INTRODUCTION

In an earlier policy brief, Where is the Learning? Measuring Schooling Efforts in Developing Countries, we drew attention to what was labeled “the global learning crisis.” While tremendous progress has been made over the past couple of decades to get tens of millions of additional children to enroll in school, progress in improving learning outcomes has been considerably less impressive. Although, shockingly, comprehensive learning outcome data are not available for most of the developing world, the many small scale, local or, in some cases, national studies that have been done show a dismal picture. For instance, Uwezo, an East African initiative, found that in Tanzania, only 44 percent of students in Grade 4 were able to read a basic story from Grade 2. Similarly, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) facilitated by Pratham found that in rural India, less than half of Grade 4 students were able to do basic subtraction. These examples demonstrate the gravity of “the global learning crisis” as students fail to master competencies appropriate for their grade level, hindering the development of life skills and success in further schooling, as well as performance in the labor market.

With about 61 million children in the developing world still not yet in school, it is too early to declare victory on the “enrollment agenda”. But we would do a disservice to the 250 million children around the world who fail to reach Grade 4 or attain minimum learning standards, if we don’t step up efforts to improve learning outcomes.

This policy brief is part of a larger effort to link resources in the education sector with outcome measures. As we have documented elsewhere, few countries systematically collect comprehensive financial data on education, although fortunately an increasing number of initiatives is trying to address this issue by producing, for instance, National Education Accounts (NEAs). When the focus of the sector changes from enrollment to enrollment plus learning, efforts to better grasp the size and use of financial resources should evolve accordingly. For instance, much learning takes place outside of the classroom, especially in the early years. For NEAs to be a useful tool for adjusting the allocation of scarce resources, the “learning” sector should be defined more broadly than the education or “schooling” sector. We will address this and related issues in a subsequent policy brief.

Once our focus becomes enrollment plus learning, we have to broaden our view and look at the entire environment in which a child develops skills, starting with the households in which children are born. It has beenknown for many decades and throughout the world, that among the best predictors of future school performance are some basic household characteristics, such as income and mother’s education level.

Data from international assessments also show a relationship between income and educational performance, exemplified by intra and intercountry results. In Colombia, average Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) math scores at Grade 8 for the richest quintile of students were close to 100 points higher than those from the poorest quintile. On the other hand, the difference in average scores between the poorest quintile in the United States and the richest quintile in Colombia was about 50 points. Income is not the only predictor of success, as exemplified in Peru, where children whose mothers have completed primary school and whose maternal language is Spanish rather than an indigenous language, have a greater probability of reaching the appropriate school grade for their age. In Kenya, Uwezo found that the higher their father’s educational attainment, the more likely children were able to read a story at Grade 3 or attend extra tutoring sessions.

In addition, the larger environment (such as the village or the urban neighborhood) in which the young child grows up also has a major and lasting impact. In Tanzania, urban students in Grade 3 are three times more likely than their rural counterparts to meet standards in literacy and numeracy. Related to the impact of the larger environment, data from Nigeria suggest that girls are more disadvantaged in school attendance, as parents may be reluctant to send girls to school because of perceived fears for their safety while traveling and concerns about the physical strength required for walking the distance.

Clearly, especially in the early years, most learning takes place outside of the classroom. Consequently, children who grow up in deprived circumstances will start life with a disadvantage leading to a lack of learning in the early grades, which will have lifetime effects.

In the next section, we will summarize the evidence that the early years (ages 0 to 5) are crucial for subsequent learning achievements. From this evidence we conclude that many of the problems with learning outcomes in the developing world (and in many developed countries) need to be addressed well before school age. Before delving into what happens in schools, we explore the relationship between enrollment, learning and dropout. As the crux of this brief is to lay out the evidence on what contributes to learning, we must acknowledge the factors leading to low enrollment and dropout. Next, we turn our attention to what happens in schools and what can be done to improve these activities, as well as try to summarize the evidence about the relationship between specific school-based inputs and learning outcomes. As it turns out, this evidence is, in many cases, rather feeble. Therefore, we will first focus on school-level inputs that are necessary for a good learning environment, i.e. without which we cannot expect any learning to take place. Most of these inputs are rather obvious, but they are worth mentioning. Subsequently, we will discuss additional inputs that have proven to contribute to learning outcomes in some cases, but not in others. Clearly how these inputs are applied matters.

