Polls and Public Opinion

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed the vice presidential debate; presidential elections in Venezuela; and nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. [audio: http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/media/editorial/2012/20121004_TWNW.mp3] The highlights: The consensus that Mitt Romney “won” last night’s night presidential debate will likely encourage speculation that next Thursday’s vice presidential debate could catapult the GOP ticket into the lead in the polls if Paul Ryan has similar success jousting with Joe Biden. Political scientists will scoff at the notion, saying that presidential debates seldom influence voting decisions and that vice presidential debates have even less impact. We will have data to test that hypothesis in just five weeks. Venezuelan voters head to the polls this Sunday to choose between incumbent president Hugo Chavez and challenger Henrique Capriles Radonski, who represents a coalition of opposition parties. Chavez leads in the polls, and many of his critics worry that he will do what it takes to guarantee a victory. If Chavez were to lose, it would upend Venezuelan politics and change the dynamics in the region. Even if Chavez wins, though, the future of his Bolivarian revolution is uncertain. Mismanagement and corruption have stalled the Venezuelan economy, and Chavez’s cancer may keep him for completing his term. The Nobel Peace Prize jury will announce this year’s recipient of the award next week. Some of the luminaries nominated for the award include former president Bill Clinton, former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier accused of leaking classified material to Wikileaks. Bob changes things up and offers up his Figures of the Week, Bidzina Ivanishvili and Mikheil Saakashvili. I stay old school and go with a Figure of the Week, which is eleven. As always, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. For more on the topics we discussed in the podcast check out: Biden and Ryan face off in the vice presidential debate: The Huffington Post writes that Biden had already put in 60 hours of debate practice a month before the debate.  Reuters reports that both candidates have attacked the other for their stance on Medicare and other social programs.  The New York Times assesses the Romney-Ryan campaign’s recent criticism of Obama’s foreign policy. The Hill writes that Ryan is “absolutely” looking forward to the debate and is emphasizing Biden’s debate experience. Presidential elections take place in Venezuela: BBC News writes that many Venezuelans continue to support Chavez because of his many social programs. Foreign Policy warns that violence might break out if Chavez is defeated. The Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that while free and fair elections may be possible, a victory for the opposition is not likely. The Guardian reports that the United States frequently misrepresents Venezuelan democracy. CFR’s Patrick Duddy writes a Contingency Planning Memorandum on “Political Unrest in Venezuela” Nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize: The Norwegian Nobel Committee notes that there were 231 nominations for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, 43 of which were organizations. Slate lists likely candidates for each Nobel Prize. The Nordic Page reports that the Norwegian Nobel Committee had an easy time selecting this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Huffington Post reveals a few publicly disclosed candidates.

The Pew Research Center is out with a new poll on American reactions to last week’s attacks on the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Libya. Contrary to speculation that the attacks would hurt President Obama politically—speculation that likened Obama to Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis--Pew’s results suggest that at least among people following the story—the attacks  have done more to hurt Governor Romney. I put “at least among those following the story” in italics, because Pew only asked people who said they had been following the news out of the Middle East—or 43 percent of the people they surveyed—what they thought about Obama’s and Romney’s handling of the crisis. Of that subsample, 45 percent approved of Obama’s handling of the situation and 36 percent disapproved. Conversely, 26 percent approved of Romney’s comments on the situation and 48 percent disapproved. (For the statistically inclined, the margin of error for the Middle East news subsample was 3.9 percentage points.) As the table below shows, Obama had higher approval scores than Romney on the embassy attacks across all demographic/political groups except for Republicans.  Also, the independents that both parties are trying to win over in November were almost twice as likely to give Obama a thumbs up (44 percent) than Romney (23 percent). Source: Pew Research Center Do these results mean that the embassy attacks don’t threaten Obama’s reelection chances? Not exactly. Remember, Pew didn’t ask the 57 percent of Americans who weren’t paying close attention to Middle East news last week how they assessed Obama’s and Romney’s reactions. The fact that people lack information doesn’t mean that they lack opinions. Such so-called low information voters might have soured on Obama despite not knowing the facts, or perhaps because they don’t know the facts. Beyond that, the story of the embassy attacks may be far from over. If they continue or even escalate, if U.S. diplomats are kidnapped or killed, or if Obama says something impolitic (think “you didn’t build that”) voters could revise their assessments. But the Pew results, limited as they are, provide a useful reminder that bad news overseas doesn’t necessarily damage a president’s political chances. For a president to pay a price, the public needs to care about the issues, believe that the president is negligent or culpable for the event, conclude that he mishandled the response, or decide that the event in question validates his rival’s preferred policies. That last factor explains why the steady drumbeat of bad news out of Afghanistan, including the killing of four U.S. soldiers by a member of the Afghan security forces yesterday, has yet to do Obama much political harm. With nearly seven in ten Americans saying they want out of Afghanistan, Romney’s criticisms that the White House is moving too fast on withdrawal and hints that he might keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan longer alarms rather than wins over disaffected voters.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs came out today with its new (and lengthy) survey on what Americans think about the world and America’s place in it. The Chicago Council has been conducting foreign policy surveys periodically since 1974, and they have been the gold standard in the field for about as long. I have only had time to read the executive summary and glance at a few charts, but here are some of the survey’s findings:  Protecting the jobs of American workers continues to elicit the broadest support as a “very important” foreign policy goal of the United States, with 83 percent of respondents naming it. To put that number in perspective, 72 percent say that “preventing the spread of nuclear weapons” is “very important," 64 percent say “combating international terrorism,” 33 percent say “climate change,” and just 14 percent say “helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations.” Nearly seven in ten Americans think that defense spending should be cut; that’s up 10 percentage points from two years ago. Seven in ten Americans favor using U.S. military force “to stop a government from committing genocide and killing large numbers of its own people.” In comparison, five in ten Americans favor intervening “if Israel were attacked by its neighbors,” and only four in ten favor coming to the aid of Seoul “if North Korea invaded South Korea.” For the first time since the Chicago Council started asking the question in 2002, a majority of Americans (52 percent) say that U.S. economic aid to Egypt should be cut or halted entirely, up 13 percent from two years ago. Forty-one percent of Americans want to cut economic assistance for Israel; that’s up seven percentage points since 2010. A majority of Americans (52 percent) think that Asia is now more important than Europe. Two years ago, Americans gave the nod to Europe by a margin of 51 to 41 percent. Republicans (70 percent) remain the most enthusiastic about the United States playing an active role in world affairs. Democrats (60 percent) and Independents (55 percent) are less so. Support for an active international role has fallen across all three political groups over the past decade, but the decline has been sharpest among Independents (15 percentage points). I will be referring a lot to the Chicago Council’s survey a lot in the months to come. If you are interested in what the public thinks about the world beyond the water’s edge, I highly recommend that you read the survey.

