Event Information

On December 4 to 6, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted its 12th annual Saban Forum, titled “Israel and the United States: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” The 2015 Saban Forum included webcasts featuring remarks by Israel’s Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon, Chairman of the Yesh Atid Party Yair Lapid, National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush Stephen Hadley, Secretary of State John Kerry, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (via video), and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The forum’s webcast sessions focused on the future for Israelis and Palestinians, Iran’s role in the Middle East, spillover from the war in Syria, and the global threat posed by the Islamic State and other violent jihadi groups.

Over the past twelve years, the Saban Forum has become the premier platform for frank dialogue between American and Israeli leaders from government, civil society, business, and the media. As a result, the Saban Forum is a seminal event, generating new ideas and helping shape the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #Saban15

Video

• A conversation with Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s minister of defense
• How to restore order in the Middle East
• Keynote address: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry
• Address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (via video)
• Keynote address: Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton

Audio

• Saturday, December 5, 8:00pm - How to preserve Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript--Keynote address: Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--Address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--How to preserve Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state (.pdf)
• U.S. Department of State Release--Remarks by Secretary of State John Kerry (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--How to restore order in the Middle East (.pdf)
• Uncorrected Transcript--A conversation with Moshe Ya'alon, Israel's minister of defense (.pdf)

Event Materials

• Uncorrected TranscriptKeynote addressFormer Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
• Uncorrected TranscriptAddress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Uncorrected TranscriptHow to preserve Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state
• US Department of State ReleaseRemarks by Secretary of State John Kerry
• Uncorrected TranscriptHow to restore order in the Middle East 2
• Uncorrected TranscriptA conversation with Moshe Yaalon Israels minister of defense

      

Editors’ Note: On March 23, the Working Group on Egypt sent a letter to President Obama urging him to publicly and privately object to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi’s accelerating crackdown on human rights and civil society organizations. Brookings senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy Tamara Wittes was among the letter’s signers, and she explains her decision to do so. The letter was originally published by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).

Tamara Wittes: In a disordered Middle East, America needs anchors of stability and reliable partners to help it achieve its goals. Both are in sadly short supply. 

For more than thirty years, Egypt was an anchor of stability and a reliable American partner in regional security. From the time Sadat expelled Soviet advisers and broached peace with Israel, ties with Egypt have been a core pillar of American Middle East policy. But, as my colleague Steven Cook presciently noted way back in February 2012, Egypt’s revolution accelerated the launch of what he calls a “long goodbye” between these two formerly indispensable partners. He argued back then that shifting from a “special relationship” to something more transaction would have four concrete benefits for Washington:

First, Washington will no longer be in the unseemly position of providing taxpayer largesse—however small in the grand scheme of things—to a government that resents the United States and clearly does not share its values. Second, it will provide an opportunity for a much-needed change in military-to-military relations in which the United States merely pays for the services it needs like expedited transit through the Suez Canal. Third, it is consistent with this moment of empowerment and dignity for Egyptians many of whom do not want U.S. assistance either because they believe it actually stands in the way of a democratic transition or accept Aboul Naga’s argument along with those who couldn’t care less about U.S. assistance because it doesn’t touch their lives. Finally, it will free up funds for the United States to help others who actually might want Washington’s help, perhaps the Tunisians, Moroccans, or some sub-Saharan African countries would be grateful for development assistance.

Since that blog post went up, Egypt has had three different governments and lost its place as a diplomatic and security leader in the region; while the United States has withdrawn from Iraq and begun to do the same in Afghanistan, while emphasizing burden-sharing in its new fight against ISIS. All of these shifts strengthen the argument for a more distant and transactional U.S.-Egyptian relationship. 

Moreover, since his accession to power (first in a military coup in July 2013 and then in a highly constrained election in 2014), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has made decisions that are undermining both Egypt’s domestic stability and key American policy goals in the region. 

• Sisi’s failure to move forward on economic reforms (recommended by leading Egyptian voices, regional supporters, and international donors) has left his country in a spiral of shrinking cash reserves, capital flight and currency devaluation that together threaten the government’s ability to import needed food and medicine and to carry out core government functions. 
• Sisi’s counterterrorism campaign in the Sinai has succeeded in “making the sand jump,” as one regional security official told me, but it seems to have stoked more than tamped down the fire of violent extremism threatening both Egypt and Israel; meanwhile, its alleged military abuses have sparked a Senate request for investigation.
• The intense political polarization and relentless repression of post-coup Egypt are producing other destabilizing effects, which are detailed in the Egypt Working Group’s newest letter to President Obama posted below (I am a member of the Working Group). 

To top it all off, the Egyptian government continues to throw obstacles in the road of U.S.-Egyptian cooperation. Its military resists learning from the hard-won American experience in effective counterinsurgency. Its leadership has resolutely refused to allow core bilateral aid programs, like those supporting higher education, to move forward. And at the same time, the Egyptian government continues to promote conspiracy theories about the United States to its public through media smears and show trials, and now, apparently, to its newly elected parliamentarians. 

It’s long past time for the United States to undertake a strategic review of its approach to the Middle East, one focused on building anchors of stability and sustaining reliable partners in pursuit of American priorities. Egypt, as I told The New York Times, no longer qualifies as either one. That doesn’t mean the two countries can’t continue to work together in those narrow areas where they agree on interests, priorities, and approaches. 

But Secretary of State Kerry’s public embrace last week of Egyptian Foreign Minister Shoukry cannot hide the facts—there is no “back to business” option for the U.S.-Egyptian relationship, and it seems increasingly clear that even direct White House engagement would not shift Egypt’s leadership off of its self-destructive trajectory. Egypt's looming instability demands that the United States take steps now to safeguard itself from reliance on a country we cannot rescue, not least from its own leaders' worst impulses. 

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March 23, 2016

Dear Mr. President,

We are writing to urge you to speak directly with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and to express both publicly and privately your objection to his accelerating crackdown on human rights, including recent moves to prosecute civil society organizations. You were correct to declare in September 2014 that “America’s support for civil society is a matter of national security,” and nowhere is that more true than in Egypt today.

President el-Sissi’s campaign against civil society takes place against the backdrop of unprecedented abuses by Egyptian security forces, including extrajudicial killings, the detention of tens of thousands of political prisoners, the widespread documented use of torture, and the forced disappearances of hundreds of Egyptians. The killing of Italian student Giulio Regeni, whose tortured body appeared on a roadside near Cairo a week after his abduction in late January, has come to international attention, but many Egyptians have shared his fate since President el-Sissi came to power.

On March 24, an Egyptian court will hear a request to freeze the bank accounts and other assets of two internationally-respected human rights defenders, Hossam Bahgat and Gamal Eid, along with members of Eid’s family. Mr. Bahgat and Mr. Eid and other activists may soon be indicted and face trial for illegally accepting foreign funding—a criminal charge that violates their right to free association and could carry a sentence of up to 25 years in prison.

The imminent proceedings are a major step in Egyptian authorities’ campaign to crush the last remnants of Egypt’s independent civil society and human rights community. Egypt’s media has recently reported that dozens of organizations are under criminal investigation, essentially for their peaceful work to monitor abuses and to hold Egypt’s government accountable to its own constitution and international human rights commitments. In recent weeks, Egyptian authorities have ordered the closure of a prominent anti-torture organization, the Nadeem Center; summoned staff from several human rights organizations for interrogation; banned prominent rights activists and advocates from traveling outside Egypt in violation of the Egyptian constitution; and harassed and threatened human rights activists with arrest and violence. The media regularly propagate vitriol against human rights defenders, portraying them as traitors and security threats.

If this crackdown is allowed to reach its conclusion, it will silence an indigenous human rights community that has survived more than 30 years of authoritarian rule, leaving few if any Egyptians free to investigate mounting abuses by the state.

The current attacks on Egypt’s rights advocates are a continuation of the same criminal prosecution of American and German NGO workers in Egypt that began in 2011. That prosecution, driven by senior members of the Egyptian government still in high office today, resulted in the June 2013 criminal convictions, in a deeply flawed trial, of 43 Egyptian and international NGO staff, including 17 American citizens. President el-Sissi, who was the head of military intelligence in 2011 when Egypt’s military government launched the investigation, has refused repeated requests to overturn the convictions.

While the current crackdown is primarily targeting domestic organizations, there are indications that international NGOs may also face increased pressure, including some that currently do not even have offices or staff working in Egypt. On March 20, the newspaper Al Masry Al Youm published the names of more than 150 individuals and civil society organizations reportedly under investigation for receiving foreign funding, including prominent American and European organizations such as the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Solidarity Center, Transparency International, Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services, CARE, AMIDEAST, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.

Mr. President, in your September 2014 Presidential Memorandum on Civil Society, you pledged that the United States government—including you personally—would stand firmly with those in civil society facing pressure or harassment from their governments. While the past five years have been tumultuous and challenging for U.S. policy toward Egypt, this is another defining moment for the United States, a moment that tests your pledge to “stand with civil society.” Secretary Kerry’s March 18 statement of concern was welcome, but further action is urgently needed. Past practice demonstrates that when the United States government speaks clearly, in one voice, and consistently on NGO freedom and human rights in Egypt, the government in Cairo listens.

It is essential that you act to stand up for human rights, freedom of association, and the rights of both Egyptian and international civil society organizations to work together on behalf of common goals. You must make crystal clear to President el-Sissi that continued assaults on civil society, including harassment of U.S. organizations, will make it difficult for the administration to cooperate across a range of issues, including your administration’s efforts to promote American investment in Egypt and to provide financial assistance to the Egyptian government and military. If Egypt’s government continues down a path to destroy its own civil society, American support and assistance will become, in both principled and practical terms, impossible.

Sincerely,

The Working Group on Egypt

       

Editor's note: Tamara Cofman Wittes testifies before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a session on aggravating factors and ways to stem the violence in the Syrian conflict. Read her full written testimony below or watch the live coverage.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Cardin, for the invitation to appear before you today. I’d like to request that my full statement be entered into the record, and I’ll give you the highlight reel. And let me begin by emphasizing, as always, that I represent only myself before you today – the Brookings Institution does not take institutional positions on policy issues.

Opportunities Lost

When I last testified before this committee regarding Syria, in April 2012, I expressed my concern that American reticence to act to shape the emergent civil war and the involvement of regional powers in it risked enabling an unbridled escalation of the conflict. I suggested then that uncontrolled escalation could entrench sectarian violence, empower radicals, destabilize the neighborhood, and generate wide human suffering. While the Obama Administration has taken incremental steps over the last four years to try and shape both the battlefield and the context for diplomacy, those steps have proved too little and too late to alter the conflict’s fundamental dynamics.

President Obama’s initial read of the Syrian conflict as holding only narrow implications for American interests was a signal failure to learn the lessons of the post-Cold War period, and the civil wars of the 1990s, by recognizing the risk that Syria’s civil war could spill over in ways that directly implicated U.S. interests. The experience of the 1990s clearly suggested how a neglected civil war offered easy opportunities for a violent jihadist movement—just as the Afghanistan war did for the Taliban in the mid-1990s—and how large-scale refugee flows would destabilize Syria’s neighbors, including key U.S. security partners like Jordan and Turkey. And as we now know, ISIS used the security and governance vacuums created by the Syrian civil war to consolidate a territorial and financial base that the United States has been seeking since late 2014, with limited success, to undermine.

Unfortunately, the realistic policy options available to the United States have narrowed considerably since 2012, the violence is entrenched, the spillover is creating serious challenges for the neighborhood and for Europe, and the number of actors engaged directly in the Syrian conflict has proliferated. All of this means that the continuation of the Syrian civil war has direct and dire consequences today, not just for regional order, but for international security. This reality, combined with the tremendous human suffering this war generates every day, drives two clear imperatives for U.S. policy: to intensify efforts to contain the spillover and misery, and to seek an end to the conflict as soon as possible.

Ending the War

We must be realistic, however, about what steps will, and will not, end the Syrian conflict. Recently, some policy experts have suggested that, in the name of advancing great-power concord to end the war, the United States should relax its view that Bashar al-Assad’s departure from power is a requisite for any political settlement. This view rests on the assumption that Russia will not bend in its insistence on Assad’s remaining in place, and on the assumption that a U.S.-Russian agreement on leaving Assad in place would override the preferences of those fighting on the ground to remove him. Both of these premises, in my view, are incorrect.

We must therefore understand clearly the interests and imperatives driving the major players in this conflict, and we must understand, too, that the battlefield dynamics will heavily condition the prospects of any political settlement. Ending the bloody war in Bosnia in the 1990s involved getting the major external powers with stakes in the outcome – the United States, the Europeans, and Russia – to agree on basic outlines of a settlement and impose it on the parties. But imposing it on the parties required a shift in the balance of power on the battlefield, brought about by Croat military victories and ultimately a NATO bombing campaign. Bosnia also required a large-scale, long-term United Nations presence to separate the factions and to enforce and implement the agreement.

So I believe that, absent a change on the ground, diplomacy alone is unlikely to end the Syrian war – but I certainly agree with diplomatic efforts to advance a country-wide cessation of hostilities and advance a vision for a political settlement. A full-scale cease-fire could create more space for political bargaining, and in the meantime reduce human suffering and mitigate the spillover effects of the ongoing violence. Right now, however, the Assad government and its patrons in Tehran and Moscow have no interest in a sustained cease-fire, because the battleground dynamics continue to shift in their favor. They used the partial cease-fires of the past weeks to consolidate territorial gains from opposition forces and to further weaken those forces through continued air attacks. Without agreement amongst the various governments around the table as to which fighting groups constitute terrorist organizations, a ceasefire will inevitably disadvantage opposition factions as the Assad regime targets them in the name of counterterrorism. That will likewise advantage the most extreme among the rebel factions as well as jihadi groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda’s affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, who will all continue to use force to acquire and hold territory and to force their political opponents and inconvenient civilians off the field.

