state or national level. If the Administration can persuade Congress to boost the national minimum wage, all employers—inside and outside a city’s limits—will be required to raise the pay they offer to their most poorly paid workers.

Note: An edited version of this post appears on Fortune.com

       

From gourmet coffee to online shopping and software, the Seattle region has a long history of bringing innovations to market. And with its environmental consciousness, Seattle consistently ranks among the greenest cities in the United States.

So it makes sense that the region is capitalizing on its sustainability ethos to sharpen its next competitive advantage: smart building technology.

The region’s desire to cement a new market capability was partly about jobs, given the Great Recession and its aftermath. But leaders were concerned about a more basic dilemma: How can Seattle get beyond the “two Bills”-- Bill Boeing and Bill Gates—to build the next generation of innovation and a platform for broad-based economic growth?

Given their existing strengths, firms and leaders in the Puget Sound region made a play to apply their expertise in cloud computing, big data, and information technology to increasing energy efficiency in the built environment. And this would be an export opportunity, too. Rapid urbanization worldwide is prompting global demand for new sustainable solutions and technologies, a market that Seattle entrepreneurs and workers could meet.

To effectively enter and lead in the clean technology market, the region needed to address some market failures, including providing proof of return on investment of new technology for hesitant adopters and investors and building a skilled labor force to staff the increasingly sophisticated industry.

After developing a business plan, the Puget Sound region is now in the midst of a three-pronged, collaborative Smart Buildings effort driven by public, private, and non-profit partners including Innovate Washington, Microsoft, the city of Seattle, South Seattle Community College, and the Puget Sound Regional Council.

First, a high-performance buildings pilot launched last year is demonstrating the efficacy and return-on-investment of energy efficient technology in a mix of buildings—the Seattle Sheraton hotel, a University of Washington medical lab, a Boeing industrial facility, and a city of Seattle office building. The buildings are providing on-site building operators access to a constant digital building performance dashboard. The dashboard helps raise alarms if a key part might break down during an upcoming major event and identifies whether a large ballroom’s temperature needs to be readjusted following a large convening.

“We’re not having to babysit the system as much,” explained Rodney Schauf, the Seattle Sheraton’s director of engineering.

In the first six months of participation in the program, the University of Washington building reduced its energy use by 9 percent and the Sheraton reduced its usage by 5.5 percent, according to Brian Geller, the executive director of the Seattle 2030 District, the city’s larger high performance building district.

Second, the Smart Buildings Center opened as hub for business collaborations, technology demonstrations, and evaluation for energy efficiency technology solutions. The center is also currently developing an initiative to harness K-12 school and public building energy data for greater efficiencies. The effort is aided by the Cleantech Open, which identifies, connects, and mentors companies participating in the center.

Finally, South Seattle College will launch a new Sustainable Building Science Technology Bachelor’s of Applied Science Program, with the inaugural class starting this fall. The program, which combines technical systems understanding with internship opportunities and management skills, has already received strong interest from prospective students.

With this coordinated and comprehensive effort—which has been aided by funds from a federal i6 Green Challenge grant, state matching funds, and other private support—the region is on its way to demonstrating that its sustainable image can also produce real economic gains.

The initiative featured here emerged from work supported by the Brookings-Rockefeller Project on State and Metropolitan Innovation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment and the analysis and recommendations are solely determined by the scholar.

       

In recent months, we’ve heard a lot about the tech industry's gender gap. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women represent just 19.7 percent of software developers, an occupation with a median salary of over $92,000 a year.

Women’s underrepresentation in these and other well-paying tech jobs is a major concern given that women still earn only 78 cents for every dollar earned by men. Meanwhile, labor shortages in software development and other high-skill occupations have tech companies worried about whether they’ll be able to grow as fast as they’d like.

Seattle’s Ada Developers Academy takes aim at both challenges. This highly selective, tuition-free program prepares women students to be full-stack software developers, meaning that they can do both front-end—what the user sees—and back-end—what’s behind the scenes that makes everything work properly. Prior experience in tech isn’t necessary to earn a spot at Ada: The main prerequisite is a strong desire to pursue a career in software development.

Ada combines six months of intensive classroom instruction with a six-month internship at a sponsoring company so that students have the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in real-world situations. Sponsoring companies—which currently include Nordstrom, Redfin, Zillow and Expedia, among others—also benefit from the internships, which provide direct access to prospective employees at a time when proficient software developers can be hard to find.

If Ada’s first cohort is any indication, the academy’s combination of rigorous in-class training and hands-on work experience has tremendous value on the job market. All 15 members of the inaugural class got job offers for software developer positions before they graduated from the program.