CFR.org just posted an interview I did with former New York Times correspondent Bernard Gwertzman looking at the role foreign policy will likely play in the remaining two months of the presidential campaign. Along the way we discussed President Obama’s acceptance speech last night, reviewed where the candidates stand on major issues like Iran’s nuclear program, and recalled how another tight presidential race was tipped in part by a candidate’s misstep in a critical foreign policy debate. Much of the coverage of the Democratic National Convention has rightly noted that the Democrats put a spotlight on foreign policy while they were in Charlotte. To some extent, the emphasis on national security was preordained once Governor Romney decided to downplay foreign policy in his acceptance speech and to dispense with traditional rituals like honoring the service of the uniformed military. Simply put, Romney handed the Democrats a political opening. They smartly walked through it. But last night’s speeches were notable not just for the prominence they gave foreign policy, but also for their confident tone. Since the days of Vietnam, Republicans have hammered Democrats for being “soft” and “naïve” on foreign policy. Democratic candidates typically responded with defensiveness and a transparent desire to shift the conversation back to domestic policy as quickly as possible. Neither trait was on display last night. As Fred Kaplan writes in Slate, the Democrats who spoke in Charlotte were so confident about their national security bona fides that they: talked openly about seeking peace, negotiating arms-reduction treaties with the Russians (which Romney opposes on the flimsiest of grounds), withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and shifting money that was once spent on fighting wars to revitalizing our own cities—as Obama put it, “to do some nation-building right here at home." But Democrats went further than that. Whether it was John Kerry warning Romney that “you’d better finish the debate with yourself” before debating Obama or Obama telling his challenger “you might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally,” the Democrats openly mocked their opponents. The Democrats’ newfound foreign policy confidence may signal, as Kaplan argues, that they are now the party of national security policy. But the point shouldn’t be pushed too far. For one thing, for a candidate campaigning under the banner of “Forward,” Obama said curiously little about what he would actually do on the foreign policy front in his second term. And while the Democrats don’t have obvious ideological divisions like the neoconservative-realist-non-interventionist split that buffets the GOP, the boos that greeted the call to add Jerusalem back into the party platform are a reminder that issues could easily arise that divide the Democratic coalition. The second caveat is perhaps obvious but it merits stating nonetheless. The significance of the Democrats’ emergence as the party of national security evaporates if Obama loses on November 6. And while Democrats feel good about what they have accomplished in foreign affairs over the past four years, the 2012 election will likely be won or lost on the economy. And on that score, the disappointing job news out today means that the outcome of November’s vote remains very much up in the air.

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks; the home stretch of the presidential campaign; and what Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will decide at next week’s meeting of the Fed’s policymaking committee. [audio: http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/media/editorial/2012/20120906_TWNW.mp3] The highlights: Eleven years after the 9/11 attacks the United States has made significant strides in diminishing the odds of a catastrophic terrorist attack. That is partly because al-Qaeda no longer has the advantage of surprise, and partly because intelligence, law enforcement, and military operations have killed or captured much of al-Qaeda’s leadership and disrupted its operations. Only 34 percent of Americans say that terrorism is an "extremely important" factor in their decision on who should be president, down from 42 percent four years ago. Perhaps more telling about how much terrorism has receded from American public life, less than one percent of Americans flag it as the most important problem currently facing the country. Nonetheless, the essential danger of terrorism remains: while government has to foil every plot to be successful, terrorists need to succeed just once. In honor of the 9/11 anniversary, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have agreed to suspend political ads for the day. But otherwise, you can expect both sides to go full bore with just two months left until the election. Foreign policy is unlikely to be a leading issue, as Romney’s decision to devote less than two hundred words in his four-thousand word acceptance speech to the challenges America faces overseas attests. Specific foreign policy issues could dominate the campaign conversation if one of the candidates says something unwise, as the Democrats look to have done with the platform flap over Jerusalem, or if events overseas take a turn for the worse. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech late last month that has raised expectations that the Fed will take steps soon to jumpstart the sputtering U.S. economy. Such a move would be controversial, as it could be read as trying to influence the outcome of the election. Of course, not doing anything could be read the same way. We will know what Bernanke’s choice is after the Fed’s policymaking committee meeting next week. Even if he decides in favor of steps to stimulate economic activity, the U.S. economy still faces a potentially powerful contractionary force: the looming “fiscal cliff.” Some U.S. companies are already considering layoffs because of the confluence of sequestration, the end of the Bush tax cuts, and several other government policy changes set to go into effect in January. Bob’s Figure of the Week is Mario Draghi. My Figure of the Week is 23,000. As always, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. For more on the topics we discussed in the podcast check out: Anniversary of September 11 Terrorist Attacks. The Daily News reports that the Romney and Obama campaigns have agreed not to run political ads on September 11. Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta is scheduled to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial on Monday, September 10; the Flight 93 National Memorial has organized events throughout the week to commemorate the victims of the attack. Bloomberg writes that Stephen Colbert spoke at a 9/11 Memorial benefit dinner on Tuesday. Last year, President Obama declared September 11 to be Patriot Day, a national holiday committed to the memory of the victims of 9/11. The Presidential Campaign Enters the Home Stretch. The Economist writes that after a rough first-term, President Obama will need to convince voters that he can bring change in a second term. The Wall Street Journal notes that voters give President Obama higher marks than Mitt Romney on national security, something seldom seen with Democratic presidential candidates. Foreign Policy flags the reasons that President Obama has the upper-hand in this election. Fed Policymaking Committee Convenes. The New York Times speculates about what Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke will do next. CNN suggests that the Fed may still change monetary policy, despite the tense campaign climate. The Wall Street Journal concludes that the Fed is still lukewarm over lowering the reserve rate. The Washington Post contends that Columbia University professor Michael Woodford may have authored the most important monetary policy paper this year; find it here. The Federal Reserve shares the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed Mitt Romney’s foreign trip; Mercosur’s special summit in Rio; anger at the EU’s efforts to make foreign airlines pay for their greenhouse gas emissions; and the Apple-Samsung battle over patents. [audio: http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/media/editorial/2012/20120726_TWNW.mp3] The highlights: Mitt Romney has begun a six-day overseas tour that will take him to Great Britain, Israel, and Poland. During the trip he will meet with government and opposition officials. His trip isn’t generating the kind of excitement that Barack Obama’s did four years ago when the then-presumptive Democratic nominee gave a speech in Berlin that drew a crowd of more than 200,000 people. Romney is hoping that the trip helps demonstrate his foreign policy bona fides and impresses critical voting blocs back home. Venezuela will be attending its first Mercosur summit meeting now that it is a full member of the South American trade group. Long-time member Paraguay, however, will not be in Rio. Its membership in the group was suspended after the Paraguayan congress impeached President Fernando Lugo. Although the Paraguayan constitution permits the congress to impeach a president, Paraguay’s partners in Mercosur regard the ouster as a coup d’etat. They seemingly aren’t as worried about the harm that Hugo Chavez has inflicted on Venzuela’s democracy. Time will tell whether Venezuela’s membership in Mercosur changes its direction and tenor. Chavez, after all, isn’t a fan of capitalism or the United States. The U.S. government hosts a meeting next week for countries upset at the EU’s decision to require foreign airlines to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions when they fly to and from European airports. China, India, Russia, and the United States are among the countries arguing that the EU is imposing an extraterritorial tax and thereby violating the sovereignty of other countries. China has signaled its irritation at the EU’s decision by suspending the purchase of $14 billion worth of jets being manufactured by Europe’s AirBus. European courts have ruled that the new environmental rules are legal, but Washington and others argue that decisions about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft should be made at the UN’s International Civil Aviation Organization. Technology giants Apple and Samsung are battling over patent rights in a court case that has been dubbed “the patent trial of the century.” Patent law was created to enable inventors to benefit from their discoveries, but there are growing complaints that too many patents are being granted for what aren’t true discoveries. The resulting proliferation of patent disputes may be bad for the technology industry, but it has been very, very good for patent lawyers. Bob’s Figure of the Week is 3.49 percent. My Figure of the Week is Ri Sol-ju. As always, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. For more on the topics we discussed in the podcast check out: Mitt Romney Visits Great Britain, Israel, and Poland. Following Romney’s speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, Steve Walt has ten questions for the presumptive GOP nominee. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Romney challenged Obama’s foreign policy credentials before jet setting across Europe. Business Insider notes that Romney will steer clear of debt-ridden eurozone nations during his international tour. The New York Times reflects on Romney’s foreign policy campaign tactics. Mercosur Holds a Special Summit in Rio. BBC provides a general overview of Mercosur—South America’s leading trading bloc. The Wall Street Journal reports that as Brazil-Argentina trade relations sour, Brazil may find new opportunities on the horizon. Reuters reports that Venezuela will join Mercosur as a full member. The Economist reports that Mercosur could be crippled by protectionism and rule-breaking. Associated Press reports that Mercosur sanctions on Paraguay loom as members question Paraguay’s presidential impeachment process. MercoPress reports that Paraguay may challenge Mercosur in front of the International Court of Justice. The EU’s New Emissions Rules. Reuters reports that a dozen countries will convene for a two-day meeting in Washington, DC, to discuss their opposition to the EU’s emissions trading system. Deutsche Welle reports that the emissions trading system may cause an international trade war. The Guardian notes that 99 percent of major airlines have complied with the first step of the EU’s carbon emissions plan. Reuters suggests that the controversial emissions trading system may stall global climate change talks. Apple and Samsung Face-Off over Patents. The Wall Street Journal reports the details of the court room arguments and the stakes for both sides. All Things D notes that Google warned Samsung that it was producing products too similar to that of Apple. Bloomberg writes that senior Apple executives will testify in court proceedings. The Wall Street Journal reports that a federal judge sanctioned Samsung for routinely destroying email evidence pertinent to the patent case. FirstPost shares that Samsung charges Apple’s iPhone maker of copying Sony design.