Likewise, some suggest that the sectarian nature of the conflict, and the deep investment of regional powers in backing their preferred sides, mean that it is not possible to hasten an end to the war at all, and that it must be allowed to “burn itself out.” This policy option is infeasible for the United States, from moral, political, and security standpoints. The scale of death and destruction already, over nearly five years of war, should shame the conscience of the world. Those seeking to escape this misery deserve our succor, and those seeking to end the carnage deserve our support. And it is beyond question that Bashar al-Assad and his allies are the ones responsible for the vast majority of this death, destruction, and displacement.

In political and security terms, the war’s spillover into neighboring countries and now into Europe can still get worse. Key states like Lebanon and Jordan are at risk of destabilization and/or extremist terrorism the longer the conflict goes on and the more of its consequences they must absorb. Turkey, as we know, has already suffered attacks by extremist groups. And the war has continued to be a powerful source of recruitment for extremists, drawing fighters and fellow travelers from around the world. ISIS and Al Qaeda feed on the civil conflict and the chaos on the ground is what gives them room to operate. It is indeed imperative that the United States remain engaged, and intensify its engagement as needed, to secure an end to the conflict as soon as possible.

Understanding the Geopolitical Context

In the ongoing diplomacy over how the conflict ends and what political settlement results, there are two issues on which the parties involved in the Vienna talks demonstrate sharp disagreement, and about which the United States needs to advance clear views. The first is a disagreement over the primacy of preserving the central Syrian government, currently headed by Assad. Russia, along with some regional actors (even some opponents of Assad), believe that the most important determinant structuring a political settlement must be the preservation of the Syrian central government, even if that means preserving Bashar al Assad in office. If Assad is ousted without an agreed-upon successor in place, they argue, then Syria will become a failed state like Libya, in which ISIS will have even more space to consolidate and operate, with dire consequences for regional and international security. It is this concern over state collapse and the desire for strong central authority that keeps Russia united with Iran behind Assad.

It’s understandable to desire the preservation of Syrian government institutions as a bulwark against anarchy, and to want a central government in Syria with which to work on counterterrorism and postwar reconstruction. The problem with elevating this concern to a primary objective in negotiations is its embedded assumption that any Syrian government based in Damascus will be able to exercise meaningful control over most or all of Syria’s territory after rebels and government forces stop fighting one another. That’s a faulty assumption, for several reasons.

First, it is extremely unlikely that we’ll see swift or effective demobilization and disarmament of sub-state fighting factions in favor of a unified Syrian military force. If the central government remains largely in the form and structure of Assad’s government, and even more so if Assad himself remains in power, it is hard to imagine rebel groups agreeing to put down their weapons and rely on security provided by the central government. Thus, local militias will remain important providers of local order and also important players in either defeating or enabling extremist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda.

Second, effective governance from Damascus is extremely difficult to imagine, much less implement. The degree of displacement, the extent of physical destruction, and the hardening of sectarian and ethnic divisions due to five years of brutal conflict (and decades of coercive rule before that) all present steep challenges to centralized rule. Those with resources and capacity within local communities will end up being the primary providers of order at the local level – and it is local order, more than a central government, that will enable communities to resist ISIS infiltration. Thus, countries concerned with having effective governance in Syria as a bulwark against extremists need to recognize the value and importance of local governance in any post-war scenario.

Finally, there is the unalterable fact that Bashar al-Assad and his allies have slaughtered perhaps as many as 400,000 of Syria’s citizens; have used chemical weapons against civilians; have imprisoned and tortured thousands and displaced millions; and, through Assad’s own horrific decisions, have broken Syria’s government, the Syrian state, and the Syrian nation to bits. Those who demand his ouster as a prerequisite for ending the war are justified in their view that Assad does not have and will not have legitimacy to govern from a majority of Syrians, that his continued rule would be divisive and destructive of Syrian unity and security, and that he should instead face justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As a practical matter, and because of all this, many Syrian fighting factions on the ground and their supporters, are committed to Assad’s ouster. US-Russian concurrence on setting that goal aside will not induce them to end their fight. The only way that might occur is if Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia – who are committed to Assad’s ouster – relent on their demands and agree to curtail support to rebel factions who continue to fight. This is hard to imagine in the current circumstances.

In other words, while preserving the Syrian state is a laudable goal, it will not alone achieve the objectives set by those who hold it out as the primary imperative in the political negotiations over the future of Syria. I would suggest that, while the fate of Bashar al Assad is not perhaps of primary concern from the perspective of U.S. interests, the United States should be pressing Russia and others involved in the talks to relax their fixation on Syria’s central government (and who runs it) as a counterterrorism goal, and to recognize that a significant degree of decentralization and international engagement with local actors inside Syria will be necessary to preserve the peace, to carry out reconstruction, and to defeat ISIS. Likewise, the Syrian opposition and those states demanding Assad’s ouster as a precondition for peace must recognize that they have even more to gain from insisting on decentralization and local autonomy than they do from Assad’s departure from power. They might even be able to trade their current demand for Assad’s immediate departure against robust assurances for empowerment of local authority, release of detainees and internationally guaranteed transitional justice.

The second major issue under contention regarding a negotiated end to the Syrian war is the role that Iran will play in post-conflict Syria. Iran’s efforts to expand its infuence – in Syria and in the region as a whole – present a concern that unites all of the United States’s partners in the region, and should be a major concern for Washington as well. The gains made by the Assad regime (with Russian and Iranian help) over the past eight months enhance the disturbing prospect of a Syrian government remaining in power in Damascus that is dependent on Iranian funding, Iranian military support, and the importation of Iranian-backed militias. While the Russians are perhaps concerned more about the Syrian state as a bulwark against extremism, Iran is deeply committed to the survival of its Alawi client and the maintenance of Syria as a channel for Iranian support to Hizballah. And while some Sunni Arab states embrace the goal of preserving Syrian territorial integrity and the central government, all are troubled at the prospect that this government would be under the thumb of Tehran. Any political settlement that institutionalizes Iran’s overwhelming role in Syria will likewise increase Iran’s ability to impact to threaten Israel’s northern border, to destabilize Lebanese and perhaps also Jordanian politics, and to interfere with ongoing efforts to assuage the anxieties of Iraqi Sunnis and bring them back into alignment with the government in Baghdad.

The rising likelihood of an Iranian-dominated Syria emerging from the war has induced a change in attitude toward the Syrian conflict by America’s closest regional partner, Israel. Israeli officials took a fairly ambivalent stance toward the civil war for several years, although they were always wary of the Syrian-Iranian alliance. But today, they judge Assad’s survival as possible only through effective Iranian suzerainty, putting their most powerful enemy right on their border. Iranian domination of post-conflict Syria would also likely spell an escalation in Iranian weapons transfers to Hizballah – and Israel cannot expect to have 100% success in preventing the provision of increasingly sophisticated rocket and missile technology to Hizballah. These and other types of support from Iran through Damascus could increase Hizballah’s capacity to wage asymmetric war against Israel, at great cost to Israel’s civilian population. Israeli observers are increasingly alarmed at this scenario, and Israeli officials now state clearly that, if faced with a choice, they’d prefer to confront ISIS than Iran across the Israeli-Syrian frontier.

American diplomacy in Vienna must take greater account of the destabilizing implications of an Iranian-dominated Syrian government, even a rump government that does not control all of Syrian territory. A U.S. focus on constructing a political settlement that limits Iran’s influence in postwar Syria could induce greater coherence among American partners in Vienna currently divided over the fate of Assad; and it could prevent a situation in which the United States trades the threat of ISIS in Syria for the threat of Iranian-sponsored terrorism and subversion emanating from Syria.

Al Qaeda and the Syrian conflict

Al Qaeda’s affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra has particularly benefited from the war’s continuation, from the weakness and partiality of the ceasefires negotiated earlier this year, and from the inability of the U.S.-Russian diplomatic process to generate any progress toward a political transition. Shrewdly, Nusra has focused on building its reputation as the most consistent, and most effective, military opponent of the Assad regime, and on its readiness to cooperate with anti-Assad factions with whom it has other, ideological and political, disagreements. The failures of diplomacy feed Nusra’s strength and win it allies amongst more nationalist rebel factions. And while it’s tempting for American efforts to focus on rallying forces to defeat ISIS, our diplomats and decision makers must beware that leaning too far back on the issue of political transition for the sake of building an anti-ISIS coalition might just end up pushing more hardline opposition elements into the arms of a different extremist movement, one with demonstrated intent and capability to attack the United States.

To summarize, it’s imperative that American diplomacy to produce a political settlement of the Syrian war be firmly focused achieving two goals crucial to the interests of the United States and its regional partners: first, enabling and institutionalizing local governance as a bulwark against ISIS (more than central government institutions), and second, establishing hard limits on Iran’s role in a post-conflict Syria and on its ability to use Syria as a conduit for support to Hizballah.

Managing Spillover and Restoring Stability

A second major priority for US policy, in addition to this refocused diplomacy, must be stepped-up efforts to mitigate the destabilizing consequences of the Syrian war, no matter how long it goes on. And, while the United States continues to work through diplomacy and pressure to produce an end to the war, work must also begin now to prepare for the long-term and wide-scale effort needed for post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction.

The scope of death, displacement and destruction threatens to rob Syria of the basic ingredients for social stability, regardless of what lines might be drawn at a negotiating table in Vienna. Without concerted effort to ameliorate the effects of this conflict for people on the ground, to rebuild social trust, and to nurture resilience within these battered communities against conflict and division, any peace settlement could quickly unravel the face of local security dilemmas and intercommunal tensions, as well as in light of the unaddressed scars and grievances of Assad’s brutality against the Syrian people.

Meeting this challenge requires at least four lines of effort:

• doing more to engage Syrians in building local governance and community resilience, especially skills and platforms for conflict resolution;
• doing more to stabilize and secure frontline states, including support for integrating refugees into the economy and society;
• helping more refugees create new lives far from the conflict zone, including much more resettlement in the United States; and
• working diligently with regional partners to tamp down the sectarianism that both drives and is driven by the war, and that feeds extremist recruitment and violence.

As we have seen, ISIS markets itself partly on the order it provides to local communities – a brutal order to be sure, but still a contrast with the chaos and insecurity of civil war. To counter ISIS effectively, we must help local communities with governance and service delivery. More can be done even now to put into place the ingredients for successful and sustainable conflict resolution for Syrians. These steps include enabling and encouraging Syrians displaced by the fighting, whether in neighboring countries or in areas of Syria not under ISIS or regime control, to engage in dialogue over, and planning for, their own communal future. Neighboring states accepting refugees have understandably sought to tamp down political discussion and debate within refugee camps, for example. But these refugee populations need to engage in dialogue to build the basis, in social trust, that will enable them to manage daily governance and resolve differences peacefully if and when they are no longer living under refugee agencies and host-government security services. These processes can also connect, over time, to negotiating efforts on a political transition in which the Syrian opposition is represented, yielding greater legitimacy and efficacy to that more formal political process.

Too often, in discussing Syria, we posit a choice between working with the central government and working with unsavory non-state actors. There is an obvious additional option, already in play, that deserves greater emphasis: empowering and engaging local municipalities, local business sectors, local civil society, and other actors who exist in territory not under extremist or regime control and who have an obvious stake in the success of their own communities and their defense against coercion either from ISIS or from the Assad government. It is these local actors who will make or break the implementation of any political settlement, because they are the ones who will give it life and legitimacy. They are the ones who will help manage differences within their own communities and with their neighbors to avoid outbreaks of violence, and they are the ones who will lead the establishment of a new social compact to enable long-term stability in Syria. USAID and its implementing partners have been creative in developing programs to engage local communities and local governing institutions, and this work deserves robust, sustained support from Congress.

The United States continues to lead in international support for refugee relief – but it lags woefully in refugee resettlement. Only about 1300 of the 10,000 Syrian refugees the Obama Administration promised to admit into the United States have been resettled here so far; and the United States can and should accept more.

In addition, American policy efforts to address the refugee crisis must go beyond humanitarian relief and expanded resettlement. Working with European partners, the United States government can work to save lives along the transit routes for refugees fleeing the region, can support successful integration of refugees into European cities (again, working at the municipal level), and can do more to support social stabilization, livelihoods, and development for the large refugee communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and for the societies hosting them.

On June 14 and 15^th, the Brookings Institution will convene a high-level gathering of regional, European, and American leaders to develop new responses and more robust forms of cooperation to meet this global humanitarian crisis. I look forward to reporting back to you on our results.

Downloads

• War in Syria: Next steps to mitigate the crisis

       

       

       

       

       

Editor's note: POLITICO Magazine released a list of the top 50 influential people in Washington, D.C., including Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, described as "the ultimate American power couple."

Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan fell in love “talking about democracy and the role of America in the world” on one of their first dates. It’s a shared passion that hasn’t faded over time.

