Protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Egypt, February 25, 2011 (Joel Carillet)

There is a narrative at work. Man has evolved from a savage uncivilized species to a level of sophistication which is today best exemplified by the Western world. This view of history is linear, it allows only for Hegelian progress and it is also ethnocentric since it makes Europe and America the leaders of human progress. Huntington’s “Western civilization” concept reflects this view.

When large political upheavals take place, most of the commentariat resorts in a Pavlovian fashion to this narrative to explain them. Thus is the case with all the series of revolutions since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Velvet Revolutions, the color revolutions and now the Arab spring are all framed as being just one more step in the world’s adaptation to the Western concept of society and civilization. But are they?

If that were the case would they all happen to happen in Europe’s periphery? We have not seen dominos fall in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia or in the Far East.

The truth as British historian Timothy Garton Ash puts it is that:

One might suggest that the best chances are to be found in semiauthoritarian states that depend to a significant degree, politically, economically and, so to speak, psychologically, on more democratic ones—and most especially when the foreign states with the most passive influence or active leverage on them are Western democracies.

NATO states gave their best efforts to influence the elites of the Central and Eastern European states during the Cold War. Propaganda and subversion activities aside, even if very few of these intellectuals actually visited the West, Western books and culture were predominant in the world and therefore also to a degree, behind the Iron Curtain. It is no surprise that Western influence continued to be felt in spite of Soviet censure since that had always been the case prior to the Cold War. Russian, Polish or Serb elites had always drifted westwards in search of inspiration and that did not change with the old continent’s division in ideological blocs.

The same holds true for the color revolutions in Russia’s “Near Abroad.”

What to make of the Arab spring? Unfortunately the same. It is not just a matter of European neighbors being demographically bigger and economically stronger, it is also the fact that the international narrative is dominated by European encultured states and societies: Europeans have colonized most of the world and the cultural standard is today a socially liberal, free market economy oriented, democratically ruled nation state.

Phenomena such as brain drain and soft power only further emphasize this tendency. Where do the wealthiest and brightest Arabs study and obtain their entertainment if not in Europe and America? Sayyid Qutb sensed this very phenomenon and called it Jahiliyyah—referring to the prevalent “ignorance” prior to Islamic rule to categorize a contemporary prevalent corruption from within which hinders Islamic values.

What is important to understand is not that Western values are wrong but that they aren’t absolute. They may make sense to Westerners but not necessarily to other cultures and it is wrong to frame every political struggle as a conflict aiming at emulating the West. This has been done before by the Orientalists who analyzed eastern cultures only by holding them to a Western standard.

The consequence of this narrative is a growing décalage between the perception of reality and reality itself. Al Jazeera is a perfect example of a corporate culture which is embedded with graduates of European and American universities and which covered the Arab spring—and the terminology here is telling—as a struggle for democracy and liberalism, as if the values of the nonsecular protestors who prayed in Tahrir Square were reason for shame.

The mishaps of this décalage are evident in all of these cycles of revolution with socially conservative and illiberal parties and politicians “surprisingly” emerging in Central and Eastern Europe and the Arab world. Who knew that the same people who toppled dictators were prejudiced against homosexuals and Jews? Antisemitism, Euroskepticism, homophobia or misogeny are just some of the most depressing gifts that media such as Al Azhar magazine or the Polish Radio Maria, bring us from these revolutions.

The most direct effect is counterrevolution and reactionary movements which view Western intervention and influence as intrusion in domestic affairs and turn to Moscow or Beijing for investment, trade and strategic relations.

Liberal elites are frequently the vanguard of revolutions in the West’s periphery but the people these intellectuals claim to speak for and liberate don’t often identify themselves with their Washington Consensus agendas. The Arab revolts cannot be Twitter or Facebook revolutions when most Arabs don’t use the Internet, much less in English, and they should never have been portrayed as liberal democratic revolutions when those values are indigenous only to Europe and European colonized territories.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican Party presidential hopeful, appears on NBC's Meet the Press, January 22

Newt Gingrich’s huge win in the Republican primary election in South Carolina on Saturday may have had less to do with the former House speaker’s popularity and everything to do with conservatives’ resentment of their presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

On CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Gingrich suggested that Romney lost votes in South Carolina when “people began to realize that he’d been pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-tax increase” as a governor in the northeastern state of Massachusetts between 2003 and 2007.

Romney has defended his record by pointing out that he had to work with a Democratic legislature in Massachusetts and claimed that he changed his position on abortion when he was confronted with the issue of stem cell research. As a result, he was nevertheless “way to the left of South Carolinians,” as Gingrich put it.