Enrique Peña Nieto had a very good weekend. While Americans were grumbling about record-breaking heat and residents of Washington, D.C., were learning to live without air conditioning because powerful storms Friday night left them without electricity, he was winning Mexico’s presidential election. With nearly 90 percent of the ballots counted, he looks to have won roughly 38 percent of the vote, handily defeating Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD), who pulled in 32 percent, and Josefina Vázquez Mota of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party or PAN), who pulled in 25 percent. But Peña Nieto won’t be moving into Los Pinos, Mexico’s White House, anytime soon. Felipe Calderón, the incumbent president, who could not run for reelection because the Mexican constitution limits presidents to one, six-year term or sexenio, has another five months to serve. So Peña Nieto has to wait until December 1 to take the oath of office. If you want to follow how things play out in Mexico during this lame duck period, check out my colleague Shannon O’Neil’s blog, Latin America’s Moment. The Basics Name: Enrique Peña Nieto Date of Birth: July 20, 1966 Place of Birth: Atlacomulco, Mexico State, Mexico Religion: Catholic Political Party: Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) Marital Status: Married to Angélica Rivera Hurtado (Peña Nieto’s first wife, Mónica Pretelini, died in 2007) Children: Alejandro, Paulina, and Nicole with Mónica Pretelini; Angélica, Fernanda, and Regina, step-children with Angélica Rivera Hurtado; a son with Maritza Diaz Hernandez; and a son, now deceased, who was born to an unnamed partner Alma Mater: Universidad Panamericana, Instituto Tecnològico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterey Political Offices Held: Mexico state governor (2005-2011); Mexico state congressman, served as majority leader of his party and speaker of the state legislature (2003-2004); secretary of administration for the State of Mexico (2000-2002) What Supporters Say Peña Nieto’s supporters praise his ability to get things done. Claudio X. Gonzalez, the chairman of Kimberly-Clark de Mexico, says that only Peña Nieto can modernize Mexico’s decrepit energy sector: So we’re only coming into doing what we have to do, and it’s the 21st century and we’re now ready to move. And as I say, Enrique Peña Nieto is probably the only candidate that can really get it done, because if he wins, he probably will have enough muscle in Congress to be able to do the things that have to be done. Indeed, a centerpiece of Peña Nieto’s campaign was his claim that he had delivered on his compromisos—608 promises he made to his constituents when he was governor of the state of Mexico, which encircles Mexico City and happens to be Mexico’s most populous state. As Eric Olson of the Mexico Institute points out: He’s made a name for himself as promising things and delivering those things, and being a pretty effective governor. Peña Nieto promises to bring that same record of following through to Mexico as a whole. Throughout the campaign Peña Nieto contrasted his self-proclaimed ability to get things done with what he argued was President Calderón’s failure to do likewise. Mexico’s murder rate has surged during Calderón’s presidency as drug-related violence has exploded. Many Mexicans voted for Peña Nieto in the expectation that he will quell the drug violence and return the country to normalcy. A young man from Texcoco put it succinctly: I think they [the PRI] were in power so long for a reason. . . . The time PAN was in power, there were a lot of deaths. When PRI ruled, we didn’t see that. One of the criticisms leveled against Peña Nieto is that the PRI represents “old” Mexico. The PRI gained the Mexican presidency in 1929 and held onto it until 2000 through a mix of election rigging, political repression, and corruption. Peña Nieto has dismissed the PRI’s past corruption as the work of “dinosaurs” and pledged not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Cesar Camacho, the president of a PRI-sponsored think tank, agrees that things will be different this time around: The PRI of 2012 is not the PRI of the 20th century. It’s a better-organized PRI that learned the lessons of political orphanhood. Peña Nieto received an unexpected plug from Vicente Fox, the man who broke the PRI’s hold on the Mexican presidency in 2000. The former president declared in April that a win for his party’s candidate, Vázquez Mota, would take a “miracle.” He followed this remark up by saying last month as Vázquez Mota trailed Peña Nieto in the polls by double digits: A clear winner is emerging…we have to close ranks behind who will win. Fox’s exhortation to all Mexicans to “close ranks” behind Peña Nieto probably ended whatever slim chances Vázquez Mota had of winning. Many Mexicans voted for Peña Nieto less because they like him and more because they don’t like either Vázquez Mota or López Obrador. Carlos Elizondo, a political science professor in Mexico, said during the campaign: The real question is, why are his opponents so bad? Vázquez Mota or López Obrador could look good in hindsight if Peña Nieto can’t make a dent in Mexico’s many problems. And he can’t forget that six-in-ten Mexican voters cast their ballots for one of his opponents. So he doesn’t have a thick cushion of good will. What Critics Say Peña Nieto’s critics typically see the PRI’s defeat in 2000 as a watershed in Mexican politics akin to the fall of the Berlin wall. After all, the PRI was known as "the perfect dictatorship" for a reason. If John M. Ackerman, a professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is to be believed, Peña Nieto will take Mexican democracy backwards: Pena Nieto is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He hides behind a telegenic smile and sharp attire, but he represents Mexico’s old corrupt political class. Corruption allegations gained steam last month when the Guardian published documents that suggested Peña Nieto may have paid the television network Televisa for favorable coverage during his time as governor. Described by its chief as “a soldier of the PRI” in 1990, the network commands a 70 percent share of Mexico’s television audience. Peña Nieto said the documents "have no solid basis and are not authentic," and Televisa said the Guardian used “apocryphal material that has been repeatedly published and denied.” López Obrador was having none of that. He called for Peña Nieto and Televisa to come clean: They should hand over all the information, the contracts, that they haven’t wanted to show. . . . Of course they have them, and we need to see how much they paid, for what kind of message, and if they include all the promotion of Peña Nieto on the television. Many young voters like Peña Nieto, but some don’t. In May, students protested when Peña Nieto made a routine campaign stop at Ibero American University. They interrupted his speech to decry his human rights record. Afterward, campaign aides suggested the protestors were not students but political plants organized by rival parties. In response, 131 students released a video entitled “YoSoy131,” or “I am the 131,” in which they showed their university ID cards and explained their grievances. The video went viral. High-school and college students across Mexico suddenly began tweeting #yosoy132 to signal their sympathy for the protestors. One of the demonstrations sparked by the #yosoy132 movement drew nearly 100,000 people last month. The protests also gave Peña Nieto’s opponents fodder with which to attack him. Vázquez Mota accused him of hiding from demonstrators during the initial protest at Ibero American University. In the final presidential debate she said: Mr. Peña Nieto, we don’t want someone who is going to hide in the bathroom of a university to solve the country’s problems. The protests obviously failed to derail Peña Nieto’s campaign. One reason was their leaderless, disorganized nature. Another was that they were dominated by young people, who (just like their counterparts north of the border) are less likely to go to the polls. Jorge Buendia, a Mexican pollster, summarized the political weakness of Mexican students succinctly: They are many. But they vote the least. Some of the criticism directed at Peña Nieto has targeted his personal life. He has admitted to cheating on his first wife, who died in 2007 of cardiac arrest triggered by an epileptic seizure, and fathering two children by two other women while he was married. The mother of one of these children, Maritza Diaz Hernández, complained on Facebook in January 2102 after the PRI pledged to protect all Mexican children that Peña Nieto neglected his own child. Last month, AshleyMadison.com, a website that helps married people arrange affairs, used Peña Nieto’s likeness on a billboard in Mexico City. The tagline: Unfaithful to his family. Faithful and committed to his country. An aspiring Mexican political science Ph.D. student no doubt has already begun writing a dissertation assessing whether the ad helped or hurt Peña Nieto’s campaign. Stories You Will Hear More About Stories about Peña Nieto inevitably get around to complimenting his good looks. The favorite