Charles W. King

Earlier this year the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that it had selected Paris and Los Angeles for the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympic Games respectively. In recent decades finding cities to host the Olympics has become increasingly difficult. Nations that typically excel at the Winter Games like Norway are balking, forcing the games to be held in locales like Sochi which is more seaside resort than ski slope. The citizens of cities of western democracies like Chicago and Boston raise vociferous objections when their cities are suggested as potential Olympic venues. The cost of the 2016 Rio Olympics and 2014 World Cup continue to cause significant problems for Brazil’s government, both fiscally and politically. While the IOC has avoided it so far, the Olympic bidding process has increasingly become the province of unsavory dictatorships. The 2022 Winter Games were awarded to Beijing over Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan.

The plight of the IOC in the twenty-first century raises the question; why did nations like the United States, Spain, West Germany, and many more compete so hard to host the Olympic Games in the twentieth century? The Olympics have been, since their modern reinvention in 1896 been a prestige event. Like the World’s Fair, the Olympics were an opportunity for nations to showcase themselves to the world. Always an opportunity to lose money, the modern Olympics were something that only a Great Power could afford to host. At the height of their respective empires both Belgium and the Netherlands hosted Olympic Games, in Antwerp in 1920 and Amsterdam in 1928. Neither nation has hosted an Olympics since. In 1936 Adolph Hitler attempted to use the Olympics in Germany to demonstrate to the world the resurgence of Germany under his Nazi regime. After imperialism began to decline after World War Two the Olympics were a chance for rising powers like the Australia, South Korea, and Brazil to make their debut on the world stage, and for declining powers like the United Kingdom to maintain some of their old prestige.

Nations, including the United States, continue to value their international prestige, so why are so many now reluctant to bid for, let alone host, the Olympic Games. One reason is certainly cost. The amount of construction requires for the Olympics is enormous, and many facilities, like velodromes, are useful only during the games. One year after the 2016 Rio Games, many of the facilities constructed for those games look like they’ve been abandoned for decades. This is exacerbated by the fact that in the twentieth century is it easier than ever for nations promote themselves abroad. Indonesian and Korean cinema is booming in popularity in the West. Travel throughout the world is easier and faster with each passing year. The benefit of hosting Olympics in an increasingly connected world has declined, just as hosting the games has skyrocketed in cost.

The Olympic Games is not simply a sporting event. The modern Olympics are an international institution like the United Nations and the World Bank. Hosting the Olympics has been a prestige event for a hundred years, and it will continue to be the hallmark of nations trying to stake a claim to the world stage. The Olympic Games demonstrates that sport is inherently political and the International Olympic Committee and western democracies cannot afford to neglect the legitimacy that hosting an Olympic Games may give to a regime like that of Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan.

Charles W. King

President Trump is expected to decertify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran Nuclear Deal, this week. He intendeds to do this despite statements from the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Association, who is responsible for monitoring Iran’s compliance, and the United States Departments of Defense and State stating that Iran is complying with the deal. This past week in testimony before Congress Secretary of Defense James Mattis said that he believed it was in the national interest of the United States to continue the JCPOA.

Given these conditions, the Trump administration is finding it hard to completely scuttle the deal. It is unlikely that any of the other signatories to the deal would agree to re-impose sanctions. The White House has found a work around. For weeks a trial balloon has been floating inside the Beltway; the administration will declare that the JCPOA is not in the “national interest” of the United States, and make Congress responsible for determining its future. This is a shrewd move for the administration domestically. It allows Trump to claim victory against the deal without dangerously escalating the situations as Mattis and Tillerson understand unilateral decertification would.

Putting a decision like the continuation of the JCPOA in the hands of Congress is inherently dangerous. Despite the extensive support of congressional staffers, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congress does not have the resources and expertise that the executive branch does. The foremost asset for the executive branch in these matters is the National Security Council (NSC). Established by the 1947 National Security Act, signed by President Harry S. Truman, the NSC truly came into its own under his successor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As Supreme Allied Commander Europe Eisenhower was known for the importance he placed on staff work and planning, and is quoted as saying, “Plans are useless, planning is essential.” Eisenhower continued this as president, and used the NSC’s staff to create comprehensive assessments of global events that reflected military, diplomatic, intelligence, and economic perspectives.