It’s not just that Romney is perceived as a moderate; he has failed to enthuse Republican activists for an election that many of them regard as historic. As former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour put it on Face the Nation, “Romney’s strengths are more managerial.” Gingrich, by contrast, is able to rally people with his ability to clearly and concisely articulate conservative beliefs and positions.

Gingrich described himself as a “populist conservative” on NBC’ Meet the Press and said that what “nobody in Washington or New York gets is the level of anger at the national establishment. People who are just sick and tired of being told what they’re allowed to think, what they’re allowed to say.”

This reiterated the argument that Gingrich made in his victory speech in South Carolina on Saturday night where he suggested that “the elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern” for ordinary Americans.

The American people feel that they have elites that been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American.

This sort of rhetoric tends to resonate with right wing voters who resent what they perceive as government overreach and an Obama Administration that Gingrich said last night has been a “disaster.”

It’s why conservative RedState blogger Erick Erickson observed that people were flocking to Gingrich not so much because they liked him but because they were “looking for a vessel to channel their anger with Obama and their complete disappointment with the GOP establishment which is now embodied perfectly by Romney.”

Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, now an MSNBC morning show host, insisted that Gingrich wasn’t even a conservative. “He uses this resentment to actually hide a record,” he said on Meet the Press; a record that is far from reactionary and fairly similar to Mitt Romney’s. Both previously supported an individual health insurance mandate and both previously supported emission trade legislation. Neither is particularly popular with the conservative base anymore.

The Republican establishment in Washington gave us $5 trillion of debt during the Bush era. They took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a $1 trillion deficit. They engaged in radical foreign policy, Wilsonian foreign policy. George Bush promising to end tyranny across the globe. The conservative moment is saying “no,” stop.

“Gingrich is not going to be our final choice,” Scarborough predicted. “But we’re not handing this off to Mitt Romney right now.”

Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, MSNBC, January 20

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s win in the early primary state of South Carolina on Saturday raises the prospect of a protracted primary battle, even a brokered Republican Party convention in August by which time none of the four candidates in the race may have secured enough delegates to win a majority on the first ballot.

Right wing blogger Erick Erickson raised the possibility of a brokered convention at RedState in December of last year, opining that none of the party’s contenders were “proving to be of a caliber of conservative leader we should be putting on the field to take on the socialist in the White House.”

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is widely perceived as the frontrunner and likely nominee. Compared to Newt Gingrich, who is his closest rival for the nomination, Romney, according to recent polls, would stand a better chance of beating Barack Obama in the general election. But there’s a fear, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out in National Review, that a Romney candidacy may not draw out rank and file Republicans in large enough numbers to make the November election a referendum on President Obama.

Every four years, pundits and activists talk about how cool it would be to have a brokered convention. This is the first time I can remember where people say it may be necessary.

Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, now an MSNBC morning show host, agreed on Friday when he said that “Newt is the vessel that people like Sarah Palin and others who want a brokered convention are riding right now. They want to keep this going.”

He predicted that if Gingrich gathered enough momentum to position himself as the presumptive nominee, prominent Republicans, like former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, would throw their support behind another candidate, presumably Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania who is the most socially conservative candidate among the four still running.

Texas congressman Ron Paul is another factor to be reckoned with. He won roughly 20 percent of the vote in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Although he may not do well in the Deep South, he could pose a real threat to whoever is the frontrunner in the Mountain West where conservative voters tend to be more libertarian.

Paul doesn’t seem to anticipate a third party run but he has a very committed base of supporters who may carry him onto the convention to try to influence the party platform. His delegates could tip the voting balance in favor of either Gingrich, Romney or a candidate who hasn’t participated in the primaries but emerges as a contender at the convention.

A recent change in party rules makes a brokered convention this year likelier than before. Unlike was the case in most previous primary races, delegates are now often elected on proportional bases instead of winner takes all. Florida, which votes January 31 and has fifty delegates up for grabs, is a notable exception but even they will only be bound for three ballots at the convention.

Before Super Tuesday in early March, when ten different states vote at once, among them Georgia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Virginia, just 15 percent of delegates will have been selected. The Super Tuesday votes combined pick nearly 25 percent of delegates. Large states like Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, New York and California will organize primaries between the end of March and early June. Each have huge numbers of delegates at stake which could prove decisive if Gingrich, Paul, Romney and Santorum all stay in the race beyond Super Tuesday.