word to describe him, as the Wall Street Journal declared on the front page of Saturday’s paper, is “telegenic.” Just how handsome? Well, according to a poll done earlier this year by Hounters.com, a dating agency, 88 percent of married Mexican women say they would cheat on their husbands with Peña Nieto. Peña Nieto’s opponents have tried to use his looks against him, suggesting that he is an empty (though good looking) suit. But he has brushed off barbs about how he is “a male Barbie” and “the PRI’s policy Beckham.” To many of his supporters, his good looks are just a bonus. As one woman explained her reason for supporting Peña Nieto: He has worked, he has kept his promises. He is very human, and he is gorgeous. Peña Nieto’s good looks certainly haven’t hurt him when it comes to social media. In late 2011, the forty-five-year-old had more fans on Facebook than all of his main rivals (and outgoing president Calderón) combined. And when Mexican voters went to the polls this weekend, he had six times as many fans as López Obrador, his next closest competitor. But Peña Nieto may not be the most popular person in his own house. His current wife, Angélica Rivera Hurtado, has acted in a series of Mexican telenovelas. Her fans call her “La Gaviota,” or the Seagull, for the role she played in one of these soap operas. Mexicans learned that she would marry Peña Nieto when he introduced her to Pope Benedict XVI as his fiancée. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the pair have since become the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of Mexico.” Whatever role good looks and celebrity played in Peña Nieto’s election victory, he and Mexico face some daunting policy challenges. Since Calderón began targeting drug kingpins in late 2006, more than 55,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence. An estimated 16,800 died last year alone. That translates into roughly one person dying every half hour. What makes matters worse is that the Mexican government’s own data show that more than 98 percent of serious crimes go unpunished. Peña Nieto says that he has a plan to reduce drug-related killings. It rests on “four pillars,” including tailoring the police force to combat organized crime and coordinating efforts on the national, state, and local levels. What does that mean? Well, whereas Calderón sought to break up the large cartels and target their leaders, Peña Nieto says he will instead stress preventing crime and increasing the size of the federal police force. In Peña Nieto’s words: This doesn’t mean that we don’t pay attention to other crimes, or that we don’t fight drug trafficking, but the central theme at this time is diminishing violence in the country. Last month, Peña Nieto named the former head of the Colombian national police, General Oscar Naranjo, as his top security adviser. Naranjo helped carry out Colombia’s war on drugs, which included devising the operation that killed famed cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar in 1993. In announcing Naranjo’s appointment, Peña Nieto said: The reason we have this environment of fear today in Mexican society is the absence of security. . . . It’s clear that the Mexican people expect immediate results. Peña Nieto’s credentials in fighting drug violence have been questioned. In his final state of the state speech as governor last year, he declared that violence, which had doubled in the rest of the country from 2006-2011, had in fact fallen by more than half in his state: One of the most illustrative achievements that we have is the reduction in murders per 100,000 people, from 16.5 in 2005 to 7.6 in 2010. The problem was, the drop was entirely the result of a change in how his administration counted murders. (The previous count had included accidental deaths and suicides.) Once the methodological change is taken into account, the murder rate in the state of Mexico had remained essentially flat. That in and of itself was a significant accomplishment, given trends elsewhere in the country, and it didn’t need embellishment. To his credit, Peña Nieto owned up to his error: The figures underwent a methodological modification in 2007...The criticism that The Economist makes is that it is technically inconsistent to compare figures derived using different methodologies. I share this view. In a democratic society, we politicians have to accept criticism, especially when it is founded. Whatever his accomplishments as governor, Peña Nieto’s success in curbing Mexico’s murder rate—and how he goes about doing it—will be watched closely on both sides of the border. The fear in some U.S. policy circles is that he might buy peace in Mexico by turning a blind eye to what the drug cartels are doing. Although much less visible than drug-related violence, Mexico’s economic problems are just as worrisome to most Mexicans. In late May, the Mexican peso fell to its lowest point in three years, and economic growth has averaged just 1.8 percent over Calderón’s six years as president. Mexico’s economic stagnation may have something to do with the rise of drug-related violence. The Mexican government estimates that violence may reduce annual economic output by 1.2 percent. And some of the violence undoubtedly has roots in the inequity and poverty endemic to Mexican society. Peña Nieto admitted as much during the campaign when he said that a major way to bring down violence was: to stop crime from occurring rather than to react once a crime has already been committed. To achieve this, we need to reduce inequality of opportunities in our country, using as a base universal coverage of social security: health coverage, pensions and unemployment benefit. Peña Nieto has promised to deliver economic growth once in office: I will be the government of increasing economic growth and creating jobs. Take it from me that that’s the main issue. The open question is whether he has a workable plan to jumpstart the Mexican economy, and whether he can persuade the rest of the Mexican government to go along with it if he does. News stories this week will assuredly hail Peña Nieto’s election as heralding the PRI’s return to power. It’s probably a bit late to label it a “return,” though. When judged by success at the state and local levels, the PRI returned to dominance several years ago. It now controls twenty of Mexico’s thirty-one states, and more than half of its 2,440 towns and cities. With that kind of political dominance, the PRI will be on the hook to deliver for the Mexican people. Peña Nieto in His Own Words Peña Nieto generally stuck to centrist positions during the campaign. He was sometimes criticized for being vague, but given his early and big lead in the polls he had little to gain and possibly much to lose by being specific. But what he did say offers hints of the policies he will pursue. Peña Nieto was unequivocal about drug-related violence: My commitment is first to reduce violence. We need to take care of three main crimes: homicide, kidnapping, and extortion. That doesn’t mean not paying attention to other crimes. But the name of the game is to reduce violence. He advocated more private investment in Pemex, Mexico’s massive state oil company. He stressed, however, that his enthusiasm for markets has limits: We need to be more productive in Pemex, and I see a chance to make the reform that can allow the private sector to invest in exploration and refineries. Let me be clear: That doesn’t mean to privatize. I believe the state needs to control hydrocarbons. What happens with Mexico’s oil industry should interest Americans. Mexico is the third largest source of U.S. oil imports, providing more than 1.1 million barrels per day in 2011. Mexico’s oil industry has suffered in recent years, however, because Mexico’s nationalistic oil policies have prevented it from attracting the kind of foreign investment and high technology that is needed to keep the oil flowing. Peña Nieto also pledged to tackle Mexico’s massive poverty, though in doing so he blamed the problem on the PAN: Something that cannot be forgotten in discussing Calderón’s past six years is that poverty has been increased by 12 million people. We have almost 60 million people in poverty. It is time to make a revolution before the revolution reaches us. He embraced tax reform as a way to ensure better government services to all Mexicans: To fund universal social security and a quality educational system, Mexico needs to pass a far-reaching tax reform. The Mexican government’s tax take is only about 20 per cent of GDP compared with 36 per cent average of the countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). . . . Mexico, therefore, must increase substantially the government tax take in the coming years. Despite his slick campaign and dashing persona, Peña Nieto committed a few gaffes. At one point, he drew a blank when asked to name the price of a kilogram of tortillas, a staple of the average Mexican’s diet. His explanation for not knowing? I’m not the woman of the house. In December 2011, he appeared at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, the second largest in Latin America. He stumbled badly when he was asked to name three books that had influenced his life. He