Seattle has long been known for its vibrant tech scene. Ada Developers Academy, its sponsoring companies and its graduates together enhance that reputation by fostering a more supportive environment for women in the city’s tech industry. In the face of serious gender disparities, organizations like Ada Developers Academy in Seattle show that it’s possible to create career pathways that will perhaps one day close the tech gender gap.

       

Summary: Why digital skills matter

As the influence of digital technologies in the global economy expands, metropolitan areas throughout the United States face the task of preparing residents for an increasingly technology-powered world. Most jobs now require basic computer literacy to operate email and other software, while jobs specific to information technology (IT) require advanced skills such as coding. At home, residents need access to the Internet and consumer technologies to do homework, shop at online retailers, communicate with one another, or check real-time traffic and transit conditions.

Digital technologies hold out the promise of more widely shared prosperity, but achieving that vision will require every person to have basic digital skills—the ability to use digital hardware and software to manage information, communicate, navigate the web, solve problems, and create content.¹

While some metro areas have made important advances on digital skills acquisition, the effects are not ubiquitous. The Census Bureau found that only 73 percent of U.S. households subscribed to in-home broadband service in 2013, leaving 31 million households without a high-speed in-home connection.² Pew Research Center finds that over one-third of U.S. adults doesn’t own a smartphone, while 7 percent of smartphone owners lack high-speed Internet access at home and have few ways to get online beyond their smartphone.³ Another survey finds that 29 percent of Americans have low levels of digital skills, and many of these persons tend to be older, less educated, and lower-income.⁴

In an advanced economy, all residents deserve an opportunity to obtain digital skills. It is up to leaders in each U.S. metropolitan area to determine how best to meet this need. As with any social challenge of this scale, meeting it will require pragmatic problem-solving and deep collaboration across the public, private, and civic sectors.

This brief summarizes the results of a workshop held in Seattle to explore these issues. While the findings from the workshop discussions are unique to the Seattle region—making its leaders and residents the primary audience for this brief—the workshop approach can be replicated in any metropolitan area interested in addressing digital skills shortfalls and developing solutions tailored to residents’ needs.

Introduction: Digital skills and the Seattle metropolitan economy

Metropolitan Seattle is well positioned to prosper in the information era. Advanced industries—including global leaders in aerospace and IT—power the regional economy and have created an impressive network of patent-producing firms that employ over 295,000 people.⁵ The region’s households actively participate in the digital economy as well, as evidenced by a broadband adoption rate of 82 percent.⁶ Collaborations bringing together firms, public utilities, and government institutions make Seattle a national leader in the use of data monitoring to reduce energy usage.

However, for the region to maintain its position in the years ahead, it will need to cultivate a more inclusive economy that gives every resident the opportunity to acquire the skills needed to succeed in the digital era.

Like most U.S. metro areas, metropolitan Seattle continues to struggle with digital inclusivity. Strong broadband adoption across the region masks lagging adoption rates in many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.⁷ A skills mismatch between job openings requiring digital skills and the education and skills training of area residents contributes to income inequality.⁸ This inequality, though less marked than in other cities with similar high-tech economies, continues to increase, with the highest-earning households experiencing rising incomes while lower-income households’ earnings stay relatively flat.⁹ Meanwhile, more than 45 percent of jobs in the region are more than 10 miles from downtown Seattle and Bellevue, and over two-thirds of poor households now live in the suburbs.¹⁰ This kind of job sprawl and suburban poverty limit many residents’ physical access to economic opportunity.

But the Seattle area has the assets to address these challenges. The region has a legacy of direct private-sector support for professional skills development and a huge network of IT firms that can expand such efforts. Government agencies and civic institutions already manage programs to promote digital skills acquisition. In addition, there is a regional ethic of supporting equitable economic growth, seen most recently in Seattle’s landmark living wage policy and Sound Transit’s discounted fee system for lower-income riders.¹¹

In an effort to address Seattle’s digital skills gap, the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program convened a group of leaders from the public, private, and civic sectors to discuss how to continue building a regionally inclusive digital skills infrastructure. The workshop consisted of brief presentations from Brookings experts and local leaders, group discussions of current efforts and challenges, and break-out groups to identify specific barriers and discuss strategies and next steps to improve future outcomes.

The following is a distillation of the key themes and lessons from the workshop.

1. Commit to ongoing collaboration

There is a clear consensus among Seattle-area leaders that basic digital skills are essential for everyone. The tough part is ensuring that all residents in the region have the opportunity to acquire these skills.

This challenge implicates a wide range of stakeholders, from municipal and county government, public libraries, and universities to area businesses, education and training providers, philanthropies, and nonprofits.