Next, we address factors that contribute to learning outside of a formal environment, after which we review issues in health and nutrition that are closely linked to learning outcomes. We then review the need for the collection and dissemination of learning assessments in order to impact further improvements in these areas and we try to answer the question: what are the building blocks for an education sector that promote learning? Finally we explore needs for future research in learning.

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In the developing world, more than 200 million children under the age of five years are at risk of not reaching their full development potential because they suffer from the negative consequences of poverty, nutritional deficiencies and inadequate learning opportunities. Overall, 165 million children (one in four) are stunted, and 90 percent of these children live in Africa and Asia. And though some progress has been made globally, child malnutrition remains a serious public health problem with enormous human and economic costs. Worldwide, only about 50 percent of children are enrolled in preprimary education, and in low-income countries a mere 17 percent. And though more and more children are going to school, millions have little to show for it. By some accounts, 250 million children of primary school age cannot read even part of a sentence. Some of these children have never been to school (58 million); but more often, they perform poorly despite having spent several years in school, which reflects not only the poor quality of many schools but also the multiple disadvantages that characterize their early life.

Ensuring that all children—regardless of their place of birth and parental income or education level—have access to opportunities that will allow them to reach their full potential requires investing early in their development. To develop their cognitive, linguistic, socioemotional and physical skills and abilities, children need good nutrition and health, opportunities for play, nurture and learning with caregivers, early stimulation and protection from violence and neglect.

The Case for Early Interventions 

The arguments for investing in children early are simple and convincing. Early investment makes sense scientifically. The brain is almost fully developed by age three, providing a prime opportunity to achieve high gains. We know that the rapid rate of development of the brain’s neural pathways is responsible for an individual’s cognitive, social and emotional development, and there is solid evidence that nutrition and stimulation during the first 1,000 days of life are linked to brain development. 

Early investment makes sense in terms of equity. The playing field has the highest chances of being leveled early on, and we know that programs have a higher impact for young children from poorer families. In the United States, for example, increasing preschool enrollment to 100 percent for low-income children would reduce disparities in school readiness by 24 percent between black and white children and by 35 percent between Hispanic and white children. We also know that equalizing initial endowments through early childhood development (ECD) programs is far more cost-effective than compensating for differences in outcomes later in life. 

Early investment makes sense economically. Investing early prevents higher costs down the road, and interventions yield a high return on investment. There is evidence of the benefits for the individual and for society more broadly. For instance, at the level of the individual, in Jamaica children participating in an early childhood stimulation program were found to have 25 percent higher earnings 20 years later compared with children who did not participate. At the economy-wide level, eliminating malnutrition is estimated to increase gross domestic product by 1 to 2 percentage points annually, while countries with school systems that have a 10-percentage-point advantage in the proportion of students

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In the developing world, more than 200 million children under the age of five years are at risk of not reaching their full human potential because they suffer from the negative consequences of poverty, nutritional deficiencies and inadequate learning opportunities. Given these risks, there is a strong case for early childhood development (ECD) interventions in nutrition, health, education and social protection, which can produce long-lasting benefits throughout the life cycle. The results from the 2012 round of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)—an international, large-scale assessment that measures 15-year-olds’ performance in mathematics, reading and science literacy—demonstrate the benefits of ECD: Students in the countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) who had the benefit of being enrolled for more than one year in preprimary school scored 53 points higher in mathematics (the equivalent of more than one year of schooling), compared with students who had not attended preprimary school. Although there is much evidence that ECD programs have a great impact and are less costly than educational interventions later in life, very few ECD initiatives are being scaled up in developing countries. For example, in 2010, only 15 percent of children in low-income countries—compared with 48 percent worldwide—were enrolled in preprimary education programs. Furthermore, even though the literature points to larger beneficial effects of ECD for poorer children, within developing countries, disadvantaged families are even less likely to be among those enrolled in ECD programs. For instance, in Ghana, children from wealthy families are four times more likely than children from poor households to be enrolled in preschool programs.