If, by the time the party convenes in Tampa, Florida on August 27, there isn’t a candidate yet, there will be as many rounds of voting as is necessary to get a majority and elect a nominee. Depending on the number of ballots for which delegates are bound, a person who didn’t participate in the primaries could be nominated if, for instance, Romney’s delegates won’t vote for Gingrich or vice versa.

Contenders may include Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, the Republican governors of New Jersey and Indiana, who are both popular with conservative activists and heralded as reform minded chief executives who aren’t afraid to challenge vested interests and cut spending. They ruled out presidential runs last year and Christie recently endorsed Mitt Romney. If, more than six months from now, their party has still failed to find a nominee, could they be persuaded to run after all?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran, September 17

Trying to make sense of Iranian power struggles from afar is rather akin to Cold War Kremlinology. In a closed power system as Iran’s, it is extremely difficult to tell who’s at odds with whom at a given time. Foreign analysts look for hints in the slightest gestures and sometimes frame otherwise perfectly meaningful quotes from officials as part of a comprehensive drama. Much is probably exaggerated in the process but still, we try.

Thus beware, we may be misreading the signals but with some expertise and even more common sense, we may be able to put together a picture of what’s going on behind the scenes in Tehran that approximates reality.

There is little doubt that, Iranian grandstanding aside, international sanctions against the regime have hurt. President Barack Obama said in August of last year that his administration had picked up “rumblings that there is disquiet about the impact” of the sanctions. The Iranian economy certainly isn’t growing at a more impressive rate that the decadent and decaying West. Rather it’s in shambles with high unemployment and inflation soaring to such an extent that Iranians are reportedly stockpiling dollars and gold.

The Iranian navy’s recent announcement that it could “easily” shut the Strait of Hormuz from international oil trade and would test its ability to do just that seems to confirm that the regime is feeling squeezed from all sides. With its sole regional ally Syria in turmoil and Russia suspending weapons sales, Tehran is isolated indeed and perhaps afraid that Israel and the United States will launch military strikes against its uranium enrichment program.

In America, Republican opposition candidates for the presidency have quite outspokenly endorsed an attack against Iran while defense secretary Leon Panetta last week said that he couldn’t let the Iranians develop a nuclear weapon which he expected they would be able to within a year.

“If they proceed and we get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it,” Panetta told CBS News.

Little wonder that the Iranians seek a nuclear weapons capacity. They know that once they have an atomic bomb, they’ll be better able to deter Western interventionism. Support for Iran’s nuclear program transcends partisan divides therefore. Even former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who was President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s main challenger for the highest office in the disputed elections of 2009, supported the enrichment program.

It’s unclear whether Ahmadinejad and Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei see eye to eye. Events earlier this year suggested a split when the president fired his intelligence minister and was quickly forced to rehire him by Khamenei. What is clear is that Ahmadinejad and his allies have targeted conservative clergymen and parliamentarians have called for his impeachment. Supporters of the president’s have suggested that “Iran needs to remove the mullahs from power once for all and return to a great civilization without the Arab style clerics who have tainted and destroyed the country for the past thirty-one years.”

Clerics and parliamentarians from the older generation, who were part of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, seem to fear that Ahmadinejad and his allies are squandering religious principles in favor of a messianic cult that rejects the intermediary role of the clergy and the need to respect the “people’s will,” as the late Ayatollah Khomeini put it. They would rather do away with elections and take their guidance only from the divine in the form of a powerful spiritual leader.

Opposed are conservative Islamists who have coalesced around former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who resigned as chairman of the Assembly of Experts in March of this year. The body is charged with electing, monitoring and, if necessary, dismissing the supreme leader. Rafsanjani clings to power as head of a committee that settles disputes between the legislature and the Guardian Council which acts as a combination of senate and supreme court.

This group of conservatives, which includes Mousavi and should not be considered particularly moderate, favors privatization of state owned enterprises and stable relations with the West. They have a reputation for corruption and their influence is probably declining relative to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps which seems largely allied to Ahmadinejad.

Second only to the clerics, the Revolutionary Guards could very well emerge as the most powerful faction in Iran as the country’s religious leaders are aging and divided on the future composition of the republic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned last year that Iran was sliding into a military dictatorship. The guards, she said, were gaining influence “across all areas of Iranian security policy, and certainly nuclear policy is at the core of it.”

There is discord among the guards as well with senior commanders and former guardsmen, including the incumbent speaker of the Iranian parliament, reportedly urging the Ayatollah Khamenei to change his way and muzzle his fiery acolyte, Ahmadinejad.

