As every good teacher knows, education is not just about academics. It is about broadening horizons and discovering passions. (The root of education is the Latin e ducere, meaning “to draw out.”) From this perspective, extra-curricular activities count for a great deal. But as Robert Putnam highlights in his book Our Kids, there are growing class gaps in the availability of music, sports, and other non-classroom activities.

Fewer field trips?

Schools under pressure may also cut back on field trips outside the school walls to parks, zoos, theaters, or museums. In the 2008-09 school year, 9 percent of school administrators reported eliminating field trips, according to the annual surveys by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). That figure rose through the recession:

Just 12 percent of the administrators surveyed about 2015-16 said they had brought back their field trips to pre-recession levels. Museums around the country report hosting fewer students, from Los Angeles and Sarasota, to Minneapolis, and Columbia, Missouri. None of this is definitive proof of a decline in field trips, since we are relying on a single survey question. But it suggests a downward trend in recent years.

Museums help with science tests

If some children are missing out on field trips, does it matter? They may be nice treats, but do they have any real impact, especially when they take time away from traditional learning? There is some evidence that they do.

Middle school children with the chance to go on a field trip score higher on science tests, according to a 2015 study by Emilyn Ruble Whitesell.

She studied New York City middle schools with teachers in Urban Advantage, a program that gives science teachers additional training and resources—as well as vouchers for visiting museums. In some schools, the Urban Advantage teachers used the field trip vouchers more than others. Whitesell exploits this difference in her study, and finds that attending a school with at least 0.25 trips per student increased 8^th grade scores by 0.026 standard deviations (SD). The odds of a student passing the exam improved by 1.2 percentage points. There were bigger effects for poor students, who saw a 0.043 SD improvement in test scores, and 1.9 percentage point increase in exam pass rates.

Art broadens young minds

Students visiting an art museum show statistically significant increases in critical thinking ability and more open-minded attitudes, according to a randomized evaluation of student visits to the Crystal Bridges Museum in northwest Arkansas. One example: those who visited the museum more often agreed with statements like: “I appreciate hearing views different from my own” and “I think people can have different opinions about the same thing.” The effects are modest. But the intervention (a single day at the museum) is, too. Again, there were larger effects for poor students:

All this needs to be put in perspective. In comparison with the challenge of closing academic gaps and quality teaching, field trips are small beer. But schools create citizens as well as undergraduates and employees. It matters, then, if we have allowed field trips to become a casualty of the great recession.

Feminism needs fathers. Unless and until men and women share the responsibilities of parenting equally, gender parity in the labor market will remain out of reach.

As Isabel Sawhill and I argued in our piece on “Men’s Lib” for the New York Times, “The gender revolution has been a one-sided effort. We have not pushed hard enough to put men in traditionally female roles—that is where our priority should lie now.”

An important step towards gender equality is then the provision of paternity leave, or at least forms of parental leave that can be taken up by fathers as well as mothers. Right now the U.S. is one of the few advanced nations with no dedicated leave for fathers:

But there are reasons to be hopeful. More companies are offering paternity leave or, like Amazon, a “leave bank” that parents can share between them. Hillary Clinton is promising to push for paid family leave if she wins in November. Recent studies of California’s paid leave scheme, introduced in 2004, suggest that there are significant benefits for fathers.

The number of fathers taking leave while the mother is in paid work rose by 50 percent, according to an analysis of the American Community Survey by Ann Bartel of Colombia and her colleagues.

Fathers of sons are more likely to take leave than those with daughters, suggesting that parents particularly value father-son bonding. Fathers were also very much more likely to take leave if they worked in occupations with a high share of female workers, indicating that workplace culture is also a big factor.

Men are more likely to take leave when it is exclusively available to them—with a so-called “use it or lose it” design—and when the period of leave is paid. The Quebec Parental Insurance Plan, for instance, which offers fathers three to five weeks at home with a child, resulted in a 250 percent increase father’s participation in parental leave.

Of course, there are costs. Paid leave has to be funded: either through payroll taxes (as most Democrats including Senator Kirsten Gillibrand want), taxes on the wealthy (Clinton’s preferred approach), or tax breaks for firms (as Marco Rubio has suggested).