One of the major barriers to scaling up ECD interventions is financing. In order to address financing issues, both policymakers and practitioners need a better understanding of what is currently being spent on ECD interventions, what high-quality interventions cost, and what outcomes these interventions can produce. If stakeholder groups are made more aware of the costs of ECD interventions, they may be able to support decisionmaking on investments in ECD, to better estimate gaps in financing, and to work toward securing stable funding for scaling up service provision and for quality enhancement. One of the weakest areas of ECD policy planning is in the realm of financial planning.6 Good data are scarce on ECD spending and the costs of ECD interventions that are useful for program budgeting and planning; but these data are valuable for a number of reasons, including the fact that they support analyses of what different inputs cost and thus can facilitate considering various alternative modalities for service delivery. In this paper, we focus on what data are available to gain a clearer picture of what is being spent on ECD and what it costs to deliver basic ECD interventions in developing countries.

ECD interventions come in many varieties, and therefore we first define the package of ECD interventions that have been deemed essential. Then we outline a framework for better understanding ECD financing, which combines a top-down approach analyzing expenditures and a bottom-up approach analyzing the costs of delivering individual interventions. We comment on the general methodological issues stemming from these approaches and the limitations of the data that have been produced. Next, we delve into the available data and discuss the different funding sources and financing mechanisms that countries utilize to deliver ECD services and what patterns exist in spending. We provide a brief overview of how many public and private resources in both developed and developing countries are invested in young children, and in which specific subsectors. Although these data on spending illustrate the flows and help us understand how much is being allocated and by whom, the data are limited, and this top-down approach still leaves us with many unanswered questions. Therefore, we turn our attention to the actual costs of individual ECD interventions, which help us further understand what ECD spending can “buy” in different countries. We identify some trends in the actual costs of delivering these services, although there are a number of methodological issues vis-à-vis costing and the services delivered, which lead to wide variations between and within countries and make it difficult to compare programs over time.

Finally, we look at a number of initiatives that are currently under way to collect better data on ECD costs and expenditures, which will be useful for countries in planning programs and identifying funding sources. These initiatives are sponsored by organizations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Given the gaps in the available data that we identify and the interventions currently under way, we conclude with recommendations for increasing the knowledge base in this area for use in policymaking and planning.

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Israeli society is diverse, dynamic, vibrant, and challenged. Israel’s long-held social solidarity faces new pressure from growing internal fissures and from the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.

In bold and candid remarks earlier this year, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin identified four “tribes” in Israeli society, representing different worldviews, and called for a new effort to find common ground among secular, national-religious and ultra-Orthodox Jewish Israelis, and Arab citizens of Israel. How might Israel’s diverse society coalesce in the coming years? How will the future of Israeli society affect its democracy, its relations with its neighbors and with the United States?

On December 10, the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted President Reuven Rivlin to discuss his vision for the future of Israeli society and the U.S.-Israeli relationship. Bruce Jones, vice president and director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, gave welcoming remarks, and Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, introduced President Rivlin.

Following President Rivlin’s remarks, Natan Sachs, fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, engaged the president in conversation.

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Five years have passed since the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia sparked revolts around the Arab world and the beginning of the Arab Spring. Despite high hopes that the Arab world was entering a new era of freedom, economic growth, and social justice, the transition turned out to be long and difficult, with the Arab world now in turmoil with revolutions, counter revolutions, wars, civil strife, and the worst refugee crisis of our times. The response to the Arab Spring and its aftermath has focused almost exclusively on political and security issues, and on the very divisive questions of national identity and political regimes. Economic and social questions have been put on the back burner.

On January 15, Global Economy and Development at Brookings hosted a discussion on a new book, "The Arab Spring Five Years Later," which explores the critical economic and social issues driving the Arab Spring agenda and the real economic grievances that must be addressed in order to achieve peace, stability, and successful political transitions as well as provides an approach to addressing those grievances.

Hafez Ghanem and Shinchi Yamanaka presented the key findings of the book, followed by a panel discussion. 

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A conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken

One year after the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, the United States continues to adapt its efforts to blunt the appeal of violent extremism. As part of this effort, the State Department is launching a series of new initiatives to better coordinate the U.S. response to terrorist propaganda and recruitment.

On February 16, the Foreign Policy program at Brookings hosted The Honorable Antony J. Blinken, deputy secretary of state, for a discussion of the United States’ civilian-led initiatives to counter the spread of the Islamic State and other violent extremist groups. Blinken will chart the path forward, to include partnerships with industry and civil society, and outlined the challenges that lie ahead.