It was just two years ago that President Obama was gushing to aides about an essay that Kagan, a historian and author, wrote about the myth of American decline—a theme Obama echoed in his State of the Union that January. This year, Kagan’s sprawling New Republic essay, “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” insisted on America’s enduring responsibility to shape the world order—and issued a direct challenge to a president who has summarized his own foreign-policy doctrine with a minimalist “don’t-do-stupid-s—t” directive. Obama promptly invited Kagan in for a West Wing consult, but it was also clear that Kagan had helped rouse the president’s Republican critics, who have been increasingly adopting Kagan’s argument that just because it’s been a decade of wearying war in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t mean America can roll up its superpower carpet and stay home when new crises, from Iraq to Russia to Syria, beckon.

Nuland, overseeing European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, has been a strong advocate of the engaged approach her husband favors as a crisis with Russia has unfolded on her diplomatic turf this year. The point was made, rather sensationally, in February, when a leaked audio recording of her F-bomb-laden diatribe about the fecklessness of the European Union, which she accused of not exactly playing a constructive role trying to end the growing conflict in Ukraine, appeared on the Internet. Nuland, a career Foreign Service officer, has been an impassioned advocate for democracy-building in Eastern Europe, and while she got pushback from European counterparts over her “f—k the EU” comment, the United States has been leading the effort to impose sanctions on Russia since President Vladimir Putin seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and waged a proxy war in the country’s east—dragging a reluctant Europe along pretty much every step of the way.

      

Politics follows geopolitics, or so it has often seemed throughout history. When the Athenian democracy’s empire rose in the fifth century B.C.E., the number of Greek city-states ruled by democrats proliferated; Sparta’s power was reflected in the spread of Spartan-style oligarchies. When the Soviet Union’s power rose in the early Cold War years, communism spread. In the later Cold War years, when the United States and Western Europe gained the advantage and ultimately triumphed, democracies proliferated and communism collapsed. Was this all just the outcome of the battle of ideas, as Francis Fukuyama and others argue, with the better idea of liberal capitalism triumphing over the worse ideas of communism and fascism? Or did liberal ideas triumph in part because of real battles and shifts that occurred less in the realm of thought than in the realm of power?

These are relevant questions again. We live in a time when democratic nations are in retreat in the realm of geopolitics, and when democracy itself is also in retreat. The latter phenomenon has been well documented by Freedom House, which has recorded declines in freedom in the world for nine straight years. At the level of geopolitics, the shifting tectonic plates have yet to produce a seismic rearrangement of power, but rumblings are audible. The United States has been in a state of retrenchment since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The democratic nations of Europe, which some might have expected to pick up the slack, have instead turned inward and all but abandoned earlier dreams of reshaping the international system in their image. As for such rising democracies as Brazil, India, Turkey, and South Africa, they are neither rising as fast as once anticipated nor yet behaving as democracies in world affairs. Their focus remains narrow and regional. Their national identities remain shaped by postcolonial and nonaligned sensibilities—by old but carefully nursed resentments—which lead them, for instance, to shield rather than condemn autocratic Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, or, in the case of Brazil, to prefer the company of Venezuelan dictators to that of North American democratic presidents.

Meanwhile, insofar as there is energy in the international system, it comes from the great-power autocracies, China and Russia, and from would-be theocrats pursuing their dream of a new caliphate in the Middle East. For all their many problems and weaknesses, it is still these autocracies and these aspiring religious totalitarians that push forward while the democracies draw back, that act while the democracies react, and that seem increasingly unleashed while the democracies feel increasingly constrained.

It should not be surprising that one of the side effects of these circumstances has been the weakening and in some cases collapse of democracy in those places where it was newest and weakest. Geopolitical shifts among the reigning great powers, often but not always the result of wars, can have significant effects on the domestic politics of the smaller and weaker nations of the world. Global democratizing trends have been stopped and reversed before.

Consider the interwar years. In 1920, when the number of democracies in the world had doubled in the aftermath of the First World War, contemporaries such as the British historian James Bryce believed that they were witnessing “a natural trend, due to a general law of social progress.”[1] Yet almost immediately the new democracies in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland began to fall. Europe’s democratic great powers, France and Britain, were suffering the effects of the recent devastating war, while the one rich and healthy democratic power, the United States, had retreated to the safety of its distant shores. In the vacuum came Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy in 1922, the crumbling of Germany’s Weimar Republic, and the broader triumph of European fascism. Greek democracy fell in 1936. Spanish democracy fell to Franco that same year. Military coups overthrew democratic governments in Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Japan’s shaky democracy succumbed to military rule and then to a form of fascism.

Across three continents, fragile democracies gave way to authoritarian forces exploiting the vulnerabilities of the democratic system, while other democracies fell prey to the worldwide economic depression. There was a ripple effect, too—the success of fascism in one country strengthened similar movements elsewhere, sometimes directly. Spanish fascists received military assistance from the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy. The result was that by 1939 the democratic gains of the previous forty years had been wiped out.

The period after the First World War showed not only that democratic gains could be reversed, but that democracy need not always triumph even in the competition of ideas. For it was not just that democracies had been overthrown. The very idea of democracy had been “discredited,” as John A. Hobson observed.[2] Democracy’s aura of inevitability vanished as great numbers of people rejected the idea that it was a better form of government. Human beings, after all, do not yearn only for freedom, autonomy, individuality, and recognition. Especially in times of difficulty, they yearn also for comfort, security, order, and, importantly, a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves, something that submerges autonomy and individuality—all of which autocracies can sometimes provide, or at least appear to provide, better than democracies. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, the fascist governments looked stronger, more energetic and efficient, and more capable of providing reassurance in troubled times. They appealed effectively to nationalist, ethnic, and tribal sentiments. The many weaknesses of Germany’s Weimar democracy, inadequately supported by the democratic great powers, and of the fragile and short-lived democracies of Italy and Spain made their people susceptible to the appeals of the Nazis, Mussolini, and Franco, just as the weaknesses of Russian democracy in the 1990s made a more authoritarian government under Vladimir Putin attractive to many Russians. People tend to follow winners, and between the wars the democratic-capitalist countries looked weak and in retreat compared with the apparently vigorous fascist regimes and with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

It took a second world war and another military victory by the Allied democracies (plus the Soviet Union) to reverse the trend again. The United States imposed democracy by force and through prolonged occupations in West Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and South Korea. With the victory of the democracies and the discrediting of fascism—chiefly on the battlefield—many other countries followed suit. Greece and Turkey both moved in a democratic direction, as did Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia. Some of the new nations born as Europe shed its colonies also experimented with democratic government, the most prominent example being India. By 1950, the number of democracies had grown to between twenty and thirty, and they governed close to 40 percent of the world’s population.

Was this the victory of an idea or the victory of arms? Was it the product of an inevitable human evolution or, as Samuel P. Huntington later observed, of “historically discrete events”?[3] We would prefer to believe the former, but evidence suggests the latter, for it turned out that even the great wave of democracy following World War II was not irreversible. Another “reverse wave” hit from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Ecuador, South Korea, the Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Greece all fell back under authoritarian rule. In Africa, Nigeria was the most prominent of the newly decolonized nations where democracy failed. By 1975, more than three-dozen governments around the world had been installed by military coups.[4] Few spoke of democracy’s inevitability in the 1970s or even in the early 1980s. As late as 1984, Huntington himself believed that “the limits of democratic development in the world” had been reached, noting the “unreceptivity to democracy of several major cultural traditions,” as well as “the substantial power of antidemocratic governments (particularly the Soviet Union).”[5]

But then, unexpectedly, came the “third wave.” From the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, the number of democracies in the world rose to an astonishing 120, representing well over half the world’s population. What explained the prolonged success of democratization over the last quarter of the twentieth century? It could not have been merely the steady rise of the global economy and the general yearning for freedom, autonomy, and recognition. Neither economic growth nor human yearnings had prevented the democratic reversals of the 1960s and early 1970s. Until the third wave, many nations around the world careened back and forth between democracy and authoritarianism in a cyclical, almost predictable manner. What was most notable about the third wave was that this cyclical alternation between democracy and autocracy was interrupted. Nations moved into a democratic phase and stayed there. But why?

The International Climate Improves

The answer is related to the configuration of power and ideas in the world. The international climate from the mid-1970s onward was simply more hospitable to democracies and more challenging to autocratic governments than had been the case in past eras. In his study, Huntington emphasized the change, following the Second Vatican Council, in the Catholic Church’s doctrine regarding order and revolution, which tended to weaken the legitimacy of authoritarian governments in Catholic countries. The growing success and attractiveness of the European Community (EC), meanwhile, had an impact on the internal policies of nations such as Portugal, Greece, and Spain, which sought the economic benefits of membership in the EC and therefore felt pressure to conform to its democratic norms. These norms increasingly became international norms. But they did not appear out of nowhere or as the result of some natural evolution of the human species. As Huntington noted, “The pervasiveness of democratic norms rested in large part on the commitment to those norms of the most powerful country in the world.[6]

The United States, in fact, played a critical role in making the explosion of democracy possible. This was not because U.S. policy makers consistently promoted democracy around the world. They did not. At various times throughout the Cold War, U.S. policy often supported dictatorships as part of the battle against communism or simply out of indifference. It even permitted or was complicit in the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed unreliable—those of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. At times, U.S. foreign policy was almost hostile to democracy. President Richard Nixon regarded it as “not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”[7] 

Nor, when the United States did support democracy, was it purely out of fealty to principle. Often it was for strategic reasons. Officials in President Ronald Reagan’s administration came to believe that democratic governments might actually be better than autocracies at fending off communist insurgencies, for instance. And often it was popular local demands that compelled the United States to make a choice that it would otherwise have preferred to avoid, between supporting an unpopular and possibly faltering dictatorship and “getting on the side of the people.” Reagan would have preferred to support the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s had he not been confronted by the moral challenge of Filipino “people power.” Rarely if ever did the United States seek a change of regime primarily out of devotion to democratic principles.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, the general inclination of the United States did begin to shift toward a more critical view of dictatorship. The U.S. Congress, led by human-rights advocates, began to condition or cut off U.S. aid to authoritarian allies, which weakened their hold on power. In the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a reference to human-rights issues drew greater attention to the cause of dissidents and other opponents of dictatorship in the Eastern bloc. President Jimmy Carter focused attention on the human-rights abuses of the Soviet Union as well as of right-wing governments in Latin America and elsewhere. The U.S. government’s international information services, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, put greater emphasis on democracy and human rights in their programming. The Reagan administration, after first trying to roll back Carter’s human-rights agenda, eventually embraced it and made the promotion of democracy part of its stated (if not always its actual) policy. Even during this period, U.S. policy was far from consistent. Many allied dictatorships, especially in the Middle East, were not only tolerated but actively supported with U.S. economic and military aid. But the net effect of the shift in U.S. policy, joined with the efforts of Europe, was significant.

The third wave began in 1974 in Portugal, where the Carnation Revolution put an end to a half-century of dictatorship. As Larry Diamond notes, this revolution did not just happen. The United States and the European democracies played a key role, making a “heavy investment . . . in support of the democratic parties.”[8] Over the next decade and a half, the United States used a variety of tools, including direct military intervention, to aid democratic transitions and prevent the undermining of existing fragile democracies all across the globe. In 1978, Carter threatened military action in the Dominican Republic when long-serving president Joaquín Balaguer refused to give up power after losing an election. In 1983, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada restored a democratic government after a military coup. In 1986, the United States threatened military action to prevent Marcos from forcibly annulling an election that he had lost. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to help install democracy after military strongman Manuel Noriega had annulled his nation’s elections. 

Throughout this period, too, the United States used its influence to block military coups in Honduras, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru, and South Korea. Elsewhere it urged presidents not to try staying in office beyond constitutional limits. Huntington estimated that over the course of about a decade and a half, U.S. support had been “critical to democratization in the Dominican Republic, Grenada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, and the Philippines” and was “a contributing factor to democratization in Portugal, Chile, Poland, Korea, Bolivia, and Taiwan.”[9]

Many developments both global and local helped to produce the democratizing trend of the late 1970s and the 1980s, and there might have been a democratic wave even if the United States had not been so influential. The question is whether the wave would have been as large and as lasting. The stable zones of democracy in Europe and Japan proved to be powerful magnets. The liberal free-market and free-trade system increasingly outperformed the stagnating economies of the socialist bloc, especially at the dawn of the information revolution. The greater activism of the United States, together with that of other successful democracies, helped to build a broad, if not universal, consensus that was more sympathetic to democratic forms of government and less sympathetic to authoritarian forms.

Diamond and others have noted how important it was that these “global democratic norms” came to be “reflected in regional and international institutions and agreements as never before.”[10] Those norms had an impact on the internal political processes of countries, making it harder for authoritarians to weather political and economic storms and easier for democratic movements to gain legitimacy. But “norms” are transient as well. In the 1930s, the trendsetting nations were fascist dictatorships. In the 1950s and 1960s, variants of socialism were in vogue. But from the 1970s until recently, the United States and a handful of other democratic powers set the fashion trend. They pushed—some might even say imposed—democratic principles and embedded them in international institutions and agreements.

Equally important was the role that the United States played in preventing backsliding away from democracy where it had barely taken root. Perhaps the most significant U.S. contribution was simply to prevent military coups against fledgling democratic governments. In a sense, the United States was interfering in what might have been a natural cycle, preventing nations that ordinarily would have been “due” for an authoritarian phase from following the usual pattern. It was not that the United States was exporting democracy everywhere. More often, it played the role of “catcher in the rye”—preventing young democracies from falling off the cliff—in places such as the Philippines, Colombia, and Panama. This helped to give the third wave unprecedented breadth and durability.