The supreme leader’s allegiances are ambiguous however. He probably has the backing of radical mullahs as well as guardsmen and intelligence officers who maybe weren’t part of the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution but did cut their teeth in Iran’s bloody eight year war with Iraq in the 1980s.

Ahmadinejad’s problems with conservatives pose a dilemma to Khamenei. If he intervenes to rein in the opposition, he will be more closely identified with the president and may lose support from leaders in the Revolutionary Guards who fear that a confrontational foreign policy will lead to war. If he doesn’t, the regime’s internal divisions will deepen ahead of parliamentary elections next year.

The main challenge to Ahmadinejad’s administration is the deplorable state of Iran’s economy. It is estimated that one out of five Iranians is jobless. Inflation could be as high as 30 percent but the government insists it’s under 9 percent—a rate that would still be considered Weimaresque in Europe today.

Prices have doubled on average during the last four to five years but forced to cut spending, Adhmadinejad plans to reduce food and fuel subsidies and replace them with a complicated and unpopular scheme of price compensation for the nation’s poor.

If European countries were to multilaterally cut off their remaining oil ties with Iran, that would send the economy into recession overnight. Oil production provides some 85 percent of government revenue but is far below capacity. Whereas Iran produced six million barrels per day in 1978, before the overthrow of the shah, today, production is roughly half that number while global oil demand has only increased and prices with it.

Petroleum and petrochemicals also account for 85 percent of Iranian exports. China and India are Iran’s main costumers and take a 16 and 13 percent share respectively. Japan and South Korea also import oil from Iran but have been under pressure from the United States to suspend their trade.

For all the political and theological disputes that are now raging, or at least shimmering in Tehran, it’s the economy that could prove Ahmadinejad’s undoing. If his popular support continues to erode, the supreme leader may have little other choice but to force him to resign. Once Ahmadinejad and his allies are removed from office, either the guards could take over with maybe a figurehead president or the conservatives could stage a coup and try to return Rafsanjani to the highest office.

Khamenei, in any event, will persevere. He is the only person whose legitimacy isn’t questioned by any political faction in Iran that’s able to exert influence.

British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband (Reuters)

Britain’s Labour Party leader Ed Miliband is struggling to connect with voters. His performances as opposition leader in parliament have been disappointing and despite mounting unease with the ruling coalition’s austerity agenda, his socialists are barely more popular today than they were during last year’s election.

Even if almost 70 percent of Britons believes that slowing budget cuts would boost growth according to a recent poll, less than 30 percent thinks Labour would do a better job than the government. The reason is simple—74 percent of respondents in another poll last week said that there should be no increase in borrowing to reduce the deficit. That included a majority of Labour voters.

It’s not just that British voters mistrust Labour on the economy. It’s that they don’t trust Labour’s leader. If ever they were willing to give “Red Ed” a chance to prove that he was more than a puppet for party activist and union leaders, he wasted it with his “predators and producers” speech at October’s party conference. There, he attempted to draw a line between honest “wealth producers” on the one hand and “asset strippers” on the other who were “squeezing” people at the bottom, indeed, ripping them off.

This sort of pre-Thatcherite rhetoric doesn’t tend to go well with a nation that’s instinctively laissez-faire. Yet the Labour Party loves it. When Miliband announced, “I’m not Tony Blair,” it was met with thunderous applause from party faithful before he could utter than he wasn’t Gordon Brown, his immediate predecessor as leader, either.

While David Cameron’s conservatives have moved to the center, the socialists have taken a hard turn leftward and many of them hardly recognize it. Coupled with Miliband’s feeble leadership style, it makes for dismal polling numbers. Just 3 percent of voters agree that he is a “natural leader,” half believe that he has no positive qualities whatsoever.

However, “there is something more profoundly wrong with Labour’s present condition than the personalities at the top of the party,” writes The Telegraph‘s Janet Daley, “although,” she believes, “the fact that they are at the top is not unconnected to this malaise.”

The party once again belongs to its hard core adherents. It has apparently given up on—or lost any understanding of—the wider electorate that once gave it a succession of general election victories.

As with committed political activist in any party, Labour’s are convinced that the other side isn’t just wrong but evil. That puts centrists off but Daley points out another predicament the opposition faces in appealing to its core constituency—working class voters.

The two legs of Labour’s activist base, militant unionism and salon leftism, “may be incompatible on many fronts,” she writes, “but what they have in common is an inexhaustible contempt for the opinions of ordinary people, or more specifically, that cohort of people which determines the outcome of elections.”