Brookings President Strobe Talbott offered welcoming remarks. General John Allen, senior fellow and co-director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at Brookings, introduced Deputy Secretary Blinken, and Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, joined Deputy Secretary Blinken in conversation following his remarks.

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Editors’ Note: In a recent interview with Foreign Policy Interrupted, Tamara Wittes was asked about how the situation in the Middle East has changed since she published her 2008 book Freedom’s Unsteady March. Five years after the Arab uprisings and the start of the Syrian civil war, and a year and a half after the Islamic State captured Mosul (along with the world’s attention), Tamara says that many of the same fundamental dynamics in the Middle East are still at work.

The situation in the region has changed so dramatically since then, but I think that the fundamental insights that informed that book remain true. The underlying drivers of change in the Middle East are still there in terms of the demographic drivers, the economic drivers, the technological drivers that I described in the book; they are all still present.

Although there’s a lot of disorder and a lot of violence, and that leads people on the ground to prioritize security and to search for security in different ways, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be satisfied. It doesn’t mean that the, “well, at least it’s not ISIS” line is going to suffice for governments in the Middle East for very long.

The underlying drivers of change are still present, the pressure for change is still present, and a lot of those pressures are about the simple fact of individual empowerment. Expectations shifted, and people, individuals, have the ability to act in ways that they didn’t before. States and governments have to accommodate that. It’s affecting politics all over the world, and the Middle East is not immune.

So the question becomes: how are governments going to learn to accommodate that and turn it into a strength? I think that the United States does have a really important role to play there. There were mistakes that the Bush administration made—setting aside his vision of Iraq, which has of course been very thoroughly discussed and assessed. But even in terms of non-military intervention to try to advance reform, the critique I made in the book is that the Bush administration was overly focused on political process and elections in particular. I think that one of the other lessons that has come of recent years is that the United States and other Western countries get very focused on political institutions and think, well, if we set up a judicial system, and we set up a parliament, and a constitution, then the gears in the machine sort of start to turn, the states start to function. Look at the rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, for example.

But what we see in the Middle East today is that formal institutions aren’t enough. People have to have trust in the institutions, and people and communities have to have sufficient agreement on the basic rules of the game to make those institutions legitimate and authoritative. And that’s what’s missing in a lot of places around the region right now, that there isn’t enough dialogue and debate and ultimately negotiated agreement on the basic rules of the game. So I think that the challenge for the United States and others who care about stability in the Middle East going forward is how to help cultivate platforms for that kind of dialogue, and how to help cultivate the skills and the mechanisms for resolving very fundamental questions about how government should be organized and what should be the role of religion and politics, and what’s the balance between individual rights and collective identity.

These are big, big, questions, and right now, in too many places, they are being fought over violently. But the questions still have to be answered, and so the challenge is helping develop ways to do that, to do it peacefully.

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The United States alliance with Saudi Arabia dates back to 1943, making the U.S. relationship with the Kingdom one of America's longest-standing in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is a key counterterrorism and diplomatic partner within the region, yet the alliance has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, especially in the period following the 9/11 attacks, when questions about Saudi support for extremist causes emerged. Saudi Arabia’s prosecution of the war in Yemen has added to the criticism, with many observers blaming the Kingdom for the unfolding humanitarian crisis within the Arab world's poorest state. In recent comments, President Barack Obama has been critical of Saudi policies, despite U.S. logistical and intelligence support to Saudi Arabia’s war effort in Yemen.

On April 21, the Intelligence Project and Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings hosted U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut to discuss the U.S.-Saudi alliance with Senior Fellows Bruce Riedel and Tamara Cofman Wittes. Senator Murphy has urged a more rigorous approach to cooperation with Riyadh that balances U.S. counterterrorism interests, strategic imperatives, and human rights concerns, and has led efforts on Capitol Hill to debate the war in Yemen. Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion. 

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With the rise of ISIS and a growing terrorist threat in the West, unprecedented attention has focused on Islam, which despite being the world’s fastest growing religion, is also one of the most misunderstood. In his new book “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016), Senior Fellow Shadi Hamid offers a novel and provocative argument on how Islam is, in fact, “exceptional” in how it relates to politics, with profound implications for how we understand the future of the Middle East. Hamid argues for a new understanding of how Islam and Islamism shape politics by examining different modes of reckoning with the problem of religion and state, including the terrifying—and alarmingly successful—example of ISIS.