Finally, there was the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the fall of Central and Eastern Europe’s communist regimes and their replacement by democracies. What role the United States played in hastening the Soviet downfall may be in dispute, but surely it played some part, both by containing the Soviet empire militarily and by outperforming it economically and technologically. And at the heart of the struggle were the peoples of the former Warsaw Pact countries themselves. They had long yearned to achieve the liberation of their respective nations from the Soviet Union, which also meant liberation from communism. These peoples wanted to join the rest of Europe, which offered an economic and social model that was even more attractive than that of the United States. 

That Central and East Europeans uniformly chose democratic forms of government, however, was not simply the fruit of aspirations for freedom or comfort. It also reflected the desires of these peoples to place themselves under the U.S. security umbrella. The strategic, the economic, the political, and the ideological were thus inseparable. Those nations that wanted to be part of NATO, and later of the European Union, knew that they would stand no chance of admission without democratic credentials. These democratic transitions, which turned the third wave into a democratic tsunami, need not have occurred had the world been configured differently. That a democratic, united, and prosperous Western Europe was even there to exert a powerful magnetic pull on its eastern neighbors was due to U.S. actions after World War II.

The Lost Future of 1848

Contrast the fate of democratic movements in the late twentieth century with that of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. Beginning in France, the “Springtime of the Peoples,” as it was known, included liberal reformers and constitutionalists, nationalists, and representatives of the rising middle class as well as radical workers and socialists. In a matter of weeks, they toppled kings and princes and shook thrones in France, Poland, Austria, and Romania, as well as the Italian peninsula and the German principalities. In the end, however, the liberal movements failed, partly because they lacked cohesion, but also because the autocratic powers forcibly crushed them. The Prussian army helped to defeat liberal movements in the German lands, while the Russian czar sent his troops into Romania and Hungary. Tens of thousands of protesters were killed in the streets of Europe. The sword proved mightier than the pen.

It mattered that the more liberal powers, Britain and France, adopted a neutral posture throughout the liberal ferment, even though France’s own revolution had sparked and inspired the pan-European movement. The British monarchy and aristocracy were afraid of radicalism at home. Both France and Britain were more concerned with preserving peace among the great powers than with providing assistance to fellow liberals. The preservation of the European balance among the five great powers benefited the forces of counterrevolution everywhere, and the Springtime of the Peoples was suppressed.[11] As a result, for several decades the forces of reaction in Europe were strengthened against the forces of liberalism.

Scholars have speculated about how differently Europe and the world might have evolved had the liberal revolutions of 1848 succeeded: How might German history have unfolded had national unification been achieved under a liberal parliamentary system rather than under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck? The “Iron Chancellor” unified the nation not through elections and debates, but through military victories won by the great power of the conservative Prussian army under the Hohenzollern dynasty. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor observed, history reached a turning point in 1848, but Germany “failed to turn.”[12] Might Germans have learned a different lesson from the one that Bismarck taught—namely, that “the great questions of the age are not decided by speeches and majority decisions . . . but by blood and iron”?[13] Yet the international system of the day was not configured in such a way as to encourage liberal and democratic change. The European balance of power in the mid-nineteenth century did not favor democracy, and so it is not surprising that democracy failed to triumph anywhere.[14] 

We can also speculate about how differently today’s world might have evolved without the U.S. role in shaping an international environment favorable to democracy, and how it might evolve should the United States find itself no longer strong enough to play that role. Democratic transitions are not inevitable, even where the conditions may be ripe. Nations may enter a transition zone—economically, socially, and politically—where the probability of moving in a democratic direction increases or decreases. But foreign influences, usually exerted by the reigning great powers, often determine which direction change takes. Strong authoritarian powers willing to support conservative forces against liberal movements can undo what might otherwise have been a “natural” evolution to democracy, just as powerful democratic nations can help liberal forces that, left to their own devices, might otherwise fail. 

In the 1980s as in the 1840s, liberal movements arose for their own reasons in different countries, but their success or failure was influenced by the balance of power at the international level. In the era of U.S. predominance, the balance was generally favorable to democracy, which helps to explain why the liberal revolutions of that later era succeeded. Had the United States not been so powerful, there would have been fewer transitions to democracy, and those that occurred might have been short-lived. It might have meant a shallower and more easily reversed third wave.[15] 

Democracy, Autocracy, and Power

What about today? With the democratic superpower curtailing its global influence, regional powers are setting the tone in their respective regions. Not surprisingly, dictatorships are more common in the environs of Russia, along the borders of China (North Korea, Burma, and Thailand), and in the Middle East, where long dictatorial traditions have so far mostly withstood the challenge of popular uprisings.

But even in regions where democracies remain strong, authoritarians have been able to make a determined stand while their democratic neighbors passively stand by. Thus Hungary’s leaders, in the heart of an indifferent Europe, proclaim their love of illiberalism and crack down on press and political freedoms while the rest of the European Union, supposedly a club for democracies only, looks away. In South America, democracy is engaged in a contest with dictatorship, but an indifferent Brazil looks on, thinking only of trade and of North American imperialism. Meanwhile in Central America, next door to an indifferent Mexico, democracy collapses under the weight of drugs and crime and the resurgence of the caudillos. Yet it may be unfair to blame regional powers for not doing what they have never done. Insofar as the shift in the geopolitical equation has affected the fate of democracies worldwide, it is probably the change in the democratic superpower’s behavior that bears most of the responsibility.

If that superpower does not change its course, we are likely to see democracy around the world rolled back further. There is nothing inevitable about democracy. The liberal world order we have been living in these past decades was not bequeathed by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” It is not the endpoint of human progress.

There are those who would prefer a world order different from the liberal one. Until now, however, they have not been able to have their way, but not because their ideas of governance are impossible to enact. Who is to say that Putinism in Russia or China’s particular brand of authoritarianism will not survive as far into the future as European democracy, which, after all, is less than a century old on most of the continent? Autocracy in Russia and China has certainly been around longer than any Western democracy. Indeed, it is autocracy, not democracy, that has been the norm in human history—only in recent decades have the democracies, led by the United States, had the power to shape the world.

Skeptics of U.S. “democracy promotion” have long argued that many of the places where the democratic experiment has been tried over the past few decades are not a natural fit for that form of government, and that the United States has tried to plant democracy in some very infertile soils. Given that democratic governments have taken deep root in widely varying circumstances, from impoverished India to “Confucian” East Asia to Islamic Indonesia, we ought to have some modesty about asserting where the soil is right or not right for democracy. Yet it should be clear that the prospects for democracy have been much better under the protection of a liberal world order, supported and defended by a democratic superpower or by a collection of democratic great powers. Today, as always, democracy is a fragile flower. It requires constant support, constant tending, and the plucking of weeds and fencing-off of the jungle that threaten it both from within and without. In the absence of such efforts, the jungle and the weeds may sooner or later come back to reclaim the land.

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[1] Quoted in Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 17.

[2] Quoted in John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 573.

[3] Huntington, Third Wave, 40.

[4] Huntington, Third Wave, 21.

[5] Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99 (Summer 1984): 193–218; quoted in Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World (New York: Times Books, 2008), 10.

[6] Huntington, Third Wave, 47.

[7] Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 196.

[8] Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, 5.

[9] Huntington, Third Wave, 98.

[10] Diamond, Spirit of Democracy, 13.

[11] Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 409.

[12] A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History Since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2001; orig. publ. 1945), 71.

[13] Rapport, 1848, 401–402.

[14] As Huntington paraphrased the findings of Jonathan Sunshine: “External influences in Europe before 1830 were fundamentally antidemocratic and hence held up democratization. Between 1830 and 1930 . . . the external environment was neutral . . . hence democratization proceeded in different countries more or less at the pace set by economic and social development.” Huntington, Third Wave, 86.

[15] As Huntington observed, “The absence of the United States from the process would have meant fewer and later transitions to democracy.” Huntington, Third Wave, 98.

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• Is Democracy in Decline? The Weight of Geopolitics

      

Great power competition has returned. Or rather, it has reminded us that it was always lurking in the background. This is not a minor development in international affairs, but it need not mean the end of the world order as we know it.  

The real impact of the return of great power competition will depend on how the United States responds to these changes. America needs to recognize its central role in maintaining the present liberal international order and muster the will to use its still formidable power and influence to support that order against its inevitable challengers.

Competition in international affairs is natural. Great powers by their very nature seek regional dominance and spheres of influence. They do so in the first instance because influence over others is what defines a great power. They are, as a rule, countries imbued with national pride and imperial ambition. But, living in a Hobbesian world of other great powers, they are also nervous about their security and seek defense-in-depth through the establishment of buffer states on their periphery. 

Historically, great power wars often begin as arguments over buffer states where spheres of influence intersect—the Balkans before World War I, for instance, where the ambitions of Russia and Austria-Hungary clashed. But today’s great powers are rising in a very different international environment, largely because of the unique role the United States has played since the end of the Second World War. The United States has been not simply a regional power, but rather a regional power in every strategic region. It has served as the maintainer of regional balances in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The result has been that, in marked contrast to past eras, today’s great powers do not face fundamental threats to their physical security. 

So, for example, Russia objectively has never enjoyed greater security in its history than it has since 1989. In the 20^th century, Russia was invaded twice by Germany, and in the aftermath of the second war could plausibly claim to fear another invasion unless adequately protected. (France, after all, had the same fear.)  In the 19^th century, Russia was invaded by Napoleon, and before that Catherine the Great is supposed to have uttered that quintessentially Russian observation, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.” Today that is not true. Russia faces no threat of invasion from the West.  Who would launch such an invasion? Germany, Estonia, Ukraine? If Russia faces threats, they are from the south, in the form of militant Islamists, or from the east, in the form of a billion Chinese standing across the border from an empty Siberia. But for the first time in Russia’s long history, it does not face a strategic threat on its western flank. 

Much the same can be said of China, which enjoys far greater security than it has at any time in the last three centuries. The American role in East Asia protects it from invasion by its historic adversary, Japan, while none of the other great powers around China’s periphery have the strength or desire now or in the foreseeable future to launch an attack on Chinese territory. 

Therefore, neither Chinese nor Russians can claim that a sphere of influence is necessary for their defense. They may feel it necessary for their sense of pride. They may feel it is necessary as a way of restoring their wounded honor. They may seek an expanded sphere of influence to fulfill their ambition to become more formidable powers on the international stage. And they may have concerns that free, nations on their periphery may pass the liberal infection onto their own populaces and thus undermine their autocratic power. 

The question for the United States, and its allies in Asia and Europe, is whether we should tolerate a return to sphere of influence behavior among regional powers that are not seeking security but are in search of status, powers that are acting less out of fear than out of ambition. This question, in the end, is not about idealism, our commitment to a “rules-based” international order, or our principled opposition to territorial aggression. Yes, there are important principles at stake: neighbors shouldn’t invade their neighbors to seize their territory. But before we get to issues of principle, we need to understand how such behavior affects the world in terms of basic stability 

On that score, the historical record is very clear. To return to a world of spheres of influence—the world that existed prior to the era of American predominance—is to return to the great power conflicts of past centuries. Revisionist great powers are never satisfied. Their sphere of influence is never quite large enough to satisfy their pride or their expanding need for security. The “satiated” power that Bismarck spoke of is rare—even his Germany, in the end, could not be satiated. Of course, rising great powers always express some historical grievance. Every people, except perhaps for the fortunate Americans, have reason for resentment at ancient injustices, nurse grudges against old adversaries, seek to return to a glorious past that was stolen from them by military or political defeat. The world’s supply of grievances is inexhaustible.

These grievances, however, are rarely solved by minor border changes. Japan, the aggrieved “have-not” nation of the 1930s, did not satisfy itself by swallowing Manchuria in 1931. Germany, the aggrieved victim of Versailles, did not satisfy itself by bringing the Germans of the Sudetenland back into the fold. And, of course, Russia’s historical sphere of influence does not end in Ukraine. It begins in Ukraine.  It extends to the Balts, to the Balkans, and to heart of Central Europe. 

The tragic irony is that, in the process of carving out these spheres of influence, the ambitious rising powers invariably create the very threats they use to justify their actions. Japan did exactly that in the 30s. In the 1920s, following the Washington Naval Treaty, Japan was a relatively secure country that through a combination of ambition and paranoia launched itself on a quest for an expanded sphere of influence, thus inspiring the great power enmity that the Japanese had originally feared. One sees a similar dynamic in Russia’s behavior today. No one in the West was thinking about containing Russia until Russia made itself into a power that needed to be contained.

If history is any lesson, such behavior only ends when other great powers decide they have had enough. We know those moments as major power wars. 

The best and easiest time to stop such a dynamic is at the beginning. If the United States wants to maintain a benevolent world order, it must not permit spheres of influence to serve as a pretext for aggression. The United States needs to make clear now—before things get out of hand—that this is not a world order that it will accept. 

And we need to be clear what that response entails. Great powers of course compete across multiple spheres—economic, ideological, and political, as well as military. Competition in most spheres is necessary and even healthy. Within the liberal order, China can compete economically and successfully with the United States; Russia can thrive in the international economic order uphold by the liberal powers, even if it is not itself liberal. 