The disdain of Labour’s leadership was particularly visible during August’s mob violence in London and other English cities. While conservatives chastised the contemptible behavior of the rioters, Miliband urged Britons to try to understand these poor, desolate youth who, supposedly, were only protesting their deplorable situation, entirely brought on by the coalition’s reckless spending cuts.

This blatant disconnect between Labour and voters has forced the party back into ideological gridlock. As Daley puts it, the socialist mindset seems to be, “if people do not agree with us, we must try harder to make them see the light.” This belief that the British public can be bullied into accepting that its own moral instincts are unsound is foremost what’s keeping Labour from rising in the polls.

That’s what Democrats are fighting for—the preservation of the welfare state in which all Americans, including the poorest among them, are able to own a home, afford college education for their children, health insurance for their families and to retire in dignity.

It’s a vision of a country where income is redistributed to the advantage of the “less fortunate” (because wealth distribution in a free society, in progressives’ view, is arbitrary, not just) and where government has a heavy hand in production and trade to “protect” workers from greedy and callous businessmen whom the president urged to “bring jobs back to the United States not just because it’s good for business, but because it’s good for the country that made their business and their personal success possible.”

For a president running for reelection, Obama’s “we’re all in this together” rhetoric will appeal to the very people who stand to lose if the American welfare state is dismantled.

According to Obama, it’s Republicans who “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess.”

In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.

People left to “fend for themselves,” the horror!

There are a lot of Republicans who will argue that they’re not as selfish and libertarian as the president makes them out to be; that in fact they do want to help people who are in need but believe it’s best for individual citizens to organize charity than have the government force it upon them. Which is fine but the dividing line is indeed one of government’s role in society—either President Obama’s welfare state where Washington tries to make sure that all Americans have a “fair chance” or the small government conservative model of traditional Republicanism where citizens are responsible for their own well being. That’s the choice Americans face in the 2012 election.

Egyptian women line up to vote in Cairo, November 28 (Gianluca Grossi)

Islamist parties in Egypt could win up to 70 percent of the seats in a new parliament. According to the Associated Press, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political wing and the puritanical Al Nour Party won last weekend’s elections resoundingly, possibly enabling them to play a key role in the drafting of a new Egyptian constitution soon.

If the results bear out and are repeated in the next rounds of voting, Egypt’s main Islamist parties would command an overwhelming majority in the freely elected legislature and could feel empowered to implement religious laws in a country that has lived under an Arab nationalist and secular government for half a century.

Ahead of last week’s vote, the Brotherhood in Egypt indicted a willingness to cooperate with secular parties. It did say to favor a ban on alcohol and allowed pious Muslim women to wear traditional garb that was frowned upon during the Mubarak regime and associated with religious extremism.

The Al Nour Party is more fanatical. According to a spokesman, it will push for an alcohol ban across Egypt, including tourist areas for which the Brotherhood was prepared to make an exception. Al Nour also champions the erection of a dedicated police agency to ensure that people fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

The preliminary election results are a reminder of the limited support that the persistent revolutionaries of Tahrir Square enjoy across the spectrum of the Egyptian population.

The ousting of longtime president Hosni Mubarak was extremely popular but modernization along Western lines should not be expected any time soon, especially as the notion of “economic reform” has been tarnished by the half hearted liberalization efforts of the 1990s which opened Egypt’s economy up to the world but also institutionalized corruption and strengthened single party rule.

The need for a pro-growth program is pressing all the same. Months of political upheaval have left Egypt’s economy in shambles. Foreign direct investment has virtually come to a standstill while the tourist industry, which employs up to two million people and accounts for more than 11 percent of gross domestic product, remains idle. Egyptian growth has stalled and no major reforms can be expected from the Islamist parties that are hostile to globalization and wary of international trade.

A traditionalist moment, perhaps a religious revival should be considered likely in the short term. The breakdown of a fifty year old regime and the chaos of an infant democracy that has replaced it left many Egyptian voters apparently craving for a semblance of order and predictability.

The Brotherhood, although it was formally banned as a political organization by the National Democratic government, is familiar to many Egyptians as a charitable institution. Voters evidently deemed it a safer choice than opting for one among an array of secular parties, ranging from the far left to conservative.

Runoff elections for the first round of voting are scheduled for early next week. A second round will take place in the second half of December and a third in January. There are nearly five hundred seats up for grabs however only two-third can be contested by political parties. The remaining seats are open to candidates running as individuals although they may be associated with an established political force.