Many of these actors already manage their own initiatives, to great effect. Programs like the Seattle Goodwill’s Digital Literacy Initiative are working to increase the number of people with 21st-century digital skills, particularly among traditionally underserved populations. The private sector is advancing a similar agenda with major initiatives, such as Microsoft IT Academy and Google’s Made With Code, that promote computational thinking through computer science. Meanwhile, nonprofit training programs like the Ada Developers Academy as well as for-profit training providers such as Code Fellows and General Assembly are getting more people on pathways into tech-intensive careers that pay well.

However, despite this demonstrated willingness to act, coordination of activities across the region remains a challenge. Most initiatives operate independently from one another, often resulting in duplicative efforts and missed opportunities for greater impact. Furthermore, current efforts often concentrate activities in either the central cities or specific portions of the three-county region, thereby excluding those who live in other parts of the metro area. For example, the city of Seattle’s excellent digital equity programs extend only to the city limits and are not available in South King County. Without more collaboration, the region will not be able to take full advantage of its creativity, resources, and capacity for pragmatic problem-solving.

By committing to ongoing collaborative action, leaders in the Seattle region will be well positioned to design, launch, and maintain smart solutions to the digital skills challenge today and in the future.

2. Identify a convener and organize for action

Once stakeholders commit to collaborative problem-solving, they must then determine how best to organize for action. Identifying a neutral convener organization can help expedite this process. Designating a convener ensures that there is a single organization tasked with driving the group’s agenda forward and fostering greater collaboration among stakeholders.

The role of convener involves a handful of specific tasks that help keep the group on track and in regular contact. Organizing regular group meetings, delegating critical tasks like research into best practices, and managing communication within the group are all critical functions for the convening organization. To take just one example, the Community Center for Education Results (CCER) fills the convener role for the many stakeholders involved in the Road Map Project, which is working to improve student outcomes in South Seattle and South King County.¹²

The Seattle area is fortunate to have a number of organizations that could act as convener. Potential candidates include the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County (WDC), the Seattle Public Library, the University of Washington, or one of the many large philanthropies in the region.

Regardless of which organization ultimately takes on this role, selecting a convener marks a crucial first step toward an actionable, collaboratively developed digital skills agenda for the Seattle region.

3. Develop a shared vision for digital skills acquisition

Crafting a shared vision for digital skills acquisition will strengthen the group’s work by ensuring that all involved are on the same page. That vision can support the creation of a coordinated regional plan, which will help stakeholders take advantage of economies of scale and ensure the greatest return on resources invested. This plan should take particular care to address challenges faced by traditionally underrepresented groups, including women and people of color as well as those in lower-income communities.¹³ Ending the persistent lack of diversity in tech-oriented careers will require a concerted effort on the part of all stakeholders involved.¹⁴

To start, the convener’s first task should be organizing a time for stakeholders to sit down, develop a shared vision, and determine the next steps necessary to achieve that vision. Conducting an audit of existing programs in the region that support digital skills acquisition can be a good place to begin. This inventory will highlight any overlapping initiatives while also providing information on gaps in the digital skills infrastructure that will need to be addressed.

In addition, the group should work with the private sector to identify the digital skills needed in various industries and begin to map out pathways into tech-oriented careers. This information will ensure that the solutions developed are informed by current and projected industry demand.

The industry-sector panels convened by WDC offer one possible approach. Under this model, WDC serves as convener, bringing together key stakeholders from industry, education, workforce development, labor, nonprofits, and other relevant areas to identify shared challenges and engage in collaborative problem-solving. The outcomes and activities of the sector panel are determined by the group, with WDC facilitating the process throughout. WDC has a demonstrated record of success in organizing sector panels for the maritime and health care industries, and it could apply the same techniques to industries requiring digital skills.

Preliminary research will provide the data and analyses necessary for truly evidence-based solutions that respond directly to specific challenges in the region. Once this baseline research is completed, the group can begin problem-solving in earnest. To start, the group should identify a punch list of action items that can be easily accomplished in order to start building a record of successful collaborations.

As the group designs these solutions, it should also take care to establish performance management systems that track progress over time. Monitoring the performance of each solution implemented will also support efforts to refine and course-correct programming over time.

4. Adopt new roles to accomplish regional goals

With a new, shared vision of the community’s digital skills infrastructure in hand, stakeholders will need to align their individual initiatives to that goal and, in some cases, redefine their roles in order to support the broader vision.

These new roles should leverage each organization’s core strengths rather than require them to develop new ones. For example, metropolitan Seattle’s public libraries are already community-meeting spots that specialize in information exchange, offer free access to the Internet, and host a variety of classes for the public. This current work positions the libraries to serve as an information clearinghouse for digital skills programs offered in the region, ranging from job-skills training to classes on smartphone use. Likewise, academic experts at the University of Washington and other postsecondary institutions could help create a new curriculum for teaching applied digital skills to diverse populations.