But security competition is different. It is specifically because Russia could not compete with the West ideologically or economically that Putin resorted to military means. In so doing, he attacked the underlying security and stability at the core of the liberal order. The security situation undergirds everything—without it nothing else functions. Democracy and prosperity cannot flourish without security. 

It remains true today as it has since the Second World War that only the United States has the capacity and the unique geographical advantages to provide this security. There is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States. And while we can talk about soft power and smart power, they have been and always will be of limited value when confronting raw military power. Despite all of the loose talk of American decline, it is in the military realm where U.S. advantages remain clearest. Even in other great power’s backyards, the United States retains the capacity, along with its powerful allies, to deter challenges to the security order. But without a U.S. willingness to use military power to establish balance in far-flung regions of the world, the system will buckle under the unrestrained military competition of regional powers. 

       

Editors’ Note: The economic, political, and security strategy that the United States has pursued for more than seven decades is under attack by leading political candidates in both parties, write Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan. But the United States plays an essential role in supporting the international environment from which Americans benefit greatly. This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.

The economic, political and security strategy that the United States has pursued for more than seven decades, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, is today widely questioned by large segments of the American public and is under attack by leading political candidates in both parties. Many Americans no longer seem to value the liberal international order that the United States created after World War II and sustained throughout the Cold War and beyond. Or perhaps they take it for granted and have lost sight of the essential role the United States plays in supporting the international environment from which they benefit greatly. The unprecedented prosperity made possible by free and open markets and thriving international trade; the spread of democracy; and the avoidance of major conflict among great powers: All these remarkable accomplishments have depended on sustained U.S. engagement around the world. Yet politicians in both parties dangle before the public the vision of an America freed from the burdens of leadership.

What these politicians don’t say, perhaps because they don’t understand it themselves, is that the price of ending our engagement would far outweigh its costs. The international order created by the United States today faces challenges greater than at any time since the height of the Cold War. Rising authoritarian powers in Asia and Europe threaten to undermine the security structures that have kept the peace since World War II. Russia invaded Ukraine and has seized some of its territory. In East Asia, an increasingly aggressive China seeks to control the sea lanes through which a large share of global commerce flows. In the Middle East, Iran pursues hegemony by supporting Hezbollah and Hamas and the bloody tyranny in Syria. The Islamic State controls more territory than any terrorist group in history, brutally imposing its extreme vision of Islam and striking at targets throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. None of these threats will simply go away. Nor will the United States be spared if the international order collapses, as it did twice in the 20th century. In the 21st century, oceans provide no security. Nor do walls along borders. Nor would cutting off the United States from the international economy by trashing trade agreements and erecting barriers to commerce.

In the 21st century, oceans provide no security. Nor do walls along borders. Nor would cutting off the United States from the international economy by trashing trade agreements and erecting barriers to commerce.

Instead of following the irresponsible counsel of demagogues, we need to restore a bipartisan foreign policy consensus around renewing U.S. global leadership. Despite predictions of a “post-American world,” U.S. capacities remain considerable. The U.S. economy remains the most dynamic in the world. The widely touted “rise of the rest”—the idea that the United States was being overtaken by the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China—has proved to be a myth. The dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, and people across the globe seek U.S. investment and entrepreneurial skills to help their flagging economies. U.S. institutions of higher learning remain the world’s best and attract students from every corner of the globe. The political values that the United States stands for remain potent forces for change. Even at a time of resurgent autocracy, popular demands for greater freedom can be heard in Russia, China, Iran and elsewhere, and those peoples look to the United States for support, both moral and material. And our strategic position remains strong. The United States has more than 50 allies and partners around the world. Russia and China between them have no more than a handful.

The task ahead is to play on these strengths and provide the kind of leadership that many around the world seek and that the American public can support. For the past two years, under the auspices of the World Economic Forum, we have worked with a diverse, bipartisan group of Americans and representatives from other countries to put together the broad outlines of a strategy for renewed U.S. leadership. There is nothing magical about our proposals. The strategies to sustain the present international order are much the same as the strategies that created it. But they need to be adapted and updated to meet new challenges and take advantage of new opportunities.

The widely touted “rise of the rest”—the idea that the United States was being overtaken by the economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China—has proved to be a myth.

For instance, one prime task today is to strengthen the international economy, from which the American people derive so many benefits. This means passing trade agreements that strengthen ties between the United States and the vast economies of East Asia and Europe. Contrary to what demagogues in both parties claim, ordinary Americans stand to gain significantly from the recently negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the agreement will increase annual real incomes in the United States by $131 billion. The United States also needs to work to reform existing international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, so that rising economic powers such as China feel a greater stake in them, while also working with new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to ensure that they reinforce rather than undermine liberal economic norms.

The revolution in energy, which has made the United States one of the world’s leading suppliers, offers another powerful advantage. With the right mix of policies, the United States could help allies in Europe and Asia diversify their sources of supply and thus reduce their vulnerability to Russian manipulation. Nations such as Russia and Iran that rely heavily on hydrocarbon exports would be weakened, as would the OPEC oil cartel. The overall result would be a relative increase in our power and ability to sustain the order.

The world has come to recognize that education, creativity and innovation are key to prosperity, and most see the United States as a leader in these areas. Other nations want access to the American market, American finance and American innovation. Businesspeople around the world seek to build up their own Silicon Valleys and other U.S.-style centers of entrepreneurship. The U.S. government can do a better job of working with the private sector in collaborating with developing countries. And Americans need to be more, not less, welcoming to immigrants. Students studying at our world-class universities, entrepreneurs innovating in our high-tech incubators and immigrants searching for new opportunities for their families strengthen the United States and show the world the opportunities offered by democracy.

Americans need to be reminded what is at stake.

Finally, the United States needs to do more to reassure allies that it will be there to back them up if they face aggression. Would-be adversaries need to know that they would do better by integrating themselves into the present international order than by trying to undermine it. Accomplishing this, however, requires ending budget sequestration and increasing spending on defense and on all the other tools of international affairs. This investment would be more than paid for by the global security it would provide.

All these efforts are interrelated, and, indeed, a key task for responsible political leaders will be to show how the pieces fit together: how trade enhances security, how military power undergirds prosperity and how providing access to American education strengthens the forces dedicated to a more open and freer world.

Above all, Americans need to be reminded what is at stake. Many millions around the world have benefited from an international order that has raised standards of living, opened political systems and preserved the general peace. But no nation and no people have benefited more than Americans. And no nation has a greater role to play in preserving this system for future generations.

       

Event Information

A conversation with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker

On Thursday, June 2, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker joined Senior Fellow Robert Kagan for a conversation on the economic dimensions of the liberal world order, including the critical economic opportunities on the global horizon and the role America’s private sector can play in helping shape modern commerce. They also discussed the importance of trade agreements to strengthening U.S. global competiveness. Suzanne Nora Johnson, vice chair of the Brookings Board of Trustees, moderated.

Video

• Economic opportunities and the liberal international order

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

Editor's Note: This article was the first published in the June 2008 World Cities Summit edition of ETHOS.

At the dawn of a new century, broad demographic, economic and environmental forces are giving American cities their best chance in decades to thrive and prosper. The renewed relevance of cities derives in part from the very physical characteristics that distinguish cities from other forms of human settlement: density, diversity of uses and functions, and distinctive design.

Across the United States (U.S.), a broad cross section of urban practitioners—private investors and developers, government officials, community and civic leaders—are taking ambitious steps to leverage the distinctive physical assets of cities and maximise their economic, fiscal, environmental and social potential.

A special class of urban interventions—what we call “transformative investments”—is emerging from the millions of transactions that occur in cities every year. The hallmark of transformative investments is their catalytic nature and seismic impact on markets, on people, on the city landscape and urban possibilities—far beyond the geographic confines of the project itself.

Recognising and replicating the magic of transformative investments, and making the exception become the norm is important if U.S. cities are to realise their full potential.

THE URBAN MOMENT
The U.S. is undergoing a period of dynamic change, comparable in scale and complexity to the latter part of the nineteenth century. Against this backdrop, there is a resurgence in the importance of cities due to their fundamental and distinctive physical attributes.

Cities offer a broad range of physical choices—in neighbourhoods, housing stock, shopping venues, green spaces and transportation. These choices suit the disparate preferences of a growing population that is diverse by race, ethnicity and age.

Cities are also rich with physical amenities—mixed-use downtowns, historic buildings, campuses of higher learning, entertainment districts, pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods, adjoining rivers and lakes—that are uniquely aligned with preferences in a knowledge-oriented, post-industrial economy. A knowledge economy places the highest premium on attracting and retaining educated workers, and an increasing proportion of these workers, particularly young workers, value urban quality of life when making their residential and employment decisions.

Finally, cities, particularly those built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, are compactly constructed and laid out along dense lines and grids, enhancing the potential for the dynamic, random, face-to-face human exchange prized by an economy fuelled by ideas and innovation. Such density also makes cities perfect agents for the efficient delivery of public services as well as the stewardship of the natural environment.

Each of these elements—diversity, amenities and density—distinguishes cities from other forms of human settlement. In prior generations, these attributes were devalued in a nation characterised by the single family house, the factory plant, cheap gas, and environmental profligacy. In recent history, many U.S. cities responded by making the wrong physical bets or by replicating low-density, suburban development—further eroding the very strengths that make cities distinctly urban and competitive.

Yet, the U.S., a nation in demographic and economic transition, is revaluing the quality of life uniquely offered by cities and urban places, potentially altering the calculus by which millions of American families and businesses make location decisions every year.

DELIVERING "CITYNESS": THE RISE OF TRANSFORMATIVE INVESTMENTS
Across the U.S., a practice of city building is emerging that builds on the re-found value and purpose of the urban physical landscape, and recognises that cities thrive when they fully embrace what Saskia Sassen calls “cityness”.¹

The move to recapture the American city can be found in all kinds of American cities: global cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago that lie at the heart of international trade and finance; innovative cities like Seattle, Austin and San Francisco that are leading the global economic revolution in technology; older industrial cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Rochester that are transitioning to new economies; fast-growing cities like Charlotte, Phoenix and Dallas that are regional hubs and magnets for domestic and international migration.

The new urban practice can also be found in all aspects or “building blocks” of cities: in the remaking of downtowns as living, mixed-use communities; in the creation of neighbourhoods of choice that are attractive to households with a range of incomes; in the conversion of transportation corridors into destinations in their own right; in the reclaiming of parks and green spaces as valued places; and in the revitalisation of waterfronts as regional destinations, new residential quarters and recreational hubs.

Yet, as the new city building practice evolves, it is clear that a subset of urban investments are emerging as truly “transformative” in that they have a catalytic, place-defining impact, creating an entirely new logic for portions of the city and a new set of possibilities for economic and social activity.

We define these transformative investments as “discrete public or private development projects that trigger a profound, ripple effect of positive, multi-dimensional change in ways that fundamentally remake the value and/or function of one or more of a city’s physical building blocks”.

This subset of urban investments share important characteristics:

• On the economic front, transformative investments uncover the hidden value in a part of the city, creating markets in places where markets either did not exist or were only partially realised.
• On the fiscal front, transformative investments dramatically enhance the fiscal capacity of local governments, generating revenues through the rise in property values, the growth in city populations, and the expansion of economic activity.
• On the cognitive front, transformative investments redefine the identity and image of the city. They effectively “re-map” previously forgotten or ignored places by residents, visitors and workers. They create nodes of new activities and new places for people to congregate.
• On the environmental front, transformative investments enable cities to achieve their “green” potential by cleaning up the environmental residue from prior industrial uses or urban renewal efforts, by enabling repopulation at greater densities to occur and by providing residents, workers and visitors with transportation alternatives.
• On the social front, transformative investments have the potential, while not always realised, to alter the opportunity structure for low-income residents. When carefully designed, staged and leveraged, they can expand the housing, employment and educational opportunities available to low-income residents and overcome the racial, ethnic and economic disparities that have inhibited city performance for decades.

DISSECTING SUCCESS: HOW AND WHERE TRANSFORMATIVE INVESTMENTS TAKE PLACE
The best way to identify and assess transformative investments is by examining exemplary interventions in the discrete physical building blocks of cities: downtowns, neighbourhoods, corridors, parks and green spaces, and waterfronts.

Downtowns
If cities are going to realise their true potential, downtowns are compelling places to start. Physically, downtowns are equipped to take on an emerging set of uses, activities and functions and have the capacity to absorb real increases in population. Yet, as a consequence to America’s sprawling appetite, urban downtowns have lost their appeal. Economic interests, once the stronghold in downtowns, have moved to suburban town centres and office parks, depressing urban markets and urban value.

Across the US, downtowns are remaking themselves as residential, cultural, business and retail centres. Cities such as Chattanooga, Washington, DC and Denver have demonstrated how even one smart investment can inject new energy and jumpstart new markets. The strategic location of a new sports arena in a distressed area of downtown Washington, DC fits our definition of a transformative investment. Leveraging the proximity of a transit stop, the MCI Arena was nestled within the existing urban fabric on a city-owned urban renewal site. The arena’s pedestrian-oriented design strengthened, rather than interrupted, the continuity of the 7th Street retail corridor.² Today, the area has been profoundly transformed as scores of new restaurants, retail and bars dot the arena’s surroundings. Residents and visitors rely heavily on the nearby transit to come to this destination.