The military council currently ruling Egypt has promised to respect the election results but insists that the army’s status remain “unchanged,” which would cement its heavy presence in the national economy, and that the “secular nature” of Egypt is maintained.

Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho of Portugal, July 20 (Global Imagens)

Portuguese politics can be called “traditional” but the term is used pejoratively.

As is the case in many Mediterranean countries, Portugal’s lack of a political culture and strong civil society have driven it to mismanage the political freedoms it acquired during the 1970s when the authoritarian government was replaced by a democratic one. Similarly, it failed to properly manage the financial backing it gained by joining the European single currency in the early 2000s.

One of the key features of the Portuguese system is the number of public functions which are subject to political nomination which implies that there is a great number of people whose jobs depend on a particular political party. This also means that every time the government changes, so does the leadership of many of the state’s agencies and not only is experience lost but political agendas are changed with ease. As a consequence, no thorough reforms are ever undertaken, let alone completed.

Political youth leagues abound in Portuguese politics since they are a pathway to a job and the former prime minister José Sócrates was a true product of Portugal’s system having been a member of both the main right of center party (PSD) and the left of center Partido Socialista. Having only barely obtained an engineering degree from a shady university, he had little experience outside of politics.

His stewardship of the Portuguese Government was everything one would expect from a man of the system. Demagogy and populism were taken to unparalleled extremes and while the national debt spiralled out of control, his socialist administration made cultural issues like gay marriage and legal abortion its battle cry. With a compliant president and an absolute one party majority in parliament, Sócrates managed to double what was already a bloated public debt. The reforms he enacted were few and without substance.

Portugal’s political left is far from the only one to succumb to populism but given the fact that it was given a mandate to manage the Portuguese state for twelve of the past sixteen years—tragically also during the time in which most of the country’s manufacturing jobs were outsourced to Asia—the importance of this mismanagement reached new heights.

Sócrates’ socialist predecessor and now United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres, implemented numerous welfare and health care programs that Portugal could ill afford as its economy stagnated—although statistically, Portugal boasted one of the best health care systems among industrialized nations—and Sócrates’ immediate conservative predecessor, the incumbent president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, lacked a parliamentary majority as well as the political courage to both implement reforms and cut spending. His government didn’t last long.

Unlike Sócrates, Portugal’s new leader, Pedro Passos Coelho, is a conservative and doesn’t try to divert the country’s attention from its debt and deficit problems. However in following with the best populist tradition, he does so knowing that his popularity depends on his image as an austere financial manager. When a few years ago he ran for the leadership of Portugal’s now ruling party, his platform was that of a classical economic conservative (neoliberal) but also a socially liberal one. He lost those elections but adapted quickly. When he gained the premiership, he did so having ran as almost a christian democrat.

Passos Coelho is a pragmatist. With a comfortable coalition majority in parliament and an opposition socialist party that’s being led by a member of its left wing, his first mandate is almost certain to go smoothly. If European and international policy demands are met, it also ominously means that no serious reforms are likely to be undertaken.

When Passos Coelho ran for the leadership of the Social Democratic Party, the candidate he lost against was a conservative former education and finance minister. She wasn’t of the adaptable kind. When she campaigned against Sócrates in 2009, she did not hide her social conservative views but also made it a point not to make promises and to denounce as much as possible the severe financial situation which the country was in.

Sócrates in his turn promised a new airport, high speed railways and the preservation of the social security system. Portuguese voters chose his promises over a reality check just as they had done in previous years by electing politicians who gave them one of the best highway systems in Europe—and one of the most underused—instead of voting for painful reforms. Cement, of course, is much more real than abstract efficiency.

An added factor was the contrast between PSD’s former leader’s and both Passos Coelho’s and Sócrates’ relationship with the media—the former loathed their sensationalism; the latter tried to use it as much as they could.

It is true that Portugal’s problems are structural and that leadership will not be that preponderant in the long term but with the prospect of Portugal’s presidency being occupied by inept former prime ministers as Guterres or Barroso and Prime Minister Passos Coelho ruling as a wind sack for the time being, the future doesn’t look bright.

Finally, the paradox that more government and ever higher tax rates have only ever resulted in sluggish growth and contributed to more indebtedness was always lost on the Portuguese left. While the delocalization of European industry to eastern Europe and Asia, North Africa and beyond was not Portugal’s fault, the rise in the fiscal burden was.