mentioned “some parts” of the Bible but didn’t say which, and then named The Eagle’s Throne, a book by Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico’s great novelists and essayists, but credited someone else as the author. Peña Nieto wrapped up his four-minute-long answer by saying: The truth is, when I read a book I often don’t fully register the titles. His critics responded by creating #LibreríaPeñaNieto (“Peña Nieto’s Bookstore”) on Twitter. It features tweets with the names of fake books with satirical titles. (Peña Nieto’s teenage daughter came to her father’s defense, tweeting that she scorned “all of the idiots who form part of the proletariat and only criticize those they envy.” That tweet may not have been politically savvy, but it gets high marks for parental loyalty.) In an interview last month, Peña Nieto did a little better when asked to name his favorite American movies: Lately the one I’ve been seeing in bits and parts is “Edgar Hoover.” Very good, by the way. ... I was drawn to it, and the truth is, well, it’s interesting. I recommend it. I’m probably halfway through. ... I also like comedies. ... Ah, “The Departed” is really good. He would not be the first head of state more comfortable with movies than with books. Foreign Policy Views Peña Nieto said little about foreign policy during the campaign. That is hardly surprising. Most Mexicans are worried about what is happening within the country’s borders and not outside them. However, in June, two of Peña Nieto’s foreign policy advisers laid out a blueprint for Mexico’s relations with the rest of the world in an article entitled, “Un Visión de México Para el Futuro” (or “A Vision for Mexico’s Future”). The authors argued that Mexico’s relations with the rest of the world suffered during the time that the PAN held the Mexican presidency: Mexico’s global position has declined during the last 12 years. They argued that Mexico has to take several steps to reverse the trend. One such step is to update the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): It’s essential to look for ways in which diplomacy can bring NAFTA up to date. When NAFTA was signed in 1994, we did not yet feel China and India’s overwhelming presence as our, the three countries’, important trade competitors. Peña Nieto’s advisers also called for Mexico to counteract the growing power of Brazil in Latin America: Various ministers in the region have constantly expressed that they have missed Mexico. We have lost important negotiation and mediation spaces. So it is not difficult to explain that Brazil has occupied the spaces, taking advantage of our absence. For this reason we should concentrate on promulgating different methods of participation with the region, and not only through bilateral relations. The effort to be more assertive within Latin America would be coupled with a bid to be more assertive in global institutions: We should underscore the importance of increasing our participation in political and financial organizations, in accordance with the magnitude of our country as a geopolitical, economic, and demographic force. That activism would include pushing for reform at the UN: Along with this, Mexico should continue with its practice of occupying positions within the Security Council, to actively participate in shaping the body that keeps a close eye on peace and international security. In this sense, the possibility of opening a new permanent seat should be our country’s goal. Peña Nieto’s advisers think that Mexico should improve its relations with China (though it is unclear how this fits with their desire to retool NAFTA in the face of China’s rise): For the current government and for the PAN administrations [Fox and Calderón], China is an adversary. From our point of view this is erroneous. The efforts to make friends with Beijing would be coupled with an effort to encourage Mexicans to better understand Asia more generally: There is a great absence in Mexico: of knowledge and understanding about what is happening in Asia. That region is changing the way we see the world. It is not only the region that is growing the most, but it is also the region that is undergoing the most dramatic changes, in both geopolitical and economic terms. Of course, predicting a candidate’s foreign policy choices once in office is always difficult. So take these suggestions with a grain of salt. Outlook for Relations with Washington Peña Nieto wrote during the campaign of the importance that the election held for the next six years of Mexico’s relations with the United States: Once every twelve years there is a unique opportunity to reinforce the bonds between Mexico and the United States, when our presidential election cycles coincide. For Mexico, the July 1 elections will be a crucial moment that will set the tone for our future and define the US-Mexico relationship for generations to come. Does this mean that Peña Nieto’s election will bring big changes to U.S.-Mexican relations? Perhaps not. Vice President Joe Biden met with all three Mexican presidential candidates in March. He was asked whether he foresaw any differences among them when it came to cross-border cooperation. “No,” he said, “I’m not being flip, but no.” So the betting money is on continued cordial relations between Washington and Mexico City. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be points of contention. Three in particular stand out: drugs, guns, and immigration. Mexicans aren’t happy that the Merida Initiative, which was intended to be the centerpiece of U.S.-Mexican efforts to stem the drug trade, has produced so little. As Peña Nieto’s advisers put it their  vision for Mexico’s future: In Mexico, without a doubt, we have to get our own house in order and search for more balanced cooperation with the United States, but we should also generate multilateral mechanisms to pay attention to this problem [drug trafficking]. In this sense the Merida Initiative has been a weak effort that did not achieve a single substantive achievement. The comprehensive efforts should at least include the Central American countries, the Caribbean, Canada, and Colombia. Mexicans also aren’t happy that the United States has done so little to curtail the demand for drugs within its borders. The American demand for illegal drugs is what makes the drug trade so profitable, which in turn makes the Mexican drugs cartels so willing to use violence. If American drug usage fell, the drug trade would become vastly less profitable, and thus less dangerous to Mexico. Peña Nieto himself has suggested that Mexico should not “subordinate to the strategies of other countries” in fighting the war on drugs. That can be read as signaling that he might seek to pressure the United States to change its policies further. But official Washington seems confident that he will live with what the White House decides. Indeed, one unnamed Obama administration official dismissed his talk of not subjugating Mexico to other countries as a political “sound bite”: What we basically get is that he fully appreciates and understands that if/when he wins, he is going to keep working with us. Mexicans are also angry at the United States for the flood of weapons that come south across the border. Americans may see loose guns laws as a sign of liberty, but for Mexicans these laws mean blood on their streets. They want Washington to halt the trafficking in death. As Peña Nieto’s advisers put it: The second amendment prevents obstacles from being put in the way of citizens acquiring arms. Here we should look to intensify the coordinated work along the borders and we should support legislative actions that demand more rigorous registrations for buying and selling arms. Based on the pressure that the National Rifle Association put on members of Congress last week to vote to cite Attorney General Eric Holder for contempt of Congress over the Fast and Furious operation, which was launched to help stop the flow of weapons into Mexico, the chances that Washington will tighten its gun laws lie somewhere between nil and nada. Immigration always has the potential to bubble up as an issue in U.S.-Mexican relations. Thirteen million Mexicans now live in the United States, which means that more than 10 percent of the people born in Mexico live north of the border. Mexicans were appalled when Arizona passed its strict immigration law back in 2010. The U.S. Supreme Court last month struck down much of that law, but not the centerpiece provision authorizing police to demand that people detained for crimes prove they are in the United States legally. With Washington unable to fix America’s broken immigration system, the topic will remain an irritant in dealings between the White House and Los Pinos. In all, any effort Peña Nieto makes to compel Washington to move on the issues that matter to Mexico will founder over a simple reality: Mexico City has little leverage over Washington. It is that basic reality that prompted (or so the story goes) the Mexican dictator José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori to lament a century ago: "¡Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!" (Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!)