Neighbourhoods
Ever since the physical, economic and social agglomeration of “city” was established, the function of neighbourhoods has remained relatively untouched. While real estate values of neighbourhoods have shifted over time in response to micro- and macro-economic trends, a subset of inner city communities have remained enclaves of poverty. Victims of earlier urban renewal and public housing efforts, millions of people are consigned to living in neighbourhoods isolated from the economic and social mainstream.

Cities such as St. Louis, Louisville and Atlanta have been at the forefront of public housing (and hence neighbourhood) transformation, supported by smart federal investments in the 1990s. For example, the demolition of the infamous high-rise Vaughn public housing project in St. Louis enabled the construction of a new human scale, mixed-income housing development in one of the poorest, most crime-ridden sections of the city. This redevelopment cured the mistakes made by failed public housing projects, by restoring street grids, providing quality design, and injecting a sense of social and physical connection. Constructing a mix of townhouses, garden apartments and single family homes helped catalyse other public and private sector investments.

What made this investment transformative was that it included the reconstitution of Jefferson Elementary, a nearby public school. Working closely with residents, and with the financial support of corporate and philanthropic interests, the developer helped modernise the school, making it one of the most technologically advanced educational facilities in the region. A new principal, new curriculum, and new school programmes helped it become one of the highest performing inner city schools in the state of Missouri.

Corridors
City corridors are the physical tissue that knit disparate parts of a city together. In the best of conditions, corridors are multi-dimensional in purpose, where they are destinations as much as facilitators of movement. In many cities, however, corridors are simply shuttling traffic past blocks of desolated retail and residential areas or they have become yet another cookie cutter image of suburbia—parking lots abutting the main street, standardised buildings and design, and oversized and cluttered signage.

Cities like Portland, Oregon and urban counties like Arlington, Virginia have used mass transit investments and land use reforms to create physically, economically and socially healthy corridors that give new residents reasons to choose to live nearby and existing residents reasons to stay.

Portland conceived a streetcar to spur high density housing in close-in neighbourhoods that were slowly shedding old industrial uses. The streetcars traverse a three-mile route through residential areas, the water front, to the university. Since its construction, the streetcar has not only expanded transportation choices, it has helped galvanise new destinations along its route—including new neighbourhoods, retail clusters, and economic districts.

Parks and Open Space
City green spaces (such as parks, nature trails, bike paths) were initially designed to provide the lungs of the city and an outlet for recreation, entertainment and social cohesion. As general conditions declined in many cities, the quality of urban parks also declined, to the great consternation of local residents. Green spaces were turned into under-used, if not forgotten, areas of the city; or worse still, hot spots of crime and illegal activity. Such blight discouraged cities to transform outmoded uses (such as manufacturing areas) into more green space. In cities with booming development markets, parks failed to be designed and incorporated into the new urban fabric.

Across the US, cities are pursuing a variety of strategies to reclaim or augment urban green spaces. Cities like Atlanta, for example, have created transformative parks from outmoded economic uses, such as manufacturing land along urban waterfronts or by converting old railway lines into urban trail-ways.

Cities like Scranton have reclaimed existing urban parks consumed by crime and vandalism. This has required creative physical and programmatic investments, including: redesigning parks (removing physical and visibility barriers such as walls, thinning vegetation, and eliminating “dark corners”); increasing the presence of uniformed personnel; increasing the park amenities (such as evening movies and other events to increase patronage);³ and providing regular maintenance of the park and recreational facilities.⁴

Waterfronts
Many American cities owe their location and initial function to the proximity to water: rivers, lakes and oceans. Waterfronts enabled cities to manufacture, warehouse and ship goods and products. Infrastructure was built and zoning was aligned to carry out these purposes. In a knowledge-intensive economy, however, the function of waterfronts has dramatically changed, reflecting the pent-up demand for new places of enjoyment, activities and uses.

As with the other building blocks, cities are pursing a range of strategies to reclaim their waterfronts, often by addressing head-on the vestiges of an earlier era.

New York has overhauled the outdated zoning guidelines for development along the Brooklyn side of the East River, enabling the construction of mixed-income housing rather than prescribing manufacturing and light industry uses.

Pittsburgh and many of its surrounding municipalities have embarked on major efforts to re-mediate the environmental contamination found in former industrial sites, paving the way for new research centres, office parks and retail facilities.

Milwaukee, Providence and Portland have demolished the freeways that separated (or hid) the waterfront from the rest of the downtown and city, and unleashed a new wave of private investment and public activities.

WHAT IS THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS?
The following are underlying principles that set these diverse investments apart from other transactions:

Transformative Investments advance “cityness”: Investments embrace the characteristics, attributes, and dynamics that embody “city”—its complexity, its intersection of activities, its diversity of populations and cultures, its distinctively varied designs, and its convergence of the physical environment at multiple scales. Project by project, transformative investments are reclaiming the true urban identity by strengthening aspects of the ‘physical’ that are intrinsically urban—be it density, rehabilitation of a unique building or historic row, or the incorporation of compelling, if not iconic, design.

Transformative Investments require a fundamental rethinking of land use and zoning conventions: In the midst of massive economic global change, 21st century American cities still bear the indelible markings of the 20th century. In the early 20th century, for example, government bodies enacted zoning to establish new rules for urban development. While originally intended to protect “light and air” from immense overbuilding, later versions of zoning added the segregation of uses—isolating housing, office, commercial and manufacturing activities from each other. Thus, transformative investments require, at a minimum, variances from the rigid, antiquated rules that still define the urban landscape. In many cases, examples of successful transformative investments have become the tool to overhaul outdated and outmoded frameworks and transform exceptions into new guidelines.

Transformative Investments require innovative, often customised financing approaches: Cities have distinctive physical forms (e.g., historic buildings) and distinctive physical visions (e.g., distinct districts). Yet private and even public financing of the American physical landscape, for the most part, is standardised and routinised, enabling the production of similar products (e.g., single family homes, commercial strips) at high volume, low cost and low quality. Transformative investments, however, require the marrying of multiple sources of financing (e.g., conventional debt, traditional equity, tax-driven equity investments, innovative financing arrangements, public subsidy, patient philanthropic capital), placing stress on project design and implementation. In addition, achieving social objectives often require building innovative tax and shared equity approaches into particular transactions, so that appreciations in property value can serve higher community purposes (e.g., creating affordable housing trust funds). As with regulatory frames, the evolution from exceptional transactions to routinised forms of investments is required to ensure that transformative investments become more the rule rather than the exception.

Transformative Investments often involve an empirically-grounded vision at the building block level: While a vision is not a necessary pre-requisite for realising transformative investments, cities that proceed without one have a higher probability of making the wrong physical bets, siting them in the wrong places, or ultimately creating a physical landscape that fails to cumulatively add up to “ cityness”. It is easy to find such examples around the country, such as isolated mega-projects (a new stadium or convention centre) or waterfront revitalisation efforts that constructed the wrong projects, having misunderstood the market and the diversifying demographic.

Telescoping the possibilities and developing a bold vision must be done through an empirically-grounded process. A visioning exercise should therefore include: an economic and market diagnostic of the building block; a physical diagnostic; an evaluation of existing projects; and the development of a vision to transform the landscape. From here, disparate actors (public, private, civic, not-for-profit) will have the best instruments to assess whether a physical project could meet specific market, demographic and physical needs—increasing its chances of becoming truly transformative.

Transformative Investments require integrative thinking and action: Transformative investments are often an act in “connecting the dots” between the urban experiences (e.g., transportation, housing, economic activity, education and recreation), which are inextricably linked in reality but separated in action. This requires a significant change in how cities are both planned and managed.

On the public side, it means that transportation agencies must re-channel scarce infrastructure investments to leverage other city building goals beyond facilitating traffic. It means that agencies driving a social agenda, such as schools and libraries, have to re-imagine their existing and new facilities to integrate strong design and move away from isolated projects.

In the private sector, it means understanding the broader vision of the city and carefully siting and designing investments to increase successful city-building and not just project-building. It means increasing their own standards by using exemplary design and construction materials. It means finding financially beneficial approaches to mixed income housing projects and mixed use projects instead of just single uses. In all cases, it requires holistic thinking that cuts across the silos and stovepipes of specialised professions and fragmented bureaucracies.

BUILDING GREAT CITIES
For the first time in decades, American cities have a chance to experience a measurable revival. While broader macro forces have handed cities this chance, city builders are also learning from past mistakes. After investing billions of dollars into city revitalisation efforts, the principles underpinning particularly successful and catalytic projects—transformative investments—are beginning to be clarified. The most important lesson for cities, however, is to embrace “cityness”, to maximise what makes them physically and socially unique and distinctive. Only in this way will American cities reach their true greatness.

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• ¹Saskia Sassen defined the term “cityness” to be the concept of embracing the characteristics, attributes, and dynamics that embody “city”: complexity, the convergence of the physical environment at multiple scales, the intersection of differences, the diversity of populations and culture, the distinctively varied designs and the layering of the old and the new. Sassen, S., “Cityness in the Urban Age”, Urban Age Bulletin 2 (Autumn 2005).
• ²Strauss, Valerie, “Pollin Says He’ll Pay for Sports Complex District, Awaits Economic Boost, Upgraded Image”, Washington Post, Thursday, 29 December 1994.
• ³Personal communication from Peter Harnik, Director, Center for City Park Excellence, Trust for Public Land, 6 June 2005.
• ⁴Harnik, Peter, “The Excellent City Park System: What Makes it Great and How to Get There”. San Francisco, CA: The Trust for Public Land, 2003. Available online at http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cd.cfm?content_item_id=11428&folder_id=175

      

Just weeks ago, Germany formally relinquished its title as the world’s top exporter to China. For 2009, China reported that its exports totaled $1.2 trillion as compared to Germany’s $1.1 trillion. The U.S. lost this title in 2003, when Germany surpassed our exports. What a difference a decade makes.

Even on the heels of their success, Germany has been cringing at the prospect of China surpassing them in total dollars generated by annual exports. In 2005, on the floor of the German Parliament, the state secretary for the Ministry of Transportation argued that Germany’s role in trade will slip without strategic, intermodal interventions to improve the movement of trade. His words highlighted the growing concern over the country’s competitiveness and conveyed that it was the federal government’s role to focus more intensively on freight. “There was a growing sense that freight was increasingly crucial to the country,” shared Johannes Wieczorek, head of freight transport and logistics for the Federal Ministry for Transport. Backed by Chancellor Merkel, Parliament voted overwhelmingly to support the development of a national strategy to strengthen the country’s logistics and freight. Less than two years later, Germany devised a national strategy that integrated all transportation modes, such as rail, roads, and waterways to accelerate the movement of freight across all parts of the country.

None of this was a minor accomplishment. In short order, the national government developed a strategy involving important stakeholders such as state and local leaders, ports, businesses, and environmental groups. 

The freight strategy, while vague on many details, outlines over 30 actions that signal where the federal government is headed: to shift more freight onto rail and waterways; to strengthen logistical gateways (such as ports) with more federal infrastructure money; and to increase funding for combined transport.

Germany’s National Port Concept is just one of these actions. It is essentially a list of priority ports that are to receive federal infrastructure investment funds given their national importance as trade gateways. Modeled after a similar effort for airports, both ports and airports will now use quantitative data to justify transportation funding. This empirically-driven process replaces a highly political one where earmarks are essentially designated by those in power. While it will clearly define who are the winners and losers, the Port Concept has sharpened federal decisionmaking on how and where to use transportation dollars wisely. Today, priority ports and airports will receive funding to create the best and most direct connections to high-speed railways and highways.

We could learn a great deal from Germany’s determination and focus. Although China surpassed Germany, a trend that was impossible to stave off in the long run, Germany is now well positioned to make sure they remain at the top of the list of the world’s top exporters. While we are just waking up to the reality that we need to increase our exports, as President Obama emphasized in his State of the Union Address, we have serious work in first improving our freight infrastructure to move our goods. Just a few days ago, U.S. DOT announced TIGER grants--funds largely focused on freight and ports. While a promising start, these grants are just a drop in the bucket in light of the level of investment needed. We would be wise to follow Germany and devise a national strategy to guide how and where to maximize every dollar for freight.

      

When President Obama unveiled his budget allocation for high-speed rail, he said, “In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth [and], remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations.” His remarks emphasize how high-speed rail is increasing the accessibility of isolated places as an argument for similarly investments. So, what’s the source of this argument in the European context?

In November 2009, the European Union’s ESPON (the European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion) released a report called “Trends in Accessibility.” ESPON examined the extent to which accessibility has changed between 2001 and 2006. ESPON defines accessibility as how “easily people in one region can reach people in another region.” This measurement of accessibility helps determine the “potential for activities and enterprises in the region to reach markets and activities in other regions.”

ESPON’s research concluded that in this five-year period, rail accessibility grew an average of 13.1 percent. The report further concludes that high-speed rail lines have “influenced positively the potential accessibility of many European regions and cities.”

In particular, the research found that the core of Europe--Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland--has the highest potential accessibility. Europe’s core produces the highest levels of economic output and has the highest population densities. ESPON argues that with such densities, the core has found reason to link their economic hubs (cities) with high-speed rail. These are the places in Europe where they have the greatest returns on investment.

But ESPON also found that high speed rail is starting to increase the accessibility of isolated places such as France’s Tours, Lyon, and Marseille. This is a very important finding for Europe. They have a long-standing policy of social cohesion and balance, striving to create economic sustainability and population stability across Europe. The objective is for areas well beyond core to thrive economically and to dissuade people from migrating in search of jobs. Fiscally, social cohesion translates into investing disproportionately more money into areas not producing sufficient levels of economic output. High-speed rail is but one of the many strategies intending to produce “economic and social cohesion,” states a European Commission report on high-speed rail.