At the same time, organizations should be open to adapting their core projects in order to fill gaps in the region’s digital skills infrastructure. For example, technology firms like Microsoft and Google could draw on their extensive civic philanthropic efforts and employee skills-training programs to provide basic, applied digital skills and computer science training that enhances the regional workforce. Such efforts could build on Microsoft’s IT Academy model and Google’s support for programs at the Boys and Girls Clubs, which could be repurposed to address adult needs rather than those of children and teens.

As individual organizations adopt new roles, they will need to ensure that services are available to residents across the entire metropolitan area. Anchored by its Department of Information Technology and its Digital Equity Initiative, the city of Seattle has an impressive record of boosting digital skills within the city proper. But the vast majority of area residents live outside Seattle. Furthermore, over 60 percent of the region’s poor households now live in the suburbs. As a result, regional actors like Puget Sound Regional Council, Sound Cities, and county governments face enormous pressure to serve residents across the three-county metro area.

To start, organizations should work together to conduct metrowide surveys of digital equity issues, perhaps following the model employed by Seattle’s Digital Equity Initiative. This quantitative and qualitative data will set the baseline for the entire region and will help organizations set achievable benchmark goals for the years ahead.

5. Create a regional digital skills brand and marketing strategy to galvanize action

In order to communicate the shared vision to area residents, stakeholders should develop and publicize a new regional brand that positions the Seattle region as a leader in digital skills adoption and more equitable economic outcomes.

The associated marketing campaign can counter misconceptions about digital skills and the tech industry, maximize awareness of individual stakeholders’ projects, and minimize costs for each organization. Working together, stakeholders can reach the broadest possible pool of local residents with a cohesive message that encourages digital skills and computer science skills acquisition. Furthermore, by directing residents to centralized

information centers like local public libraries, the campaign will connect individuals with experts who can help them find the best programs for their needs.

In crafting this branding effort, the Seattle area should look to similar campaigns for inspiration. One example is Portland, Ore.’s We Build Green Cities campaign, a trade-based effort to leverage Portland’s international reputation for environmental sustainability and design in order to increase the region’s exports. Baltimore’s Opportunity Collaborative offers a more equity-focused model that brings together local and state public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and universities to solve common workforce, housing, and transportation challenges. A digital skills marketing campaign patterned after existing efforts will allow the region to capitalize on proven models when positioning itself as a leader in digital skills adoption that supports more widely shared prosperity.

Conclusion

The Seattle region stands at a crossroads. It has the industrial assets for continued growth that fosters ongoing innovation and provides jobs that pay well. It also has a commitment to shared prosperity, best represented by the public, private, and civic actors that support better wages, affordable transportation options, and education and training focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations. The region should build on these efforts by advancing a shared vision for digital skills and undertaking the sustained collaboration necessary to make that vision a reality.

Additional resources

The Boston Consulting Group, “Opportunity for All: Investing in Washington State’s STEM Education Pipeline” (2014).

The Boston Consulting Group and the Washington Roundtable, “Great Jobs Within Our Reach: Solving the Problem of Washington State’s Growing Job Skills Gap” (2013).

Capital One and Burning Glass, “Crunched by the Numbers: The Digital Skills Gap in the Workforce” (2015).

City of Austin, “Digital Inclusion Strategy 2014” (2014).

City of Seattle Department of Information Technology, Community Technology Program, “Information Technology Access and Adoption in Seattle: Progress Towards Digital Opportunity and Equity” (2014).

Communities Connect Network, “Defining Digital Inclusion for Broadband Deployment & Adoption” (2014).

Maureen Majury, “Building an IT Career-Ready Washington: 2015 and Beyond” (Seattle: Center of Excellence for Information & Computing Technology, 2014).

Seth McKinney, “Economic Development Planning in Seattle: A Review and Analysis of Current Plans and Strategies” (Seattle: University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy, 2013).

Seattle Goodwill, “Digital Literacy Initiative: Overview” (2014).

Seattle Goodwill, “Digital Literacy: Theoretical Framework” (2014).

Angela Siefer, “Trail-Blazing Digital Inclusion Communities” (OCLC and Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2013).

Tricia Vander Leest and Joe Sullivan, “ICT Training and the ABCs of Employability: YearUp’s Jobs Program for Urban Youth” (Seattle: University of Washington Center for Information & Society, 2008).

Authors

• Jessica A. Lee
• Adie Tomer

Image Source: © Anthony Bolante / Reuters