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC all ran stories in June 2012 about Tibetan monks who have set themselves on fire to protest against the Chinese government. The stories provoked little reaction in Washington. That was not the case when a sixty-six year-old Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire on June 11, 1963 on the streets of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam. To understand Quang Duc’s story it is essential to know the story of Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S.-backed president of South Vietnam. He came to power in 1955 in the aftermath of the Geneva Accords, which ended French colonial rule and split Vietnam along the 17th parallel. He had gained national fame when he quit a critical job working for the French colonial government before World War II and then refused to cooperate with the Japanese occupiers during it. But he was hardly the ideal choice to lead the new South Vietnam. He was a French-educated Catholic in a Buddhist majority country, and he had spent much of the decade after World War II living in the United States rather than building a political organization in South Vietnam. And he was hardly a democrat. When he ran in a “national” referendum in October 1955, he arranged it so that he won more than 98 percent of the vote. Not surprisingly, the Vietnamese public’s support for Diem soon faded. He repressed his opponents and favored his friends and family. His policies to counter the growing strength of the Viet Cong had the opposite effect; they alienated many South Vietnamese against his government. By the spring of 1963, public unrest reached a crisis point. On May 8, residents of Hue, the imperial capital of old Vietnam, organized a rally to protest a ban on flying the Buddhist flag. Police fired on the crowd, killing nine and wounding fourteen. Hunger strikes and more protests followed. On June 11, 1963, Thich Quang Duc and more than 300 other monks and nuns marched in a procession down one of Saigon’s major boulevards. Wearing a saffron robe, he sat down in the lotus position on a cushion in the middle of the street. Two other monks emptied a five-gallon can of gasoline on him. Quang Duc then took a match, struck it, and dropped it on himself. The journalist David Halberstam, who was present, described what happened next: Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered even to think. . . . As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him. A fire engine raced to extinguish the blaze, but several monks blocked its path. The flames eventually burned out, and the monks placed Quang Duc’s body in a coffin and carried him away. Malcolm Browne, an Associated Press photographer, caught the self-immolation on film. His photograph won the award for World Press Photo of the Year, and it remains among the most famous (and haunting) images from the Vietnam War. It certainly stunned millions of people around the world who saw it in June 1963. As a U.S. embassy official put it, the photo “had a shock effect of incalculable value to the Buddhist cause, becoming a symbol of the state of things in Vietnam.” Seven other monks soon followed Quang Duc’s example and set themselves afire to protest Diem’s rule. Convinced of his own rectitude, Diem did nothing to appease the growing anger being directed his way. His sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, however, added to it. She likened Quang Duc’s suicide to a “barbecue.” “Let them burn,” she said, “and we shall clap our hands.” President John F. Kennedy said of Browne’s photo that “no news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.” The so-called Buddhist Crisis incident certainly helped sour Kennedy on Diem. Five months later, Kennedy looked the other way as a group of South Vietnamese Army generals overthrew and executed Diem. Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later in Dallas. The political crisis that Quang Duc’s self-immolation highlighted did not, however, prompt either Kennedy or his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to rethink the wisdom of the American involvement in South Vietnam. In late 1963, the United States had fewer than 16,000 troops in South Vietnam. Four years later, it had half a million. The differences between South Vietnam in 1963 and Tibet in 2012 are many and vast. But if history provides any guide, Beijing will no more learn from today’s events than Washington did nearly a half century ago. Indeed, in the wake of two recent self-immolations in Lhasa, China responded by closing Tibet to foreign visitors.

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed the UN Human Rights Council’s special session on Syria; the International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors meeting in Vienna; and the start of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit. [audio: http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/media/editorial/2012/20120531_TWNW.mp3] The highlights: The massacre of more than one hundred civilians, most of them women and children, in the Syrian town of Houla has triggered outrage around the world. But it seems unlikely that the outrage will prompt anything other than ritualized condemnations of Syria’s government at the UN and the UN Human Rights Council. Russia and China are poised to veto any resolutions at the UN Security Council that would impose a price on the Assad government, and neither the United States nor any other western governments looks eager to become involved militarily in Syria. The IAEA’s board of governors will meet next week. Iran will likely top the group’s agenda given that IAEA inspectors recently found evidence that Iran has enriched uranium to a higher grade than it has previously disclosed. The IAEA will release a report detailing that discovery in conjunction with the board of governors meeting. That report will get a very close reading as the U.S. Congress considers motions to impose new sanctions on Iran that would give President Obama very little leeway in when or how they are imposed. Iran’s nuclear program will also be on the agenda of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit next week in Beijing. The SCO is a regional security forum for China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be attending the summit as an observer. China and Russia had hoped to build the SCO into a major counterweight to U.S. influence in central Asia. So far, however, the organization hasn’t proven itself to be a significant force in regional, let alone global, affairs. Bob’s Figure of the Week is 1.9 percent. My Figure of the Week is Mitt Romney. As always, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. For more on the topics we discussed in the podcast check out: The UN Human Rights Council’s Special Session on Syria. Bloomberg tells how the Red Cross and Red Crescent found 5,000 refugees from Houla. Reuters says that the United States might bypass the UN on Syria if the international body does not act. The Guardian has live updates on the ongoing situation in Syria and across the Middle East. The New York Times reports that Susan Rice, the U.S. envoy to the UN, sees a grim outcome in Syria. The Washington Post says that Turkey and Japan have joined a number of Western nations in expelling Syrian diplomats in protest over the massacre. The IAEA Board of Governors Meeting in Vienna. Al-Arabiya reports that IAEA inspectors have found traces of uranium enriched up to 27 percent in Iran, which is a higher level of enrichment than Tehran said it had achieved. The news agency also says that Russia is willing to work with Iran to build another nuclear power plant, as long as it is allowed to do so. Bloomberg’s editors argue that keeping Iran at the negotiating table will require skillful manipulation of the sanctions on oil currently imposed by the West. Fox Business reports that the IAEA has begun a two-week inspection of South Korea’s second-oldest nuclear reactor in the wake of concerns after the Fukushima disaster. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit. AFP notes that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will attend the summit while Reuters reports that China has attacked new sanctions against Iran. The China Daily writes that a senior Chinese diplomat has indicated that regional security issues will be addressed at the summit. The Eurasia Review predicts that the meeting will not be run of the mill.