But we are not Europe. While their thesis underpinning high-speed rail is social cohesion, what is our underlying thesis for high-speed rail? And what does this look like spatially? What was the logic behind the selection of Florida over other possible corridors? Is this line going to strengthen our national economy and GDP? Clarity on this score will help ensure the project is a success and offers a high return on investment. Lessons from this accessibility study say that places with high population levels and GDP output offer the greatest accessibility and therefore success.

It would be a pity if the U.S. finally jumped on the high-speed bandwagon but still missed the train.

      

In partnership with the ESADE Business School and the City of Barcelona, the Metropolitan Policy Program planned and participated in three intensive days of learning in Barcelona in June 2011.  The focus of the session was to look at examples of strategies Barcelona, Spain and its greater metropolitan region is embracing to rebuild and re-invent their economies.  The goal is to share innovative ideas with U.S. metros engaged in similar initiatives as they face the challenge of moving to a new economic growth model.

This paper features brief synopses of the tours and meetings held with the City of Barcelona and the Catalonia Region on their economic development strategies.

Specific strategies include:

Barcelona Activa »

Barcelona Economic Triangle » (PDF)

22@Barcelona » (PDF)

Parc de l’Alba »

Click on any image below for a larger version

Barcelona Activa
The 22@Barcelona revitalization area	The Parc de l'Alba revitalization area

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• Download the Full Paper

      

Editor’s Note: During the Global Cities Initiative’s international forum in São Paulo, Bruce Katz delivered remarks on metropolitan areas and their potential to power national economies worldwide. The remarks were written by Katz and Julie Wagner.

The Metropolitan Future of Brazil and the United States
(This presentation is also available in Portuguese)

Good morning everyone.  It is a pleasure to be back in Sao Paulo with JP Morgan Chase, our partner in the Global Cities Initiative.  I am grateful for their support and leadership.

I first want to thank Governor Alckmin and Mayor-elect Haddad for their participation today and we fully welcome the opportunity to work with both of them and the city and state in the coming months and years.

This has been an extraordinary week for our delegation of mayors and business, civic, and university leaders from 10 major American cities and metropolitan areas.

We have seen firsthand the proud history and infectious energy and vibrancy of this great city and macro-metropolis.  We are grateful to Luiz Felipe D’Avila and the Centre for Public Leadership for co-sponsoring this forum today. We also owe a debt to others who have hosted and guided us this week—the State of Sao Paulo, particularly the State Secretariat for Metropolitan Development, Insper, the Commercial Association of Santos and the Port of Santos and the Brazil-U.S. Business Council, and the U.S. Embassy and Ambassador Shannon.

As Aod said at the outset, São Paulo is the first stop outside the United States in our five year Global Cities Initiative.  That is a deliberate choice.   The relationship between the United States and Brazil is a critical one.  Despite barriers, the economic and social ties between our two countries are strong and growing stronger.  Trade is booming.  Investment is up.  Tourism and business travel have never been higher.  And the recent state visits by presidents Obama and Rousseff send a clear signal that this is a partnership of the highest order. 

Yet there is hard work to do in both our countries. The U.S. and Brazil are undergoing major economic transitions. By global standards, both of us under-perform on exports, far trailing other countries.  The U.S. is shifting slowly back towards a more productive, sustainable economy after our worst downturn in 80 years; Brazil is moving forward towards a more open, outward looking economy.

Against this complex backdrop, our delegation comes bearing a simple proposition. The answers to national challenges lie, in great part, below the national level.

We live in a century where cities and metropolitan areas are driving national economies and the global economy. The U.S. and Brazil have 84 and 85 percent of our respective populations living in our cities and metropolitan areas … and these communities generate 91 percent of the GDP in the U.S. and 88 percent of the GDP in Brazil.  There is, in essence, no American or Brazilian—or German or Chinese—economy; rather our national economies represent networks of powerful city and metropolitan economies.

 Today, I will make three main points.

As the world urbanizes, cities and metropolitan areas have emerged as the engines of national economies.

As our economies globalize, cities and metropolitan areas act as the centers of international trade and investment.

To prosper today, cities and metropolitan areas need to drive their economic destiny.  In our federal republic, where power is shared across national, state and local governments, that requires new thinking about who does what. 

But, first things first; we cannot put forward a metropolitan playbook without first understanding what a metropolis is.  And the best way to do that is from the ground up.

On the right side of the screen you see the São Paulo metropolis, 20 million strong, 10^th most populous in the world.

On the left side of the screen you see Chicago, Mayor Daley’s hometown, with a population of 9.5 million, 26^th largest in the world.

Both of these metro areas cluster around core cities but cover large land masses and encompass multiple jurisdictions.

The São Paulo metro is more than 8,000 square kilometers in size, with more than half of your population living in the city proper and the remainder residing in 38 other municipalities.  

Chicago is close to 19,000 square kilometers in size with one third of the population living in the central city and the remainder spread across, incredibly, three states, 14 counties encompassing hundreds of separate municipalities and townships.

The assets São Paulo and Chicago need to compete nationally and globally are spread across their regions:

Clusters of workers;

Key colleges and universities;

Major hospitals and health care facilities;

A network of urban green space; and

The infrastructure—roads, rail and transit and airports—needed to move people, and freight

In other words, metro areas are the natural, organic geographies of the economy, clustered around central cities for sure, but also benefitting from the assets offered by satellite cities and suburban, exurban and rural areas.   

With that background, let me start with an irrefutable observation: cities and metropolitan areas are the 21^st century engines of national economies.

Since 1950, the world’s urban population has more than quadrupled in size.  Now sized at 3.6 billion people, it is expected to surpass 5 billion by 2030.

In 1950, 29 percent of the world’s population lived in cities and their metropolitan areas.  By 2009, the share surpassed 50 percent. By 2030, urban settlements will harbor more than 60 percent of the world’s population.

In many respects, the world is becoming more like us.  The United States and Brazil are two of the most highly urbanized countries with city and metro concentrations surpassing those of both mature economies in Germany, Britain, and Spain and emerging economies like China, India, and South Africa.  

Cities and metros do not just house people; they power economies.  Today Brookings released our annual Global Metro Monitor that tracks the economic performance of the world’s top 300 largest metropolitan economies.

Incredibly, we find that these metropolitan areas house a little under one fifth of global population but generate nearly half its total output.  Put simply: Metros around the world punch way above their weight.

Why are they so powerful? 

Because they cluster and connect firms, large and small, with ports and airports, transport and energy infrastructure, and a broad range of supportive institutions that supply skilled labor, advanced research and customized capital.    And when that happens, productivity improves, entrepreneurship rises, employment and wages increase.   

The dominance of metros holds true for both our countries, which house 13 and 76 of the top 300 global metros, respectively.

Your thirteen top metropolitan areas are home to one third of Brazil’s population, concentrate half of Brazil’s manufacturing output and your population with college education and account for 56 percent of national GDP and 63 percent of financial services output.

These metros range from Sao Paulo, 11^th largest economy in the world, to Baixada Santista, 295^th largest.    

Eleven of your metro areas are state or national capitals; this state is home to three of the 13 large metro areas.

Metro São Paulo takes its place among the world’s most populous and economically powerful metros.

You are home to one tenth of Brazil’s population, account for one-fifth of Brazil’s GDP and generate 57 percent of the GDP of this state.

For America’s part, our top 76 metros form the real heart of the U.S. economy. 

Housing 61 percent of our population, they concentrate a majority of our manufacturing output, gather our most educated people, and generate more than 68 percent of our national GDP.

They also make an outsized contribution on financial services and the production of patents. 

In the U.S., the top 76 metros range from New York, L.A., and Chicago to less well known communities like Allentown, Little Rock, and Harrisburg.

This leads to my second point: as economies globalize, cities and metropolitan areas act as the centers of international trade and investment.

Metros and trade are inextricably linked, and have been for millennia.   The Silk Road that connected Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa.   The Hanseatic League that grew from Hamburg and Lubeck to include 170 cities that monopolized trade in Northern Europe between the 13^th and 15^th centuries.  The great Italian city-states of Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and Amalfi.   

These historic networks offer essential lessons:

As a recent Brookings report concluded:

“Trade is essential to metros—it is how they grow their economies. And metros are essential to trade—they provide the specialization and market access that facilitates exchange among producers and consumers.” 

The top Brazilian and U.S. metros are our nations’ logistical hubs, concentrating the movement of goods and people by sea and by air.  In Brazil, 61 percent of foreign waterborne trade, measured by tonnage, passes through the seaports of the top metros; in the United States the equivalent share is over 66 percent. Passenger travel is even more concentrated; in both countries, close to 82 percent of international air travel passes through the airports of the top metropolitan areas.

Significantly, the top cities and metros in both our countries are magnets for foreign direct investment, particularly “greenfield FDI” where foreign entities invest in new facilities or expansions of existing facilities rather than just purchase domestic companies. 

From 2003 through September 2012, Brazil’s 13 accounted for 77 percent of greenfield FDI projects in Brazil and 59 percent of the jobs created through this key growth vehicle.  The top 76 U.S. metros also accounted for 77 percent of Greenfield FDI projects and 70 percent of the jobs created.

Brazil’s 13 are responsible for a third of all national goods exports; the share is substantially higher for the top U.S. metros.  Brookings research on U.S. exports shows that our top U.S. metros dominate the trade in manufacturing and services … and, given their edge in sectors like chemicals, consulting and computers, are on the front lines of commerce with China, Brazil, and India. 

In sum, our research has shown the collective centrality of our top cities and metros to the trading position of our nations. 

Yet metro economies do not exist in the aggregate; they have distinctive starting points and vary considerably in their trading prowess and intensity.  What makes São Paulo special on the global stage—your distinctive offer, your special investment potential—is different from what defines and drives Rio or Curitiba or Salvador.

São Paulo is Brazil’s premier global metropolis and the numbers reflect that.  Your metro houses 10 percent of Brazil’s population but:

• Your airports handle 26 percent of all passenger traffic in Brazil and 33 percent of all air cargo.
• Your macro metro neighbor, Santos, which we visited yesterday, is the busiest container port in South America and 43rd in the world.
• You are Brazil’s largest metropolitan exporter, producing 27 percent of all metropolitan exports of goods

• And from 2003-2011 you received 19 percent of all greenfield FDI in Brazil … in fact, more FDI than New York, LA, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco combined.

You trade with the world’s most prosperous cities, in the United States and elsewhere, but in particular ways given your distinctive industry clusters and sectors.

Given your substantial concentration in financial services (with 19 of the 25 top international banks present and the world’s third largest financial exchange), you interact naturally with New York and Miami in the U.S., London, Madrid, and Frankfurt in Europe and Shanghai, Tokyo and Hong Kong in Asia.

Despite the outward movement of industry, you still serve as Brazil’s main global platform for advanced manufacturing sectors like automotive, linking you closely with Detroit in the U.S., Milan and Stuttgart in Europe, and Nagoya in Japan.

The shape and structure of your economy puts São Paulo in an exclusive club of “global cities,” a definition drawn in the 1990s when the process of trade, investment, and globalization was seen as empowering a few command and control finance metros of the world.

But today, our notions of “globalizing cities” are more expansive, recognizing that all cities are fueled, to different degrees, by global investment and connected, in distinctive ways, via global commerce and exchange, global product and labor supply chains. 

The energy cluster in Rio finds common interest with the energy cluster in Houston through investments by Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Petrobras … and then further with energy firms in Amsterdam, Dar es Salaam, and Bogota.

Campinas’ hi-tech sector naturally links with the hi-tech cluster in San Jose’s Silicon Valley via elite universities, advanced R&D institutions, and global tech giants like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell … and then further with tech clusters in Tokyo, Bangalore and Dublin.

As headquarters of Embraer, São Jose  dos Campos links via supply chains to Palm Bay, Florida, Harbin, China and Lisbon, Portugal.

In short, a new global map is being drawn in the world, not of nation to nation trade but of metro to metro exchange.

That leads to my final point: To prosper in the global economy today, metros need to drive their global economic destiny.

We have a three part playbook:

The playbook starts at home, with cities innovating locally to exploit their distinctive competitive advantages in the global economy.

In the U.S., cities and metropolitan areas are acting with intentionality in the aftermath of the Great Recession to devise and implement what we call “metropolitan business plans.”  The purpose: build on their distinctive competitive advantages in the traded sectors of the economy, given the crippling effect on housing and consumption.

The elements of business planning are fairly simple and straightforward

Each metropolis does a market assessment of their unique economic profile and potential … what goods and services they trade, which nations they trade with, where trade trends are likely to head given market dynamics here and abroad. 

Armed with this information, metros then set goals and objectives that build on their distinct advantages, devise strategies to meet those goals and establish metrics to gauge progress.

All these efforts are undertaken by a consortium of corporate, government, university and civic institutions that cut across jurisdictions, sectors, and disciplines and “collaborate to compete” globally.

Let me give you an example of how these business plans are helping cities and their metros grow jobs and restructure their economies.

Los Angeles, represented here by Mayor Antonio Villaragoisa, has devised an ambitious plan to grow exports by identifying and proactively supporting export ready firms in leading trade sectors like aerospace, computers, professional services, and film and television.  The L.A. system of trade is moving from a story of fragmentation, where no clear institution defines or drives decision-making, to a reality of coordination and collaboration, responsiveness and flexibility under one Los Angeles Regional Export Council.  The result: More firms will export more goods and services to more places producing more and better jobs.