So what are the upsides? Among the potential benefits from paternity leave are:

• A more equal division of labor in terms of parenting and childcare
• More equal sharing of domestic labor, including housework
• Less stress on the family
• Closer father-infant bonding
• Higher pay for mothers (according to a study in Sweden, future income for new mothers rises by 7 percent on average for every month of paternity leave taken by the father)

Gender roles have evolved rapidly in recent decades, especially in terms of the place and status of women. But the evolution of our mental models of masculinity, and especially fatherhood, has been slower. Helping fathers to take time to care for their children will help children, families, and women. Fathers need more than a day.

Like many Brits, I’m reeling. Everyone knew that the "Brexit" referendum was going to be close. But deep down I think many of us assumed that the vote would be to remain in the European Union. David Cameron had no realistic choice but to announce that he will step down.

Mr. Cameron’s fall can be traced back to a promise he made in the 2010 election to cap the annual flow of migrants into the U.K. at less than 100,000, "no ifs, no buts."Membership in the EU means free movement of labor, so this was an impossible goal to reach through direct policy. I served in the coalition government that emerged from the 2010 election, and this uncomfortable fact was clear from the outset. I don’t share the contents of briefings and meetings from my time in government (I think it makes good government harder if everyone is taking notes for memoirs), but my counterpart in the government, Mr. Cameron’s head of strategy, Steve Hilton, went public in the Daily Mail just before this week’s vote.

Steve recalled senior civil servants telling us bluntly that the pledged target could not be reached. He rightly fulminated about the fact that this meant we were turning away much more skilled and desirable potential immigrants from non-EU countries in a bid to bring down the overall number. What he didn’t say is that the target, based on an arbitrary figure, was a foolish pledge in the first place.

Mr. Cameron was unable to deliver on his campaign pledge, and immigration to the U.K. has been running at about three times that level. This fueled anger at the establishment for again breaking a promise, as well as anger at the EU. In an attempt to contain his anti-European right wing, Mr. Cameron made another rash promise: to hold a referendum.

The rest, as they say, is history. And now, so is he.

Immigration played a role in the Brexit campaign, though it seems that voters may not have made a clear distinction between EU and non-EU inward movement. Still, Thursday’s vote was, at heart, a plebiscite on what it means to British. Our national identity has always been of a quieter kind than, say the American one. Attempts by politicians to institute the equivalent of a Flag Day or July Fourth, to teach citizenship in schools, or to animate a “British Dream” have generally been laughed out of court. Being British is an understated national identity. Indeed, understatement is a key part of that identity.

Many Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish feel a much stronger affinity to their home nation within the U.K. than they do to Great Britain. Many Londoners look at the rest of England and wonder how they are in the same political community. These splits were obvious Thursday.

Identity politics has tended in recent years to be of the progressive kind, advancing the cause of ethnic minorities, lesbians and gays, and so on. In both the U.K. and the U.S. a strongly reactionary form of identity politics is gaining strength, in part as a reaction to the cosmopolitan, liberal, and multicultural forms that have been dominant. This is identity politics of a negative kind, defined not by what you are for but what you are against. A narrow majority of my fellow Brits just decided that at the very least, being British means not being European. It was a defensive, narrow, backward-looking attempt to reclaim something that many felt had been lost. But the real losses are yet to come.

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire.

The much anticipated Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party’s 18^th Congress closed its four-day session last Tuesday. A relatively bland initial communiqué was followed today by a detailed decision document spelling out major initiatives including a relaxation of the one-child policy, the elimination of the repressive “re-education through labor” camps, and a host of reforms to the taxation and state-owned enterprise systems. Today’s blizzard of specific reform pledges allays earlier concerns that the new government led by party chief Xi Jinping and premier Li Keqiang would fail to set major policy goals. But is this enough to answer the three biggest questions analysts have had since Xi and  Li ascended a year ago?

Those questions are, first, do Xi and his six colleagues on the Politburo standing committee have an accurate diagnosis of China’s structural economic and social ailments? Second, do they have sensible plans for addressing these problems? And third, do they have the political muscle to push reforms past entrenched resistance by big state owned enterprises (SOEs), tycoons, local government officials and other interest groups whose comfortable positions would be threatened by change? Until today, the consensus answers to the first two questions were “we’re not really sure,” and to the third, “quite possibly not.”