In the decades since 1947 the NSC has been an unqualified success, bureaucratically speaking. President after president have imbued it with more and more power as they have steadily eroded the authority of older parts of the executive branch, the State Department in particular. In the twenty first century the most important presidential appointment is the National Security Advisor (NSA). Unlike the Secretaries of State and Defense and their Undersecretaries and staffs, the NSA and the staff of the NSC do not have to be approved by Congress. The need to select compromise candidates for head the Departments of State and Defense has slowly increased their role as bureaucratic managers and decreased their policy influence, a trend that can be seen in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barak Obama especially.

In the twenty first century the government body with the resources and expertise effectively assess and make policy recommendations on important policies like the JCPOA is the National Security Council. The Constitution invests the executive branch with responsibility for foreign policy for a multitude of reasons; the Senate is responsible only for the ratification of treaties. Making Congress responsible for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is both reckless and could herald a new era in American foreign policy making; Quarterback by Committee.

Charles W. King

Independence is in the news once again as both Catalonia and the Kurdish region of Iraq have held referendums on the subject. The prospect of an independent Kurdistan is unacceptable to the governments of Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and already there are rumblings of a new outbreak of violence in the region if the Kurds follow through with the independence that many of them voted for. The referendum in Catalonia has already broken out in violence, as the Spanish government deployed militarized police to attempt to prevent Catalans from voting in a referendum that the Spanish Government and Supreme Court deemed illegal.

The Catalonian push for independence from Spain raises the question of why in the 21st century a relatively autonomous region of a reasonably well off and advanced economy would seek independence. Both Catalonia and Scotland, despite possessing autonomous rule, have legitimate grievances with their respective central governments in Madrid and Westminster. They contribute significantly more to the national budget than they receive in national disbursements. Despite being profitable engines of growth for their respective economies they receive little in the way of reinvestment to ensure that they remain healthy and growing. Along with the fact that they feel like their cultural differences are ignored or suppressed by central governments, it is understandable the politicians and citizens of Catalonia, like the Scotts before them, feel like they are being exploited.

Like the legal Scottish independence referendum of 2014, the prospect of Catalonian independence would grant increased political autonomy, but an uncertain future. There exists no precedent for a member of the European Union to split, and it is unclear which, if any, European institutions an independent Catalonia would be a member of, or eligible to join. If not a member of the Euro Zone, would a Catalonian state be able to issue a currency? On what terms would it trade with the European Union? The sovereign debt crises in the wake of 2008 have empowered the European Central Bank and made European finance ministers wary. It is now common knowledge that Greece cooked their books to join the Euro, and Spain may have as well. It is unlikely that a new Catalonia would be immediately allowed join all of the European institutions that Spain is party to. The effect on the Catalonian economy while the European Union investigates the new country’s books could be devastating, even more so if the result is rejection from one or more institutions.

Prosperity in the 21st century is inextricably linked to the ability to conduct international trade. Catalonian independence from Spain could scuttle the economies of both countries. The tactics deployed by the Spanish government to repress the Catalonian referendum, in the wake of years of ignoring Catalan concerns, are heavy handed but they demonstrate the concern that the Spanish government has for the consequences of losing one of its most prosperous regions.

Charles W. King

The recent ban on Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) of new cryptocurrencies by the People’s Republic of China and the possible closure of all cryptocurrency exchanges in the country are being heralded as a success by some cryptocurrency advocates. They believe that the ban demonstrates how crypto-currencies like BitCoin disrupt traditional government issued currencies like the Yuan and Dollar. For a portion of the cryptocurrency community the most important feature of these new mediums of exchange is not their security, but their inability to be observed or regulated. The nature of the technology that underpins all cryptocurrencies, the blockchain, makes important kinds of government intervention difficult or impossible: taxation, seigniorage, and monetary control.

The distributed nature of the block chain and fact that cryptocurrencies are only observable during digital transfer makes it difficult for the IRS or any other tax collecting agency to know whom has what for the purposes of taxation. In addition the fact that cryptocurrencies can also be transferred physically on something as innocuous as a keychain make them similar in the eyes of governments to Bearer Bonds and Krugerrands, two now defunct mediums of exchanged deeply associated with terrorism, money laundering, tax fraud, and Apartheid.

Cryptocurrencies by their nature make government seigniorage and monetary control impossible. The minting of new units of crypto-currency is controlled by an algorithm and the ability of users to perform complex mathematical computations. When a new unit is created it is owned by the computer that completed the computation, a profit for the user, at the cost of computing power. Traditional seigniorage means the issuing government makes a profit of the difference between the cost of minting and the face value, for cryptocurrencies ‘miners’ receive the seignorage. This also means that governments have no control over the number of units in circulation, and are therefore unable to increase or decrease the monetary supply. This is a key feature of some cryptocurrency advocates who oppose on principle the very existence of Central Banks and their role in regulating economies. The rate of inflation in cryptocurrencies is controlled solely by the mining algorithm, how much computer power is dedicated to mining a given currency, and how much users are willing to pay for a unit. This obviates methods of economic intervention that have been key for government's recovery efforts from the Great Depression, the Stagflation of the 1970s, and the 2008 Financial Crisis.