In spite of the slight depression that the current financial crisis has caused in Portugal, the export sector is still expanding, in large part thanks to Lisbon’s proximity to the Angolan, Brazilian and other former colonial markets. However, even Portuguese companies will think twice before reinvesting their overseas profits at home if the overly bureaucratic and slow judicial system isn’t reformed and tax rates remain high.

Samantha Power, director of Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council, speaks at the United Nations Office at Geneva on June 1, 2010 (Eric Bridiers)

Like the sensationalist political pamphlets of the early stages of the printing age, today’s humanitarian activists’ purpose is to, artificially, stir public sentiment through their writing.

Samantha Power’s manifest A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and the professor’s rhetoric seem to nowadays produce the same effect on those who read it.

Early in the last decade, when the name Paul Wolfowitz was controversial, Power had nothing but compliments for the Bush Administration’s “Iraqi Freedom” hawk. An uncomfortable truth considering that the Democratic Party withdrew its endorsement of the invasion of Iraq once weapons of mass destruction were found not to exist. Certainly if one takes into consideration that for some in the ranks of its pro-war intellectual base, the weapons were never the issue (mirror image apropos of French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner). But an even bigger embarrassment if we take into account that she currently sits on President’s Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

This should not come as a surprise since both the Republican neoconservatives and the Democratic liberal interventionists aspire to the best tradition of no other than John F. Kennedy. A wildly loved, charismatic and young president whose term was cut short right before it actually had to pick up the pieces of the many idealist policies he enacted.

This Peace Corps generation keeps leaving its mark on the minds of the youth MTV humanitarians and Bono-Brangelina peaceniks with wars of excellence such as Libya, where the no-fly zone was actually an intervention, where the “matter of days” timeframe turned into months, where the war is to be called only conflict and all to avoid a genocide that wasn’t.

In the run up to the Libyan campaign, Power’s voice was heard loudly, as The New York Times reported that she was one of the main instigators of action. Once again the Rwanda precedent was used to incite military action where few American interests were actually at stake.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Rebecca Hamilton writes of the inceptive influence that A Problem from Hell had on Lorne Craner, an assistant to Colin Powell who in 2004 organized the State Department investigation into whether Darfur should be classified as genocide or not. And who really is surprised by now if rumors surfaced of her militancy for action in Uganda?

Power’s activist legacy stretches as far back as the Yugoslav wars and the Clinton Administration. For her Kosovo is the model to follow—which bodes poorly for Libyans.

Samantha Power isn’t alone. Other high officials of the Obama Administration like Anne-Marie Slaughter certainly harbor the same fantasies of the liberal interventionist creed and the biblical terminology is ever present in their language. One of Slaughter’s friends (Sarah Chayes—surprise, surprise, a former Peace Corps volunteer) who was advocating for an American nation building effort in Afghanistan wrote a book entitled Punishment of Virtue.

Like the high priestess of the Church of Human Rights, Power and the Libints embody today what the papal envoys represented in Europe up to the sixteenth century: diverters of national interests on behalf of a morality which they alone could arbiter. The Treaties of Westphalia would eventually redirect Europe and its dominions into the path of sovereignty and rational diplomacy but only after the bloodiest conflict since the Hundred Years’ War had ravaged the old continent. Who better than the Jesuit of humanitarianism to let us all know what awaits those of us sinful enough to ignore “a problem from hell”?

Many pointed fingers at George W. Bush’s lack of tact when in one of his many slips of the tongue he called the intervention in Iraq a “crusade.” Would they by as critical of Power? The term suits her agenda so well.

For the politically correct academia and civil society the hallmark of sophistication is now “Responsibility to Protect” (or R2P for the t-shirt makers).

R2P is a humanitarian’s “limited sovereignty” doctrinal version. It draws on international humanitarian law—a field of law which is still in its early stages and being written based on principles instead of practicality or empiricism—to claim that states are obligated to protect their citizens and that whenever they fail in this mission, the international community gains the legal right to intervene. In its light form, the territory is to simply be “civilized” by the missionaries of liberal democracy. In its worse form, military force is to be applied promoting forceful regime change.

As strategy blogger Joseph Fouché put it, R2P is for Libints what Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) was for neoconservatives—a doctrine in which to ground the Pentagon’s approach to belligerence.

RMA was supposed to allow small deployments of hyper sophisticated forces to promote regime change en masse and simultaneously in different theaters around the planet in an effort to overcome undemocratic regimes. It didn’t work because as it turns out some populations aren’t that eager to be freed and as in Iraq, they must be helped to “liberate themselves.”