These concerns are misplaced. It is clear that the full 60-point “Decision on Several Major Questions About Deepening Reform”[1] encompasses an ambitious agenda to restructure the roles of the government and the market. Combined with other actions from Xi’s first year in office – notably a surprisingly bold anti-corruption campaign – the reform program reveals Xi Jinping as a leader far more powerful and visionary than his predecessor Hu Jintao. He aims to redefine the basic functions of market and government, and in so doing establish himself as China’s most significant leader since Deng Xiaoping. Moreover, he is moving swiftly to establish the bureaucratic machinery that will enable him to overcome resistance and achieve his aims. It remains to be seen whether Xi can deliver on these grand ambitions, and whether his prescription will really prove the cure for China’s mounting social and economic ills. But one thing is for sure: Xi cannot be faulted for thinking too small.

Main objective: get the government out of resource allocation

The four main sources we have so far on Xi’s reform strategy are the Plenum’s Decision, the summary communiqué issued right after the plenum’s close,[2] an explanatory note on the decision by Xi,[3] and a presumably authoritative interview with the vice office director of the Party’s Financial Leading Small Group, Yang Weimin, published in the People’s Daily on November 15, which adds much useful interpretive detail.[4] Together they make clear that the crucial parts of the Decision are as follows:

• China is still at a stage where economic development is the main objective.
• The core principle of economic reform is the “decisive” (决定性) role of market forces in allocating resources (previous Party decisions gave the market a “basic” (基础）role in resource allocation.
• By implication, the government must retreat from its current powerful role in allocating resources. Instead, it will be redirected to five basic functions: macroeconomic management, market regulation, public service delivery, supervision of society (社会管理), and environmental protection.

In his interview, Yang Weimin draws a direct comparison between this agenda and the sweeping market reforms that emerged after Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992, claiming that the current reform design is a leap forward comparable to Deng’s, and far more significant than the reform programs of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

This a very bold and possibly exaggerated claim. But the basic reform idea – giving the market a “decisive” role in resource allocation – is potentially very significant, and should not be dismissed as mere semantics. Over the last 20 years China has deregulated most of its product markets, and the competition in these markets has generated enormous economic gains. But the allocation of key inputs – notably capital, energy, and land – has not been fully deregulated, and government at all levels has kept a gigantic role in deciding who should get those inputs and at what price. The result is that too many of these inputs have gone to well-connected state-owned actors at too low a price. The well-known distortions of China’s economy – excessive reliance on infrastructure spending, and wasteful investment in excessive industrial capacity – stem largely from the distortions in input prices.

Xi’s program essentially calls for the government to retreat from its role in allocating these basic resources. If achieved, this would be a big deal: it would substantially boost economic efficiency, but at the cost of depriving the central government of an important tool of macro-economic management, and local governments of treasured channels of patronage. As a counterpart to this retreat from direct market interference, the Decision spells out the positive roles of government that must be strengthened: macro management and regulation, public service delivery, management of social stability, and environmental protection. In short, the vision seems to be to move China much further toward an economy where the government plays a regulatory, rather than a directly interventionist role.

Keep the SOEs, but make them more efficient

Before we get too excited about a “neo-liberal” Xi administration, though, it’s necessary to take account of the massive state-owned enterprise (SOE) complex. While Xi proposes that the government retreat from its role in manipulating the prices of key inputs, it is quite clear that the government’s large role as the direct owner of key economic assets will remain. While the Decision contains a number of specific SOE reform proposals (such as raising their dividend payout ratio from the current 10-15% to 30%, and an encouragement of private participation in state-sector investment projects), it retains a commitment to a very large SOE role in economic development. The apparent lack of a more aggressive state-sector reform or privatization program has distressed many economists, who agree that China’s declining productivity growth and exploding debt are both substantially due to the bloated SOEs, which gobble up a disproportionate share of bank credit and other resources but deliver ever lower returns on investment.