On June 9, Shadi Hamid and Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy Leon Wieseltier discussed the unresolved questions of religion’s role in public life and whether Islam can—or should—be reformed or secularized.

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

First it was the Europeans who sought an escape from the tragic realities of power that had bloodied their 20th century. At the end of the Cold War, they began to disarm themselves in the hopeful belief that arms and traditional measures of power no longer mattered. A new international system of laws and institutions would replace the old system of power; the world would model itself on the European Union—and if not, the U.S. would still be there to provide security the old-fashioned way.

But now, in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is the U.S. that seems to be yearning for an escape from the burdens of power and a reprieve from the tragic realities of human existence.

Until recent events at least, a majority of Americans (and of the American political and intellectual classes) seem to have come close to concluding not only that war is horrible but also that it is ineffective in our modern, globalized world. "There is an evolving international order with new global norms making war and conquest increasingly rare," wrote Fareed Zakaria of CNN, borrowing from Steven Pinker of Harvard, practically on the eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Islamic State's march across Syria and Iraq. Best-selling histories of World War I teach that nations don't willingly go to war but only "sleepwalk" into them due to tragic miscalculations or downright silliness.

For a quarter-century, Americans have been told that at the end of history lies boredom rather than great conflict, that nations with McDonald's never fight one another, that economic interdependence and nuclear weapons make war among great powers unlikely if not impossible. Recently added to these nostrums has been the mantra of futility. "There is no military solution" is the constant refrain of Western statesmen regarding conflicts from Syria to Ukraine; indeed, military action only makes problems worse. Power itself isn't even what it used to be, argued the columnist Moisés Naím in a widely praised recent book.

History has a way of answering such claims. The desire to escape from power is certainly not new; it has been the constant aspiration of Enlightenment liberalism for more than two centuries.

The impossibility of war was conventional wisdom in the years before World War I, and it became conventional wisdom again—at least in Britain and the U.S.—practically the day after the war ended. Then as now, Americans and Britons solipsistically believed that everyone shared their disillusionment with war. They imagined that because war was horrible and irrational, as the Great War had surely demonstrated, no sane people would choose it.

What happened next, as the peaceful 1920s descended into the violent and savage 1930s, may be instructive for our own time. Back then, the desire to avoid war—combined with the surety that no nation could rationally seek it—led logically and naturally to policies of appeasement.

The countries threatening aggression, after all, had grievances, as most countries almost always do. They were "have-not" powers in a world dominated by the rich and powerful Anglo-Saxon nations, and they demanded a fairer distribution of the goods. In the case of Germany, resentment over the Versailles peace settlement smoldered because territories and populations once under Germany's control had been taken away to provide security for Germany's neighbors. In the case of Japan, the island power with the overflowing population needed control of the Asian mainland to survive and prosper in competition with the other great powers.

So the liberal powers tried to reason with them, to understand and even accept their grievances and seek to assuage them, even if this meant sacrificing others—the Chinese and the Czechs, for instance—to their rule. It seemed a reasonable price, unfortunate though it might be, to avoid another catastrophic war. This was the realism of the 1930s.

Eventually, however, the liberal powers discovered that the grievances of the "have-not" powers went beyond what even the most generous and conflict-averse could satisfy. The most fundamental grievance, it turned out, was that of being forced to live in a world shaped by others—to be German or Japanese in a world dominated by Anglo-Saxons.

To satisfy this grievance would require more than marginal territorial or economic adjustments or even the sacrifice of a small and weak state here or there. It would require allowing the "have-not" powers to reshape the international political and economic order to suit their needs. More than that, it would require letting those powers become strong enough to dictate the terms of international order—for how else could they emerge from their unjust oppression?

Finally, it became clear that more was going on than rational demands for justice, at least as the Enlightenment mind understood the term. It turned out that the aggressors' policies were the product not only of material grievances but of desires that transcended mere materialism and rationality.

Their leaders, and to a great extent their publics, rejected liberal notions of progress and reason. They were moved instead by romantic yearnings for past glories or past orders and rejected Enlightenment notions of modernity. Their predatory or paranoid rulers either fatalistically accepted (in the case of Japan) or positively welcomed (in the case of Germany) armed conflict as the natural state of human affairs.