We believe business planning holds great potential for São Paulo and other Brazilian metros.   Obviously, fixing the basics is a critical first step for economic growth: safe streets, quality schools, efficient transport and sound governance.  But a business plan might focus on increasing foreign direct investment in infrastructure necessary to reduce congestion, improve mobility, and enhance accessibility to jobs. 

The key is not what you focus on … but to decide your focus based on evidence and in a collaborative manner and then to hold yourself accountable through continuous assessment and measurement. 

Having innovated locally, cities must network globally—creating and stewarding close relationships with trading partners in both mature economies and rising nations.

The new global reality is leading to intricate networks of trading cities which grow together by linking together and learning together.

These networks obviously start with firms and ports that do business with each other.  

But, over time, networks extend to supporting institutions—governments, universities, business associations—that provide support for companies at the leading edge of metropolitan economies.

The city of Houston and the city of São Paulo, for example, executed a formal agreement earlier this year that commits each city to increase commercial relations, intensify scientific and technological connections, and facilitate information to tackle shared challenges.

Enterprise Florida, the principal export and investment organization in that state, opened an office in São Paulo in 2011 to help Florida companies expand trade.  APEX-Brasil, Enterprise Florida’s Brazilian counterpart, has its only U.S. location in Miami’s free trade zone.  There it executes projects like providing clean and renewable fuels to IndyCar, the American based auto racing body. 

The Ohio State University and the University of São Paulo have partnered to support the exchange of students and collaborative research.  Areas of recent focus: natural and mathematical sciences, medicine, and teacher training.  In 2014 Ohio State anticipates opening its third “Global Gateways” office in the world in São Paulo to further capitalize on these linkages.

Here is the simple message: We can see a network of trading cities emerging right here in São Paulo and it is a future characterized by multi-layered relationships across multiple dimensions and disciplines, interests and institutions. 

Finally, having innovated at home and networked globally, cities and metros must advocate nationally for federal and state policies and practices that will support metro growth.

Metros are engines, but they do NOT act alone.

Only national governments can set the rules of the road: enhancing access to foreign markets, enforcing trade agreements, opening up borders to immigrants and protecting intellectual property.  They can also help match domestic firms with potential global customers, provide export promotion support, and commit resources to modernizing logistics hubs.

As the world evolves as a network of trading cities, it is only natural that cities become more articulate and aggressive about the support they need from higher levels of government. 

In the United States, cities have found a receptive partner in the Obama Administration.  Key federal agencies—the International Trade Administration, the Ex-Im Bank, the Small Business Administration—have been central partners in guiding business plans with a particular focus on boosting exports.

Similar alliances could be built here.  As part of the Global Cities Initiative, the ESADE Business School mapped the trading system in São Paulo.  Their research clearly shows the central role of your federal and state governments in advancing the internationalization of your economy.  True success will come when these higher level entities align closely with your distinct assets and advantages.

Going forward, the advocacy of cities must extend beyond accessing the export promotion and finance programs of federal and state governments.  They must get to the heart of the matter.

The United States has had a North American Free Trade Agreement in place for 20 years with our partners, Mexico and Canada.

We have recently concluded important Free Trade Agreements with Colombia, Panama, and Korea.

President Obama was in Southeast Asia this month discussing the possibilities of a Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The 2011 Agreement on Trade and Economic Cooperation signed by President Obama and President Rousseff provides a platform to build on.

As they have expressed, we need a new vision for our Hemisphere … and for our two countries.

We are both growing with healthy demographics.

We both have an enormous pool of natural assets.

We both have a shared imperative to reorient our economies.

Empowered with the right policies, enabled with the right frameworks, we have the potential to grow together this century, powered by our major population and economic centers.

So that’s our playbook:

Innovate locally.  Network globally. Advocate nationally.

Let me end where I began. 

From the beginning of time, cities have been centers of commerce, formed along the roads and routes of trade. 

And so it is today.

The cities of our nations are powering our nations.

They are giving physical shape to the globalizing economy, seamlessly integrating the exchange of people, goods, services, energy, capital, ideas, and culture.

The promise of the Global Cities Initiative broadly is to capture and channel this energy into lasting, sustained networks and partnerships.

Our pledge as we leave here today is to work with you, partner with you, and ensure that the United States and Brazil bind together not just as two nations but as living, vibrant, powerful networks of trading cities and metropolitan areas.

      

Once upon a time, innovation was an isolationist sport. In America’s innovative economy 20 years ago, a worker drove to a nondescript office campus along a suburban corridor, worked in isolation, and kept ideas secret.

Today, by contrast and partly a result of the Great Recession, proximity is everything. Talented people want to work and live in urban places that are walkable, bike-able, connected by transit, and hyper-caffeinated. Major companies across multiple sectors are practicing “open innovation” and want to be close to other firms, research labs, and universities. Entrepreneurs want to start their companies in collaborative spaces, where they can share ideas and have efficient access to everything from legal advice to sophisticated lab equipment.

These disruptive forces are coming to ground in small, primarily urban enclaves—what we and others are calling “innovation districts.” By our definition, innovation districts cluster and connect leading-edge institutions with startups and spin-off companies, business incubators, and accelerators in the relentless pursuit of cutting-edge discoveries for the market. Compact, transit-accessible, and highly networked, they grow talent, foster open collaboration, and offer mixed-used housing, office, retail, and 21st century urban amenities. In many respects, the rise of innovation districts embodies the very essence of cities: an aggregation of talented, driven people assembled in close quarters, who exchange ideas and knowledge. It’s in the vein of what urban historian Sir Peter Hall calls “a dynamic process of innovation, imitation and improvement.”

Globally, Montreal, Seoul, Singapore, Medellin, Barcelona, Cambridge, and Berlin offer just a few examples of evolving innovation districts. In the US, the most iconic innovation districts can be found in the downtowns and midtowns of cities like Atlanta, Cambridge, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Diego, and St. Louis, where advanced research universities, medical complexes, research institutions, and clusters of tech and creative firms are sparking business expansion, as well as residential and commercial growth. Even a cursory visit to Kendall Square in Cambridge, University City in Philadelphia, or midtown Atlanta shows the explosion of growth and mixed development occurring around institutions like MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and Georgia Tech.

Other innovation districts can be found in Boston, Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Seattle, where former industrial and warehouse areas are charting a new innovative path, powered by their enviable location along transit lines, their proximity to downtowns and waterfronts, and their recent addition of advanced research institutions (reflected by Carnegie Mellon University’s decision to place its Integrative Media Program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard).

Perhaps the greatest validation of this shift is found in the efforts of traditional exurban science parks (like Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham) to urbanize, in order to keep pace with the preferences of their workers for walkable communities and the preference of their firms to be near other firms and collaborative opportunities.

Innovation districts are already attracting an eclectic mix of firms in a diverse group of sectors, including life sciences, clean energy, design, and tech. We even see a return of small-scale and customized manufacturing, made possible by 3D printing, robotics, and other advanced techniques.

Unlike efforts to grow the “consumer city” via sports stadia, luxury housing, and high-end retail, innovation districts are intent on growing the firms, networks, and sectors that drive real, broad-based prosperity.

At a time of increasing concerns over inequality and resilience, innovation districts can spur productive, inclusive, and sustainable growth. If properly structured and scaled, they can provide a strong foundation for the commercialization of ideas, the expansion of firms, and the creation of jobs. They also offer the tantalizing prospect of expanding employment and educational opportunities for disadvantaged populations—many innovation districts are close to low- and moderate-income neighborhoods—as well as sparking more sustainable development patterns, given their embrace of transit, historic buildings, traditional street grids, and existing infrastructure.

Innovation districts represent one of the most positive trends that have emerged in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Smart cities, innovative companies, advanced universities, and financial institutions would be wise to embrace them.

This piece originally appeared on Quartz.

      

For years, corporate campuses like Silicon Valley were known for innovation. Located in suburban corridors that were only accessible by car, these places put little emphasis on creating communities where people work, live and go out.

But now, as the economy emerges from the recession, a shift is occurring where innovation is taking place. Districts of innovation can be found in urban centres as disparate as Montreal, Seoul, Singapore, Medellin, Barcelona, and London. They are popping up in the downtowns and midtowns of cities like Atlanta, Cambridge, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

These are places where advanced research universities, medical complexes, and clusters of tech and creative firms are attracting businesses and residents.

Other innovation districts can be found in Boston, Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Seattle, where older industrial areas are being re-imagined and remade, leveraging their enviable location near waterfronts and city centres and along transit lines. Innovative companies and talented workers are flocking to these areas in abundance.

Even traditional science parks like Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham are scrambling to urbanise to keep pace with their workers' preference for walkable communities and their companies' desire to be near other firms.

In these districts, leading anchor institutions and start-ups are clustering and connecting with one another. They are coming together with spin-off companies, incubators, and accelerators in the relentless pursuit of new discoveries for the market.

These areas are small and accessible, growing talent, fostering open collaboration, and offering housing and office space as well as modern urban amenities. They are both competitive places and "cool" spaces.

The growth of innovation districts is being driven by private and civic actors like universities, philanthropies, business associations and business improvement districts. Yet local governments play an important role in accelerating the growth of districts and maximising their potential . Three roles stand out:

1) Mayors are leading efforts to designate districts

Barcelona's former mayor Joan Clos set his eyes on transforming his city into a "city of knowledge". Through extensive, focused public planning and investment, Clos designed an innovation district from the debris of a 494-acre industrial area, which was scarred and separated from the rest of the city by railroad tracks. His vision included burying these tracks, increasing access via a new public tram, designing walkable streets, and creating new public spaces and housing.

Today, the area is a 21st-century urban community with 4,500 firms, thousands of new housing units, and clusters of universities, technology centres, and incubators.

Across the Atlantic in Boston, former mayor Tom Menino declared the South Boston waterfront an innovation district in 2010. Menino persuaded innovators like MassChallenge to move to the district and exacted important concessions from developers (including land for innovation-oriented retail, shared labs and other spaces, and micro-housing) to help realise the district's vision.

2) Changing land-use laws to build spaces with a mix of facilities

Barcelona and Research Triangle Park, for example, developed bold master plans encouraging the "mixing" of large and small firms, research facilities, housing, restaurants, and retail and outlining where to create open spaces for networking. Cambridge, Massachusetts, by contrast, has allowed incremental moves from rigid, antiquated rules to encourage similar outcomes in Kendall Square .

3) Supporting scarce public resources with large private and civic investments

In New York , former mayor Michael Bloomberg deployed $100m in municipal capital to prepare the infrastructure necessary to lure Cornell and Technion universities to Roosevelt Island. In other cities, including St Louis and Seattle, local resources are financing infrastructure improvements to buttress and accelerate private growth.

Given that many innovation districts are adjacent to low-income neighbourhoods, cities like Philadelphia are considering smart use of school investments to prepare disadvantaged youth for good jobs in the Stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) economy.

As this decade unfolds, we should expect more cities to use their powers in the service of this new model of innovative, inclusive, and resilient growth.

This opinion originally appeared in The Guardian

       

The tide of uncertainty that has swept the United Kingdom after its vote to leave the European Union has spared few—including its emerging class of innovation districts.

These hubs of innovation—where anchor institutions, such as universities and R&D laden companies cluster and connect with startups, incubators, and a host of public spaces, coffee shops, retail and housing—are now asking themselves important questions that will affect their future. Will the U.K. broker a deal to continue free trade with Europe? Will access to talent across Europe be curtailed? Will the devalued pound keep U.K. advanced manufacturers competitive for the medium to long term? Will European Union legal frameworks be replaced with a regulatory platform that continues to support advanced sectors? What will happen to EU funding on science and innovation, such as Horizon 2020?

Of course, innovation districts are no stranger to uncertainty, if not chaos. These districts thrive on random mixing, on smashing different kinds of disciplines and people together to generate new ideas and new products for the market. In this close-knit, highly networked ecosystem, chaos breeds creativity. At the same time, the backbone of districts is a clear regulatory and legal framework with rules on intellectual property, investment, and funding streams. The twinning of chaos and certainty is what makes these places simply superb spaces to incubate new technology, aggregate talent, and experiment in linking placemaking with innovation.

Yet from the distinctive innovation districts in London to those emerging in the middle of England, such as in Sheffield and Manchester, to those rising in Scotland, such as in Glasgow, this moment of uncertainty could be not only painful—it could be downright dangerous. 

In the face of such uncertain times, the temptation will be to sit back and wait for the cards to fall. But this tempered, conservative approach is ironically the more risky tactic.

We recommend another path.

Now is the time for the institutions and firms that are driving innovation districts to strengthen their competitive position and expand their reach.

Now is the time to try new forms of collaboration between universities, large companies, and local enterprises.

Now is the time to test more democratic modes of innovation with maker spaces, fab labs, and shared infrastructure and equipment.

Now is the time to forge new partnerships with other innovation districts in the United States and Europe to share promising strategies around commercialization, networking, and financing.

Now is the time to apply new energy to creative placemaking, including strengthening the innovation–place nexus around key nodes and applying quick interventions around traffic calming, bike lanes, and pop-up gathering spaces. 

U.S. cities and innovation districts have demonstrated that progress can persist even when higher levels of government are adrift. U.K. cities and districts can do the same.