The communiqué and the Decision both make clear that state ownership must still play a “leading role” in the economy, and it is a very safe bet that when he retires in 2022, Xi will leave behind the world’s biggest collection of state-owned enterprises. But while privatization is off the table, subjecting SOEs to much more intense competition and tighter regulation appears to be a big part of Xi’s agenda. In his interview, Yang Weimin stresses that the Plenum decision recognizes the equal importance of both state and non-state ownership – a shift from previous formulations which always gave primacy to the state sector. Moreover, other reports suggest that the mandate of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (Sasac), which oversees the 100 or so big centrally-controlled SOE groups, will shift from managing state assets to managing state capital.[5] This shift of emphasis is significant: in recent years SOEs have fortified their baronies by building up huge mountains of assets, with little regard to the financial return on those assets (which appears to be deteriorating rapidly). Forcing SOEs to pay attention to their capital rather than their assets implies a much stronger emphasis on efficiency.

This approach is consistent with a long and generally successful tradition in China’s gradual march away from a planned economy. The key insight of economic reformers including Xi is that the bedrock of a successful modern economy is not private ownership, as many Western free-market economists believe, but effective competition. If the competitive environment for private enterprises is improved – by increasing their access to capital, land and energy, and by eliminating regulatory and local-protectionist barriers to investment – marginal SOEs

must either improve their efficiency or disappear (often by absorption into a larger, more profitable SOE, rather than through outright bankruptcy). As a result, over time the economic role of SOEs is eroded and overall economic efficiency improves, without the need to fight epic and costly political battles over privatization.

Can Xi deliver?

Even if we accept this view of Xi as an ambitious, efficiency-minded economic reformer, it’s fair to be skeptical that he can deliver on his grand design. These reforms are certain to be opposed by powerful forces: SOEs, local governments, tycoons, and other beneficiaries of the old system. All these interest groups are far more powerful than in the late 1990s, when Zhu Rongji launched his dramatic reforms to the state enterprise system. What are the odds that Xi can overcome this resistance?

Actually, better than even. The Plenum approved the formation of two high-level Party bodies: a “leading small group” to coordinate reform, and a State Security Commission to oversee the nation’s pervasive security apparatus. At first glance this seems a classic bureaucratic shuffle – appoint new committees, instead of actually doing something. But in the Chinese context, these bodies are potentially quite significant.

In the last years of the Hu Jintao era, reforms were stymied by two entrenched problems: turf battles between different ministries, and interference by security forces under a powerful and conservative boss, Zhou Yongkang. Neither Hu nor his premier Wen Jiabao was strong enough to ride herd on the squabbling ministers, or to quash the suffocating might of the security faction. By establishing these two high-level groups (presumably led by himself or a close ally), Xi is making clear that he will be the arbiter of all disputes, and that security issues will be taken seriously but not allowed to obstruct crucial economic or governance reforms.

The costs of crossing Xi have also been made clear by a determined anti-corruption campaign which over the last six months has felled a bevy of senior executives at the biggest SOE (China National Petroleum Corporation), the head of the SOE administrative agency, and a mayor of Nanjing infamous for his build-at-all-costs development strategy. Many of the arrested people were closely aligned with Zhou Yongkang. The message is obvious: Xi is large and in charge, and if you get on the wrong side of him or his policies you will not be saved by the patronage of another senior leader or a big state company. Xi’s promptness in dispatching his foes is impressive: both of his predecessors waited until their third full year in office to take out crucial enemies on corruption charges.

In short, there is plenty of evidence that Xi has an ambitious agenda for reforming China’s economic and governance structures, and the will and political craft to achieve many of his aims. His program may not satisfy market fundamentalists, and he certainly offers no hope for those who would like to see China become more democratic. But it is likely to be effective in sustaining the nation’s economic growth, and enabling the Communist Party to keep a comfortable grip on power.

Editor's Note: Arthur Kroeber is the Beijing-based managing director of Gavekal Dragonomics, a global macroeconomic research firm, and a non-resident fellow of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center. A different version of this article appears on www.foreignpolicy.com.

Event Information

Around the world today, there are more than 15.5 million refugees and over 28.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by conflict, in addition to some 32.4 million displaced in 2012 from their homes due to natural disasters. These displacement crises are not simply humanitarian concerns, but fundamental development challenges. Forced migration flows are rooted in development failures, and can undermine the pursuit of development goals at local, national and regional levels.