By the time all this became unmistakably obvious to the liberal powers, by the time they realized that they were dealing with people who didn't think as they did, by the time they grasped that nothing short of surrender would avoid conflict and that giving the aggressors even part of what they demanded—Manchuria, Indochina, Czechoslovakia—only strengthened them without satisfying them, it was too late to avoid precisely the world war that Britain, France, the U.S. and others had desperately tried to prevent.

This searing experience—not just World War II but also the failed effort to satisfy those who couldn't be satisfied—shaped U.S. policy in the postwar era. For the generations that shared this experience, it imposed a new and different sense of realism about the nature of humankind and the international system. Hopes for a new era of peace were tempered.

American leaders and the American public generally if regretfully accepted the inescapable and tragic reality of power. They adopted the posture of armed liberalism. They built unimaginably destructive weapons by the thousands. They deployed hundreds of thousands of troops overseas, in the heart of Europe and along the rim of East Asia, to serve as forward deterrents to aggression. They fought wars in distant and largely unknown lands, sometimes foolishly and sometimes ineffectively but always with the idea—almost certainly correct—that failure to act against aggressors would only invite further aggression.

In general, except for a brief bout of fatalism under President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, they were disinclined to assuage or even acknowledge the grievances of those who opposed them. (President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the architects of armed liberalism, never had much interest in bargaining with the Soviets, while President Ronald Reagan was interested chiefly in bargaining over the terms of their surrender.)

Behind the actions of the U.S. architects of containment lay the belief, based on hard experience, that other peoples couldn't always be counted on to value what the liberal world valued—prosperity, human rights or even peace—and therefore the liberal world had to be constantly on its guard, well-armed and well-prepared against the next stirring of the non-liberal, atavistic urges that were a permanent feature of humankind.

How much easier it was to maintain this tragic vigilance while the illiberal, conflict-based ideology of communism reigned across more than half of the Eurasian continent—and how much harder has it been to sustain that vigilance since the fall of communism seemingly ushered in a new era of universal liberalism, and with it the prospect, finally, of a Kantian peace in a world dominated by democracy.

For a time in the 1990s, while the generations of World War II and the early Cold War survived, the old lessons still guided policy. President George H.W. Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, sent half a million American troops to fight thousands of miles away for no other reason than to thwart aggression and restore a desert kingdom that had been invaded by its tyrant neighbor. Kuwait enjoyed no security guarantee with the U.S.; the oil wells on its lands would have been equally available to the West if operated by Iraq; and the 30-year-old emirate ruled by the al-Sabah family had less claim to sovereign nationhood than Ukraine has today. Nevertheless, as Mr. Bush later recalled, "I wanted no appeasement."

A little more than a decade later, however, the U.S. is a changed country. Because of the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, to suggest sending even a few thousand troops to fight anywhere for any reason is almost unthinkable. The most hawkish members of Congress don't think it safe to argue for a ground attack on the Islamic State or for a NATO troop presence in Ukraine. There is no serious discussion of reversing the cuts in the defense budget, even though the strategic requirements of defending U.S. allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East have rarely been more manifest while America's ability to do so has rarely been more in doubt.

But Americans, their president and their elected representatives have accepted this gap between strategy and capability with little comment—except by those who would abandon the strategy. It is as if, once again, Americans believe their disillusionment with the use of force somehow means that force is no longer a factor in international affairs.

In the 1930s, this illusion was dispelled by Germany and Japan, whose leaders and publics very much believed in the utility of military power. Today, as the U.S. seems to seek its escape from power, others are stepping forward, as if on cue, to demonstrate just how effective raw power really can be.

Once again, they are people who never accepted the liberal world's definition of progress and modernity and who don't share its hierarchy of values. They are not driven primarily by economic considerations. They have never put their faith in the power of soft power, never believed that world opinion (no matter how outraged) could prevent successful conquest by a determined military. They are undeterred by their McDonald's. They still believe in the old-fashioned verities of hard power, at home and abroad. And if they are not met by a sufficient hard-power response, they will prove that, yes, there is such a thing as a military solution.