R2P on the other hand bases itself on international law (unprecedented and inapplicable) to argue for small deployments of military forces in service of transnational human rights, mainly in a peacekeeping capacity but able to rapidly change into peace enforcement.

If Iraq was the neocon moment, Libya is the Libint one but if Libya is indeed Obama’s Kosovo, then the post-Cold War reality of America is one of centrist consensus idealist interventionism.

Neocons failed because they put belligerence at the service of ideals rather than interests and attacked a regime which actually served American interests—by keeping geostrategic balance in the Middle East.

Libints and R2P will fail for the same reason. They abandon allies that don’t comply with their version of morality and without courage (or money) to go after big targets, they occupy themselves with campaigns in insignificant countries. Insignificant countries bring insignificant gains and what little is gained can quickly turn into a big loss when regional powers that don’t share American interests decide to exert influence against it in the political vacuum the idealists don’t want to fill with troops or support for less moral proxies.

Ultimately, because Libya isn’t essential to American strategy, there’ll be no incentive to keep American involvement which will award the country’s foreign policy with yet another example of erratic and counterproductive interventionism.

Patrick Buchanan on Fox News' Hannity, October 18

Will tribalism trump globalism? That’s the bigger ideological struggle that can be derived from Patrick Buchanan’s latest book, Suicide of a Superpower, which argues not just that the United States are disintegration but that the whole of Western civilization could dissolve.

The former Republican Party presidential hopeful and political commentator fears a Balkanization of America as the country becomes increasingly secular and people of European descent are dying it. “The death of European Christianity means the disappearance of the European tribe,” he writes, “a prospect visible in the demographic statistics of every Western nation.”

Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.

Buchanan points out that by 2020, whites over the age of sixty-five are expected to outnumber those aged seventeen and younger. “Deaths will exceed births,” he notes and “Mexico is moving north.”

The demographic shift will exacerbate tension between conservatives and liberals in the country. Whereas immigration increasingly fuels apprehension on the right, the political left has embraced multiculturalism. Buchanan wonders, “What kind of man looks with transcendental joy to a day when the people among whom he was raised have become a minority in a nation where the majority rules?”

Historians will look back in stupor, Buchanan predicts, at twenty-first century Americans “who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.”

On Fox News’ Hannity Monday night, Buchanan suggested that the left has a political motive for supporting immigration. Minorities, he pointed out, overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Once they constitute half of the electorate, “Republicans will never win another election.”

Ethnic minorities trend Democratic because “they depend on government,” he said. “They believe in government. And they vote for the party of government.” Even if their values are Christian or conservative.

To prevent the stagnation of European culture in America and combat the decline of conservatism, Buchanan advocated a moratorium on immigration. He claimed that after the United States imposed immigration quota in the 1920s, citizens of eastern and southern European descent had time to grow out of poverty. “Once they move into the middle class, into the taxpayer category,” they’ll consider voting for the party of small government, he said.

If, on the other hand, the United States make no effort to stem the tide of immigration and allow a disintegration of American culture, it will give rise to an ethnic nationalism, according to Buchanan who writes in his book that it will inevitably trump globalism.

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse.

Buchanan’s moratorium on immigration represents half of his isolationism. Protectionism is the other half. These may seem appropriate steps to take for a country if indeed modern tribalism is more powerful a motivator for people than the economic benefit that is derived from globalization. But is this true when a person’s self interest collides with his “tribal” affiliation, whether it’s race or religion or politics?

Globalization is an unstoppable force because free trade is demonstrably more advantageous to a country than is protectionism; because open markets are demonstrably more prosperous than closed ones. Countries that turn inward tend to lose business whereas countries that engage in competition instead of trying to cheat others blossom.

The globalized world of the early twenty-first century is testament to the success of American superpower. Without its military superiority, which ensured a predictable balance of power, and proven economic model of success, other nations either could nor or would not have become part of it.

There is, however, in every country, even America, a class that’s unable to keep up with the highly competitive and demanding flexibility of being part of a global labor market. There is an even larger group of people in every country that doesn’t recognize the tremendous benefits of globalization even if they’re able to buy cheap products made in China.

These people depend on a model of government, the welfare state, that’s bankrupt. It’s a model that Buchanan, a small government conservative, has never endorsed. If he wants to kill it, he shouldn’t champion isolationism, which would allow people to continue to believe for probably a longer period of time that it’s a sustainable model; he should embrace globalism as the destroyer of the big government that he has always rallied against.