Linking humanitarian responses to displacement with longer-term development support and planning is not a new concern. Beginning in 1999, for example, the “Brookings Process” – under the leadership of Sadako Ogata and James Wolfensohn – sought to bridge humanitarian relief and development assistance in post-conflict situations. But the challenge remains unresolved, and has acquired new urgency as displacement situations are becoming more protracted, and situations such as the Syrian crisis show no signs of resolution.

The Brookings Global Economy and Development Program and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement held a roundtable on these issues on May 14, 2013 with Sadako Ogata, former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, former Director of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Megan Bradley, Fellow with the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, facilitated the roundtable, which followed Chatham House rules.

The roundtable addressed several key topics including:

• The relevance of the concept of human security to addressing displacement and development challenges
• Displacement as a development challenge in fragile states
• Protracted displacement
• Contrasts in the approaches and processes adopted by humanitarian and development actors

The event report provides a brief overview of the discussion.

Event Materials

• Brookings IDP Roundtable with Sadako Ogata May 14 2013

On Valentine’s Day, even a dismal scientist’s mind turns to love. It’s a powerful feeling, with a value that goes far beyond the millions of chocolate boxes and bouquets that will be delivered this Feb. 14.

Survey data from the Gallup Organization, where Justin works as a senior scientist, allow us to take a uniquely deep look at the state of love around the world. In 2006 and 2007, Gallup went to 136 countries and asked people, “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?” It’s the largest such dataset ever collected.

The good news: Ours is a loving world. On a typical day, about 70 percent of people worldwide reported a love-filled day. In the U.S., 81 percent felt love, as did 81 percent of Canadians and 79 percent of Italians. Germany and the U.K. were less loving, with slightly less than 3 in 4 people reporting feeling loved. Surprisingly, the same was true of the supposedly romantic French. And if you’re in Japan, please hug someone: Only 59 percent of Japanese said they had experienced love the previous day.

Across the world as a whole, the widowed and divorced are the least likely to experience love. Married folks feel more of it than singles. People who live together out of wedlock report getting even more love than married spouses -- an interesting factoid for conservatives worried about the effects of cohabitation. Women get more love than men, particularly in the U.S.

Young Love

If you’re young and not feeling all that loved this Valentine’s Day, don’t despair: You’re not alone. Young adults are among the least likely to experience love. It gets better with age, ultimately peaking in the mid-30s or mid-40s in most countries before fading again into the twilight years.

Money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience the feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling your income is associated with being about 4 percentage points more likely to be loved. Perhaps having more money makes it easier to find time for love.

That said, the data aren’t necessarily telling us that money can buy you love. It’s possible that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.

What’s perhaps more striking is how little money matters on a global level. True, the populations of richer countries are, on average, slightly more likely to feel loved than those of poorer countries. But love is still abundant in the poorer countries: People in Rwanda and the Philippines enjoyed the highest love ratios, with more than 9 in 10 people providing positive responses. Armenia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, with economic output per person in the middle of the range, all had love ratios of less than 4 in 10.

Fun facts aside, we think there is a deeper and more consequential purpose to the study of love. Think about what love means to you. To us, it means caring about others and being cared for. Love is valuable, even if it is absent from both our national accounts and our political discourse.

In the language of economics, love is a form of insurance. It involves bonds of reciprocity that provide support when we’re feeling down, when we’re sick and when times are tough.

More broadly, love has the power to mitigate the free-rider and moral hazard problems associated with social (and private) insurance. Bailing out a bank might encourage executives to take bigger risks in the future, but helping loved ones down on their luck has fewer incentive problems because our loved ones typically care for us in return. Such mutually beneficial relationships make us all more resilient in times of crisis. This is why the household remains one of the most powerful institutions for organizing not just families but also our economic lives.

If we can find more love for our fellow citizens, our society will function better. Hard as this may be to achieve in an era when trust in government, business and one another is low, it’s worth the effort. When you expand the boundaries of trust and reciprocity, you expand the boundaries of what is possible.

Note: This content was first published on Bloomberg View on February 13, 2013.

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

Event Information

With ongoing crises in Ukraine, Syria, and other regions of the world, U.S. global leadership is arguably as critical now as it has ever been. However, many question how the United States should exercise its leadership, what foreign policy agenda it should pursue, and how it should configure its military and security agencies going forward. In a recent speech at West Point, President Obama laid out his foreign policy agenda for the remainder of his presidency. While the Obama Administration will pursue the president’s agenda as laid out at West Point, others in Washington have different views on how best to manage U.S. foreign policy going forward.