This lesson won't be lost on others who wield increasing power in other parts of the world and who, like Vladimir Putin's autocratic Russia and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's fanatical Islamic State, have grievances of their own. In the 1930s, when things began to go bad, they went very bad very quickly. Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931 exposed the hollow shell that was the League of Nations—a lesson acted upon by Hitler and Mussolini in the four years that followed. Then Germany's military successes in Europe emboldened Japan to make its move in East Asia on the not unreasonable assumption that Britain and the U.S. would be too distracted and overstretched to respond. The successive assaults of the illiberal aggressors, and the successive failures of the liberal powers, thus led to a cascade of disasters.

The wise men and women of our own time insist that this history is irrelevant. They tell us, when they are not announcing America's irrevocable decline, that our adversaries are too weak to pose a real threat, even as they pile victory upon victory. Russia is a declining power, they argue. But then, Russia has been declining for 400 years. Can declining powers not wreak havoc? Does it help us to know that, in retrospect, Japan lacked the wealth and power to win the war it started in 1941?

Let us hope that those who urge calm are right, but it is hard to avoid the impression that we have already had our 1931. As we head deeper into our version of the 1930s, we may be quite shocked, just as our forebears were, at how quickly things fall apart.

This piece was originally published by Wall Street Journal.

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at a joint meeting of Congress. His address sparked an intense debate among U.S. and Israeli lawmakers over the protocol issues raised by the invitation to speak, which came from the Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives without consultation with the Obama White House, as well as the substance of the address — a broadside against Obama’s Iran policy — and its timing during the final days of a closely contested Israeli election.

Brookings scholars weighed in on the debate, through blog posts, op-eds and the media. These include:

Fellow Natan Sachs explained why Netanyahu’s speech was so controversial.  "Israelis, by and large, don't like it when their prime minister quarrels with the United States," Sachs told Vox. "For most voters, especially in the core base on the right and I think center right, here's Bibi doing something that opposition leaders cannot do: speak the way he does with his English and this reception from Americans.” Also read Sachs' blog post on the electoral implications of the speech as well as his Haaretz op-ed with recommendations for Israeli and American strategy toward the Iran nuclear talks.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Center for Middle East Policy (CMEP) at Brookings, appeared on Charlie Rose following the speech, and said, “I think the speech was very effective, as a speech, particularly at the end when Netanyahu was really playing to his domestic audience and political base more than anyone…I think that’s probably the video clip the Likud will be playing in  ads as the campaign winds down.”

Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami looked at poll results examined U.S. public opinion related to Netanyahu’s speech. "Among Democrats, those holding favorable views of the Israeli prime minister declined from 25 percent in November to 16 percent in February, and among Independents from 21 percent to 14 percent. Correspondingly, unfavorable views increased from 22 to 26 percent among Democrats, and from 14 to 21 percent among Independents," he wrote in Foreign Policy.

A New York Times editorial examining Netanyahu's speech discussed American public opinion on the Iran nuclear deal, and cited Telhami’s poll results “show[ing] that a clear majority of Americans — including 61 percent of Republicans and 66 percent of Democrats — favor an agreement.” Telhami also organized and moderated the annual Sadat Forum earlier this week, featuring a discussion on the Iranian nuclear issue and the Netanyahu speech with Brookings Distinguished Fellow Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Matthews, and CMEP Senior Fellow Suzanne Maloney.

According to Ambassador Martin Indyk, who has served as director of the Foreign Policy program and was just named Brookings Executive Vice President, Netanyahu remained against any agreement. “He was pretty clear about his opposition to the deal,” Indyk told Foreign Policy. “I believe he wants to sink it, not modify it.”

Prior to the speech, Robert Einhorn, senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Intelligence and Security and the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Initiative, wrote an op-ed published in the International New York Times discussing Netanyahu’s angle on the Iran talks. After Netanyahu’s speech, Einhorn appeared on Christiane Amanpour and argued that the deal was “not an ideal deal, but it’s a good deal, and one that’s better than any realistic alternative.” Einhorn, who formerly participated in the negotiations with Iran as a senior State Department official, was quoted in coverage of the speech published in the Washington Post and Politico, among others.

In an op-ed on U.S. News and World Report, Maloney argued that when it comes to a deal with Iran, “The ever-present illusion of a more perfect deal is not worth risking an imperfect, but minimally sufficient, bargain.”