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed Ireland’s referendum on the EU’s fiscal treaty; the UN Security Council’s debate on Yemen; the beginning of hurricane season in the North Atlantic; and Memorial Day in the United States. [audio: http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/media/editorial/2012/20120524_TWNW.mp3] The highlights: Irish voters go to the polls on May 31 to say yea or nay on the EU’s fiscal treaty. The polls suggest that the “yeas” will win. Prime Minister Enda Kenny of the center-right Fine Gael party strongly supports a “yes” vote, as does Ireland’s major opposition party, Fianna Fail. If the “no” vote wins, however, Kenny says that he will not order a second referendum. That is what happened in 2001 and 2008 when Irish voters voted the “wrong way” the first time an EU initiative was put before them.  A “yes” vote keeps the fiscal treaty alive and gives Ireland access to the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which is intended to help keep the eurozone from unraveling. A “no” almost certainly means that Ireland would have to leave the euro, and it would likely aggravate the debt problem facing Greece, Portugal, and Spain. The UN Security Council will meet this week to discuss the findings of the UN Special Envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar. This discussion comes on the heels of a suicide bombing in the heart of Sana that killed more than one hundred Yemeni soldiers, which al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has taken credit for. AQAP was also behind the recent foiled plot to blow up an international airliner using an underwear-style bomb. Yemen’s internal divisions and fighting provide AQAP with an environment in which to operate. U.S. drone technology can solve only part of the problem. Putting Yemen back together would probably do far more. But that is a mighty tall task. June 1 marks the traditional start of hurricane season in the North Atlantic. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting a normal hurricane season—which means somewhere between nine and fifteen named storms. The prediction does not mean that global climate change might not make hurricanes both more powerful and more frequent in the future. The international community has made little progress, however, in curtailing the emission of the heat-trapping gases that drive human-induced climate change. And as long as countries are focused on repairing their economies and can’t agree on how to apportion responsibility for curtailing emissions, not much is going to get done. The United States celebrates Memorial Day on May 28. The holiday dates back to May 30, 1868 when Decoration Day was held to commemorate soldiers who died in the American Civil War. As Americans celebrate this Memorial Day, they are deeply skeptical of U.S. participation in the war in Afghanistan. Polls show that two out of three Americans oppose the Afghan War and three in five want U.S. troops to come home as soon as possible. Bob’s Figure of the Week is Dr. Shakil Afridi. My Figure of the Week is 656,241. As always, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. For more on the topics we discussed in the podcast check out: Ireland’s Referendum and the EU’s Fiscal Treaty. CFR had a meeting with William H. Buiter, chief economist for Citigroup, on the financial crisis in Europe. Bloomberg says Hollande might be willing to renegotiate the fiscal treaty. Pedar o Browin of the Institute of International and European Affairs wrote a working paper on the euro crisis. The Wall Street Journal has the eurozone’s dire economic numbers. The Journal also notes that doubts about the euro are surfacing in its birthplace, the Netherlands. The UN Security Council Debate on Yemen. CFR’s Micah Zenko discusses “how to grow terrorists in Yemen.” The BBC reports that al-Qaeda attacks in Yemen are a setback for the country’s stability. USA Today says the fight against al-Qaeda in Yemen is taking a toll on the country. The UN News Centre mentions that the Security Council condemns terrorist actions in Yemen, and that “a record number of African migrants fled to Yemen this year.” Al-Arabiya notes that the United States cited Yemen as a “model of political transition.” Hurricane Season and Climate Change. The National Hurricane Center has an overview of how cyclones work. Weather.com has your 2012 hurricane forecast. AccuWeather.com lets you track all the hurricanes. The International Research Institute for Climate and Society has the number of Atlantic hurricanes per hurricane season. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that climate talks in Bonn have stalled over a divide between rich countries and poor ones. AFP quotes Raul Estrada, one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol, who believes that “negotiations are returning to square one.” Reuters reports on possible ways to raise climate ambitions. Bloomberg notes that the EU’s lead envoy believes that China is leading developing nations seeking to block a UN climate treaty. Memorial Day. Reuters claims that “weary warriors favor Obama,” and that civilian deaths in Afghanistan have fallen by 20 percent. The Hill notes that a House-passed defense bill will publish the cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. The Chattanooga Times Free Press mentions how hundreds of bikers are making their way to Washington, DC for Memorial Day events. The Sacramento Bee reminds us of the true meaning of Memorial Day: “to honor and remember our fallen heroes and the families they left behind.”

The Pew Global Attitudes Project is out with a new poll on what Egyptians think about politics a few weeks ahead of their historical presidential elections. Some of the results are interesting: Egyptians like the idea of democracy. Two-thirds say it is preferable to other forms of government, and six-in-ten Egyptians say democracy is the form of government best suited to solving their problems. Economics is job number one. Eight-in-ten Egyptians say that the government’s top priority should be improving economic conditions. So Egyptians look to be like other publics around the world that want their governments to produce jobs. The open question for Egypt, of course, is whether its new government will be able to make the tough choices needed to get the economy going again. Egyptians think that Saudi Arabia provides the right model for the role of religion in government. By a margin of more than three-to-one (61 percent to 17 percent), Egyptians say Saudi Arabia provides a better model for the proper role of religion in government than Turkey does. The preference for the Saudi model seems to contradict the embrace of democracy. But Egyptians are hardly the first people to give pollsters conflicting answers. The poll also contained a finding that comes as no surprise: Egyptians aren’t terribly fond of the United States. Only about one-in-five Egyptians (19 percent) has a favorable view of the United States. But the poll also contains a finding worth highlighting: Despite these negative sentiments, a majority of Egyptians says either they want the U.S.-Egypt relationship to stay about as close as it has been in recent years (35 percent) or become even closer (20 percent), while 38 percent would like to see relations become less close. So Egyptian attitudes toward the United States look to be deeply ambivalent. They can’t live with us; they don’t want to live without us. That spells danger for Washington’s diplomacy going forward. But it also spells opportunity.

Wednesday marks one year since Navy Seal Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. He won’t be missed here in the United States. And according to the latest poll conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, he won’t be missed much in Muslim-majority countries either. Pew asked Muslims in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” view of al-Qaeda. As you can see in the table below, lopsided majorities in all five countries opt for “unfavorable.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that Egyptians, Jordanians, and Pakistanis suddenly approve of American foreign policy. Other polling by Pew shows they don’t. But the numbers are a marked improvement from six or seven years ago when majorities in Jordan and Pakistan gave bin Laden a thumb’s up.