On June 11, the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings will host Senator John McCain (R-AZ), former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, for an address on the future of U.S. foreign and security policy. The address will be introduced by Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of Research for Foreign Policy Michael O’Hanlon, and the discussion following the Senator’s address will be moderated by Senior Fellow Robert Kagan.

After the program, Senator McCain will take audience questions.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #McCain

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.

Event Information

John Quincy Adams famously said that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” A diplomat, secretary of state, as well as the sixth president, Adams is often described as a “realist,” and as the founder of American foreign policy realism. But did his own policy choices square with that doctrine of restraint? Recently, President Obama has described his own views in explicitly realist terms; Hillary Clinton is widely viewed as a more ardent believer in the active use of American power; and the Republican candidates seem more eager to build walls than to engage the outside world.

On April 11, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS) hosted a discussion between Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan and James Traub, columnist and contributor at foreignpolicy.com, lecturer of foreign policy at New York University, and now the author of the new book, “John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit” (Basic Books, 2016). Kagan and Traub debated whether Adams was a foreign policy realist and whether his approach to foreign policy can still inform the policy choices facing the United States today. Brookings Fellow Thomas Wright, director of IOS, moderated the discussion.

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• Was John Quincy Adams a realist? A debate

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• Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20160411_john_quincy_adams_transcript

Before the international Urban Age conference in Berlin, Bruce Katz argued that if cities are the organizing units of the new global order, then a broad range of policies and practices at the city, national, and supra-national levels need to be reevaluated and overhauled around new spatial realities and paradigms.

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Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey's new Prime Minister, is a familiar name in Western capitals. It is also a name that generates mixed feelings among his peers.

What most agree is that he is was an incredibly ambitious and hardworking foreign minister, always willing to travel wherever necessary, even when the outcome of such visits generated little concrete results. There is also consensus about his willingness to lecture his counterparts. He probably believed that his academic background and the relative ignorance of his counterparts entitled him to do so. But in most cases he had a tendency to forget that he was dealing with fellow foreign ministers and not students of history. This tendency generated only a begrudging sense of respect, even among his most graceful and objective peers.

It is also clear for people who knew him when he was an academic that politics has changed him. In the eyes of most his students, he was a reluctant policymaker when he began his political life. He often mentioned that his real goal was to go back to academia, where he could once again enjoy the intellectual life of an analytical thinker who can keep a healthy distance from events. Yet, in a matter of few years he discovered the irresistible pull of power. It was maybe "Kissinger syndrome" — realizing that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Perhaps most important is the question of Davutoğlu's ideology. There are numerous articles written about this question, and the emerging consensus is that he is an incurable idealist. It may be reductionist to argue that he is an Islamist, but it is undeniably true that he has focused on parts of the world where Muslims are facing injustice with much enthusiasm. Although he rejects being labeled neo-Ottoman, it is also undeniably true that he speaks of Ottoman tradition, tolerance and governance with great nostalgia. As most of his students, he is very critical of the West and its Orientalism. His years in Malaysia as a professor bring a colorful interpretation to his critic of colonialism and imperialism. Yet, what he often fails to realize is that in his criticisms of the West, he often repeats the methodological fallacy of Orientalism. The result is what can be best labeled "Occidentalism" — a tendency to generalize and construct a Western civilization with a prejudice similar to the one displayed by Orientalists.

Finally, there is the issue of missing modesty. Although Davutoğlu appears to be very modest and unpretentious, he often displays a stubborn resistance in admitting mistakes. This is perhaps a defense mechanism in dealing with the press. But combined with his unabashed sense of idealism, his reluctance to recognize failure and to see the world as it is rather than how it should be is very troubling for a policymaker. The reluctance to admit policy failures creates two major problems: a disconnect from reality and an inability for course-correction.

In short, there is a lot of ambivalence towards Davutoğlu in the West. He is coming to his new position with a lot of baggage and the looming shadow of a powerful president. Newly elected President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wanted someone who would follow his lead without hesitation. His choice speaks volumes about Davutoğlu's new persona and about how much he has changed since the early days of his political career.

This article was originally published in Today's Zaman.