With the prospect of a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 looking increasingly likely and with the caveat that, “as always, Iran’s future behavior is hard to predict because its motives going into the nuclear negotiations are unclear and its decision-making is always opaque,” Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack examined the possible scenarios and offered his thoughts on whether a nuclear deal would likely make Iran more or less aggressive — or neither. 

Bruce Riedel, senior fellow and director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, wrote about Netanyahu’s address in contrast to Saudi Arabia’s diplomacy. “As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plays center stage at the Congress this week to slam the Iran deal-in-the-making, the Saudis are playing a more subtle game,” Riedel wrote. “Iran is priority number one. It's more than just the nuclear issue.” The pot was also quoted in a Bloomberg News analysis of Gulf reaction to the state of play on Iran.

Last week, William Galston, who holds Brookings' Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, wrote about the implications of Netanyahu’s speech, warning that “[t]he last thing he should want is a negative reception in the United States that fuels Israeli swing voters’ doubts about his capacity to manage Israel’s most important relationship.” And in his Washington Post column last week, Senior Fellow Robert Kagan argued that “there is no doubt that the precedent being set is a bad one” and regretted that “bringing a foreign leader before Congress to challenge a U.S. president’s policies…will be just another weapon in our bitter partisan struggle.”

And finally, for anyone wanting to see what our scholars were tweeting during Netanyahu’s speech, and reaction afterward, here’s a round-up.

The world order that was created in the aftermath of World War II has produced immense benefits for peoples across the planet. The past 70 years have seen an unprecedented growth in prosperity, lifting billions out of poverty. Democratic government, once rare, has spread to over 100 nations around the world, on every continent, for people of all races and religions. And, although the period has been marked by war and suffering as well, peace among the great powers has been preserved. There has been no recurrence of the two devastating world wars of the first half of the 20th century.

Today, however, that liberal order is being challenged by a variety of forces—by powerful authoritarian governments and anti-liberal fundamentalist movements, as well as by long-term shifts in the global economy and changes in the physical environment. The questions we face are whether this liberal world order is worth defending, and whether it is capable of surviving the present challenges. We believe the answer to both questions is an emphatic “yes.”

To say that a “liberal” world order is worth defending is, of course, a declaration on behalf of a certain set of principles—a belief that the rights of the individual are primary, that it is the responsibility of governments to protect those rights and that democratic government, in particular, offers the best chance for human dignity, justice and freedom. This is not a universally held view. The leaders of some nations and more than a few people around the world disagree on this hierarchy of values.

There is, and always has been, a division about how nations should be governed, and about the differences in and between democratic and autocratic forms, the role of religion and the connections to economic structures. While recognizing that these differences exist and that every structure has its failings, the authors of this report are confident in their conviction that the liberal world order offers the best hope for meeting human aspirations, both material and spiritual, and for calling forth the very best in people across the world.

To strengthen and preserve this order, however, will require a renewal of American leadership in the international system. The present world order has been forged by many hands and peoples, but the role of the United States in both shaping and defending it has been critical. American military power, the dynamism of the U.S. economy, and the great number of close alliances and friendships that the United States enjoys with other powers and peoples have provided the critical architecture in which this liberal world order has flourished. A weakening of America’s commitment or its capabilities, or both, would invariably lead to its collapse.

But in recent years, many have come to doubt America’s ability to continue playing this role. Only seven years ago, pundits were talking of a “post-American world” with a declining United States and a remarkable “rise of the rest”. These days, however, that prognosis appears to have been at least premature. The United States has substantially recovered from the Great Recession, while the once-heralded “rise of the rest” has stalled.

A new foundation for an effective U.S. foreign policy for a new international environment needs to be established, but it should be recognized that the United States is not omnipotent and faces limitations in what it can do. The emphasis must be on taking advantages of American comparative advantages in certain key areas, doing what the United States does best, and in a way that reflects what those around the world want and need from America.

To this end, this paper focuses on four baskets of policies—Strengthening and Adapting the Liberal Economic Order; Strengthening the International Security Order; Taking Advantage of the Energy Revolution; and Playing to America’s Strengths in Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

A key task for American political leaders and policy advocates will be to demonstrate and explain 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. By looking at the whole picture, the importance of the individual strands of policy will be clearer and therefore easier to sell.

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• Strengthening the liberal world order

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

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• Economic opportunities and the liberal international order