The Chinese is government is understandably concerned about the increasing prevalence of mediums of exchange beyond its control, like BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies. That the strict regulation of the Yuan incentivizes their use is another important issue. In the case of cryptocurrencies, the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party is remembering the events that began what is known as the “Century of Humiliation”. In 1839 the British Empire had not yet successfully smuggled a live tea plant out of China and was paying of millions of tons of silver to China annually for exported tea. To alleviate this trade imbalance the British sought to sell opium from the British Raj in China, where it was illegal. The British and Chinese fought two wars, 1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860, that transferred control of Hong Kong to the British, legalized opium, and gave the British and others the access to Chinese markets and exemption from internal tariffs. With the loss of these wars the Qing Dynasty was weakened in many ways, including the fact that the reversion of the balance of trade up-ended the Chinese economy, and foreign trader’s protections from imperial regulation would continue to extract wealth from the country. The inability to intervene in their own economy devastated the Qing.

Cryptocurrency advocates are correct to believe in the potential disruptive power of crypto-currency technology. The People’s Republic of China has made a decisive move against this disruption, but this should be understandable given some crypto-currency advocated see their invention as a method to dismantle the state and the history of China.

Charles W. King

A letter from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Senator Robert Corker (R-Tennessee), the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, published by Foreign Policy today outlines changes to 66 of the 70 current Special Envoy positions at the State Department. Organizational and personnel changes at Foggy Bottom are the subject of current headlines, for good reason, but reform to proliferation of special envoy positions may not be as detrimental to the Department as other new policies. It provides an opportunity to examine how the conduct of diplomatic relations has changed over the years.

Prior to World War One the United States’ Department of State owned five overseas properties. In the nineteenth century being an American ambassador or consul required independent sources of wealth, as they were responsible for both their own expenses and the salaries of their staffs. Consuls in particular were frequently American business-people trading abroad. They became representatives of the United States after establishing themselves in foreign centers of trade. In the nineteenth century the State Department followed Americans abroad, following missionaries as well as entrepreneurs. This system would begin to see reform after the assassination of President Garfield over a State Department posting. It was not until after World War Two that the State Department and the Foreign Service would become the extensive bureaucracy that we recognize today.

Communications is the other major factor in the history of the U.S. Foreign Service. American Ambassadors were empowered to act with a large degree of autonomy. Even after the first transatlantic telegraph cable was completed in 1858 the seventeen hour transmission time, and relative lack of security in early cables meant that the Foreign Service continued to need to act without detailed instruction from Washington. Nonetheless by the turn of the century, the diplomatic cable was one of the most rapid and secure methods of communication. A hundred years later its relative lethargy would be the object of scorn. The absurdity of reliance on diplomatic cables in the era of modern telecommunications is a recurring joke in Abel Lanzac’s Quai d’Orsay which recounts the months of lead up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq from inside the French Foreign Ministry.

Modern transportation is another field where advances in technology may not have provided American diplomatic efforts with all the benefits possible. It is now possible to travel long distances in very short amounts of time. Six hours to cross the Atlantic, let alone how easy it is to travel quickly within Europe. Yet the State Department maintains individual Ambassadors for each European capital, with limited purviews. The ubiquity of air travel shows why Special Envoy positions have proliferated in the past four decades. Combined with modern communications it has become possible to select diplomats with expertise and dispatch them to travel between foreign capitals with a specific task. This raises questions about the effectiveness of the proposed reforms. Will the under-secretaries, assistant secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries who are receiving the staff and budgets of the eliminated envoy positions be empowered to communicate and travel like the envoys were? Given the speed and security telecommunications is the independence of Foreign Service officials abroad receding? Is the importance of the United States’ Ambassadors abroad declining as Washington based officials have increased communications and access to their foreign counterparts?

Further Reading

Colum Lynch, Robbie Gramer, "State Department Reorganization Eliminates Climate, Muslim and Syria Envoys." Foreign Policy, August 29, 2017, Accessed August 29, 2017, http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/29/state-department-reorganization-eliminates-climate-muslim-and-syria-envoys/

Abel Lanzac, Christophe Blain, Quai d'Orsay, (Paris, France: Dargaud, 2013)

Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982).