Americans love generals. We have elected twelve of them president. But for a president, generals can be an enormous pain—and a political threat. James K. Polk worried (rightly) that Winfield Scott was hankering after his job. Abraham Lincoln couldn’t get George B. McClellan to fight, finally relieved him of command of the Army of the Potomac, and then beat him decisively in the 1864 election. But the president who had the most tempestuous confrontation with a general was Harry Truman. He appointed Douglas McArthur commander of all UN (and U.S.) forces in Korea in June 1950, only to relieve him of command ten months later for publicly challenging administration policy. McArthur didn’t take his firing quietly. He immediately returned to the United States, and on April 19th, 1951, gave a rousing speech to a joint session of Congress. It remains one of the best speeches in American history. And it nearly sparked a constitutional crisis. The clash between Truman and MacArthur turned on what to do about China. In the spring of 1951 the Korean War was not going well. The smashing victory that MacArthur had engineered at Inchon in September 1950 was swept away two months later when 300,000 Chinese troops poured across the Yalu River. Rather than facing a relatively weak adversary in North Korea, the United States now possibly faced total war with China—or worse yet, China and its ally, the Soviet Union. Truman concluded that discretion was the better part of valor. He would do what he could to keep the war in Korea limited. That meant not attacking China itself. MacArthur, however, wanted to take the war to the Chinese. He thought that would break the stalemate that had begun to form on the peninsula and win the war. Truman ordered MacArthur to keep his opinions to himself. But the general made sure that his thoughts made their way into the public debate. He went a step too far, though, when he wrote a letter to the House Republican Minority Leader criticizing Truman’s limited-war strategy. When the letter became public, Truman decided that he had no choice but to relieve MacArthur of command. As he said years later: I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the President. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a b*tch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail. Unfortunately for Truman, whose public approval rating stood at 26 percent at the time, the story did not end there. His critics lashed out at him for firing a bona fide war hero and a man who was one of only five five-star generals in American history. Congress invited MacArthur to address a joint session, an honor never before (or since) extended to a general who had been relieved of command. MacArthur, who had been away from the United States for fourteen years, used his address to defend his preferred strategy for Korea at length, insisting that “in war there is no substitute for victory.” He went on to make a not-so-subtle jab at the president who refused to take the war to the Chinese: There are some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They are blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches with unmistakable emphasis that appeasement but begets new and bloodier war. It points to no single instance where this end has justified that means, where appeasement has led to more than a sham peace. Like blackmail, it lays the basis for new and successively greater demands until, as in blackmail, violence becomes the only other alternative. "Why" my soldiers asked of me, "surrender military advantages to an enemy in the field?" I could not answer. MacArthur concluded his tour-de-force with one of the most memorable passages of any speech ever delivered by an American and one that was clearly designed to put himself in the most sympathetic light for his countrymen: I am closing my 52 years of military service. When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that “old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” And, like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good Bye. The speech was a sensation. Some thirty million Americans had watched it on television. (You can listen to the speech in four parts, here, here, here, and here.) Though MacArthur only spoke for thirty-four minutes, members of Congress interrupted him more than thirty times with applause. One congressman called it the “voice of God.” Herbert Hoover hailed MacArthur as “a reincarnation of St. Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.” The day after the speech, MacArthur traveled to New York City, where the welcome only got warmer. The city threw him the largest ticker-tape parade in its history. LIFE reported that more than seven million people tossed an estimated 2,852 tons of paper during the parade. Western Union set the figure at 1,700 miles of ticker tape. Truman had a different assessment of MacArthur’s speech, saying privately that it was “a hundred percent bullsh*t.” One of Truman’s advisors wrote a satirical memorandum outlining the schedule that MacArthur imagined for his homecoming: (Schedule for Welcoming of General MacArthur): 12:30, Wades ashore from Snorkel submarine; 12:31, Navy Band Plays “Sparrow in the Treetop” and “I’ll be Glad You’re Dead, You Rascal You”; 12:40, Parade to the Capitol with General MacArthur riding an elephant; 12:47, Be-heading of General Vaughan at the rotunda; 1:00, General MacArthur addresses Members of Congress; 1:30-1:49, Applause for General MacArthur; 1:50, Burning of the Constitution; 1:55, Lynching of Secretary Acheson; 2:00, 21-atomic bomb salute; 2:30, 300 nude D.A.R.’s leap from Washington Monument; 3:00, Basket lunch, Monument grounds. Although the mock schedule was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, it highlighted the White House’s real concern that MacArthur’s behavior threatened the bedrock principle of civilian control of the military. (William Manchester subsequently wrote a best-selling biography of MacArthur, the title of which, American Caesar, implied the potential threat MacArthur posed to the American constitutional system.) Fortunately for Truman, the controversy quickly died down, though less because Americans suddenly remembered that presidents had an unquestioned right to fire generals and more because they didn’t really like the policies that MacArthur favored. In congressional hearings held soon after MacArthur’s speech, U.S. military leaders testified that they did not support a broader war with China. General Omar Bradley, himself a five-star general, famously told Congress that “in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, [MacArthur’s] strategy would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy.” A Senate committee eventually concluded that "the removal of General MacArthur was within the constitutional powers of the President but the circumstances were a shock to the national pride.” However much a shock MacArthur’s firing was, it reaffirmed what the Framers had intended when they made the president commander-in-chief—he, and someday she, has unquestioned authority to relieve military officers of command. Many commentators speculated at the time that MacArthur would emulate McClellan and challenge Truman for the presidency. (An effort by MacArthur’s supporters to get him the Republican presidential nomination in 1948 had failed miserably.) But when 1952 came around, he instead endorsed Robert Taft and worked with the Ohio senator to keep Dwight D. Eisenhower, MacArthur’s former aide, from winning the nomination. That effort failed. In 1953, Eisenhower took the oath of office as the country’s 34th president and the last one to have served as a general. MacArthur meanwhile made good on the closing passage of his speech and largely faded from public view.

I noted in a post this morning that Americans have less confidence in Mitt Romney than Barack Obama when it comes to foreign policy. Moments after that post went up the Pew Research Center released a new poll.  It shows the challenge Romney faces in closing the gap with the president on foreign policy. The issue in question is Afghanistan. Pew found that public support for keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan has hit a new low. Sixty percent of voters want to see U.S. troops come home as soon as possible. That’s up from 48 percent a year ago. Okay, no real surprise here. Just the continuation of a trend that has been underway for a while. The interesting news comes when you examine opinion by party. Two-thirds of Democrats and 65 percent of voters who say they support President Barack Obama also favor a rapid troop withdrawal. That’s good news for the White House. The even better news is that support for a rapid troop withdrawal is nearly as high among Independents (62 percent) and among undecided or swing voters (59 percent). So Afghanistan shouldn’t damage Obama much politically. He’s drawing down troops, which is what the public wants, and he can deflect questions about the speed of their departure by saying that a more rapid draw down would endanger American (and Afghan) lives. Things look different, however, on the Republican side of the ledger. Among Republicans as well as among voters who say they are certain they will vote for Mitt Romney, 48 percent favor removing troops as soon as possible, while 45 and 46 percent, respectively, support keeping U.S. forces there until the situation is stabilized. These numbers point to Romney’s political bind. He has talked tough on Afghanistan ever since last June, when Republican national security conservatives blasted him for what they saw as his insufficient commitment to the mission there. Romney responded with much tougher rhetoric even though the policies he favors look a lot like Obama’s. Now that Romney has the nomination locked up he could dial back his rhetoric, emphasize his desire to depart Afghanistan, and thereby keep pace with where public sentiment is headed. But doing that risks alienating a sizable chunk of his base and potentially confirming the charge that he is a flip-flopper. Conversely, Romney could stick with the tough talk, but that risks putting him at odds with voters. Ironically, that would confirm a different, but equally damaging charge that Romney has been trying to fight off, namely, that he is out-of-touch with the American public. Of course, what Romney decides to say on Afghanistan won’t matter much if November brings a lopsided election. But it could in a tight race. In that case, even a few votes could spell the difference between watching the inaugural address and giving it.